Using 0 Dollars and Creative Finance to Buy Financial Freedom - Creative Finance, Business, Marriage

When we bought our first apartment building, I think this is a really important thing to note. One of our investors actually came short on the money, and we actually spotted one of them for several months using a HELOC on our primary residence, which means we risked our house. We gambled everything. Hello and welcome to another episode of Multifamily Strategy. I'm Christian, joined again by the amazing Dani.

I am here today.

We have two mics testing out the audio for the first time. If you are new and you're just listening, thanks for listening. If you're watching this on the YouTube channel, Welcome to the new studio. We've officially built it. We did the thing.

Dani! It still needs the shelves, but you know.

I know, we need a little bit more, but guys, this is gonna be the new location. I hope you all like it. Dani, how are you liking Texas so far?

It is good. I miss my family, but it's good.

That's okay, because they'll be coming down next week on Wednesday.

Party time!

There we go. We'll see them very soon. We started with a goal. If you're brand new to the channel, we've bought hundreds of rental properties starting with $0, were able to do so through creative finance. On today's episode, we're going to talk a little bit about how we made that decision to do that as a couple, what it looks like to have the push and pull of being entrepreneurs together, more about what Danny actually does in some of the companies. We talked about it last time, but we're going to go deeper into some of that. And yeah, welcome to the podcast. So the original goal, retire you from teaching. Moved to Texas. Last time we filmed an episode, we were still in Washington State. Favorite part of Texas so far?

The weather. It's so nice to go outside. It's warm.

I also really appreciate the fact that in Texas they have frozen custard.

Yes, your waistline does appreciate that.

I have gained weight and we haven't been here very long.

Same. I'm pregnant.

People don't know that. Dani is, uh, I'm 9 months pregnant. Very pregnant. The goal is we wanted to move to Texas to have a 1, warmer environment, 2, more business friendly, 3, we wanted to raise kids in an environment that was more appropriate for our lifestyle.

Yes.

We're going to have a native-born Texan. I'm pretty excited about this.

Yeehaw. Yeehaw.

Dani, what's been the hardest part about Texas so far? Has it just been the being farther away from family or what's the biggest challenge been?

The bugs are bigger.

I did not realize.

They're much bigger.

How much bigger? The scale is pretty wild.

They're pretty big.

Yeah. So we saw a frog the other day that was about the size of our Frenchie. I know that's not a bug.

I was about to say, that's not a bug.

But the wildlife here is just astronomically larger.

Yes.

And it's not that weird. I don't know. The bugs are bigger and it's kind of like they just are.

It is a thing.

It is a thing. When we started in real estate, we had this goal again to retire Dani from teaching. We got the question a lot at our event last night. How did you know you could make it? I got asked that question. You got asked that question. When we went into business, we had no money at the time.

Yeah.

Well, we were living on your teacher salary. I had just left the CoStar Group.

Yeah.

So we really weren't— we were We had savings. Yeah, we had, yeah, like a few thousand dollars.

We weren't being stupid, but we were risking it.

Yeah, we were basically going, hey, we're gonna step out on a teacher's salary, a kindergarten teacher's salary, and we're gonna make the business work. How did you know we would make it?

Well, I didn't, but I also feel like if you just don't jump in, you'll never know if you'll sink or swim. So it was kind of like we just, You were like, I had this vision, I had this idea. And I was like, okay, go for it. I mean, you already didn't have a job. So I was like, success. So I was like, okay, let's try.

You wanna leave the 9 to 5? First step, leave the 9 to 5, check.

And I was already like in my teaching contract. So it was like, I was locked in for the year. So it wasn't like I was able to go anywhere. So I wasn't too worried. And I knew that you, Christian, don't like it if, we don't have a path forward. So I knew after like a couple of months, if it wasn't working, you would have gone back to the 9 to 5. So I wasn't too worried.

And when we bought our first apartment building, I think this is a really important thing to note. We got in like, yes, we raised the capital. One of our investors actually came short on the money and we actually spotted one of them for several months using a HELOC on our primary residence, which means we risked our house. Like when we say we didn't have any money, like—

I fully didn't understand that at the time.

