Real Estate Youtubers Live!!! Dion, Cody, Mike, and Christian

YouTube crew.

So this is one of my favorite things to do because we'll just get stuff come to the chat, we're going to answer everything on chat. So the camera says we're live. So hello room, hello YouTube, I'm Christian, this is Dion, Millennial Mike, first name Millennial, last name Mike.

Yes, my mom was really good with the foresight there, recognizing that's what my generation is going to be called.

Cody Davis and myself. But, um, welcome. This is the second time we've tried live streaming these, so we're going to make sure the internet works this time. And if it doesn't, I apologize to YouTube. However, for everyone here, we're at the Robin Hood Village Resort. We're talking real estate strategies because everyone up here except for these two have a totally separate strategy. Different things work in real estate. What I don't want people thinking is like, oh, seller financing, you can just do this for every deal and you're gonna— that's gonna be your strategy. It is a fantastic tool in your arsenal. It is not the only tool. It's just the— it's my favorite. We're going to introduce everyone. I did want to talk about this a little bit because apparently somewhere on your guys' YouTube channel, Dion Talk Financial Freedom, Money on Mike, somewhere in the Three Amigos ether, there's some sort of blood feud between you two. And I want to just address that right now. What is going on?

He's trying to kill me. That's all.

So now we're canceled.

Those who don't know, Mike is a highly capable individual.

He's smart.

Not quite as capable as Dion. Marine law enforcement black belt. I'm a close second.

So there are different strategies when it comes to investing, and, uh, we both live here in around Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, where it's kind of a high-cost living area. I chose to reach financial freedom by investing in small multifamily, right? I only have 16 units. For me, that was financial freedom, so I retired last year. But it's slow, right? I save a down payment, buy a property, save a down payment, buy a property. And Millennial Mike.

Yeah, real quick, how many people in here have less than 16 units? Oh, wow.

Well, it's just 16 units. It's only— how many?

I have 10. I have 10.

Right.

So it doesn't take $5,000 or $1,000. And we see the Grant Cardones and you hear these big, huge numbers, right? It can be— financial freedom can happen with a small number of units. But there's another strategy where somebody— Mike house hacks, I also house hack, so we both live in small multifamily in Washington State here. But Mike doesn't want to take the time to save a down payment and buy a property in a high cost of living area as an investor because 20% or 25% down is significant when you're buying a $400,000 or $500,000 duplex. I totally understand that. So he invests in Gary, Indiana, where the the house costs the down payment like it is in this state. Yeah. And so I casually mentioned that the cash flow from one duplex in Washington is equivalent to the cash flow of 10 rentals in Gary, Indiana, which is actually— we did the math, it actually comes up with that. And somehow I said, if you're going to invest at a distance, don't do it because it's cheap. You can go broke buying cheap. The reason it works for Mike is because he piggybacked on somebody else's network. He has a mentor who knew the systems, had the players in place, because if you're going to invest at a distance, the things that you really need is boots on the ground that you trust, right? So I was saying that, and all he heard was, he's wrong, I'm right, and you should do it my way.

That's one perspective of what happened. I have a different version. Dion was in front of his huge audience, you know, just throwing me to the wolves about what a fool I am.

I think that was a little closer to home.

Different strokes for different folks.

So in a nutshell, that's what we do. We have house hacks. We both invest in buy-and-hold rentals. I don't think you do any short-term. No. Mid-term. So neither one of us do like traveling nurses or we're not flippers. You have finally done your first 2 BRRRRs.

Yeah, 2 BRRRR strategies in the last 6 months, which is the worst time historically since 2007 to try a BRRRR project.

Imagine buying a BRRRR property with 3% interest rates, thinking and projecting your ARV and your cash-out refinance at that rate. And now the rates are 6 or 7.

Yeah.

And you survived.

Oh, I made money. It was a great deal.

We can talk about that. So neither one of us is using really creative strategies. Not that seller financing isn't creative, but I mean, we're not doing flipping, we're not doing the BRRRR strategy. We're not making it more difficult than it needs to be. Sometimes you can make this as complicated or as simple as you want to. For instance, you're going to hear people say, well, you need an LLC for every property to protect yourself, or you need a bank account for every property to do these. And that's like the far end of the spectrum. There's people who have like 16 rentals. I have one checking account, one saving account, one credit card, one Excel spreadsheet.

That's it.

Total business. And never lose sleep over, I'm not protected because it has nothing to do with having an LLC. But I hear people often talk about wanting to be creative, and creative doesn't mean difficult. When you guys do this relationship building, you find your person, you don't approach them and go, hey, I want to buy a property from you. No, you build the relationship first. If the sale happens later, that can, right? Yeah. It's a very simple concept. But if you ever hear some of the really larger audience people that say, this is how you do seller financing, they have a system that makes it really confusing. So that was our blood feud, and you didn't kill me.

And now we'll fight.

No, not yet, not yet. That'll be a— that'll be an epic fight. That's too highly—

you guys can fight on the boat.

Highly capable, guys. Yes, follow along later for the boat scene. Uh, I want to talk about different strategies. So we mentioned there's different strategies that everyone implements, and, or you can buy 10 houses for the price of a duplex. Dion, you have a lot of small multifamily. We have a lot of midsize, midsize and some small multifamily, but we have just a lot of multifamily in this building. Different strategies, they all work different ways. We have Matt Hawkins is actually on our channel. He's actually co-hosting Monday every single day for February. And like he has 135 rentals with no partners and he does it kind of the Dion way, but to a ridiculous scale. Just a ton of small rentals. But I want to talk about everyone's individual strategies, how you came up with what works for you, why it works for you, and maybe some of the pitfalls of like, here's the strengths, here's weaknesses of my strategy. Dion, let's start with you.

