EP 596 – Valuable Lessons Learned From My First Rehab

Foreign this is the no Closer show where you get the latest developments in distressed note investing and learn the secrets of how you can control millions of dollars worth of property for pennies on the dollar. Get educated and entertained by someone who has closed thousands of deals and lives to support you in achieving the same. Now, here's your host, CEO of We Close notes, Scott Carson. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Note Closure Show. As always, Scott Carson. Excited to be here today. Today's episode, I'm going to share some of the lessons that I learned from doing my first ever rehab project. And with everything going on in the market and being kind of chaotic, obviously we all had some time to sit around, figure out what's going on. And with the market being just crazy housing, you know, with it being single family homes or rentals or commercial market as well too, in real estate, there's a lot of upheaval going on. And so we learn a lot about what's happening right now by going back 10 plus years behind us to take a look at what happened in the past. So I actually went a little bit further back as I got busy diving into individual deals that I've done in my 15 plus years of real estate experience. I started going back saying, okay, what was this property worth? And on Friday, I actually got in my truck and drove around Austin here and looked at some of the properties that I've bought, rehabbed subject tools, some of the projects that really kind of stood out in my mind. And over the next few few days, few episodes, I'll be reviewing some of those deals to kind of break it down because I think there's a lot of valuable information in closed deals, especially when it comes to the marketing, the workout strategies, how you ended up making things work or not work along the way. So I'm gonna share some of my triumphs and then also some of my failures on some of the different deals that we've seen over time. And I always think back to, I think one of the most important deals that any real estate investor can do is the first one. And we all learn more by doing than actually sitting through a workshop or a webinar, in this case a zoom call. A lot of times we all learn a lot more so than anything else by actually doing and taking action and trying to be a educated idiot, as a lot of people are. There's a lot of people that are well educated, but they've never pulled the trigger on a real estate deal. It's a different mindset they just don't have the expertise. And that's one of the first things I want to put out there. To all of you guys that are listening out there, if you've pulled the trigger on a deal, I don't care how big it is, kudos to you. You have a lot more going for you now because you've stepped out in that ledge, you stepped out in that branch and actually taken action on it. Whereas a lot of people, they scratch their itch by going to a workshop and never ever doing something, never ever taking the action. So for those of you that are listening out here and you're kind of embarrassed because even bought more deals, don't worry about that, you'll get to it. The fact that you're taking action is head and shoulders above those that aren't going to take any type of action. I was watching something last and I think many people here who catch Showtime like to show billion and I was watching the episode last night where Axe is sitting there in a retreat and he's all these bankers, they don't know what to go out, buy, trade and be a riverboat gambler and all these different things. They're just sitting their comfort level of being a banker and just sitting there because they've got their. I kind of chuckled a little bit. It's good to be the bank, but not everybody is a bank. A lot of times we get started by going to workshops, learning how to wholesale, learning how to put things under option. Ron Legrand's book how to be a real estate investor with none of your own money by talking about options and wholesaling. One of the most impactful books for me as a real estate investor and I still highly recommend it to everybody out there. If you think back to my first deal, my first deal that I pulled the trigger on that was a real estate true real estate invest, not me going buying something retail off the moi. I'm not talking about that. My first house. I'll get into my first house later on, but my first real estate investment deal where I had to go out either a and market for it, raise capital for it, do the workouts in some sort of fashion. That's what I want to talk about today. And this property is located in Round Rock. If you guys don't know where Round Rock is. Round Rock is north of Austin right up height 35. It is the headquarters for Dell Computers. It's also the home of the Round Rock Express which is in the last few years switched between being the double or triple A Affiliate for either the Texas Rangers or the Houston Astros, owned by Nolan Ryan's two sons, Reed Ryan's the president and then he's got a partner that does it. But I love baseball. And why did I choose Round Rock to buy my first house to move to begin with? Well, Ryan Rock is up and coming