Brandon Laughridge - Managing and Investing In Multifamily

As long as it's all a publicly listed deal, I think doing a once a week, once a month, whatever cadence is possible, tear down, like underwriting just off what's publicly available would be an amazing way to establish yourself as an authority. If you wanted to, you could prep a lot for it and do it really professionally. But if you wanted to make it really easy, you probably could just do it all live. Like, You really could just like record yourself searching for a deal, pulling it up, throwing it in a little spreadsheet and underwriting it on the fly. And then when people say, hey, can you talk a little bit about the market? I'd say, yeah, go watch my videos here. So it's kind of saving you from those conversations. But then also it's incredible the inbound sort of stuff that comes your way, Twitter, whatever. Like, I mean, off Twitter, I've had billionaires literally send me messages, like direct messages, and say, you know, I'm interested in this kind of a thing. And it's kind of amazing. So I wouldn't be surprised if some crazy opportunity came of that, just throwing out that kind of content marketing.

Welcome to season 2 of Owner Occupied. On the business of property management. Owner Occupied is a show about property management in the real world. I'm your host, Peter Lohmann, co-founder and CEO of RL Property Management. For season 2, I have a different guest each week and we go deep into conversation about what actually works when trying to build and scale your property management business. Thanks for listening. Now let's go. Welcome back to Owner Occupied. I'm beyond excited today to introduce Brandon Laffridge to the show. Brandon has a lot of experience in property management. He brings to the table a lot of expertise in the area of entrepreneurship through acquisition, SBA loans, and a whole bunch of other really great stuff. So I'm excited to get into conversation with you, Brandon. Thanks for coming on the show today.

Thanks for having me, Peter.

Absolutely. If we could start by just having you give like a 1 to 2 minute background on sort of your history in the world of property management and bring us up to speed on sort of your current business and, and where it's at.

Sure. So I have a very, very varied entrepreneurial path, I guess, to get to where I am today. And I think we're almost exactly the same age, which is, you know, mid-30s.

Yeah, I'm 36.

Okay, there you go. I just had my birthday. I'm 34, so we're close in age. And I had the good fortune of working for a couple of very entrepreneurial brothers when I was in college at the University of Missouri, and they ran a number of online businesses, and there's a few hundred people when I was there, and I, I was lucky enough to work directly with one of the founders, and now it's a few thousand people. And just, yeah, it's an amazing story. And there's been all these interesting people that have kind of spun off of it that I've remained friends with and gone on to kind of do other businesses with. So right after that experience, I started a business and it was actually like an online marketing consulting business. And it was sort of accidental how we fell into that. But we built that to 25 people and a few million dollars in revenue.. And that was sort of age 21 to 26 or 27. Did a little, you know, sort of frat house on the beach thing. I live in Missouri and I'm from Missouri, but we moved to California, San Diego, and took our, our business with us. And it was super fun. But as we, as we grew up and everybody wanted to, you know, get married, settle down, all that sort of thing, my wife and I decided to, to move back home, which is Kansas City. And figure out our lives here. It's just too convenient to have both of our parents near one another. And Kansas City is a pretty, pretty cool place to live, kind of under the radar. And my partner and I sold that online marketing business, and I've always kind of had a finance—

I don't know if fetish is the word to say, but did you major in finance?

Yes, I did. Although at Mizzou, that as with like a lot of big state schools, majoring in something specific in business means you took like one extra class. And I think it, I think it might've even been a derivatives class that I got like a D in. So, so I don't think I really have any special knowledge. I just always had like a deep interest in it. And it kind of was like a finance history buff, especially like the crazy '80s and reading about, you know, Mike Milken and liar's poker and all those sorts of things. Super fun and crazy. So I wanted to be in finance, and that was a high school thing, but just knew that I never really was going to have the pedigree to go after it the traditional route. And by that point, I'd had a taste of the good entrepreneurial life and couldn't imagine restarting and working 90 hours a week like you kind of have to do in finance for 5 or 10 years. So developed a relationship with a guy out of Canada who had a private equity firm that was very nontraditional, and he had a nontraditional background. So there was the opportunity to consider someone like me. And my partner and I had just sold our business, and we joined kind of on a performance basis, basically. And they wanted to set up shop in the US, and we kind of had the operator thing going for us, and that's really what they needed because they were not a big finance organization. They bought small companies. So worked there for a few years, and during that time moved from California back to Missouri and really enjoyed getting to learn how to buy small businesses and getting exposed to more normal small businesses, I guess you could say, because I'd been super coddled in working in these like sort of fun, high-growth, not like Silicon Valley tech companies, but like just outside the real world of small business where everybody kind of looked like me, acted like me, and it wasn't very diverse. And I don't mean that in like age diversity, racial diversity, anything. It was kind of all copies of me and all those previous businesses. So getting exposed to that a little bit was really valuable and I realized I loved buying businesses but didn't really want to just make the act of transacting my focus. It was more exciting to buy and grow something and then maybe once you've improved that to the point that it could kind of potentially run without your oversight daily, you can go on and do something else. So throughout that period, I had started buying rentals in Kansas City. This is 2008, '09. This was sort of the beginning of that time. And you could buy great houses for $30,000, $40,000 that are now maybe $150,000 to $200,000. And it was even clear then that they were worth way more than that. And like a million people have said, I'm sure they wish that they would've just figured out a way to buy 1,000 of them at that time.

Yeah, myself and—

Exactly. I wouldn't be doing anything right now. It'd be great. But I bought a few and gave me a taste of sort of half asset management, half property management. I'm pandering to my audience here because I know that you draw the line hard on that, as, as I try to as well with our clients. And when I moved back to Kansas City, we were self-managing, or I was self-managing those. And at one point, I think we had about 20 units. And I started to get burnt out and either needed to hire a property manager, sell everything because it had gone up quite a bit, not to where it would be today, but quite a bit, or find a way to focus on it myself and not feel like I was moonlighting doing something that I was really not that excited. I was excited about the high level, but not the day-to-day of the management. So I started talking to a guy that owned a property management company and I was pretty direct.

So, and so this is, I want to interrupt just for a second here. So this is where your story diverges from the standard story that quite frankly, I've heard 100 times in the property management world, which is, yeah, you know, I was buying single-family rentals and I was managing myself. And what most people say right here is, so then I started a property management company, but I know because I know you, I know that's not what you're about to say. And I want to, I'm excited to hear you talk about the path you went here because it's very unusual for the property management world. So sorry to interrupt there, but I wanted to set the stage for the audience to like really listen here because this is different.