Okay. All of my deals are from the MLS. All of my deals have been traditional lending. So all through a lender, no seller financing, no creative financing. The strength is I don't recycle capital. So I've never done a home equity line of credit. I've never done a cash-out refinance. I've never sold the 1031s. There's all of these strategies that you can use to grow faster and larger. So the weakness is I'm not scaling. The amount of work I've put in, in about a decade of investing, if I use Matt Hawkins' strategy, I would have 100 units. So the lumberjack landlord, if you want to grow and scale quickly, you know, Listen to these guys. Listen to Matt Hawkins. The strength in mine is I could handle a 50% rent reduction without dipping into my own pockets. I'm about 40% loan to value on equity, so I have 60% equity position. I don't worry about a recession. I don't worry about tenants not paying rent. I don't worry about rents going down. And just in case anybody in here is worried about rents going down, rents have never once gone down in the history of us tracking the data since 1940. We've never seen a period of 5 years where rents went down. When you invest, it's good to plan like you expect rents to go down so that you'll survive it if it ever happened, but it has never. There have been years where it's went flat, but never where it's actually gone down. The other strength to my strategy, and here's a strategy, is there anybody in here who knows what the binder strategy is? Okay, so there's a few people who haven't heard of that. The thing that makes it possible for me to find my deals on the MLS and to cash flow is that I have a tactic that gets my tenants to ask me to raise the rent. And when I agree to this increase, which is much more than I would have raised the rent myself, they thank me. So we'll cover that before the end of this conversation. But that strategy makes it a lot easier to look on the MLS and look at the listing and think, I know what's going to happen to the rents once I own it, and find cash flowing deals that way. And also, if you use the binder strategy, on a scale when you're buying mid multifamily and you can have the tenants ask you to raise the rent $200 or $300 a month at their request and have very little tenant turnover with it. Imagine what that does to the net, the value of that property when you do it on that scale. And so you actually have a way of doing that when you have, you were mentioning earlier, how many binders would you have to make?

Oh my gosh.

But if it's for one building, you have to make one. It's not like you need one for each tenant, which is very helpful.

I was thinking about the workload of printing 130 binders for each individual person, knocking on their door and saying, here's your binder, what would you like to pay? And then fielding all those calls.

The Lumberjack Landlord actually uses this strategy and he does it through email, so it doesn't even take a physical binder. But we'll cover that. So that's the strength of mine. And the other thing that's missing from a lot of people's investing is the element of time. When you hear that somebody is 20 years old or 21 years old and has 80 units or 120 units and they have an interview on our YouTube channel, and the one thing they say is, I really wish I started sooner, right? You think, okay, that's very challenging. My first 2 years of investing, I purchased one duplex. The next 2 years of investing, I purchased one duplex. Those first 5 years, suck for most people. There are people who find a strategy that you guys are learning here. So congratulations on being at the right place. I didn't know that strategy existed to scale that fast. After about the 5-year mark, if you invest slowly that way where you're not recycling capital, I started doing this thing called recycling cash flow. Each new cash flowing unit and house hacking, so reducing my expenses, allowed me to save faster. So the next duplex was a year and a half, then the next fourplex was a year, then pay off a mortgage in a year, and then 6 months, and then 3 months to add the properties, it just starts going faster with stability. So it's really hard to do my strategy if you want a lot of results in the first 5 years. You're still in the first 5 years and already have 10 units. So let's talk about how you got there.

Yeah. So I get a lot of flak for where I invest. I don't know if we can say it on YouTube, but Christian had a fantastic phrase that he used. I invest in garbage properties in a garbage area, but he used a worse term than that. So I get a little bit of flack because I invest in the Midwest where it's a lot less expensive. I invest in Gary, Indiana. And if you've ever done a Google search of Gary, Indiana, you said to yourself, uh, I don't want to get shot. I want to actually be able to go to my properties and look at them. I, you know, I don't need like murders to happen there. You probably wiped your browser history afterwards. That guy's crazy. Not worth it. So, and I understand because that's exactly what happened when I first was propositioned with the the idea of investing at a distance in Gary, Indiana. I Googled it and I went, okay, 3 times the national poverty rate, 3 times the crime rate. The city used to have a population of 200,000. It's depopulated to 67,000. Why would anyone ever, ever invest in this city? Makes no sense. But the reality is, in any market in the entire country, whether it be luxury, whether it be the ghetto, whether it be in ridiculous landlord-tenant laws like California and Washington, or it's in a much more tenant-friendly place like Texas, There are people who are investing successfully and there's people who are not investing successfully in any market. So what you need to do is find the people who are doing it right, network with them, and copy and paste their strategies. And I've recently been saying, as everyone's talking about interest rates are so high and what are prices going to do, oh my God, it's a terrible time to buy, just like geographically, at any place in the market geographically, there are people who are doing it right. At any temporal place in the market, at any time in the market, there are people who are investing successfully and people who who aren't. We've talked a lot about the lumberjack landlord. Do you think a guy— I don't know how many of you guys watch his stuff, but a guy like him, he has contingencies for his contingencies. Oh, the market's going down? Oh, great. I know how to make money. Oh, the market's going up? Well, great. I know how to make money. A stock phrase that's commonly used is the bulls make money, the bears make money. It's the pigs that get slaughtered, right? So there's ways to make money in any economic cycle. You just have to know the right people, know the right strategies, and copy and paste. So I started investing in Gary because Um, what Dion mentioned earlier, when I started house hacking out here, I said to myself, how am I going to save a 20% down payment on a $500,000 property? And then of course, 2, 3 years later, that $500,000 property is now a $900,000 property. That down payment goal just gets further and further away. A friend of mine who was a law enforcement officer from the East Coast, never made more than $50,000 in his career, um, invested in his hometown of Virginia, home state of Virginia. He started investing in Gary, uh, and he slowly built a portfolio from his first rental to number 3, then number 8, number 12. Now he's 25. About the time he got to 9 or 10 rentals of him saying, Mike, check out Gary, call my property manager, call my team, talk to these people. And I was like, Mark, bro, no dude, like this is it. Like, it looks like someone fired a nuclear bomb off in parts of that city. I call it Gotham City. It's that bad. Batman couldn't save it. It's terrible. And I was like, there's just no way I'm going to invest here. But Mark is a bully. Mark's also a little socially unaware and he won't leave me alone. And so he's like, Mike, Mike, do it, call these people. So finally, just to appease him and shut him up, I finally started calling and talking to these property managers. I was like, dang it, you know what? He's actually right. So I call these people. Well, aren't you experiencing 10 times the normal eviction rates? And I mean, everybody that you're renting to is probably a felon. And how many of your houses get burned down on a weekly basis? Well, none of those things are actually happening. Because if you work with the right people, if you work with the right team, a lot of those negative scenarios get ameliorated by making sure that you have the right people on your team to handle the problem. So I finally fucked up, bought that first rental, and guess what? The world did not fall apart. So then I was like, all right, I'll try to buy another one, and then another one, and then another one, and multiple other ones. And so that's how I've invested in Gary. Wholesaling— I purchased from wholesalers, I purchased off the MLS, I purchased seller finance. But I think one of the most humbling moments I have is when we had a conversation at your triplex last time I was here, and I talked about seller financing. Gentleman had offered 50 of his 450 properties, and I thought that I had done something real great when I got seller financed 2 of them with great interest rates. Christian looks right at me dead in the eyes and speaks to my soul and goes, well, why didn't you try to get the whole 50? And I thought to myself, it never even dawned on me I just did the math in my head of I've got money for like 2, maybe 3. I'm doing the right thing. And Christian makes me regret that moment to this day.