area. It's in Williamson county, which is when we were moving to Austin, moving to the neck of the woods from graduating school at Southwest Texas State. Picked the area. It was up and coming. Although it was quite a bit of a drive for me to get to my job. And then, you know, when I was married at the time, you get to her job in South Austin as well. So we could have probably picked a much more ideally closer location. But we were running up north and we found our house there and about the time, too. This goes back to 2006. Yeah, I'd been working with Bob Leonidi and Jamie Kaylor for a couple years and Boyd Pops in the mortgage business for two, three years. Kind of like I said before, I think maybe you've shared it that we were getting over our lumps. I was starting to make money again as a mortgage in and making good money as a mortgage broker at the time, doing a lot of great deals, doing a lot of loans for investors across the country. Started putting some marketing into, I should say some money into my marketing here in the local market. Now, if you go back to 2006, 2007, things were still booming in Austin. We had a bit of a bubble earlier in 2000 where there was layoffs. You know, we had the high tech. The bubble burst, you know, the dot com error affected us a little bit more so than other areas. What affected me originally, Dell Computers laid off a lot of their staff as they moved their shipping and production and some of their stuff to Memphis. And my two rental properties that I bought at full retail became vacant and I became a deadbeat bar. Luckily saved our house, get rid of those two rental properties that we bought retail. Proceeded to lick my wounds for two years to get caught back up. Well, back on board, getting rocking and rolling, making some money and sorry, like I said, started putting some money into marketing. Now what did I do now for the marketing side of things? I was like many other people out there, sending out postcards, sending out yell letters, a variety of things. So what I would do is I would pull the foreclosure list like many. There was a service here in Texas called the Roddy List that was around for years. It pulled the pending foreclosure list for really the top 15 to 20 counties across Texas, the bigger ones. And you could purchase that list for 35, 45 bucks a month. So I bought it for Williamson county. And if there's about 600 to 700 pending foreclosures on there now, one of the things that I did is I was seeing foreclosures and yes, I did the yellow letter aspect of things. Pull out a yellow tab with a red ink and you write on it, hi, my name is Scott. My wife's name is such and such. We would like to talk about buying your house at such and such address. And many of you guys have probably seen or even received a letter or two on that. I know if you've got enough investment properties, you've probably gotten a letter or had a property go vacant for a while. You've definitely got a letter from an investor like that. John and Donna McNeil kind of started that aspect. I got a chance to spend some time with them. Great people. Really, really lovely, beautiful people. Now I started marketing and sending out letters. I didn't really do postcards because I found out that I could probably say, well, postcards, while it might be faster, is it cost me a lot more. So on a bootstrain budget, like many investors, I. So, okay, I'm going to. Not going to handwrite. I don't have the time for that. But I will print some letters out. So I printed some letters out. You know, it's kind of the same thing. Hey, I'd like to talk to you about your property at this address. It'll mail merge and drop 700 letters in the mail. Now, one of the things that I did differently than most real estate investors, since I had been in a rough period beforehand, as I was thinking back to five years earlier where I was like, okay, you know, not really five years. Three to four years roughly, depending on the timeframe. I was like, what would I like what would have made me to call the person, send a letter out? I said, a lot of investors will hide behind a 1, 800 number. They'll hide behind a bandit sign. They'll hide behind a website. Not really put themselves out there. That's intimidating when you're stressed out. That's intimidating when you're on your mortgage payment and you don't have any type of answers. I mean, borrowers are in stress because they're afraid they're going to lose their home. They know they're not being able to pay the bills. It's the same mentality that's going on Right now in the country, people are stressed. People are making a decision between them making their mortgage payment or the rent payment. And you know, I'm having food on the table. So I thought myself, I said, okay, I had a good photo of me from my mortgage side. I said, and one of the things I put down at the bottom of the letter, I send out and make it a one page letter. Anything longer than that, it's a waste of print and ink. The bottom I said, I put my face, me smiling. Suit and tie. Scott in a suit and tie, right? And I said, P.S. i put my picture on this letter so that, you know, I'm a real person with a real solution. And I would send out