Yeah. Well, in the same way that I didn't want to go get into finance and have to work 100 hours a week, I didn't really want to take our 20 units, which if you applied sort of a, you Even the highest industry standard management fee, I don't know, that might have been $1,800 a month or something like that, you know, that it could sort of pay me as a startup management company. I didn't want to start from scratch. I didn't want to go through years and years of being the guy on call and all of that because while I was still super young, the whole point was I wanted to buy sort of an entry point into the space and a track record and be someone important, be kind of a player, basically. And starting that from scratch just didn't check any of those boxes off. It was kind of starting a tough business that, yeah, there's some attractive things about property management, but from a straight complete standstill, there's probably better businesses to start. Or there, I would've thought that at the time. I mean, I, I probably still think that, but the idea of shortcutting it was very appealing. However, it's pretty difficult. There's not that many companies to buy, not that many you'd want to buy. And I had an additional criteria of, I didn't want to buy a company that managed a bunch of kind of boring quote unquote properties. I mean, today we manage cool kind of urban buildings as well as more, you know, standard, I guess, suburban stuff. Boring is kind of a pejorative, but I didn't really want to like drive 30 minutes to a part of town where I don't want to spend any time and manage buildings that I'm not passionate about, that sort of thing. It's easy to— we've grown into now managing those sorts of kind of more standard properties, but I've got the core foundation of really fun stuff that I'm passionate about. But I kind of skipped ahead here. So I had the conversation with a guy that owned— basically there was two companies that I felt like from information that I could glean publicly could potentially be in the right size to be attractive enough financially that they could kind of pay me so I could buy a job. But not too big. And there wasn't a ton of— the other thing you run into is some businesses on the— or some property management companies on the surface might look big enough, and they are. However, the owner owns like a third of the portfolio. So unless, unless you just get— and that's kind of what I'm creating now— but unless you caught them at the perfect moment where they want to keep their portfolio but retire from operating it, it's going to be really difficult to step in and take that over. So I happened to catch someone who was not a native of Kansas City and actually had purchased a home that was kind of, I don't know, 45 minutes away. And he was trying to figure out how to step away from the business as I started knocking on the door. So yeah, it was just super lucky timing. I mean, it's half luck, half the fact that you put yourself out there, right? I used to send a lot of love letters saying, I want to buy your business, or I want to meet you, or whatever. I always call them love letters. And I sent him one of those, and we talked both about, like, him managing what I owned and then also me buying the business. And it actually— we first talked a little bit before I moved back to Kansas City. Then I moved back, and I ended up buying the business 2 years after I moved back. So there was a disagreement initially, and it was nothing— it wasn't like, you know, it was a fight or anything, but he was open to sell, and we agreed on a price pretty much, but there was a disagreement on working capital. Classic. Yeah, exactly.

It tells all this time.

Yeah. So that kind of killed the deal the first time, but then a few years later, I basically got more desperate is the true way to say it, but maybe the, uh, papered-over, better version would be I saw the value in what I'd be buying. And truly, that's— I mean, at the time I was just more desperate to do something because I had just kind of restless. And but really I paid, I don't know, 2 times SDE. So, and the, if you looked at the difference in working capital that we were sort of arguing over, as an addition to that multiple, kind of thinking back, that might add a half. So instead of really paying 2, I paid 2.5. Who cares?

Right. So at the time that probably felt big, but in retrospect, that's a drop in the bucket. Yeah.

When it was obviously the right move to move forward with, and especially when you're layering on— I'm sure you were going to ask about this, but I financed it via an SBA loan. And not only was it an SBA loan for, I think, 90%. So just to use, it wasn't $1 million, but just to use a million-dollar example, $900,000 is financed at great terms, 10-year, it's a 10-year term. It was, I think, 5.5% or 5.75% interest rate. And you're stepping into just a nice salary. Basically, the down payment was also financed because it was just home equity loan. So I wouldn't do that again, but to get started, it was great. It's funny because you're, you're betting your personal residence anyway, so it's actually not as crazy as it sounds because it actually prevented— funny enough, it prevented a direct claim being placed on your house because if you have less than a certain amount of equity, I think it's 20 or 25%, the SBA then You still personally guarantee it, but they don't actually put a mortgage on your house. So you write yourself that check to turn and use as the down payment on the business, which then prevents them from putting that claim on it. Yeah. So it's like, you might as well do it. Why?

Yeah. So, so for those who may not be familiar with SBA loans, basically the SBA forces you not only to sign personally, so it's a recourse loan, but they also collateralize that with typically your, your, your personal residence.

Is that right? That's correct. Yeah. As long as you have— it's 20% or 25% equity in your home. So I guess it doesn't matter. It's been long enough. The gentleman at the bank who gave me the SBA loan said, hey, I'd recommend you go to credit union. You should call this credit union. You should get a home equity line. Do this now. And while you still have a W-2 and then write yourself a check because then you'll be in Missouri. It's very state by state, but in Missouri you can go to 100%. So he's like, go to 100%, put that in your bank account. Then when you apply for this SBA loan, we won't have to directly put an encumbrance on your house. You're still— it's still on the line. But the big difference is then if you wanted to move during that 10 years, you don't have to beg the lender to allow you to move.

Got it. Okay. So let me kind of recap. So you have a background in business/finance. You did some— you had some great success with a marketing firm that you sold. You went and worked for some private equity guys. And then in the meantime, you were buying some rental properties in Kansas City and you were like, hey, I like the idea of owning a small business. Property management kind of makes sense. I kind of need it anyway. So you went out and purchased the property management company that you now own and run. And what year was that that you purchased it?

2017, March 1st, 2017. 2017.

Okay. So not that long ago. So 5 years ago, roughly. And fast forward to today, about how many units do you have under management? And I think you're still pretty actively involved in the day-to-day of that business, right? That's like your primary gig.

Yes. So we, So in 2017, when I bought the business, it was 800 or 900 units under management. I don't remember the exact number. And today it's around 1,500, you know, changes a little bit every month. So, and our niche was when I bought it and remains kind of a funky size scattered site apartment complex. So if somebody calls us and says, I have a duplex, will you manage it? Probably not. I mean, almost certainly not unless it's right next to our office or something like that. Because it's more about— it's less about the property and more about how many, like, units per client we want. And then if somebody calls us and says, I have a 200-unit complex, and it's, you know, got 4 on-site staff, that sort of thing, we would certainly be more tempted than the duplex, but we're probably not going to do that either. Love it.