Sorry.

So it used to just be Cody that made me feel bad about myself. Now it's Christian.

Now we have 3 blood feuds.

I know. But you need to put yourself in places where you network with the right people because you always need to push yourself to be better, right? There is no area in life where you have an opportunity to stagnate. You're either progressing or you're regressing. And so I put myself around people who are better than me or smarter than me, who could kill me, uh, but not without a fight, right? Who could delete me, right? Yeah, you weren't canceled before because they ask questions like that and I go, fudge. But immediately after I had that conversation with Christian, I have offered creative financing every single conversation I have with everybody, and I just got an offer accepted for 3 properties with creative finance from a seller. Hey, that's more than 2, right? Well, and in this case, that was all they had. So I was like, I'm picking up their whole package. So that's a little bit of my story, what I do. I know Gary, Indiana's a little scary, uh, but there's other markets out there that are less expensive markets at a distance. You can overcome the issues with investing at a distance if you have the right team.

Perfect.

We'll get into, uh, some of our strategy. Cody, I'll just interview you on what our thing was so everyone knows, uh, what the strategy actually looked like. For those on YouTube, by the way, feel free to ask your questions in the chat. We're actually going to get into the chat. We'll do questions in the room. I will read the chat, so keep posting questions there. We will get to you shortly. Also, I noticed All Nighter, I see you. He has entered the chat. My man, we're waiting for you.

We can start.

Yep, it officially starts now. Uh, okay, so we have investing the lazy way, one rental at a time, pick up stellar deals on market, you're financially free, you're done, you're out of the rat race.

What do you do with your time now, by the way? A lot of World of Warcraft.

Oh man, wow.

Serious. Um, Spirestone, whoever asked that.

Thank you, member.

Yep. I don't know what that means, but join Spirestone. Mike, you have an epic job. You get to jump out of helicopters and do fun, fun stuff. Are you ever leaving that job? Do you do that because it's fun or because you have to?

Uh, just in the time since you and I last spoke when we were here, I've been shot at like 3 more times. So my goal is to make sure that I do get to retire at some point. As much as I love being a police officer, SWAT officer, and arresting dangerous people, I have a son, 6 years old.

I have full custody.

It's just me and him. And I gotta make sure that I'm there for him. So if I can push to financial freedom by the time he's 10, I get him from 10 to 18, going to the range, we're playing soccer, we're gonna do BJJ together. You know, it's gonna be— that's our life. That's my goal.

How much more of Gary do you have to buy up to do that?

About 50% of the city. We'll see how it works out, you know.

Oh, that's funny.

I have 2 duplexes in Washington.

So Cody, what, what has our strategy been like? The journey— and we've summarized it a little bit here, but just a brief— what was the methodology that we chose with the pieces we have to get where we are?

There's only 3 questions you have to ask yourself: how do you buy it, how do you never lose it, and will it be fun? Originally it was how do you buy it, how do you never lose it, and I thought that was sufficient. That's not the case. We bought some real estate. We have, we have a, uh consulting company and we thought, "You know what? It's been a while since we bought anything. We should show these people it's still possible." So we wrote up two triplexes and then we bought them without any money, but the transactions weren't fun and that violated a principle we didn't have at the time. So really the only questions you have to ask yourself is how do you buy it? How do you never lose it? And will it be fun? And if you break that down, how do you buy it? You find a property, your deal comes first. Then you figure out the debt. Well, most people do the conventional route. They try and go with FHA, VA. So you can do the house hack model, or you do the 20% down conventional, or you do a— what Christian did, you do a house hack, 5% down on a house with an ADU, because you can't do that on a duplex typically. So, um, you can do your conventional, then do your FHA. But you figure out your deal, then you find your debt. I did seller financing because I didn't qualify for anything. And then you find the down payment, which is usually equity. That can also be debt. So when I bought real estate, the how do you never lose a part, you figure the first part out. The second part is long-term fixed-rate debt and cash flow. A lot of people are getting crushed right now, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of portfolios that they're losing because they did adjustable-rate mortgages. That is not part of our model. If you want to make sure you never lose it, you need to fix the variables, as many as you can. And that's what I like about Deon's model because he does fixed rate. He doesn't pull money out. He doesn't change his debt structures. If he wants to lever up, he'll go get new debt to buy new buildings, but that's it. And you don't have to do that anymore. You've won capitalism.

That's actually a great point. It's the hardest thing to do because imagine if you get to the point that you want, like right now, think of how many units you want or what cash flow you want per month coming in, like that metric in your mind of, that's my goal, I can't wait to get there. As soon as you are, are you going to move the goalpost? That's been my magic trick. If not, I got to 4 times my cash flow for my freedom number and I thought, I'm good. I've not heard of very many investors doing that. It's almost always, well, you got to hear what's the next level. Everyone asks me, what's the next thing for you? Not investing. There's a chronology to it. And at some point you hit, I have at least 4 times what you need. So you want that stability. You don't go, I need $10,000 a month. So you get $10,000 a month in cash flow and retire, because now a recession, a medical need, or something can tank you. But if you need $10,000 and you get to $40,000, or I needed $4,000 and I got above $16,000, that was enough. Enough is a word that just doesn't exist for most investors, right? Most money, which is most humans.

Yeah. So for us, the model is we set out a goal, we did the math, and to retire my mom, get her in a position where she can get the condo, live there for free. So I'd buy the condo, give her a free stay forever. We turn her house into a rental. So she gets $5,000 a month in passive income because we have an ADU in the back and Tacoma rents are ridiculous. And then to be able to retire his wife, which costs about the same amount as me taking care of my mom, the thought was, okay, we just need to buy 100 rentals and then we'll be done. So we set a 2-year goal, buy 100 rentals in 2 years. We did it in 11 months. And we celebrated with this resort that Dion said we should buy. All of it was seller financed except for one deal we bought with hard money. And the idea was, how do we break this down into logical steps? You figure out, how do I buy it? And we're talking about the creative finance section later, so I won't go super deep right now, but you just have to solve for the deal debt equity portion and then make sure that you cash flow on long-term fixed rate debt and you can buy forever. Where people get capped is they cannot acquire new debt that cash flows. Conventional typically will cap you out at 10 traditional loans. We're gonna have Matt Hawkins come to our next event because he has 35—