We gambled everything. And when I— we'd explain like, okay, you know, like, if we're backing this with a loan against our house, but there's explaining and comprehending. Yeah, exactly. But it does have to work. Right? What about that first deal? And we went 38 units, we walked the property, there's like a homeless camp on the back of it, it's super rough. You were immediately like, yes, this is the project. Like you were immediately on board. What about that project when you go like, we have really no money. We have no experience in doing anything kind of like this heavy of a turn. It's 38 units. We've never done a seller finance contract in our lives. What about that building made you look at it and go like walk on site and say, yes, this is the project we want to do?

I saw the potential. I feel like Christian and I before, he forgot to mention, we bought a condo. We pretty much flipped it. Yeah. And then we bought our house. We pretty much flipped it and it was like, okay, I mean, a house to you know, 38 units is a lot, is a big jump. But it was still like I could see the potential and stuff like that in it. And I was like, okay, we're just gonna chunk and chew through this like we did with the house. We didn't just do all the renos at once. We like did the fireplace first and then the floors, and, you know, and just like they kept going. Same thing with the rentals. Like, okay, let's get unit, you know, 6 done and then unit 12. And then we just kept going. And then I was like, oh yeah, this is possible, this is doable. So Yeah, I saw the potential.

If you had to go back in time to the 38-unit, what would you have had us do differently in that deal knowing what you know now?

I wouldn't have waited as long to do the renos. We waited a bit.

Yes, we did.

And that was stupid because we bled. We should have found the money and we should have, or raised it or whatever, because then you patch the bleed. But I mean, for surgeons, if you start bleeding out, there's a Styrofoam that you like, they just fill the wound quickly with. And it's like we just didn't do that. We just kind of like looked at the bleed and went, oh, and that was not smart.

We had a couple of things working in our favor. This was in the middle of COVID which was— that was really my wake-up call into getting into real estate. I was sitting at home and I had time to think for the first time in my career. I was sitting at home and I was like, I hate selling things for other people. This is dumb. What are we doing? 8 years in, we have 2 duplexes. That's not financial freedom. We didn't even have the second duplex yet.

And I was teaching at home.

And we're just looking at it like, is this what we want life to look like?

Yeah.

A few years into our marriage, we're in our house. We hit most of the metrics for like graduated school, got reasonable paying jobs, bought the house, had the yard, the dog, the cats.

Cat at the time.

Yeah, single cat. And now we can afford two. When we started on that project, we didn't really necessarily know what we were doing. We just believed like, hey, buying these— this property at this price per door, that $50,000 per door in Washington State, I'm like, I understand how this would make money, but we have to execute. We started with no money. An advantage that we had is this was in the middle of— again, this was, this was pandemic time. This is everything was shut down. There were government checks available for people who were behind on their rent.

Those are fun.

And so we got 3 months in the past, 3 months in the future for a ton of delinquent tenants because so many people were delinquent, because collections were so bad on this building. We got a ton of money, enough to start renovating the first 2 units. Yeah. Problem is my wonderful business partner Cody at the time gave a thumbs up emoji to the contractor when he asked to rent out 3 units. So we get a bill and the most expensive unit, the one that was completely destroyed, $30,000 renovation.

Well, you guys also found the most expensive contractor known to man.

Oh, yes. No, we got fleeced. We call this the stupid tax. When you don't know what you don't know. Yeah. However, and they did look very nice, but beautiful. But you get under the surface and the work actually wasn't very good. No. So we had a lot of plumbing problems in the future, a lot of flooring problems in the future. We had a lot of problem problems with the entire job. That being said, $30,000 reno above what we had money for. Bill comes in and we're like, oh boy, what do we do? We don't really have options here. We don't have money. We've rented our 2 units. We just leased them up. We're cash flowing, but we spent the money. We got bailed out. The city actually reached out— or not the city, the county. Reached out. They're building a roundabout right outside of our property. We have two entrances to the property. They're like, hey, we don't really love the location of your first area. If we can store a little bit of equipment on your property while we build a roundabout and you guys agree to shut down permanently one of the two entrances to your property, we'll give you $29,500.

Didn't they also buy some of the land?