Yeah. And I've heard some people in our industry call this boutique multifamily, which is like less— yeah, less small enough. So there's no on-site staff, which at least in Ohio is probably under 100 units, but larger than 4 units. So basically it's commercial, it's a commercial loan, it's commercial property. It's not like somebody's house hack, you know, gone wrong or something like that. Okay. And I love— this is one of the reasons I want to bring you on the show, because This is unusual. I don't know if you know how unusual this is, but in— I kind of move in a lot of these property management circles, the NARPM community and things like that. And I would say 90 to 95% of that world is single-family rentals. And these guys are like, they also wouldn't take on a duplex, but that's because they don't— they don't even want 2 units. They just want single-family rentals. So you're coming from the complete opposite 180 degrees, which is like, I don't want a duplex because that's not enough units. And I, I like boutique multifamily. We love taking on more of those units. And in fact, we have a great appetite for it, but we don't have a lot of success in finding them. I don't know if there's just fewer of them in Columbus or if they're kind of locked up with some historical management companies that have always done it and get all the referrals from the brokers or what. But I love that you've chosen that path to go down, and I think it brings with it a lot of advantages. I want to talk about briefly kind of your famous tweet. So for those of you who don't follow Brandon Lafford on Twitter, first of all, you should. Second of all, he has a tweet pinned to his Twitter profile, which is all about purchasing a business with an SBA loan. You say something about like you think it's one of the best paths to $10 million for younger folks who are entrepreneurial. And this tweet had over 8,000 likes. It has over 800 retweets. So it, it got a lot of legs and sort of positioned Brandon in the SMB Twitter world and, and the real estate Twitter world as the, you know, the SBA loan guy. So I've, I've like maybe one or two questions on this. So One is, where did you pick up this knowledge about SBA loans? And I would say more than knowledge, but almost an obsession or fascination. I've seen you tweet out all kinds of arcane technical rule details and rules. I mean, I get the idea that every night before you go to bed, you're like flipping through the latest, you know, SBA lending criteria or something like that. So I've never read—

because they call it the SOP. The SBA SOP, I've never read that. Now, I've definitely Ctrl+F'd my way through it a million times, but I've never read it start to finish like some SBA lending dorks that I know, because I think it's like 600 pages. But so anyway, I don't know if I cut off your— did I get both? Did you get both questions out there?

Basically, I was just gonna ask, was it like these private equity guys who kind of turned you on to this, or was just something you were always interested in?

Well, I don't know when exactly I first got interested in it. A number of years before I used it. It wasn't like I came at it from, I want to buy this business, then I need to find out a way to do it. It was much more, I don't know if you've seen my weird comments that I make on Twitter about financing boxes, I always call it. And I don't know if I made that up or if I stole that from someone, but I like the reason I kind of got interested in multifamily was I got interested in the debt around multifamily and then it's like, okay, now what do you buy with that debt? And the same was sort of true of SBA loans. I got really interested in at some point, and it's not totally divorced from like, oh, let's just buy a business. But when I learned that you could get, I can't remember the, if I learned about it before the limit was increased to $5 million, because it was increased from $2 million to $5 million maybe 10 years ago. But whenever it was, either number would've been really very significant. And I learned that you could do that. Basically anyone could do it, and it's explicitly subsidized. I don't know if that's the right word, but essentially banks are incentivized by the government to do this. For people that are essentially unqualified from a financial perspective, I'm like, oh, shit, that's got my name written all over it. I have no qualifications financially, so that'd be awesome. And then I just kind of— maybe it's something that I absorbed through osmosis from those guys that I mentioned that I worked for in college, but kind of this idea of you should probably spend your 20s taking a lot of risk that you're going to be unwilling to take later in life. So all those things sort of banging around in my head at once just led to, okay, I should probably just sort of in a controlled way go nuts for a few years. And, uh, you know, that— what's the— you could get it off better than me, probably— the adage about live like, live like no one for a few years so that you can— you know what I'm talking about? That, that No, I don't think I know. There's an entrepreneurial quote about basically do what no one will do for a few years so that you can live like no one can live for the rest of your life or something like that.

Oh, gotcha.

That makes sense. Whatever, whatever that quote is, it's much prettier. But I feel like I had that sort of mentality and then applied that to basically using an SBA loan. And I guess it was COVID, and I'm part of it too.. And then people that have had a lot more sort of fame or whatever on Twitter, Cody Sanchez and those kinds of people. Now it's like huge. And then there's also the search fund world has come down market, so they're very interested in this. But it's so interesting because even with— we just live in this like little echo chamber on Twitter and everybody's talking about it. But any of your friends or even a more curated group of entrepreneurial people and just Asked, what's your next thing going to be? I think very few of them are still talking about buying businesses or understand this world of calling up a business broker to find an opportunity or calling up an SBA lender. So I like how dislocated it is.

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You're right. And it's interesting when, when you're already in an industry, you can buy something financed 100%. You can do that basically when you're getting into the first acquisition, but when you're already into it, you can be less sort of sneaky about it, I guess. That sounds bad, but you know, you don't have to kind of hide the fact that you're trying to do it with little to no actual cash equity if, if that was something you wanted to do. The SBA is a big fan of that when you have, you know, a successful track record to point to and you want to add something on. So you could certainly, if there was an opportunity, buy it with an SBA loan, then finance the balance of that purchase price with a note like you're talking about. And then yeah, put some sort of a contingency in there that if, if their customers sort of roll off through no fault of your own, that some of it's forgiven or something like that. Love it.

Okay, I want to move into property management sort of on the operational side of things. You have a pretty serious property management business with well over 1,000 units. I had a few things I wanted to ask you about because I really respect you as an operator. And, you know, you and I have had plenty of discussions and, you know, I'm always looking to learn from folks who are a little bit ahead of me. So I was going back through some of your older podcasts and your Twitter to prepare for this, and I saw an amazing quote that I want to pull out here and maybe get you to talk about a little bit. You said, quote from a client that I'm stealing, in the long run, what you pay for property management doesn't matter. It's what you get that matters. I'd love to hear you share a little bit about your thoughts on how that makes sense for somebody who's like, what do you mean it doesn't matter what you pay for property management?

So the guy that said that is a partner of mine. So he was a client first, and this goes back to kind of why I wanted to get into this. So I bought the business, he was a client, he was the biggest client. Now we're partners and the majority of property that we manage for him, I'm a partner in. So that was the thesis and it's worked out, which is interesting.

Maybe. So he's a partner in the property management business itself?

No, no, no, no, no.

In, oh, just in some of the properties.