he has 35, 34, 35 conventional—

35 conventional fixed-rate 30-year mortgages. He created bank products. He made— he pitched the bank, they created a product for him, and they sold it to the masses. So you can expand, but the problem is most people don't know you could do that, and so you get capped at your ability to get new cash-flowing debt. For us, all the debt's made up, it's all fake money. Because it's seller financing. We're willing it into existence with a promissory note and a deed of trust. When I realized that it was just that simple, we just kept buying. And within 11 months, we bought our 110 rentals. We bought the resort to celebrate. We're doing a 70-unit development, but we don't have to buy anymore. We are not moving the goalposts. We're just optimizing our pieces. And, um, that comes into the last piece of our business model is You start with your build phase. Once you set out your goal, figure out where you're going, you build to that number. Then you stabilize the portfolio, which is what we're doing right now. We're going to redevelop some of the land parcels. That's called the optimization phase. So it's one thing to stabilize your real estate. It's another thing to optimize it. How do you get the max rents? How do you get the lowest expenses? And once you've done that, then you pay everything off. You go from build, stabilize, optimize, and then debt hammer. And that is the fastest way that I've found to scale from anybody's position, whether you have money or not, whether you're in debt or not, to a position similar to Dave Ramsey without being 60 years old. Because I think Dave's model is phenomenal. It's just the starting point is so discouraging for people. I want to be a debt-free org. We're going to pay off everything. By the time it's paid off in 5 years, it'll be about $30 million of real estate. And then we can go play the next game. What gets us to where we're at is not what gets us to the next level. We'll play with non-recourse debt so we don't jeopardize what we built to just get bigger, like your point. And that's our model.

Yeah. All three work is the main thing. And we had Brandon Vukelic up here speaking earlier. He has a different model as well, like where you buy properties in an ugly market.

Yeah.

That I imagine your cash flow numbers are just phenomenal on that.

They'll be fantastic.

Yeah.

Brandon will take a lower return to get a nicer asset that he's proud to stand in front of, and that means a lot to Brandon. There's a pride of ownership, and how you like to play the game is a big piece of it. Like, Dion, when you talk about like, I'm retired, I'm playing WoW, like, I bought what I wanted to buy and now I'm playing real estate. It is different getting out of the acquisition phase and playing real estate. It feels completely different. Like, this is really fun for me, working with the city and being like, hey, what can we build? How do we optimize this? Where do I put employees? Like, can we move pieces around? I have fun playing this game, but you get to your goal first and then you stabilize, you optimize. And do you move the goalpost? I'm 30, Cody's 23. We have a lot of time to optimize. If we were done, I mean, I don't— I can't play WoW for 50 years.

2 or 3 hours a week is fine. Yeah, you mix in a cruise every other week, you mix in Vegas 2 weeks ago, you mix in Europe, you just travel, do whatever you want. That's That's the whole point of financial freedom is you don't have to continue to grow.

Yep.

If you've turned that into the game, sure. But you do it with non-recourse debt. You don't put at risk what you already have.

You don't jeopardize.

Just growing to grow is the dumbest model that people put online. And getting to 1,000 units is great. We'll get there. Difference is we'll have no debt on it. And everybody that owns 5 or 10% of their 1,000 units, they're going to be 70% leveraged. With adjustable rate mortgages just to squeak by. You don't have to do this thing forever, but it doesn't take forever to play the game. It took us 11 months to build a 6-figure a year for each of us passive income, and we did that with $100,000 of his money and $10,000 of my money.

Yeah, that's crazy. That's so weird. That hasn't sunk in yet.

I've only had 11 months for that to But, but that's what we want to put out there. Whether you want to buy out of state— I bought 3 hours from where I live, and for those who don't know, like, I totaled my car driving over the pass. Uh, like, the pass isn't super safe, so you can't always go over there. I thought otherwise until I lost my car into a barrier. But, um, like, that was a distance for me. Whether it's a 3-hour flight, 3-hour drive, 10-hour flight, whatever it is You just have to figure out how do you buy the real estate, how do you never lose it, and will it be fun? Because when you go through the, the journey and you buy a whole bunch of real estate, there's times where we have to spend $15 grand because trees are falling, and it's not fun, but the overall adventure is fun. If the adventure wasn't fun when we have to spend 5 figures on trees or 5 figures on a septic line, it'd be really easy to just say, all right, we're done, we'll sell out and and that defeats the purpose of why we originally did this.

I have been actively reaching inside every single septic tank of this building, getting things functional. It is not all, uh, super fun. It's a lot of work.

Christian is the poo man.

I—

that won some huge points with the prior ownership. They're like, they're willing to deal with the shit. Oh, they're willing to— don't cancel me. They're willing to deal with the, the not fun stuff. If you handled the poo, you can handle all the other projects. Yander Poo, you can handle the electric. So it's all an adventure. It's not always easy. However, it's a lot faster than— at least from what I've seen, it seems a lot faster than working a 9-to-5 for 40 years, retiring, and having like 11 years to do whatever you want.

And if you just do the math, if you want to make $10,000 a month in a 6% rate of return market, you need $2 million of equity. Quickest way to get to $2 million if you're at zero is to borrow it and let someone else pay it off. That's the simplicity of the model. If you can buy a $2 million asset, if it never went up in value, but a 6% rate of return, if you owned it outright, it'd be $120,000 a year, $10,000 a month. You just have to figure out how do I get the debt? If you have no money, you're not going to get it through— like our next speaker, Trevor, you're not going to get it through a traditional route because you don't fit the box. I didn't fit the box. That's where creative options come into play. But If you do qualify for that, it doesn't have to be a home run deal. You just have to get to your number and then let your tenants pay it off. They're really nice people, and if you take care of them, they'll take care of you. That's the simplicity of it. Whether it's $20,000 a month, you know, adjusted for inflation, you need $4 million, or you buy in Gary, Indiana, and you make, uh, like 40% on your money.

22%.

Okay, that's still fantastic.

22%. But you just do the math, it's almost worth it.

Almost.

Does that factor for your bulletproof best budget?

Yeah.

So yeah, I lose another 4% off the top when I get plate carriers and the armored vehicle and everything.

Escorts.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm sorry, you're fun to make fun of. It's a fantastic strategy and your yield is fantastic.

It's all good.

But you do the math of whatever market you're investing in's return is, you get to that amount of real estate and then you pay it off as quick as possible once you optimize it. That's why we said you build stabilize, optimize, debt hammer. Because when it's all paid off, you can do what you want when you want. It doesn't matter.

So the next thing that I want us to cover is getting started. Who in the room— and, uh, for everyone watching on YouTube, just throw a, throw a hand emoji up if it's you— but who here owns real estate today? Just a quick show of hands.

Who has it?

Okay, so we're about half the room, maybe slightly over half the room here, and apparently none of YouTube.

YouTube's on a lag by 20 seconds.

Okay, in 20 seconds we'll find out how many of you on YouTube have, uh, have bought real estate. But if you are new to the game and you're getting started, we've just presented 3 different strategies. We've talked about another strategy. Where would you get started if you were day one buying your first rental? What would you do?