letters. Now, I didn't send out 500, 700, always at the same time. Sometimes it would just be 50 because that's all we had in the budget that month. You know, 100. The stamps, you know, stamps are still expensive then. And you gotta figure out the time. And in Texas, by the time you're buying the Roddy list, you might only have two weeks before the foreclosure auction takes place. Cause the foreclosure auction is always the first Tuesday of the month. And the Roddy list would come out the first week of the month. So you have two, three weeks before the foreclosures would happen here in Texas. And they happen every month. So you had to really be Johnny on the spot to get your letters out. Now what do we all know happens when you're. You've got a limited timeframe like that. If you've got two, three weeks and you dally, or you dilly, dally, you're going to get phone calls the week of phone calls the week after the foreclosure auction. You often don't have a lot of time to negotiate with the banks to just to spend things or the attorneys to stop it while you try to work out the situation. If a borrower calls you, first of all, you got to get the borrowers to call you. And we all know direct mail, you're gonna see a 1 to 4% response rate. So send out letters. Now. I also at the same time was sending out letters for the mortgage business. And we did a lot of mortgages, a lot of refinances with World Savings clients. Because World Savings was a big client, we were doing a lot of origination with them. And so I sent out a chunk of letters as well. Basically the same letter, but different. Hey, we can help you. Here's my photo. It's the same thing. P.S. i gave you my photos. I'm a real person with real lending solutions for you. And send it out as well. Well, little did I know that when I pulled a list of deeds from World Savings that were five years old, did I know that this property at Oak View Drive, the borrower was going to get busted to letters. Not only did they have a World Savings mortgage roughly five years old, they were also facing the foreclosure list. Now the property we're talking about here is on Oakview Drive in Round Rock, Texas, has obviously been bought soldiers, I think twice after we got involved in the deal. And I get this phone call on a Thursday evening if I remember correctly. And the bar's like, hey, I got your letters. I'm like, letters? Okay, great. Can you come over and talk? I'm talking on the phone, he gives me the address. I'm like, oh, that's just not too far. Now, I was living in Round Rock at the time. I'm like, oh, it's like that's near me. That's like 10 minutes, less than 10 minutes away from my house. Sure thing. So I come over to the house and it's a husband and wife and their three kids. And I pull up and gorgeous curb appeal. You got a red brick two story house, huge oak tree in the front yard. Yard looks decent. It's two car garage in the front of the house. You know, big window, got a dining room nook. I'm like, oh, this is bigger than my house I was living in because I was living in a 32 16, 95 square foot house. I was like, ooh, what is this? 22, 2500. And the neighborhood is great. Neighborhood's got big houses on both sides, at least 2,000 square feet outside. It's well wooded. It's on the east side of I35. So I'm sorry, the west side of 35, which is the first built, it's a little bit older side, but not anything bad. So I'm not excited. So I go in, the borrower's outside and I get to talking to this guy, his name's Jerome. And I'm talking with Jerome and he tells me, he goes, yeah, he goes, I'm facing foreclosure, I've been out of work for six months, can't pay the mortgage on it. My dad actually financed this to us. He's on the mortgage for it and he can't pay because he's sick as well. And we're afraid we're going to lose this place. And I'm like, okay, let's see what we can do. So Adam signed a letter of authorization. Authorization, release information. And I asked him, so what made you call me Jerome? And he goes, the reason I called you, Scott, is because I got two letters from you. One to hopefully refinance and another one that you had a solution for us of some sort. You could try to help us out. And I like your picture at the bottom. You're a real person with real solutions. I like. Ah. Bingo. Ding, ding, ding. That worked. So I get on the phone, I'm calling the bank, and the mortgage had been sold to Chase at the point it was no longer a World Savings Loan. It's just been recently sold recently, and that's okay. So I knew, A, I wasn't gonna be able to try to buy the note at all, and B, he was roughly about seven, eight months behind. Payments, I think, were around $800 a month. So they was getting up over 10 grand behind. Taxes hadn't been paid either, but they had a pretty decent interest rate on their mortgage. And so I'm on the phone with them. I said, okay, what do you want to do? And they're like, he had some equity. That was the really nice thing. They had about Roug roughly 30, 40 grand in equity on the deal, depending on your valuations and stuff at the time, from what I remember. And so I said, well, you know, can we work with some things? You know, the bank's like, well, literally, you