Correct. So he was the largest client. So it's funny going back, if I was to search my email, I probably had some email threads with the old owner, definitely discussions saying this guy's name and saying, how can I be sure that he's not going to go anywhere and whatever? And it's just, it's amazing how sticky things are if do a good job. And I mean, there's even been plenty of screw-ups for him. And it's just sometimes the more experienced clients are, they're less likely to switch because they've experienced more, you know, a diversity of management companies. And they understand that like, oh, maybe that, that bad review that cites their property on our page is a one-off thing, or, you know, maybe it's whatever. So that's a bit of a sideline. So he's the guy that said that. And it was funny when he He actually recently got into Twitter and he sent me the tweet after I said it and he was like, just made a joke about, hey, now don't be tweeting everything we say.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's awesome. But the lesson that I've learned, and I don't know if this is going to exactly answer your question, but, and this is more of a less property management specific and maybe more just sort of business in general, but when I first got into this, I was much more nervous about losing clients and I was much more willing to sort of adapt our services to what a client might want and not draw a hard line on, you know, this is our process because I felt like, hey, they have this even a small property. This is a half a million dollar or $1 million asset. That's huge. Even though for us revenue-wise, or attention-wise, it's pretty small. It's a huge deal to them, and I need to treat it that way. And I still agree with that. However, I've set myself up for failure a number of times because I was too willing to, you know, sort of adapt our process to what a client wanted. You know, like a thing that I rant about a lot, and I don't think I've said it ever publicly, but I'm happy to say it. People that come out of the, like, multifamily boot camp type things tend to have these templates that they have been trained to think are the end-all be-all gospel truth on how things need to be done and are unwilling to, to consider the fact that maybe, like, there's market by market or asset by asset like nuance that you should consider. And I'm saying this much more nicely than I would say it if we weren't recording, to be honest. So that's an example of something where I would have bent in the early days and done it their way to get the business. And now I'm firm about it. I'm not a jerk about it, but I'm firm and say, like, look, We herd cats on so many levels. It's insane. And this is the way that we have to do it or things are just going to fall apart. I'm going to lose employees. I'm going to look like an idiot in the community, whatever it is. We're going to have tenant rights organizations coming after us. There's so many ways to get burned and screwed that I'm not willing to do the work a different way, really. And that's not to say I'm anti-improvement.. So I'll consider ideas, but we've got to follow our rules sort of 90% of the time or whatever. And I'm also not willing to do it for less because I've had fun with that same sort of premise or quote when I'm having a conversation with somebody that's buying a property and they're saying, I say, hey, it's going to be X%, and they say, well, I'm going to buy a lot. It's going to, you know, you're going to have good scale. Like, could we potentially do less or something like that? And I, I first ask if they had that conversation with the broker that's selling them the deal and how that went. And of course, nobody negotiates the commission with the broker. And then I explain that, you know, best case scenario, we have low, pretty low profit margins. And you asking for a discount on the top line fee that we charge be crazy. You're saying we've never done anything together and you want me to make no money or do this for free, and I'm just not interested in doing that. So yeah, I would say we've been moving in that direction, and in the last year or two, I've drawn a totally hard line on that, and we just started charging more for things because I don't want to set us up for for failure. And actually, you're a big part of the reason why, and I'm not just pandering to you. I would say this if there was a different host on the line. You're pretty adamant. There was a particular fee that we implemented that you and I talked about at SMBash, and you're like, I don't know why you haven't done that, why you didn't do this the day you bought the company. It was really because I didn't know that it existed, and they had this fear of coming in and looking like I bought this business just to sort of serve me, and I didn't necessarily have the goodwill banked with clients to not spook them. And there's some truth to that. So it was probably good that I didn't do it right away, but I could have done it much sooner than I did it. And interestingly, I asked kind of the person who oversees that particular department 2 weeks ago, hey, we've been doing this now for 3 or 4 months, have you had any pushback? And I think we've charged that fee probably 150, 200 times in the last 4 months. And she was like, one person one time asked for some details on what it was for. I explained it and they said, oh, okay, makes sense.

So nice.

Oh man, I'd love to hear that. Yeah, it's a, that's a real mixed feeling of, okay, I'm super happy that that's working out. And there were some other changes that we made associated with it where we were actually, it was not just a fee. Like there was actually, we reordered some payments so that basically it's covered. It's sort of financing something and it's much more resident-friendly to the order that they have to make payments in is, is much better. So even though there's a little bit higher gross amount, what would have been paid on day one is now spread over sort of 3 months. So people are actually like totally happy with it.

So yeah, anyway, awesome. That's great to hear. So along that same theme, so you and I have talked about, and we're going to get into this, but you have a significant number of the properties that you manage where you have an ownership stake in them of some sort. And I think last time we talked, if my memory is right, you view the third-party property management business as kind of there to serve your investors and you And like, in other words, it's— you're not out here trying to grow to a 5,000-unit third-party management business. That's not really the primary goal, I guess. Is that still the case? And how do you think about, like, do you operate the property management business at a loss to sort of make the numbers work for your investments or to make them more profitable? Or have you reached some sort of equilibrium there? I want to hear a little bit about that if you're comfortable sharing.

Yeah, I am. And so with regards to the second question about operating at a loss, to serve, you know, my own stuff. I try not to do that. I have done that in the past, and I would continue to do it on a case-by-case basis. You know, there are circumstances where it makes sense, just because, like, a good example might be sometimes, sometimes we shoot ourselves in the foot because we run something better than an owner-operator would run it, but it's also more expensive. And if it's, say, it's a value-add sort of a deal where you purchase it and you're looking to put permanent financing on it in 18 or 24 months, someone who just runs it on the side, their expenses will not be normalized to represent what they will have to be in the long run. So you go to underwrite that first 18 to 24 months and the lender is going to give them credit for all this free labor. And obviously we're charging for that labor. So we would not do it for free because I think that's like totally disingenuous. That's like hiding basically and borderline fraud. That's not to say that it's the bank's fault for not underwriting it correctly. If I just buy a property and I do all the work and don't charge for it, that's not— that guy is not doing anything wrong. But if we did a bunch of work and didn't charge for it, in my mind, we're kind of doing something wrong. However, what I might do is just do like a flat rate maintenance guy that's basically not at a loss but with zero margin. And that way we can at least plan and hit our numbers from the expense side almost perfectly. So that's the kind of thing where I would sacrifice some of the upside on a month-to-month basis from a management perspective for the bigger picture of like we can sort of force this pro forma to happen, but they're going to be real numbers. They're not going to be like we just put in numbers at a loss or maybe a slightly lower management fee or something like that. But I want it to be for a short period of time and it's eventually going to get on the normal program because you just can't build a sustainable business that way. And I don't want to be like fighting internally because if it was third-party business, then we'd be making more and people are somehow disincentivized to like focus on the stuff that maybe I'm a part of because they're, it's dragging their compensation down or something like that. So eventually everything has to sort of be market rate. And the first part of the question, what was the first part of the question?