No, it was an easement to the land. They got the right to park their vehicles there and to shut down that. We own all of that land.

I know Cody would love that again if that happened.

I'm sure he would love more units on that land. We had a $30,000 bill and we got magically saved for $29,500. Basically the exact amount owed on the reno. We got a unit reno'd. We leased that unit shortly after. Again, the income keeps going up on the property. We did this for a while. Now we're cash flowing. Next month we have some extra cash, do another unit. Lease it. The problem we ran into is that it took a really long time to rent out that building. We did get income up so high on that because it started at $5,000 on 38 units. We got it into the 20s. We refinanced, pulled out about— I think at the time it was like $600,000, $700,000.

It was a lot of money, which we bought out the partners.

We owned the building just ourselves and Cody, and the rest of the money went into renovations. And we did siding and we did windows, we did more interiors. We got the income up again.

Yeah.

And then we refinanced again, took out more money and then did more renovations.

Rinse and repeat.

While it sounds really fun over a couple of years, cashing out $1 million from one property, I think the best thing we did on that property is we didn't slum it. No, we kept making it nicer. We didn't actually get to keep any of the money. We kept putting it back in the building again and again and again. We reinvested. We made the community better. We raised the income. We made the community safer. We raised the income. We made the buildings look nicer. We didn't raise the income again after that. We'd already got it pretty close to market rent. Now, the tenants have a wonderful place to live in a place that really was a slum. There have been more murders at that property than any other property in Grant County in the history of Grant County. That is, again, a lot of them were in the '80s. City incorporated it. Police actually helped us clean it up. But we had a really rough property. I would say the only property in Moses Lake slummier was probably Cody's 12-plex when he first bought it. He also made that one really nice. We bought the two worst properties in the entire city.

Yeah.

And we made them great places to live where there's actual, like, fantastic community. There's events on, like, we have a huge lawn on that property.

There's people having picnics.

Yeah.

Not a thing.

That was not a thing because if you go outside your house, you'd be killed. We took a terrible property and we made it a safe place to live. And it is still astronomically under market rent. We work with programs like Section 8, so we work with people who need housing. We screen them well. We create a great community. And you have this really nice, safe place that's a little bit under market rent and a little nicer than other properties of its class. Yeah, you can actually take slums and you can make them great places to live. And I think we've done the best job of everything that we did. That's the part of the business I feel best about is we could have paid ourselves we could have retired earlier, we could have moved to Texas faster, and instead we went and we stabilized the properties. Then we optimized the properties, and with a better community and a significant impact there, we still had a profitable business and enough income to—

then we put in the work.

Yeah, move to Texas. If someone was to copy that strategy— so that's one deal, right? We've done— I think we've done 23 deals since then.

It's pretty impressive.

Well, that's because I have someone who actually runs everything. For those who can't— for those listening, I'm pointing at Danny. We've done a lot of deals since then. If someone was trying to replicate that, you'd already said the piece of advice: raise enough money up front. When you hear about people saying, hey, I don't cash flow, it's because the building eats the cash flow again and again and again, especially when you're doing these projects where you're— when you buy a building, you're buying something that was someone else's problem. For some reason, there was some problem that you're fixing by buying the building from them. Could be money right now, it could be deferred maintenance, it could be a tenant problem. You're buying whatever set of problems they had and you make money when you fix them. If you don't have enough money set aside for that, cash flow will elude you for a long time.

Yep.

On that deal, we had to drive there physically. We had to do a lot of work ourselves. We had like we had a fight to get that thing to cash flow. That was really hard. When we do deals today, the 26-unit that we did together in Stephenville, Texas, with our buddy Caleb, Perfect example. We came into that property, we raised enough reserve. I think we put it— I think we budgeted for— we'd probably need about $30,000. We raised $70,000 to be safe. So more than double what we thought we would need. And it turns out we didn't spend the full $30,000 that we originally thought. We have an overfunded account. It's almost fully leased. I think we have one vacancy left in that one right now, one or two, but they're rent ready. The building is in excellent condition. Paved parking, brand new roofs, the ACs all work. We fixed a major mold problem and a major bug problem in 2 units. And that was it with a $70,000 budget. Do you know what's been great about that deal? It cash flows every single month. And if we have a CapEx thing, we have reserves to dip into to fix it so we don't have to contribute back to the property. It doesn't just eat itself. We bought the building right. If you were to replicate the strategy the way that we bought the 26, better than we bought the 38. It is a stress-free deal and there's more than enough upside. So when we refinance, we can pull all the money out from the investor. They're going to stay in the deal with us.