Starting with Dion.

Okay. I'm gonna let Mike go first.

Nope, too late.

If you're starting right now, don't have any real estate, uh, people mention house hacking a lot. Looking at the different strategies of house hacking would be my first My first step, right? That's getting at real estate. Anytime you're going to start, whether it's now or you already have 5 properties and you're buying your next property, the first step, the first actual step, actionable step, is learning how to save. You're not going to magically learn how to save once you have property. You need to learn that beforehand. Saving doesn't mean spending less. That's the mistake a lot of people think. They think, I'm going to cut corners, cut costs. Saving means increasing your income.. For some of us, that's a side hustle or overtime, but the most impressive way that people are making more money in the last couple of years than the last decades is by changing companies. So for most people right now, you can get a 5% or 7% cost of living raise if you stay at your company. You're going to get a 15% to 20% increase in pay if you change companies. So changing employers right now is a more effective way of making more money. Then avoid life creep. Just because you start making more money doesn't mean you start spending more money. That money increases your savings. Second actionable step is work on your credit score and don't rely on Credit Karma. You're going to see, you know, you're going to hear every lender on the planet say you need a 740 or higher credit score. What you see on Credit Karma is not what they see, the FICO score versus what Credit Karma puts out. You want to hit for that 780 or higher to get the best lending options because that means when the lender looks, they're probably going to see 740 or higher. So everything that you can do, every YouTube content that you can find on strategies to improve your credit score should be the next thing. Choosing your strategy comes next. If you're starting right now and you probably don't have the ability— unless you're in Gary and it's going to be $18,000 for the house in Washington— you're going to want to save a down payment. 20% takes a lot more than it takes to save up 3%. If you're starting right now, don't own any property and you haven't done anything in the last 3 years, a conventional loan, not FHA— FHA doesn't mean first-time homebuyer, it means you have terrible credit, terrible debt-to-income, and you need a loan product that'll work for you. So you use conventional at 3% down for that first purchase. Next purchase is going to be 5%. That's on single-family house. So the first thing I— when I talk to people about house hacking, they'll say, I don't want a shared living space, I have kids, so I don't want roommates. I don't want to live on a duplex or triplex or fourplex because, oh, I can't imagine my garage touching my neighbor's garage. That's just gross. Whatever the reason is, you can buy a single-family house with owner-occupied lending, live there for a year, rinse and repeat 10 times in 10 years, 10 rentals. All owner-occupied lending. You don't ever have to even share living space or your wall touching someone else. A step above that is you can go for a house with an ADU, qualifies for single-family lending like you said, better than a duplex, triplex, or fourplex. You can go conventional with that low owner-occupied. House with an ADU is an often missed asset class because investors, we put in the search small multifamily, duplex, triplex, fourplex. Homebuyers don't want tenants. So it's actually, if you're searching for ADU, Make sure you understand what— that you can't control what the listing agents are doing. They might put ADU, DADU, JADU, accessory dwelling unit, auxiliary dwelling unit, granny flat, mother-in-law house. List all of them in your search so that you see those. You can go for a duplex, triplex, or fourplex where you're not shared living space. Um, you can have fence, separate yards, so this can be done with kids. So you can house hack a resort with seller financing. Cody, you're still in here, right?

No, I moved back.

You moved back?

Okay, but you were here for a bit.

Been there, done that. Okay, been there, done that.

So it's possible to do that. For most people, your living expenses, your housing is your biggest expense. It's either housing or taxes. Those are your two. So if you can find a way to reduce or eliminate that, that's how I would get started. Now, a lot of people are going to say, I don't want to do that because I have a spouse, and moving in or sharing space or small multifamily is a step back. You asked, how would you start now? That's I would say house hacking is the reason I reached financial freedom in 10 years or less. When I first started, this here was my starting position. If I didn't house hack, I don't think I'd ever own a property. In 2008, I was a police officer and I got laid off because of the recession, because when there's a recession going on, we don't need cops anymore. There's no more crime. So newsflash, I was a single parent with 3 kids, found out about $89,000 in bad debt in my name that I didn't know existed until the divorce. Started teaching at commercial driver school here in Tacoma. So you guys have seen, if you look around here, the trucks that drive around the CDL school, making $17 an hour. How do you get started in real estate if you have bad debt-to-income because of debt you didn't know about? You don't have a high salary. You just changed careers from law enforcement to teaching, so lenders aren't going to work with you. So I talked earlier about patience and how much time those first 4 years suck, 5 years suck. For the first 2 years, what I did is I moved from my house into an apartment. So imagine having kids and saying, hey, we live in a house, it's 4-bedroom on a lake, you have boat launch, basketball courts, tennis courts, I'm gonna go live in an apartment. If you haven't talked to your kids right now, you don't understand kids. They were excited. We get to live next to other kids. I get to be the new girl in the school, right? So until you have that conversation, you don't know if your family is against this. We knee-jerk reaction think they're going to be. Rented out the house for 2 years. Got rental income on my tax returns. Debt-to-income now means nothing to lenders because they'll look at 75% of rental income on my debt-to-income ratio on the next property that I'm buying, including the rents on that property. So I'm able to buy a duplex owner-occupied, 5% down on a duplex, which is still possible. He did it too. To get into small multifamily, it took 2 years. To start now, I would start making a 2-year plan. Yes, you can be creative and do it much faster, So learn those strategies too. But for me, since I know that it works because I've experienced it, that would be my start today method. Learn to save, work on credit, figure out my strategy, which form of house hacking is going to work for me, and then plan for 2 years.

Your turn. Yeah, well, I mean, I don't want to just sound like a, uh, like an echo, but I did house hacking too. Um, and when I think about getting started in real estate 5 years ago, um, when I started my YouTube channel—

was that a ghost? It was.

John Beckman is here.