I'm sorry. Basically your plans for the third-party side of the business? Is it something you're actively trying to grow?

Yeah, I would tell this to someone sitting in my office and a client might listen to this. I struggle with that. When things are going great, I'm excited about growing the third-party business. When a client shows up to their property on the day that a mattress happened to be dumped there and calls me freaking out and says, when was the last time somebody looked at this?

There's a mattress.

Oh my goodness. You know, that kind of a thing. Then I'm like, okay, what am I doing with my life that on one hand things are going great and I get to do what I want most of the time, and then on the other hand, I have to get a call getting kind of chewed out over this silly little thing. So I struggle with that and I don't know the answer. The main sort of thing that I do is if we say we're going to do something, we're going to take some business on, then I want to do a really great job. So I don't want the client base that we have to think that our attention is waxing and waning, because that's not the case. What's waxing and waning is whether we want to grow into something huge, which—

Appetite for new third-party business. Correct. Yeah, it's not like you're ignoring your current.

Yeah, exactly. And I bet that pretty hard on the front end. And to be honest, that archetype that I was talking about earlier, the mentoring, here's my spreadsheet that you must follow to a T archetype. I've worked with that 3 or 4 times and it never went well. So I'm usually vetting for that specifically upfront. And it's not to be arrogant, but pointing to the fact that I mentioned at the beginning where, hey, I wanted to buy a management business and there was really only a couple to consider. It's the same when you're trying to hire a management company. So I don't have to work, we don't have to work with people that are not going to be fun to work with. And it doesn't mean that people need to pander to us or kind of be like delicate and whatever, but for whatever reason, there's a certain type of person who treats their property management company like they're not sort of the most important piece of the puzzle, and they really are.

Yeah, couldn't agree more. So I want to— your mattress example is spot on. Like, I think anyone who's listening who's managed a property for more than 10 minutes can resonate with that feeling that you describe of what am I doing with my life, right? Like, I can't believe I'm on the phone with this owner who hasn't been here in a year and just now is accusing me of whatever, right? And it's hard to not take that personally, I think. As the owner of the business, or at least it is for me. I'm curious, as your business has grown and as you're very involved in purchasing properties, you know, as part of a joint venture or syndication, how do you view your involvement in the day-to-day operations of the management company? Is this something where you're on a trajectory to put in place an operator and be out so you're not getting those calls anymore? Do you still feel like maybe sort of obligated to stay very close to the metal since your own money's on the line?

I guess share a little bit about that. So right now, my responsibility, I am not fully responsible for everything day to day, but I've also not given someone completely the reins in the way that you have, I think. I have a woman who is our director of operations, we call her. And the org chart is everyone essentially flows through her, then to me. And then I had a baby 2 months ago and I tried to— Oh, congrats. Thank you. Yeah, I tried to use that as an— So this is a change that I've been wanting to make for a long time. It's just easier for people to digest if you've got a bit of a reason. Clients, employees, everyone, vendors. As opposed to just like, oh, he doesn't want to spend time with us.

I don't give a reason. Yeah, well, I'm just like, no, I'm just— yeah, I'm taking off June, so I'll be seeing you guys later. What are you doing, you guys? No, I'm not really doing anything. I'm just going to be at home. Um, so yeah, don't, don't call me.

Well, maybe that's— yeah, I just— I aspire to have the chutzpah, I guess, to do that, but I took the easy way out and used the excuse of a baby It's funny. So we were planning on doing this at some point, and then I don't know why it was so late in the game that I realized this, but I was like, oh, shit, this is perfect. So I think it was about a month before he was born, and then we crammed and made some adjustments and kind of sent out the messaging to our team internally, then a handful of clients and everything. And I immediately felt this weight lift, and it felt so great. So now it's 2 months later. I'm starting to come back every day, basically, but not the way that I was before. Not 8:30 to 5 or 5:30. I'm doing a slightly abbreviated day, 9 to 3-ish, and it's somewhat driven by my older son has a summer camp thing that I gotta pick him up from. But it's still kind of a nice way. Now I've— I still have a forcing function that doesn't allow me to bleed back into everything. And officially, my duties are the high level. She brings things to me, I make decisions, whatever. And then I'm sort of bouncing from department to department and focusing on, you know, that sort of perennial issue with small businesses is that you're either staffed to perfection or more likely you're understaffed. So there, when you have an idea of, hey, let's try this, hey, we want to recruit maintenance guys, like, here's an idea, no one has the time for it. So I am basically going from department to department working on, you know, special projects, we call them. So, you know, like right now, that's going to be like a leasing deep dive for the next month or two. And then I want to go to make ready and try and leave a sustainable improvement in my wake, essentially. And then the other sort of overarching special project that I'm working on is we have a developer who worked for that internet marketing business that I had mentioned a long time ago, and he's a good friend of mine. He's coming on for the next 12 months in a part-time capacity and basically kind of doing the stuff that you do for your business. For my business. Not all like no-code improvements, but some of it's actually coding. But every little— it's sort of like having just an optimization expert on retainer. And a grand example would be resident verification requests. So somebody's moving out and you get this email and it's like, please print and fax and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we will come up with a plan for— and I know we could do this with off-the-shelf tools, but it's so much easier if it's built specifically for what we need. He'll build a page on our site, which he's rebuilding the website first, but he'll build a page on our site. This is the only place you can send this request. That request will go to one person. That will be a link that they can click. They can annotate directly on the form. No print, whatever. We're not faxing. We're not doing any of that. They can e-sign directly on the form, they can send it right back to the person and that resident, and it's done. So that's kind of my, my focus now. I don't know, in the 5, 10-year plan, if it's to— I think it's to be able to sort of come and go as I please and be super confident that we're executing, you know, on things basically as perfectly as possible, because then I'm, you know, sort of free to do whatever I want.