bring the payment, basically take over. I mean, just bringing the payments to him. We'll stop the foreclosure. And that was really all that Chase wanted to do, the attorneys as well. So I'm like, okay, where am I going to come up with the 10 to 15 grand it needed to come in? And I hadn't really taken a good look at the property when I was over there. I knew it was a little bit dirty, but it wasn't like, you know, like, oh, it could be just normal wear and tear from living in the property, family, three kids, stuff like that. So I said, okay, it's fine. So anyway, I get back, I call Jerome up. I'll go over Jerome and told him, here's the bank really isn't going to stop the foreclosure for the most part. They want to get their full amount due, 10 grand. You know, you've got some equity here. There's not really a solution for you. I mean, the thing is, look, if they foreclose, and based on the repairs needed to the property, Based on what? I can see you're really not in an equity equity position for the most part. And I had my whole one page checklist of going through and pulling out. Like, you've got this might need to work. Your AC looks like it's old. It's probably be replaced. Paint, carpet. Do you have the money for that? And he's like, no, I don't. I said, well, what do you want to do? And he goes, well, with my dad financing this and him kind of being sick, I would just like to walk away from the property. I'm like, and I'm sitting there trying not to show. Oh, he just wants to walk away. I said, he goes, but I need some help with moving costs. I'd be willing to sign up, deed the property over to you if you can do something with it and just help me with my moving costs. I'm like, seriously? He's like, yeah. So I was like, okay, let me think about this. Let me walk through, take some photos. So I walked back through the property. Not a bad property. All the bedrooms, there wasn't holes in the wall. I mean, needed some work in it. So I started reviewing. It was dirty. I mean, the ceiling fan in the kitchen, I'm not joking. Then after I had a chance to look at it, probably had a half inch of dirt on top. Now, don't get me wrong, I think we've all got those dirty ceiling fans, but this one is like you could reach up and touch. Okay, not the ones that like at the top of like a 20 foot ceiling or 12 foot ceiling where it's hard to get to. This one you could reach up and touch. It was dirty. I was like, okay, fine. House didn't smell the greatest. You know, carpet was pretty much trash. Like I said, paint was outdone. There's some spots on it. Backyard needed to be clean. Had these really nice raised beds along the fence. It was way overgrown and the garden back there obviously didn't take care of it and it had some junk in it. So I said, okay, let me figure it. So I go back, I'm like, what am I going to do? Lo and behold, I'm talking with my buddy Boyd. He and I had moved out of Bob and Jimmy's office. We're running everything on the mortgage side of the north side of Austin. And I told him about this deal he's got going. He goes, well, hey, man. He goes, my mom came to me and my mom's got about 180 grand, 200 grand. She asked me to reach out to invest with. I was like, do you want to jump in and partner on this? I think we need roughly about 20 grand, 10 grand pay off or get chased back on track, and then probably five to ten grand in repairs. And then we're gonna have to probably put a new AC in, and we need to do paint and carpet. But I think of the rest of the repairs, what I can tell we could do ourselves, the internal painting, stuff like that, we could pretty much knock it out. So sure enough, we agreed to do it. Awesome stuff. So I went over. I had Jerome deed the property over to our entity. I called Chase bank, so wire in to make the payments to avoid the impending foreclosure. All happened in just a couple days. If I hadn't said anything about this deal to the people around me, I would have never known that Boyd and his mom had some money they were looking for stuff with. So lo and behold, subject to financing. We get this deal, we'd reset the clock. I'm like, okay, let's get rocking. Called the bank, you know, called the bank, Check numbers, check taxes, pretty much good and stuff. So then next weekend, we started the rehab project. We cleaned stuff out. Well, first, here's the funny thing. We showed up on a Friday as they were supposed to be moved out. And of course, you know what? They weren't moved out, I guarantee you. And when we offered pay his moving expenses, Jerome and his family had started packing. They were just sitting there just trying to chill. And even though I said, okay, hey, you need to be out this weekend. We gave you a week. You gotta be out. So went, got the rental truck form, rented it, pulled it up, boom, I'm there. Boyd is there, boss is there, and we're helping them move, Literally helping them move stuff into it, breaking stuff down. And the more we started hauling stuff out of the house, could start to see that they had not cleaned the house. I'm not joking. In a couple years, it had to be at least a year till they had swept properly or cleaned behind the fridge. I mean, don't get me wrong. You