Yeah.

And everyone will be into that deal. No money out of pocket. We will maintain a reserve. It will cash flow for $0. The trade is the investor parks their money there for a couple of years. And in 2 years for $0, we put in 2 years of work, they put in 2 years of hold. We all own a building together that cash flows very significantly in an excellent market, an excellent location, below market rent, excellent tenants.

Yep.

You want a strategy to copy? Buy deals that cash flow day one, have a reserve, and just do it again and again and again. When you have a husband who is me, who starts too many businesses and takes on too many projects—

I have a video of Christian promising me that he'll not start any more companies.

For that calendar year.

And he's lied.

No, I didn't. I started no new companies in that calendar year.

We will have this argument later.

No, it's a fact. You can, you can, you can look up my LLC filing records. I have filed no LLCs from when I recorded that video.

The property management company that's in Texas.

Yes. That was filed in which year?

This year, which I have the video of this year.

We're going to go back to the tape on that one.

I'll post the receipt at the end of this, the video. It's what the cool kids are saying now.

Which was filmed in 2023. On that, on the actual video that I started too many companies and I bought the Robin Hood Village Resort, which while an amazing asset and a wonderful place that is doing very well with an amazing team, was a huge distraction for us when I have all this on our plate. And then we decided to commit to, hey, we're going to share this adventure with other people. We're going to have the podcast. We're going to have the YouTube channel. We're going to do Multifamily Strategy, the course, the mentorship, we ran our first event in Dallas that was just amazing last night. When we do all of these projects and then property management, and I can go on and on with all the businesses, some of the details get missed, and especially things like the Robinhood where it was like, I can't run a resort and do all those. The amount of work that we do is beyond the 14 to 16 hours a day that I can work every day.

Yeah.

You came out of this as a teacher. How did you find your role in the company?

I feel like we hinted on that last time, but like, I was just, I mean, I want to go deeper into this because I do what you have to do. Like you, you do what you have to do to survive it. And if I didn't step in, you would not have survived it.

Were there specific skills that you felt like were directly transferable or was it literally you're just learning a new thing and you became amazing at it?

Well, thank you for the compliment, but I feel like yes and no. I feel like I didn't know how to run a resort. I still feel like I don't feel like a kid trying to figure it out. But yeah, I mean, that one I definitely had to figure out the management of things. That was super easy to me because I mean, I used to create schedules and calendars and all that for the kindergartners. And, you know, I think about 5 and 6-year-olds, you have to be very organized or they run amok, especially when you have 23 of them crammed in a small room.

They're not just self-sufficient.

No.

They don't know how to use Zoom, so they can't just learn themselves over Zoom for kindergarten.

No. Huh.

That's a bummer.

That's what we were told in 2020. I know.

I was going to say the talking box very clearly told me that that was going to be fine.

Yeah, so, you know, um, so, um, that— those pieces, yes, I already knew how to do. It was just how to take what I already knew and morph it into what I needed it to become. And so, and that was how do we manage a bunch of companies and stuff like that. And also people management. I used to manage 5 and 6-year-olds, stickers, and, you know, You know, star charts and all that. That gets you really far with those guys. Not adults.

How similar is managing adults and partners and investors and employees to managing kindergartners? Realistically, are they just big kids who need a gold star?

In a way, yes. But also you're just different in an adult size. 'Cause like for some people it's like, I come to people and I talk to them and they're like, oh, it's Dani Osgood. Like she has her opinions, I'm gonna just listen and stuff like that. And kindergartners don't do that. You have to earn that. And so that's what's really nice about adults. But then there's some adults who are like, you're just 29 or in your 20s or whatever. You don't know what you're talking about. You know, they kind of just brush you off versus kindergartners are like, it's this big teacher who knows everything. You know, so it matters on the person. And it's just, I just feel like that's sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don't. So it's just how you, you get, you put yourself in that person's shoes and then you figure out what works best for them and their communication style and their pat on the back style. And you know what I mean? Like, it's just, and then you learn who the person is and that's how you are able to help not manage them, but like direct them through things because, you know, you come alongside somebody.