I love this. I love the idea of you kind of floating around from department to department working on special projects. That resonates a lot with me. That's kind of similar to how I view my role now. There's something about being the owner of the business and having been there a long time where you have a vision, you have a view. It's almost like if you're on a ship, like picture like a sailing ship, right? You're at that like top lookout, right? And everyone else is kind of down on the deck. You can see further and you can see everything that's going on. And so you can see like, oh shoot, like these rental verification forms, like they're coming in from every which way and like, there's no consistency. We're burning up all this time on something that could not have a lower value to our company. In fact, we're just helping other companies, right? There has to be a better way. So, and you have the bandwidth and the insight to to think clearly kind of from first principles about, okay, what is this thing that we're doing? Do we even need to be doing it at all? Okay, we're doing a favor for somebody else. Great. Well, then they can do it on our terms. We're going to set up a form on the website. They don't like the form. Great. They don't have to. We're not doing it then. Easy, right? And you have the authority to make a decision like that where, oh, mom-and-pop landlord, they want to fax the thing. Well, guess what? They're not getting the rental verification form then. And I'm fine with that.

So that's really, really cool to see. Connecting the dots too. Sometimes even if you had the perfect person in place who was passionate about fixing, they identified that problem, they went above and beyond and came up with a system to fix it, all of that, they might not then have the vision to think because they just aren't involved in other departments to go, oh, Well, if this person is sending this verification, we should do X, Y, and Z to see if there's a retention opportunity. So having the vision of all the pieces.

Yeah, exactly like you say. Very cool. And it's been my experience that going back to your description of offloading activities and responsibilities in preparation for the baby, and kind of using that as an excuse. It's been my experience that as I do that, once I get something off my plate, I'm like, oh yeah, I shouldn't have been doing that anyway. Like, what was I doing? Like, why was I doing that for 3 years? And there's something about, in your mind, it's this big complicated thing and no one else is ever going to be able to do it. And you have to know this little detail and you always have to go in and manually do this one thing or it doesn't work right. And then you like record a little Loom video or you have someone come in your office and you show them how to do it and take notes for 15 minutes. And they're like, "Okay, yeah, I got it." And you're like, "Oh, okay. Just, I guess, let me know if you have any questions." And then you're like, at least for me, I feel foolish. I'm like, "Oh, shoot. Why did I think that only I could do this?" And then once it's off your plate, you're like, "Great." You never think about it again. You're happy that someone has taken the responsibility and you sort of are able to have a more clear picture of the business because you have a little bit of distance now. And it's just, for me, it's been really, really valuable.

That's totally true. I mean, my wife and I always joke about learning the same lesson in parenting. It's like almost the exact same thing. You know, you do something for your kid forever. And I mean, it's a little bit different because they're growing up and at some point they didn't have the capacity, but we don't coddle our older son too much, I don't think. But there will be things where we give in too easily or whatever it is, and we make a little change or we ask him to do something and it's no problem at all. And yeah, we continuously learn that lesson. I don't know what needs to happen if there's like a daily affirmation we need to start our day with or something, expect more of others or something like that.

Yeah. But yeah, people are more capable than you think.

Yeah, yeah.

Or I'm less capable than I think, or I'm not a genius.

Other people actually do know how to—

yeah, you know, whatever it is. Exactly. Okay, great. Let's take a minute to thank this week's sponsor, Appfolio. With Appfolio Property Manager, all of your business-critical workflows from marketing to leasing to accounting and work order management can be completed on one powerful, easy-to-use platform. You know how important it is to me that your data is transparent and easily accessible, and that workflow and process automation is at the forefront of property management software design. Some of the features built into AppFolio that customers love the most are online payments, rental applications, maintenance requests, text messaging, virtual showings. These things are all built into the platform. You can have a central repository for all your data and workflows, meaning less back and forth and more transparency. AppFolio automates the back office, including manual tasks like accounting, so your team can focus on what matters, like growing your business and delivering great customer service. Every customer receives ongoing support with options for self-serve training, video tutorials, how-to resources, instant chat, and phone support by appointment. AppFolio goes out of their way to make sure you have a great experience using their product. Let me read a quote from Karina Lyons at Concept Property Management. She says, "AppFolio has allowed us to streamline our workflows so we can focus on what's most important, our relationships." Thank you to AppFolio for sponsoring the show. Let's get back to it. So I want to, we'll stick with property management for a little bit longer here, and then I want to touch on a couple other cool things that I know you're involved with. So in many of your properties, you've got an ownership stake. Like hundreds of units, I think, if I remember right. Syndication is becoming a really hot topic in the property management world lately. There was literally a property management syndication summit, like a conference, the first one ever that wrapped up a couple weekends ago. So there's a lot of discussion in the world of property management around, hey, turns out owning real estate is really profitable. Like, you know, it almost seems so obvious that why even say it, but a lot of property management company owners, for one reason or another, that hasn't been an area of focus for them, and it is starting to become that. So you've obviously had a tremendous amount of success here. You're somebody that I look up to as somebody who's done this right. And you're, you know, quite frankly, your net worth is well ahead of where it would have been had you not focused on getting ownership, getting equity in these deals. What might be your advice to somebody who owns a smaller property management company and wants to start syndicating or JVing deals in the way that you have done?

Well, a funny illusion, I guess, that I make often is I often joke with— I'm sure you have this call frequently. Somebody reaches out to you or is connected to you by someone that you know and says, hey, I'm interested in Columbus, Kansas City, whatever market. Do you have some time? Could we talk about it? I want to invest there. Depending on where that comes from, you say yes or no. If you say no, you try to do it in a nice way because you don't want to, you know, sound like a jerk. But it's kind of a strange phenomenon in property management that people think you should be totally willing to give all this free time for the carrot being that you will do this thing for them that is not actually that profitable. Yes, it's your business, but like your business, growing your business is not predicated on investing a ton of time in one client that's going to make you a couple hundred bucks a year potentially, or that's per unit, whatever. But so the funny illusion that I make is, Hey, I've been doing all this research into, you know, Sioux Falls. There's not enough barber shops there and they're all like mismanaged. So I am going to go and they're all underpriced. I'm going to go buy all the barber shops and I'm going to start some new barber shops. I just need to find a great barber shop management company to do all the work for me. That sounds insane. It doesn't exist. No one. No one is going to do that when you say, hey, I'm going to give you 7% or 8% of the revenue and you're going to take on a lot of risk. And here's my spreadsheet that I made that maps out my barbershop plan. Just hit these numbers and let me know how we're doing every quarter. It doesn't work that way. But for some reason, real estate is this special industry where that's the way it's supposed to work. And I think that's crazy. I don't understand. If there's so many people trying to get into real estate that don't bring anything to the table, and it's so bizarre to me that people think that's reasonable, like they don't have an extreme amount of capital because that's an advantage. If you just have an extreme amount of capital and you want to buy properties and hire a property management company, great. That makes sense. Your returns just have to be like your return expectations just have to be reasonable. It's not going to be an outperformance value-add type return if you just are buying things and your advantage is tons of money. If your advantage is operating it, like I think our advantage is, and that's why I chose to go down this path, so I had some sort of an advantage, then that makes total sense. You're an operator and you can find the capital. There are so many people though that have no advantage, and I don't get, I don't get like, It's so fundamental. It's like, it doesn't make sense to me if you went into any other industry and you said, I'm going to start a, you know, whatever, a t-shirt printing business. And you're, you know, you tell your father-in-law that and he says, well, why t-shirt printing? Well, I know of a profitable t-shirt printing business. Like, well, yeah, that guy's done it for a long time and he knows everybody in the industry or whatever.