move a fridge, we all have stuff and cobwebs and stuff that falls underneath there. This was disgusting. There was a sandwich that had fallen behind the fridge. Okay, A ham sandwich. Well, it had something in it. A sandwich that fell behind the fridge. So I found out what the smell was, cleaned the stuff, hired a dumpster, dumped in a full of stuff, and we're pulling stuff out that they didn't want. They just left there, cleaned out the Backyard, mowed it and then really proceeded to figure out, okay, what the heck are we going to do? The cabinets, we can't, we don't want to rip out. They're decent cabinets. We pulled the fixtures off, the hardware off. There had ceramic towel in the kitchen, which is pretty nice. It needed new appliances for sure. Fridge was shot. Nasty. Fridge was shot. Stove was just completely filthy and the ac. So we basically. Okay, let's put the AC in last because the one that's in there right now is working. Okay. Got the power turned on, water turned on, over to our names and we started painting. Okay. So we got the paint pretty much done. We did ourselves over about a month of rehabbing it ourselves. This is the biggest lessons learned is we try to do it all ourselves. Like, oh, I can come by here at night, you know, watching all these flip these houses and whatever they are, they're all there done themselves. I know grew up in a hardware store. I could do it all. My wife had left her job at that point, so she's like, oh, I'll come over, I can help out. So she was over there during day painting, doing it, you know, manually. We're trying to spray paint, but most of the time it was rolling work. And it's a lot of work when you've got a two story house, 21400ft, painting all the rooms and everything. Cleaned up on that and doing a lot yourself. A lot of lessons. Should have hired a clean out career to come and been a lot cheaper to pay them $1500 versus doing it all ourselves. Same thing, a paint crew to get somebody in there to do it would have saved us a lot of time. But we still. And we're looking at here. Okay, come in. 90 days. We finally got it done. So we're getting ready. So, okay, we got the AC moved in and we're getting ready to have an open house on a Saturday and all excited. The yard's mowed, manicured backyard was cleaned up so it looked really nice, really beautiful aspect of things. So we walk into the house, look, everything's fine. I go out to put the open house sign in the front yard and I turn around and come back in and I see my wife at the time peeking out the window and she looked like she'd just seen a ghost. Literally scared to death. And I'm like, I run in and I'm like, are you okay? What's wrong? And she's like, scott, the ceiling in this spare bedroom has caved in. And I'm like, what the roof was fine. We know the roof. We have the roof. Take a look at. Roof was fine. I walk in there and sure enough, the whole ceiling, it caved in in the spare bedroom. I'm like, uh, you know, what is it? And the kids look. And I'm like, we just put the ac. It's gotta be something with the ac. So sure enough, call the AC guys. They come over like, oh, yeah, we forgot to take the drip pan plug out so it would drip naturally. So what happened? The drip pan got full, it overflowed, wetted the sheetrock and the insulation and all came in. Well, sure enough, he was fine. He said, we'll get taken care of. So we're not having an open house. That weekend came out. They redid the ceiling, retextured it, repainted it, cleaned the carpet up at their own cost. And then we had an open house. Well, we hired a realtor. Diana Hicks just came. I just remembered her name, who's a friend of mine. I met her actually doing a loan for one of her clients. And she listed the property. She just did a flat fee, 500. We listed it on the MLS. We had a full price offer roughly within about 30 days. A few concessions here and there, and then sold. We were able to sell the property. We did run over our budget. When we checked to pull a statement from Chase, it didn't give us the full payoff amount. Miscalculated that with the taxes, back taxes owe versus taxes paid. So we ended up selling it and we still ended up owning about five grand afterwards. Luckily, our investor is like, well, we get another couple deals, we'll get that five grand. So I made no money on my first flip, my first rehab project. But I learned a whole lot of lessons. It was a very expensive tuition. And so the biggest, here's the biggest lessons I learned. Part of the reason I don't like rehab, I mean I. We have rehabbed plenty of properties since then. This is the first one and one. Trying to do it all yourself is not the smart thing. If you think you're going to do that, you're not going to save money. You're going to waste money. Not just maybe save. You might save cost on labor, but time is going to eat you up. It's definitely going to eat you up. Speed is the key. We could have sped up the rehab on this property, which should have been 30 days, and so it took 90 days. Another thing too is a have specific guidelines in place for the borrowers. If you're taking, you get them out of the property. I give them cash once they were done, a little bit of cash for the