Yikes. Okay, so 5 years ago when I started my YouTube channel, my very first video is me saying, I don't have any money, I don't own any real estate, I'm currently renting in Bothell, Washington for $1,800 a month, I just got divorced, I don't have custody of my son, uh, I have no college education, I grew up poor, I work night shift, I'm this Things suck. And I was like, but I want to become financially independent through investing in real estate. I don't know how long it's going to take and I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm going to record the entire process. And so I made a video for every property I bought, for every step that I've taken along the way to document the entire journey. And now when I tell people how I recommend that they get started in real estate, I give them the same advice that Dion just gave. So I'm not going to talk nearly as long, but it really is, um, no offense, yeah, I'm just thinking about repeat everything you said. But the biggest expense that you have each month is probably what you pay in rent, or maybe what you're currently paying, like your mortgage or something like that. And so the sacrifice you might have to make is, yeah, you're gonna leave a nice house and go live in an apartment, which luckily for you, your kids were on board. But for a lot of people, when I tell them house hack, oh dude, my wife's not gonna buy off on that, dude. She ain't gonna do that one. If not, there's other ways to get started. But yeah, realistically, taking your monthly cost of your rent as close to zero as possible will free up all of that money you were just paying in rent to now save more aggressively and buy a rental property. So house hacking is the best way to get started, in my opinion. Now, there's lots of people who start with a bunch of money. Maybe they don't need to house hack. I have a friend of mine who lives for free with his parents. He's a young guy, you know, 24 years old, something like that. And we got him his first rental property ever in Gary, Indiana, using my team. So there are other ways to get started, but I still think that the most preferable, best way to do it is save as much of your monthly income as you can so that you can aggressively save faster for more rentals through house hacking.

That's how Christian did it. Yep, condo.

Yep, did a condo, 2-bed, 2-bath. So it wasn't even like a multi-family building.

I just—

we rented out a room to a college buddy. I lived there. Uh, my wife and I bought it when actually we were engaged, so I lived there with a roommate. We got married, she moved in, we kept the roommate for another year, and that gave me enough to buy a house. So rented out the condo, bought the house, needed to remodel the house, so then I sold the condo. And then I— then my wife got to the point where she's like, well, I don't really want to share a wall with someone again. And so I was like, okay, well, house hacking's out at that point. So then I bought a— uh, so I was like, well, I really want to invest. She's like, well, idea: what if you made more money? And I was like, okay. So I spent 5 years doing that. Bought 2 duplexes, and then I was like, well, I want to buy more stuff, and I'm pretty much capped where I think I can realistically make money from what I knew how to do. I had a decent paying job, so I was like, well, I'm out of money. I don't want to do this for another 5 years. And that's where I got into the creative finance space.

But if you had to start over, would you do the house hack again?

Would I do it from the beginning? I think it's a fantastic strategy. For me, I actually was happier This is just, this is a personal preference. Having a house and going, how do I cover the house? I bought duplex, I bought a second duplex, and they were both low down. One was 5% down, one was 0% down. They covered my mortgage on my house, so I lived completely for free with my own walls. It was like a house hack. I just bought two low down properties to cover my mortgage, and that's what I did. I still had to get creative with it.

That's how most of us that house hack get out of it. How do you escape house hacking? Matt the Lumberjack landlord with 137 units did the same thing. He house hacked for like 18 years or something, but his wife was, I'm done house hacking. We don't want to do this anymore. So he said, sure, we're going to buy a house. The payment for that house is going to be the cost of the unit we could rent out that they're moving out. So if you can rent it out for $2,000 a month, then the mortgage is going to be $2,000 a month. So you can use house hacking as a springboard. It doesn't have to be forever. Some of us do it because we get addicted. I live in a fourplex right now where that one property is cash flowing $2,500 a month. With me living.

It's a baller property.

So it is very cool. I'm very, very happy there. Um, will I buy a house someday? Maybe, but it's going to be based on how much my unit, when I move out of it, will rent for, will cover the cost of it.

But not—

I don't know, but not today.

Through my head too.

Cody, how about you?

How would you start?

Because you did not house hack.

Yeah.

Oh, well, I mean, you technically did house hack this, but this was after you got started.

Yeah.

So if I had to start over today, regardless of age or what I do for a job, whether I was making $100 grand or $20 grand or $50 grand income, I would go meet with the players in the space and I would first start and learn how to communicate. I talked about this earlier, where you're coming from, where you're going, why, what changes for you when you get there. Everything you want, someone else has. When we talk about money, there are people that are billionaires, there are people that are above the billionaire list, the oil families that are trillions of dollars, and then there's everybody else. And for most things that you want to accomplish, you just have to talk to everybody else. You don't have to talk to anybody special. People that have accumulated $5, $10, $15 million of real estate, it isn't that much real estate anymore. At least, I mean, it's all of Gary, but it's not much of anywhere else. So how much Gary?

I don't know.

18 grand houses. But I would go meet with the players after I figured out how to map out and communicate effectively where I'm coming from, where I'm going, what changes when I get there. Because if I went out and met with— and that's what I did, I met with players. One of the guys' names is Gary. He's over in Moses Lake, and you look him up on, on, uh, like a Yardi search or a Realist report, and the whole map lights up.

My garage is worth more than $18K.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, he owns the railroads, he owns the commercial districts, he owns the residential districts, he owns the multifamily, he is the player in that town, the midsize player. Then you got the billionaires, like you got Schneider Homes that owns some of the really big complexes out there. But outside like the super billionaires, there's a lot of people that are in the $10 to even $90 million range that just own a ton of real estate. They've played the game. They're the pros and the experts in the space. Getting started, if I lost everything today and everything's non-recourse except for a 38-plex loan, but if everything went away, I would pick a new market. I would go learn who the players are. I'd figure out if I had to start over how to communicate my story. And I'd make sure that I don't get kicked out of the table. It's one thing to sit down at the table. It's another thing to not get kicked out. So if you get in the room, make sure you stay there. And I would just try and build relationships with those players because they're the only people that could feasibly get me back to where I'm at today within a year or less. And I don't want to spend 30 years. Nobody here has done that over 30 years, but I don't want to do the long route.

Yeah.

And even the way we did it, I mean, we went very fast, very quickly. I don't want to rebuild that again. No, so much. It was painful to go that fast.

But once you build the relationships with the players, not only can they help you scale, they can teach you how to play the game, but I've borrowed money from some of those people that have bailed me out. Like, not everything goes well, but if I'm in a tricky situation, I call up the owners that taught me how to play the game and they'll just lend me money. They can seller finance a second loan or they can refinance a first loan because they're sitting on a lot more money than any of us, I believe, have. So they can fix a lot of short-term problems and turn it into long-term real estate problems. But I wouldn't have access to that had I not built those relationships. So if I had to start over, I'd go build that in a new market.

So there's a hypothetical study that my dad always talked about, and I still miss you, Dad, but he used to talk about if you take a millionaire, a blue-collar worker, and a homeless person, you take away everything that they have and you let them start over, in a year or 5 years, you're going to have a millionaire, a blue-collar worker, and a homeless person, right? The homeless person is going to figure out where the shelters are, where the food is, where I can sleep safely at night, Blue-collar worker is going to say, where will my resume get me the best results? Millionaire is going to say, what strategy got me here? And I'm going to repeat it, right? So 99% of the people aren't in the 1%. It's factually how it is. Most of our advice is coming from the 99%. Our parents, our teachers, they're all telling us how you would do this. What you have is all of us said this is how we would start again to get to where we are because we know that it works. I think you should continue to surround yourself with people that are in a similar position that you want to be in. So even the conversation of how would you start, what would you do next, wanting advice on something is going to come from somebody that's done it. Find your local REI meetups, stay in contact through email with us, get the questions. Because if you're talking to your friends or family, you're going to hear, you're crazy, that's risky. You could just have a job, you could have a retirement account, you could do the work for more than 40 hours a week for more than 40 years to retire on 40% of what you made. That's safe. That's what everyone else is doing.. And to me, that's the most risky thing that you can do, but it's going to be where most of your advice comes from.