Yeah. You know, my partner and I have a saying because this happens to us all the time and you know, we'll get a call from somebody and they'll say, one I get all the time is like, hey, if you see any good deals, could you like let me know? And another one we get where we have the same reaction is people say, hey, I'm looking for like a really good handyman who can like, you know, I've got this property and I need to like totally flip it. Like, do you know anyone who could just do that for me? And my response to both of those questions, I joke with my partner, I'm like, that's the job. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that's, That's what you're— that's your job, right? Like, this is kind of the same of what you were saying. It's like, no, I know I don't. The answer is no, that's your job. Like, I'm not going to hold your hand through this whole thing. If I, if I could do all that, I would just do it.

I wouldn't be helping you with it. Exactly. And if there's a, if there's a good deal, I'm going to buy it or one of my clients is going to buy it. I'm not— why would I call you up and give it to you? When you've offered me no reason to do that? Doesn't make any sense. And for whatever reason, that's considered by many in real estate to be totally reasonable, to have no edge and offer no incentive to people, especially to property managers. You know, the carrot being just provide the service that you'd provide anyway and they need.

So yeah, it's like one, it's like one step above someone coming to you and just saying, hey, um, I want money. Can you just— can you just like, do you have any extra? I just— I'm just like, my business plan is just to get rich. So like, if you could just help me with that really quick. Like, I'm like, what? No, what?

It doesn't make any sense. Totally. Yeah, no, it's— so I think I just gave you a pretty jaded half answer to what you asked. But so the flip side of that, maybe the not jaded and positive spin on that is there are a ton of people who want to be in real estate and have some capital, but maybe not an extreme amount to the point that it's like a big advantage. If somebody came for me, if they came into Kansas City and it was like, and this has happened, a tech guy that sold the business and he made $50 million and he's like, I'm going to put $10 million into real estate in Kansas City. I'm from here, or I visited or whatever, and I'm going to Put $10 million in equity and we're going to buy $20 million and it's going to be low levered and I just want to— it's a store of value. That's a real advantage because there's not tons of people doing that and it's enough money that they could really dictate terms and things like that on deals. But as a property manager, you can bring the operational advantage. So I have spun some of those conversations of basically, and I wouldn't start by just grilling people on what's your advantage, but if they really don't have any advantage, but like they, it's, there's somebody you'd potentially want to work with. You can have the conversation around, hey, look, you basically don't have an advantage. I can be that advantage potentially. And if their return expectations are something that you could meet because maybe they, I don't know, come from— they're representing a small group of people that are just, again, with that example of like the tech guy, and they're not looking for the value-add 25% a year type return. They're looking for a 10% return where you can pretty much buy something stabilized. You as the operator can be the difference maker in them like being able to actually achieve that or not, and you can wedge your way into some deals. So I don't know, that's one example of how you might be able to take the position of being a property manager and start to kind of leverage that into deals.

Love it. Okay, great. Thank you for sharing that. So I want to touch on SMBash. So for those who don't know, Brandon is a co-organizer, co-host of a conference called SMBash. It was in Orlando late last year. Fantastic. I went, had a lot, a lot of fun. I'd love to just hear a little bit about what made you decide to host a conference. How was the experience? Was it worthwhile from a financial perspective? And then maybe share a little bit about— I know we have the second annual coming up in Austin, I think, and maybe share a little bit about that if you can.

Absolutely. Yeah. So I tweet out a lot of half-baked thoughts and ideas and stuff. I mean, most of my tweets are half-baked, and that's kind of the point. I, despite like kind of getting lucky and having those tweets go viral and getting a relatively large amount of Twitter followers, I didn't turn into like somebody that worried about— I still say stupid stuff and, you know, I don't want to say like offensive things, but I just tweet the same stuff basically. And I think, what was the timing on this? Maybe 9 to 12 months before we hosted this event, in February of 2022. It's now June of 2022. So sometime early 2021, I tweeted out basically a description of what SMBash eventually was. I said, hey, if there was an event for people looking to do a self-funded search, so just buy a small business with an SBA loan is like kind of the easy way to say that, would anyone come to that conference. And I don't remember how many replies it got. It got a lot, maybe 50 responses. Oh, hell yeah, I'd be there, whatever. And then my co-hosts, Matt Henson and Sam Rosati, I think it was Sam, sent me a message and said, hey, we're already working on this. Would you like to join us? And I said, yes, of course I would like to join you because I wasn't even saying I was going to do it. I was just think, I mean, yeah, of course when you tweet something like that, part of you is thinking, yeah, maybe I'll do this. But realistically, I don't think without them I would've pushed and, and did it. I think I probably would've played with the idea and then, you know, decided, ah, I don't have the time to do this by myself. So it was awesome. So I, I just latched onto them and then none of us had any event experience and So I think that was, if I remember the timeline correctly, it was kind of like April, May, something like that of 2021, maybe when we were starting to really plan stuff and had really committed to doing it. And last summer we kind of would make tiny incremental progress, but it was just the three of us and we're all doing other things and it wasn't going super fast. And in August-ish of last year, one of my employees, well, actually two of my employees, we were having kind of a fun, I don't remember, end of the day or just after-hours conversation, you know, what are your hopes and dreams type stuff. And one of them said that her dream, and I'd forgotten this, she had worked at a wedding venue and done event planning, and she dreamed of kind of the van life and going, maybe working here still, but going remote. But definitely like doing event planning, like as a business. And it like immediately was like, oh, well, I'm your client. I didn't even realize you had this skill set. And we, we had been interviewing event planners, but it was— I don't know, they didn't have the, like, the grind that we needed and just sort of wanted to be more sort of formulaic about about it. And the event itself, you know, from attending, was not like a hotel ballroom sort of event. It was much more of, you know, like a group of people that kind of knew each other hanging out and in some ways kind of a reunion and mixed with really good speakers. And it just was not an out-of-the-box event. If you just told a company that does that, if you described it to them, I think they would have ended up at an Embassy Suites and it would have felt not the way we wanted it to feel. So we brought them on to do it and it was a perfect thing because they were like super motivated to do a really good job because they wanted to build a real business out of it. And then it's very convenient to be able to just kind of steal some time during the day and work on it and not have to do it all, you know, nights and weekends. And they did a really good job planning it. We had it in February, had 100 people. I think something on the order of 70% paid. And then there was speaker tickets and sponsor tickets, which the sponsors still paid. And so it was profitable. I mean, nobody's retiring off of it. And we're basically rolling everything we made on the first one into the next one. There's a lot of deposits and things. And You got to travel and scout locations, all that sort of stuff. So basically everything that we came out ahead on has now been spent or committed for the next one. And we don't know exactly where we're taking it, but we know the first one was great. And it's interesting, actually, I don't know if you saw this, but yesterday there was a little thread about it that went viral from an attendee talking about how a connection that he made, which just so happened Yeah, it just so happens to be with Sam, but they didn't really know each other before the event. So Tony Lane is his name and super successful, really interesting guy. He was on Alex Bridgeman's podcast a few weeks ago. I think he and Sam ended up buying a business together as a result of a conversation they had on the first night of SMBash this year. So it's exciting that obviously those are the exact interactions that we're trying to foster amongst guests. But then, I mean, frankly, that's the reason you host this kind of stuff too. So to be able to point to, hey, look, like 2 hours into the first event this happened is really exciting. And it wasn't staged. It's not like this was already happening and then we said, hey, let's give SM Bash the credit. So I think the future on that is really exciting. We're going to continue doing the event at least annually. We'd thought about kind of doing smaller local events, but those have kind of organically sprung up, not necessarily related to SM Bash, but I think you went to, you had one or went to one in Columbus, right? And then there's one in New Jersey and we kind of decided, hey, let's not like, there's no competition here. We'll do our event and we can be a big sort of annual thing. And then we want to try and attend a lot of those things. And then frankly, our event will pay for us to attend those things. And then there's, there may be some bigger idea that we can use all of this to kind of like, we, we all personally want to invest in self-funded search a lot. So it's, you know, a deal flow vehicle for us is super interesting. And that's, that's probably, you know, sort of the pot of gold, I guess, at the end of the rainbow for it. But it's really cool to be able to be the, the host of something like this and just kind of see what opportunities that creates for you.