moving, stuff like that. And I gave them to them on the front end. A lot of people give money to people on the front end, and they're not going to be motivated, like, oh, I'll just stay here and live for free before I have to do any work. Turns out the bar was laid off for lack of work. When we showed up on that weekend to help see check the property. He was drunk off his butt. And you could tell by the number of beer cans we found in the beer cans and bottles in the garden in the backyard and the shrubs and stuff like that. Pretty heavy drinker. May have led to not him having a job, but anyway, probably should have hired a realtor full time to do it. A full listing would have helped us out with that. Because we didn't stage the property, it took a little bit longer. We had to make some concessions. But we did a really good job, though. Curb appeal was nice. We didn't do much landscaping, a couple bags of mulch, clean the yard. That was relatively easy. But the biggest thing that I learned from this too, is make sure your partners have the same motivation as you do as far as if you're in the rehab side of things. Me and my wife at the time, we did 90% of the work on the weekends we were over there. On the nights we were over there, Business partner wasn't. He would show up every once in a while like, oh, sorry, my wife's going to a concert, gonna go babysit. And that got old and old and old. Cause there's only so much stuff that two people could do when they need the third person to fix some things. And so we had to come to Jesus discussion like, listen, I'm here, We're here. We're working for less than minimum wage on this deal to get this thing done. You need to be here. It's more important for you to hire a babysitter. And you show up and help us knock this out. Three hands will make the work go by a whole lot faster, versus one and a half or two. So that was one of the biggest lessons learned is that a, you don't need to partner with somebody to do the deal, Especially if you don't have the same motivation, the same work ethic as you guys do. That was one of the most important things. Don't get me wrong. I love the guy. Still great friends today. We still talk real estate stuff like. But we realized the end of this deal hey, if it wasn't gonna be a wholesale deal, some sort of things, if it was gonna be a longer rehab, we probably need to be go down a different path than that. And that was a very valuable lesson on that aspect too. Another lesson learned on this, make sure the AC pulls the drip pan plug. Okay. Big important thing on that second big thing. A clean out crew for 500 to $1,500 would have saved us a lot of time. Would have helped us tremendously out there. When we put the out. You know, the carpet guys came and did a great job. We did a lot of paint. I still remember picking out the pallet. It's a roasted cashew. Roasted mushroom, sorry. Roasted mushroom and roasted cashew are the two paint colors we used on that. The white trim. There are other things we did, you know, I. We bought a lot of our new doors we needed because every. Almost every bedroom needed a new door and some other features. We went to Habitat for Humanity and that's a great place to go to. That was a lesson learned. We're going there find. And one of the things that I've always liked doing when I was doing my rehabs is having some sort of feature to the property. You know what I mean? I mean, because if you look at it, it's pretty nice. I mean, we painted the door green on the front yard versus black. That was a nice kick to it. I could have gone red a little bit, but I always like putting a nice light fixture in the property. And we found this really nice kind of pan light fixture that we put in the kitchen. We put it over the dining area. And that way when people are driving by, we had that light on and painted a picture of the kitchen. And that was one of the things that people said, oh, we really like, we drove by, saw the light on, looked like we would be sitting there having dinner, looking out over our front yard and seeing our kids play in the front yard. So we did that. Didn't do much in the garage besides putting a fresh coat of paint down the floor to cover up the grease and the oil stains. Left the workbench pretty much the same. It was just kind of cleaned up. The garage for the most time on that. The master bedroom, you know, we put new doors in there. Didn't have to clean up, didn't have to rehab the bathrooms. We did put new toilets in there. City of Austin at the time would give you. Or sorry, this was in Williamson county. So we didn't have the feature that they do in Travis county. But we did put new toilets in there, which we installed ourselves. Was not too difficult to do, you know, a little stink on you, but left pretty much the same. This is, you know, five, ten grand rehab with a few mistakes on there. We could have had this to market, maybe gotten a little higher price on it, but we were glad to get this thing sold and done. Especially when you start looking at 90 to 120 days for a light rehab, you'll learn a lot. You'll learn that, hey, delivered is better than perfection not to do the work yourself. And then also, always, always, always