And something I found was really helpful in partnerships and LLCs is creating what we call an idea meritocracy, which is everyone's ideas are heard. And this is one of the things I like working with, with diverse people. There are some incredible people, like incredible people in our organizations who are very young with little experience. They never went to college. They They're people who the pandemic was in the middle of their high school. So, they essentially have like a 10th-grade education. They never have a job. They're incredible hard workers, really intelligent people. There are ideas that they have that need to be heard that push the companies forward and that drive the companies. And there's also ideas that they have that sometimes we've already experienced why that doesn't work or partnership things where it's like you don't want to build too fast or grow too fast or how many employees do we actually need? I think the important thing is that everyone is heard and there's just a weighting put on the amount of experience that they have.

Everyone's heard, seen, and appreciated.

Yes.

And valued. It feels like they're valued.

But also, people who don't know what they're talking about don't just get automatically pushed. When you're managing people and you're building teams, there's a certain amount of company hierarchy that I think needs to be created. And it's just based— so we've use the model where it's based solely on experience level. And I think it's been really helpful because we have people in our companies who may not know a lot about how to run a company, but they do know everything about property management. I think about our good friend Corey, who has worked with us on so many projects, and she was a huge part of the success of the Washington State property management company. Her being a part of that made that company astronomically better because she knew things or learned things about management.

Yeah.

That we didn't know. She might not have known the most about business. She might not have had any experience of being an entrepreneur. But when it comes to, are we screwing up or are we going to obey the law on this? Or are we doing things that we don't know that we're not doing? You have people like that who's like, okay, you come into the organization and when you say that this is how we're doing things, that outranks other people of less experience. I kind of look at it like baseball cards. It's like everyone has their stats of what they're good at and what they're experienced at, and we weigh that. It's been amazing. A helpful tip that I have found really, really useful for us in our business. And Danny, when you are coming in and again, so you're used to managing children and you have, are there any techniques that specifically from that era that you use regularly in business where you're like, wow, this actually translated much better than one would think about being a, going from a teacher with a master's degree to I'm a full-time entrepreneur doing all the detail work, making sure that nothing is missed. You've learned so many different things with people management, with bill pay, with creating systems and charts and paperwork, which I hate paperwork. You wouldn't have known how to do any of these things in a corporate setting, really. I don't think being a teacher— were there any things that were like, wow, this was shockingly transferable?

I feel like if teachers good teachers, they are thrown in and they have to figure it out. And I feel like that was the biggest one that I had to just figure it out. So like, if I get like a piece of paper that I have no clue how to fill out, I can't not fill it out as a teacher. I have to figure out how to fill it out correctly so I can get it turned in for whatever purpose it serves. It's the same exact thing with business. If we have something from, uh, I don't, I don't know, payroll or whatever, like I have to figure it out because I can't not pay my people. So it's like, okay, I'm just gonna keep pushing until I can do this skill and then move on. And I, and then I have that little new skill that I will use over and over again. I just feel like that's really transferable from teaching cuz like I mean, you learn stuff in college and then you get put in a classroom and it's like, oh my gosh, whole different world. So I feel like that one's a really big one. And then like just the time management piece of just chunking my day, which we talked about in the last podcast of how I chunk my day and make sure that everything is pretty much met just like I would do in the classroom. So, and you also get curveballs thrown at you just like you do in the classroom. So it's just how you you know, have your, make your decisions and, you know, move around.

What's been most surprising for you going to all of the businesses, the resort, the multifamily, the education space, the whole thing? What has been the most surprising piece of the journey?