Fantastic. Well, it was a super fun event. Highly encourage anyone who's listening to, to try and make it on the guest list for the next one. A lot of good connections. And it's the nice thing about property management is it's basically at the intersection of small business and real estate. And so I feel like I have a lot in common with both real estate folks and small business folks. So I love attending. I love attending conferences that are outside the normal conference circuit for property managers. And this is one that I'm definitely going to make sure I hit every year. So let me wrap up. I want to be respectful of your time, Brandon. This is a question I'm trying to ask every guest at the end of the show. What marketing advice would you give to a smaller property management company owner looking to grow their third-party business? You obviously have a very sizable operation. I'm curious, maybe in like a minute or two, what would be your advice in that scenario?

So this, you, this is the one question you gave me ahead of time in full disclosure, and I didn't have a great response for it until the end of the day yesterday. I saw something that was really interesting that I might copy. So I didn't do this. The way that I grew my business was a couple of broker relationships that sent a lot of business and then my own investing. So this is not what I've done, but I really like this. There is a broker in Kansas City who every week or two on LinkedIn, he makes a video of publicly listed properties. And he's kind of built a list around this. And I didn't really see it until yesterday. Maybe I'd seen it, but I hadn't paid attention. And the fact that you gave me this question ahead of time probably had me thinking about it in my subconscious. But He does like a 15-minute video and he breaks down— breaks down is not even the right way to say it. He kind of just at a very, very high level says, I think this one looks interesting. I don't know about this one, which I don't know if I do it quite that way because then you're saying— I don't want to say on a video that I'm publishing for marketing like this one's way overpriced. You might make some, some enemies or something. But what I think you could do as a property management firm, as long as it's all a publicly listed deal, I think doing a once a week, once a month, whatever cadence is possible, tear down, like underwriting just off what's publicly available would be an amazing way to establish yourself as an authority. And I think you really could only invest the time if you wanted to. You could prep a lot for it and do it really professionally. But if you wanted to make it really easy, you probably could just do it all live. Like, you really could just like record yourself searching for a deal, pulling it up, throwing it in a little spreadsheet, and, you know, underwriting it on the fly. And then when people say, hey, can you talk a little bit about the market? I'd say, yeah, go watch my videos here. So it's kind of, you know, saving you from those conversations. But then also, it's incredible, the inbound sort of stuff that comes your way, Twitter, whatever. I mean, off Twitter, I've had billionaires literally send me messages, like direct messages, and say, whatever, I'm interested in this kind of a thing. And it's kind of amazing. So I wouldn't be surprised if some crazy opportunity came of that, just throwing out that kind of content marketing. And it's not like a big, complicated campaign that you're doing a bunch of difficult stuff to prepare for.

This reminds me of Acquisitions Anonymous, for those who have listened to that podcast, another really great one where they break down publicly listed small businesses for sale. It's kind of like a mini solo version of that where you pull up property for sale or an apartment building and then, yeah, just like you said, 10 or 15 minutes, you're like, "Hey, here's how I would think about this. If a current client came to me with this, here's how I'd advise them." and you can just demonstrate your expertise and share some really valuable content with folks who are likely to be potential clients of yours. Fantastic, Brandon. That's probably the best answer I've heard out of the episodes I've recorded so far. Thank you for that. I really appreciate your time today on the show. If folks want to keep in touch with you, follow your work, where should they go to do that?

Twitter is pretty much the only social media I'm active on, and my handle is just my last name, Loughridge. So L-A-U-G-H-R-I-D-G-E. If you wanted to look at our business, of course, northterrace.com. That site is going to be changing. I think it looks fine now, but it's— we're going to kind of do an upgrade. And then my email is brandon@northterrace.com.

All right. Thanks so much, Brandon. Appreciate it. Thanks, Peter. Thank you for listening to Owner Occupied. I hope you have enjoyed this episode. If you like the show and want to get connected to the community, you can follow me on Twitter @PSLohmann and subscribe to my email newsletter on my website, peterlohmann.com. I try to share as much valuable property management content as I can on a regular basis. Thanks again for listening and have a great week.

Mm-hmm.