double check your numbers. Always, always double check your numbers. That was one of the biggest things, is realizing a, that the number on the bank can always change tax has been paid by Chase. And that adjusted our numbers. And we didn't double check the call back taxes, missed it completely. The number we saw, oh, I know what it was. I know exactly. I remember exactly what it was. When I called to check the taxes, it showed that no taxes were due. But the payment that Chase hadn't met and reflected yet, that Chase had bought paid the taxes yet. So we called during that timeframe. The transition totally missed on the back taxes that been paid. So there's a couple of things there for you. But, you know, I look back at this property, I drove by it this weekend and you know, it's gone up in value. It's gone up to over 100 grand in value in 13 years. Still a great little neighborhood. And that's the thing. Somebody, the person that's bought it, lived into it for about three years. They sold it to a new couple. They had a couple of kids out there playing this weekend. What you have to realize, everybody is you learn a lot from doing deals. I learned so much more that I did not want to spend my nights and weekends doing rehabs, especially if it was going to be something major. And even though I was getting ticked off the little things, yeah, I was like, okay, I'd get ticked off of the bigger things. And I should have taken this insight a little bit better. Focus at what you're good at and outsource what you're not good at. It was one of the most important values, important lessons I've learned. And the thing is here, everybody too is don't be afraid to make mistakes. Don't be afraid to get out there and take action. You never know. I look back at the conversations I had and trying to think of the ways to get outside the box. Taking what I had learned and applying it was one of the most Valuable lessons I think anybody could learn. It's a gorgeous property. The thing you look at in the neighborhood now, we think the value is if this had gone to foreclosure, it would have affected the rest of the properties there for a little bit time. Yes, it would have rebounded over 12 years, 13 years. But I always look back with fond memories of this property, more lessons learned, and the fact that we took action and applied what we learned and it worked out for us in the long run. Hey, it's not a bad day. You can check it out. Hey, you've got the deal done. Pop cherry, whatever you want to say about that aspect of things. But that's the thing. I encourage all you guys that are listening out there. I don't care what you're doing in real estate. Hopefully you're doing something. Notes, wholesaling, subject to's, whatever it might be, residential, commercial. I think we all remember our first deal better than a lot of it. And we've done. You know, I look back at the thousands of deals, thousands of properties, thousands of notes I've bought over the last 15 years. And it was funny. I found myself driving to this property very easily without even really thinking about it. And there it was. And I just could not help but chuckle and smile. And the great thing too about this is we were rehabbing, working the property. The neighborhood came out, the neighbors came out and shared a little more of the inside. They're like, oh my gosh, so glad to see somebody taking care of this property. The neighbors were loud, they were fighting, their kids were all over the place. They're like, oh, this is such a pretty property. We're so excited to see it being rehabbed. And we could have done a better job marketing to people while we were rehabbing. You know, we did put a couple bandit signs out there. Hey, if you're interested, give us a phone call. So before the time of a lot of the text message or the SMS services, the thing is, don't do it all yourself. One of the biggest lessons I learned, don't try to do it all yourself, outsource it, help somebody else out, give somebody else a job, they come do what they're good at. There's carpet painting, clean out, roofing, whatever. You'll learn more about that in the long run. So like I said, first deal, I learned a lot of lessons from our first rehab. What I like to do, what I don't like to do, who I like to partner with, what I don't want to partner with, and specific due diligence, things that you don't want to miss out on the long run. But hey, it's still I consider this maybe not a home run but definitely a hit in Round Rock. So hopefully this is valuable to you guys and gals out there. I would love for you send me details on your first deal. Let's talk about your first deal. Let's get you on the lessons learned here on a podcast. So feel free. Drop me an email@scott weclosenotes.com or schedule a phone call with me talkwithscottcarson.com let's talk about your first real estate deal. If you're watching this on YouTube, our video replay share in the comments below about your first deal. Tell us about it. If you got a photo, love to see it. I guarantee we've all got photos, especially the before and after photos. But anyway, hopefully it's helpful for you guys. Go out, take some action and we'll see you at the top. Bye.