And had I listened to my family and friends, I would be graduating this year. Yeah, I would be $100,000 in debt instead of $12.5 million.

Dave approves of this message, right? All right, I want to get, uh, YouTube— I promised you all that we'll get to your questions. However, all of you, and I know for a fact because Basically every channel here has invited you to this event. You're not here, so this room out here gets first shot. Does anyone have any questions for anyone on the stage in the room?

Boom.

Uh, Dan, if you would like to, uh, find another area to invest in the way you guys did, how would you do that?

For me, I would look at— there's one metric I look at above everything else. You are providing a service which is housing for humans. Do humans want to live here? And I do that on worldpopulationreview.com. And if the graph is going up like this over time, that is my first indicator that is a market that I want to invest in. Because we did really bad at developing, especially through 2020 through 2022. Material costs skyrocketed, labor was really difficult, there's a whole bunch of government hassle. So we're behind on building. So places where people moved to, I would love to own those. Those are the Because 85% of my market analysis is finding housing for humans, houses for humans, humans, humans. All the humans want to live here, I want to invest here.

I think we each just share one metric so we can bomb through questions.

Yes, dude, metric, go.

Something I didn't realize until I drove through Seattle and then drove through Quincy. For those who don't know where Quincy is, it's right above George Washington. You just go to George and then you go north about 10 miles. So if you don't know where Georgia is, it's because it's in the middle of nowhere. But I bought in Quincy and everybody takes care of their yards. There's no trash in the streets. The streets are probably 30% wider than anywhere on the side of the mountains. And people take care of each other and they take care of their stuff. You don't see that in Seattle. Seattle, you get what's called needle soup, where you have those trash cans full of water and needles, and there's all the trash on the streets. And what's not supposed to be on the streets is in the trash. And it's just a mess. So I look at pride of ownership. I don't have to have the nicest building, but if I own it in an area where everybody takes care of stuff as if it was their own, the tenants take care of people, the buildings, their yards, I'm more inclined to buy there because you can get great returns investing somewhere where people won't take care of their stuff. But if you want to up your returns, just figure out how to borrow cheaper money and buy the nicer stuff. Yeah.

I would find a person that's investing successfully and I don't care where they are geographically.

I would say, "Oh, this person is doing something that I really like and I developed a good relationship with him and I don't think they're lying to me and they want to help me and they care about me. I'm going to learn everything I can from that person and where they recommend I should invest, I'm going to listen. And then I'm just going to copy what they're doing because I don't need to reinvent the wheel." I'm going to cheat and go with 2.

So first, to find out population trends, you can go to U-Haul, track where the trucks are going. To actually go there in person and find out or ask property managers, what's this area like? That's great. You're piggybacking like you did with Matski and finding a market to find your market. So the first one is trusted boots on the ground. If you're starting in a market, it should be the one you live in because you know the market, you know the neighborhoods to avoid, or a neighborhood you used to live in, so you trust your boots on the ground. If not, it's somebody who works in the industry, like an agent, property manager, handyman, contractor, who's somehow affiliated with real estate, who you trust enough to where you think they're going to come to your funeral. They'll know the neighborhoods to avoid because you can invest in Florida, in Cape Coral, and there can be a $700,000 house and a $250,000 house 60 feet from each other. One's on the canal, one's not. If you don't know that, you're going to lose. Based on the elevation of the house, your flood insurance might be $1,000 a year or $8,000 a year. So you have to know little things about the market. That's just one town in one little place in Florida. So trusted boots on the ground. And second, for me, the most important aspect when it comes to investing in a market, economic drivers. I want more than one source of tenants. If there's just a paper mill, logging mill, Silicon Valley's all IT. I wouldn't want to invest in or around because Sacramento dropped 75% in 2009 in the crash. Market-wide, the largest drop we've ever seen in a 12-month period market-wide is 8.9%. That one market dropped 75%. So I want something like— one of the reasons why I invest in Washington is we have JBLM. So a base, there's a port, there's colleges, there's hospitals. Tacoma has a population over 100,000. So several economic drivers. If I was going to pick another market, it doesn't have to have a large population or a Boeing or a base. It has to have at least 3 different sources of tenants so that something massive has to happen to actually impact the market. So that's my 2 things, boots on the ground, economic drivers.

Love it. Fantastic. And just so you guys know, we'll go a little bit over on this for our plans, 2:30, and I will adjust everything on the backend so that everyone gets their full speaking allotment or greater. Because we have a few great speakers coming up. I want to make sure everyone gets their full time.

Yeah, we might just bomb through questions on here and then not get to YouTube. I apologize, YouTube, we're doing our best. Be here next time.

Yes, be here next time. There's another hand earlier.

Yes, Cody, you mentioned that you, um, one of your things you do is you find players in the area, then you find— yeah, you know, where do you go specifically, or do you have multiple sources? Google Maps. Is that—

I know you said that a lot, but that's the only thing you use?

Google Maps is the play. Because all the players own real estate and all the real estate's on that map.

But how do you—

how do you find out who owns it?

Yeah. So, yep. So you go online and if you look up an address, you can find the tax parcel ID and that could be on different websites. Redfin, Zillow, you can find the ID, you plug that into the tax assessor website, you can find the name. Once you find the name, it'll also typically have an address where you can mail to them. You put in just the city and their name. And phone number, and 9 times out of 10, it will pop up without scrolling and you can find their phone number. And if you want to cheat, most people have iPhones. You can try and text it if you have an iPhone, and if it pops up blue, you got a good number. But that is how I found people's contact information. And I've done that. Nobody's exempt from that. If you want to test that, I can find anybody's phone number in here if you own real estate. But we've done that for Elon Musk. We've done it for Belfort and Cardone, like all those players, their numbers are just online.

Can I ask that— I guess this would be for Mike and Dion, right? Because I'm in Washington and I invest in Washington, and I feel like here we see a lot more equity gain, appreciation, whatever you want to call it. I know you guys don't invest in that, right? But, you know, in other markets that don't, like Gary, that don't appreciate as much, right, how can we take advantage? Like, for me, I have a lot of equity in Washington in my properties and I want to scale, right? And I want to, I want to get bigger faster. Um, what would be your strategy or a thought in someone in my position that has locations that appreciate?