I feel like for me, it's that I can actually take a business that is not falling apart, but hurting. Like Robinhood was really hurting. And I could fix it. And I just never thought that I could do that. We had a situation at the beginning of the summer where it was just like Robinhood was handed back to me and it was just an absolute mess. And it was like, okay, I have to manage people. I'm their boss, which was— it's a weird concept to me even nowadays. And it's like, okay, how do I get these people to own Robinhood, you know, be excited about their job, want to come to work and also like that and give me their feedback and their ideas willingly and openly as I also tweak systems and make their environment kind of uncomfortable because I have to fix things. And so that was like really cool that I was able to take that. And then we had the most profitable month we've ever had. And it was just really cool to see that I could actually do that because a year ago I would have never thought that. I could do that.

Which was incredible. And you took a model before that, you took a model on our expenses and you took our, our expenses were just out of hand and you took our bottom line and you fixed it. And then you came in and you're like, okay, Robinhood's finally off me. We had someone come in to help us with the company who absolutely screwed up the company. And you came in and you restructured the entire top line. So when you look at the Robinhood, which is now a very strong organization, the bottom line expenses and the top line revenue have been massively improved. And it's just been you sitting in that company for the most part.

It's not just me. I mean, I have the most incredible staff at the Robinhood. Like, I literally could not do what I do. Like, Robinhood could not function without them. And so it's like, for me, I'm one— I know how rare that is, because I used to manage adults in my classroom as well. And it's just really cool to see, like, I have these adults at Robinhood who are in their own lanes and doing their own thing, and like, it's just Robinhood's running really smoothly. And it's just really cool to see them doing that as well, because not just me. I'm at the point now in the company where I can step back and kind of see everything and how it runs, which is the same way as in the classroom. That's what you do the first 4 months is you get all your systems in place, you get everybody in line, you teach them how to do everything, and then you step back in December, January, you watch either the train wreck or the success. And as, I mean, you obviously don't watch it fully crash and burn, but you come in and you keep coaching and keep teaching and stuff like that. So I feel like I'm starting to get out of like the January month. In Robinhood in the sense of teaching. And then it's like they're just doing the thing and it's running really, really well because they come up to me and they're like, hey, I have this idea. And I'm like, that's a— I would have never thought of that. Let's try it. You know what I mean? It's just like cool to see how they're like, it's a team effort. It's not just me in the driver's seat doing everything. I would not be able to do it without them. So, which is really cool.

Let's talk a little bit about Apex Asset Management. That's a company that is another venture, and the goal was to sell the property management company. We successfully sold that in Washington State. Yep, got it off the plate. That's a low-margin business that is really hard. And then we started another one down here. What does success look like for you in that company as we start up again? And we chose some areas of Texas where we found that our options for property management there were not acceptable, either ludicrously expensive or ludicrously negligent, negligent to the point where we did a quick audit of how things were run and consistently laws are being broken. Like they are set up to get us sued, to be sued. That's not an option. So we were in a position where if we're going to buy down here, it looks like we have to do this all over again. Now that we have that company, what does success look like for you in property management?

I want to bring it back to what I want to bring Apex to where Kensho, like where it was when we sold it, like it was great, great systems like that. But then I want to take it even further. We had just started really in the company. I mean, it was 3 years old. How old? Yeah, that's pretty much— that's like a toddler company. It's not an infant, it's not a baby, but it's pretty much— it's learning how to walk still.

About 300 units matters.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was It was a small PM company, but I want to take it further. Like, I want it to be like we are able to do more systems and things like that, have more people, have more people in the company and stuff like that. Like, we can start offering different things that we weren't able to offer before that we've been talking about. And it's just, I want to watch it grow and help with the growing piece of it.

Yeah.

Versus before, I did more of like the, maintenance side and the reno side and stuff like that, which I'm great with. I love it, it's fun. But I want to watch that company become even bigger than the one that we just let go of— well, sold. So, and that's what my, my goal is. I mean, it's not going to be a 1-year project, like it's like multiple years. Like I want to break it down and be like, hey, in 3 years I want to see it like this, in 5 years, in 10 years, you know. And just watch it grow and then, yeah, just watch it take off.

I'm so excited about it too. I'm excited about the team we're building. I'm excited about the scale of it. I think we built a set of skills in a market like Washington State where it's really hard to manage properties. Yeah, I found that it's easier in Texas. It's not that there's no— there's plenty of rules and regulations. There's lots to know.

There's sometimes not enough rules.

Yeah, it's weird, which is odd, but I feel like we've come from a very difficult environment into an easier environment and we just have we have the skill set of like, wow, we're used to business just being harder than this. I think we're geared to be really competitive. I'm excited about the clients we're onboarded already. I'm excited about what we're getting to do in our own portfolio. And I'm super excited to scale that company. It's fun to have you building the company with me. Having a spouse in business can be a very strange thing. I found for us, do we ever argue about business? I can't think of any time that we've had significant disagreements on business.

No, because you just tell me yes, ma'am.

For the most part, yeah. Well, because there's so many projects. Should we do this one?

No.

It's like, oh, okay.

I also tell you why.

But oftentimes you say yes. Like, we've said yes to a lot of things and it's allowed for a lot of business. We already know the Robinhood if we can go back in time, that wouldn't have been a project we took on with how the businesses have evolved. That has been more of a distraction. We've talked about that all the time.

It's going to be great for the next person.

It is an amazing asset. It is unbelievable. One of a kind asset.

I'll be sad when it's gone from us, but at the same time too, I'll know we're not the operators for it.

By the way, if you want a resort, Give us a call. We are not the operator for it. That is a deal that we are looking to transition like we did PM. It is a company that we love that is built to where it— not to all the way where it can be, but it's doing amazingly well. It is a company that is reaching its potential. And someone can take it to the next level. And someone doesn't have to be us. And I think that's true for any business. Just because it can be done, it doesn't mean that the pieces make sense.

Yeah, no, I— it's just for me with Robin Hood, it's like the time, the time piece of just like—

it's—

I mean, it's the— it's not a passion project of mine. It's more like it's the thing that I like breathe life back into and like that kind of thing. And so it's like I'm just excited to watch it like go and take off, you know? And that's not going to be with me.

What is outside of the Robinhood? What is one other thing that you would change about the businesses that we have today?

Long pause. No. I feel like in real estate investors, you have so many ideas.

Which is multifamily strategy, by the way.

Yes.

Sorry.

You have so many ideas and it's like you just need someone to help you organize those ideas. And help you with your vision and that kind of thing. And you're finding your people for those roles. But I just think the next thing is finding someone who can organize you. And that's not me because I'm too busy with other things, plus growing your child, which is exhausting. So, um, I think that's the— like, for me, it's just like the organization piece of real estate investors because it's like, that is truly your baby.

There is, there is so much great about it. And there are so many different projects.

We—

the education product is great. And by the way, spoiler alert, I'm launching Multifamily Strategy 2.0. We're starting recording here in about a week, I believe.

With both of us.

With both of us. Right now it's a 250-video course. The new one's going to be about 350 videos. It's going to be crazy.

Yeah. With a functional flipping section.

Yep. We're going to have— we're adding renovation standards and strategies. To the already existing mega library of stuff that we have in the original one. By the way, if anyone's listening to this, they're like, wait, I'm part of this. Am I going to get the course? If you're part of Multifamily Strategy now, you will have access to the new course. You have lifetime access. So spoiler alert, but we came up with an education product that I'm really proud of. Yeah, really proud of. Our mentorship group is so tight-knit. I go over the hour almost every time, but every time, every time. But we have amazing discussion. It goes so well. We're now building communities where we launched our first group here in Dallas. We did our first ever meetup, no advertising. So many people showed up. It was absolutely amazing. People came in from all over Texas. Some people came out of state, which is wild to me. But yeah, there's so much vision for what it can be. There's— I have found that I am not all that smart. I'm certainly not all that organized.

He's very smart.

I don't. Disagree. We have built something that is so stupidly simple, anyone can repeat it to the point where the feedback I get most often is, well, geez, I hear about like the stuff that you're doing and it sounds like a scam. And I'm like, no, it's just absolutely simple. Meet people who don't want to do, and then if you don't have money, you find people who have money and then you own real estate. All you do is you move from being an outsider to being an insider. And when you're an insider, you have access to deals that people don't have. That's how real estate works. That's how any business works.