So you're, you're at— your question is you want to know how you could take the equity gains you made here and invest those at a distance in a lower-cost entry market, or just in general you want to figure it out? Yeah, well, I mean, in general, if you've already got a couple properties out here— I know we've chatted before— um, if you've got a good system that's working for you here, I would just rinse and repeat. I would maybe try to incorporate some more of their creative financing, which is what I'm doing. I'm rinsing and repeating in my market. But now every single time that I talk to a listing agent, after I've already said things like, hey, you know, would you mind representing me in this transaction if your seller, if your seller isn't offended by that or something? And now they got the dollar signs in their eyes. Oh, I get a double dip. And after they've made that emotional attachment to me, then I say, by the way, Is there any chance that your seller has any other properties? Are they a homeowner? They're an investor? Oh, they do have more properties. Well, that's great. How many more? Well, they have a few. Oh, I'm not going to miss that opportunity again. Is there a way that I could get all of those? You know, can we put together a package?

Go ahead. I've got a question for you that piggybacks off of that. Sure. You said that there's investors that will do well and do poorly in every market. Yeah. And the people that hear about Gary and they're like, oh, I'm going to get 22% cash on cash. They call the brokers and they buy all the bad deals. Yeah. How do they finance an $18,000 house?

Is it cash?

So, oh, first of all, I've never bought an $18,000 house. Okay. So that's just a number I pulled out.

But, but let's say like those small deals, you're not gonna get a ton of conventional loans.

The cheapest house that I've ever bought was $29,000. I paid all cash with a home equity line of credit.

So, so let's say a lot of less than savvy investors here online, they wanna buy in Gary and then they get fooled into buying all the, the less than desirable locations, less than desirable properties. What's stopping you from coming in? Because people will lose, right? If you want to go into a new market, finding the players that are struggling, you see all these new investors moving in. You can see when deals are trading, where they're geographically based. Could you just target those people with the title company and then call them up? Because if they're in trouble and they're paying cash or they're using equity lines of credit, like if you got a HELOC, you could buy over there. You find the people that are losing. They have no debt on their assets. You could just seller finance huge portfolios of failing operators.

Yes. And that is an email chain that I was responding to this morning. There's a person that went in and they tried to buy themselves 15 different tax sale properties because they were just all dirt cheap. And I looked online, they were picking them up for $10,000. They're picking them up for $14,000 at tax auctions. They bought themselves 15 to 20 of these. And then they realized, oh my God, this is a huge project. It would be a lot of money. You don't have the systems. Exactly. And so now, I'm like, okay, well, can I carve off these 4 into a package deal? Or can I get these ones into some sort of structure? Because some of them are so bad, I don't want to deal with those things, you know? Or which ones are actually currently operating and have people living in them? Can I carve off all of the livable, rentable, usable ones into one portfolio deal? And I'll take these off your hands. So, that's exactly what I'm trying to do right now, is find the people who bit off more than they could chew.

So, let me try to answer that as succinctly as possible.

Possible.

The first thing that I think I would like to kind of correct is you said, I have equity and I would like to use it. Let's switch that to, you have the ability to put debt on an existing asset. It's not that you have equity, it's that you can put debt on it. So the second thing is, how do you want to put the debt? Is it a home equity line of credit? For that, can you pay it off before the rate adjusts? And then most people are going to say, well, it's fixed for 10 years. Well, can you pay it off in 10 years? Second thing is, is a new mortgage maybe the option? What's the current interest rate? So maybe you don't want to touch it. So now you'll get a second mortgage instead of refinancing up the money and touching that first mortgage. But the first question that comes in anytime you're going to do something like that is, do you have confidence in your ability to find a deal that's going to generate enough revenue to justify the debt on the existing asset? Risk adjusted. Risk adjusted. So you're going to have the new debt, you're going to lose the cash flow on the first deal or increase your mortgage payment on your current house. And I don't mean I think I can make an offer and I'd probably get a return close. I mean, you know, there's a deal you can make an offer on, you're confident they would accept that offer, and that cash flow from that property is going to justify that debt. So that's kind of the thought process when it comes to doing that.

Any other questions from audience?

If anything, guys, you guys asked most of the questions in the chat. So YouTube, we did get to you in a roundabout way.

We are going to round up. If you guys have anything you want to share, We'll share our last thoughts. If not, we'll just do a 10-minute intermission and then kick it off. We've got muffins over there and apples and—

so enjoy, YouTube.

Muffins over here. But that's on YouTube. If you want to see the rest of these speeches, you only get one for free, so make it here to the next event. I know you were all invited. Um, closing thought for me, for anyone getting started, because we talked a lot about that, uh, the one thing you have to do, and this will be the hardest thing that you do in my experience, is you have to buy your first deal. And it doesn't matter if it's a 12-plex, it's a house, it's a duplex, whatever that first deal is, you just have to get the first one done. And to Brandon's speech earlier, it's like, what's one of the first things brokers want to see is have you actually gone through the steps? Because a lot of people who are going to learn it, want to do it, never buy. So if you want to buy, make the commitment to yourself, I'm going to buy something. And if it's as simple— conveniently, we're early in the year, so If it's as simple as like, okay, I have a 12-month runway to buy something, like in 2023 I'm going to buy a property. Cody got started with no money, no connections, 9 months. 9 months. Caleb and Chuck, we have all the time on our channel, and you should also check them out on YouTube.

Caleb and Chuck, they're the only people I know that have gone faster than I did.

Yep.

And it took them 9 months from when they started to close the deal, and now they have 28 units at 19.

Yep. I had a little bit of money, and when I finally committed to buying a deal Took me about 4 months, but I started with money, which is a little bit easier than starting with absolutely no money and no real estate.

You didn't start with money as a kid though. You started with money because you worked.

Oh yeah. I mean, I worked for it, but when I committed to, hey, I want to buy real estate, it takes some time, but 1,000% you can do it within your first year.

If you said a 12-month window, only way to buy real estate is to buy real estate. And if you got a little bit of money stocked away, whether it's 5 figures, 4 figures, 6 figures, you meet with a broker, you meet with a lender, and you can buy a piece of real estate. It's not going to be necessarily a home run, but to this day I've still never bought a home run. Everything I buy sits on the MLS or it's direct to owner. So everybody's had a chance to buy it. You just have to make a home run out of the resources you got. So thanks, guys.

Yeah, thank you.

Fantastic.

Everyone, there's food and drink, unless you're on YouTube, you drink your own food. Yeah. And we'll see you all soon.