I think for you too, you're so passionate about this. Like, you wake up and you're talking about this, you go to sleep, you're talking about this. Like, a lot of people in your space, what I've been seeing, they're not as passionate, and that comes across in the videos. Versus like you, it's like this is truly what you're super, super excited about. You want to change people's lives and you want to help people to get out of the 9 to 5. And that's not just like reading some script, you know what I mean? It's like, it's truly what you believe. And it's just really cool. And I like at the event yesterday, it was just really fun to have people come up to me and they're just like, he's authentic. I'm like, yes. Yeah, he really, he really wants people to be super successful. And it's just cool to see that whenever people run into you, that's what they That's the vibe they're getting from you because it's true.

Marketing team, isolate that. That's testimonial. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

That's not authentic.

It's fun to be— yeah, and my marketing team does not edit my stuff.

Um, I wish they did. No kidding.

No, it would be nice to have someone who is more organized because I do have so many ideas and there's so many, there's so many more things that we're going to be doing in multifamily strategy and so many other ways to share this. Like, I want this available to— it just wasn't— the information wasn't available to me when we started. We had to learn by doing, and it was really expensive to learn that, especially on the 38 and renovations. It's like the $10,000, the $100,000 things where you're like, wow, had we done this differently, we'd have a few hundred thousand more dollars.

Like, can you imagine?

That makes a difference. That's years of working when we were in the 9 to 5. That's just money that we blew on learning how to do this by not knowing how to do this.

Can you imagine, Christian, if we had had a course that we could have taken? We would be so much farther. Yes, we would be so much farther.

And we looked for it. The best that we could find at the time was a book that Cody introduced me to, Deals on Wheels by Lonnie Scruggs, and it was about creatively financing mobile home parks. And it's an older book from the '80s that is out of print, which is why if you look for that book, it is godly expensive.

Oh, it's that one.

But like, that's the sort of source material we had to go to at the time. There are people doing creative finance. There are lots of different ways to do it. But the simplest way to do this was actually— I hate the idea of like, oh, there's secrets online about real estate. The simplest way to buy real estate, we learned from all the owners who've already done it. Like, we had to go interview people who already had 100-unit portfolios, and the stories were almost all the same.

Yeah, there's no secrets anymore. There's YouTube.

Yep, there's YouTube. And if you want to learn how to do it, if you're like, well, if you have a course, you have a YouTube channel, what are you hiding on the YouTube channel? We share everything on the YouTube channel. And of course, it's an organized way to provide downloadables. And there are certain things on YouTube where there's a 0% chance that I'm going to get a video. I've tried to get a valuable video on tax strategies in real estate that you need to know. No one's going to watch it on YouTube. It's going to damage my channel. We want to get the message out to as many people as possible. A course is a succinct way for— here is all the information one would need, an organized thing. YouTube, we will always share everything for free. The, the information is not a secret. There are no secrets in real estate. The path, we share it all the time. It is find those other owners in your market who've done exactly what you want to do and learn how to do it from them. That is the best way to buy real estate. You'll find deals, you'll get knowledge, you'll get connections, you'll find your contractors, your brokers, your property managers, all of it. It is already done for you. The information is there. Your ability to go seek that and how you can do that effectively. Learn from everyone you can. And if you haven't yet, like and subscribe to this channel. We interview— this whole podcast is about interviewing owners. The community that we just started in Dallas that we're launching all over the nation, it's called The Owner Meeting. Because guess what you're doing? You're meeting with owners. It is a place for people who feel like they're still on the outside to move to the inside. That is all we do. So I appreciate you plugging Multifamily Strategy. This was unscripted, but it is the biggest passion project that I have. And yeah, I think that is probably the next, the next role in the company is finding someone who is more of a business organizer and creating like, hey, are we consistently always uploading the video immediately after mentorship to be watched immediately. Or like, hey, when we host an event in Dallas, are we marketing more than 6 days out? I have an idea and I'm like, let's just go do it. It would be nice to have more, more of that. So yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, no, if you haven't yet, subscribe to the channel. Danny will be on here all the time. Get prepped for Multifamily Strategy 2.0. That is on the way, getting recorded and working with the team on that diligently. So, uh, that's going to be an absolute adventure. Thank you so much for listening today. We will see you on the next episode.