178: From High Risk Distressed Debt to the SAFE Method in Self-Storage: Tom Dunkel’s Evolution

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Explain what you're investing in, like to your, you know, your teenager or maybe your mom or something, then you might want to, you know, rethink it.

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Hello, this is Chad Ackerman and you're listening to the Passive Investing from Left Field podcast. Today I'd like to welcome Tom Tom Dunkel from Bellrose Storage Group to the podcast. I appreciate you joining me today. Tom, welcome.

Hey, thanks Chad. It's great to be with you and all the listeners today. Looking forward to our conversation.

Awesome. Very good, very good. We always like to start out with easy stuff and just ask you about the journey and give us a little background. If you could kind of walk us through your past, what got you into real estate, where you are today, those kind of things, it'd be great.

Yeah, sure, of course. Well, you know, I'm solidly in my 50s at this point, so I tend to get a little long winded. But I'll try to keep it punchy. But I'm sure we can, you know, backfill with questions later. But yeah, I was.

I got into mergers and acquisitions in the aerospace industry after finishing up business school. I was working with some amazing people, Harvard MBAs, Wharton MBAs, X fighter pilots, astronauts, like all these really amazing accomplished people. So we were growing aggressively through acquisitions. So we were raising money from private equity firms and we were doing these big bank deals and just all this amazing transactional stuff to build the business. And so I got this great foundation in corporate finance and doing deals, which was great. So I just sort of built on that over the next several years until finally in 2006, after doing some more deals and transactions along the way, I ended up getting fired from my corporate job at a publicly traded company. And you know, I knew going in the job just wasn't a great fit because it wasn't really very transactional, it wasn't really deal related. The company was wanting me to kind of use my skills in a different way and I didn't really see the fit, but they threw a lot of money at me and a lot of stock options. So I was like, okay, I'll give it a try. Well, sure enough, about a year later, you know, it didn't work out. So I end up out of a job in 2006. But I said, hey, you know what, this is really the kick in the pants that I needed to go out and really start building my real estate empire, which is something I had been wanting to do and had been planning to do, but you know, it's never easy to, you know, when, when is the right time to exit and, and that sort of thing. So it was kind of, that decision was kind of made for me and so I, I took that opportunity and I started into residential real estate. I started doing fix and flips, I started accumulating some rental properties, I was doing some wholesaling and that sort of thing. But then, you know, this was 2006, Chad. So I started, you know, right into, you know, the tidal wave of the Great Recession sort of, you know, wiped me out as, as well as a lot of other unfortunate investors in real estate. But I had a wife and two babies at home, so I had to kind of figure things out. And so 2009, I started learning about distressed mortgage debt and was intrigued by it, started looking into it some more, getting educated, learning, learning. And 2010, I hooked up with my partner, Joe Downs, and we launched what's known today as US Mortgage Resolution, which still is continuing on today. It's a distressed mortgage debt company that's generated over 55 and a half million dollars of revenue over that time period, which has been great, but it is a very volatile and very, just unpredictable kind of business. And so for all these years, you know, we've been looking at ways to, you know, how do we smooth out our business with, you know, some different asset classes. So along the way, we've been LPs in some apartment deals, we've done some hard money lending, we've done short term rentals. But around about like 2017, we started hearing more about self storage. 2018, we started going to the conferences, get educated and really liked what we were learning. 2019, we joined a self storage mastermind group. And through that process, Joe and I realized real quick that even though we're good deal guys, we can raise the capital, I can run the financial models and do the projections and all that stuff. We were missing two critical things. One was the front end of finding these off market self storage deals, which anybody knows in real estate you make your money when you buy, right? And so it's really preferable to find those off market deals. We didn't have that skill set. We tried and we just weren't good at it. So through the mastermind community we were able to fill in that piece of the puzzle with our partner Tim Kaine, who is an expert at that. But he, he wasn't very strong at the financial side of things. So it was, it was a great fit. And then of course, once we find the deal, we analyze it, we raise the capital, you know, we do all that and then we close on it. Well, now you got to run the thing, right? So we had no idea how to run a self storage facility. So again, through our mastermind community, we were able to find an expert operator that was able to join our team and help us with, with the management of these, of these facilities. So with once we had the team together and we had already kind of teed up some capital, we were able to go out confidently in 2020 and acquire our first facility. So since then we're now up to 16 facilities that we've acquired over 600,000 square feet of self storage with acquisition value of 48 million, give or take.

You timed it well in 2006, you almost timed it well in 2020. But it sounds like maybe the pandemic didn't necessarily slow you down. Self storage, I don't want to call it recession proof but you know, it seemed like self storage was one of the stronger asset classes through the last.

Yeah, 100% it was. It's funny, at the beginning of the pandemic, of course this was something new. No one really knew what was going to happen, but I talked to several self storage operators that thought they were going to go out of business. And so you know, they're like cutting staff and all this stuff. But meanwhile what ended up happening is the pandemic ended up Being a huge driver of self storage demand because that spare bedroom that everyone has in their house, well, guess what? They had to turn it into a home office. And so they had to, they had to move the furniture into storage and get an office set up in there. And now that's become permanent. Right? I mean, lots of people are now working permanently from home, but there's plenty of other demand drivers we can, we can get into later. But certainly the pandemic was, was, was very helpful in that, in that regard, keeping our occupancy up. We're able to push our rates, but now things are different. Things are back to kind of the normal cyclicality of self storage. And in fact, last year, with interest rates going up so dramatically, it actually really slowed down the self storage industry because it is largely predicated on people moving. Right. So when, when people decide, hey, you know, I'm not going to sell my house with the 3 or 4% mortgage because I'm going to have to go to get a seven or seven and a half percent mortgage, they decided not to move, which really dropped a bunch, dropped the residential transactions dramatically and which had a negative impact on not only our portfolio but across the self storage industry.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, thank you for that. I wanted, I do want to back you up a little bit. You unpacked a lot of stuff in your history as you've gone through all of this. You've experienced a lot of different aspects of the real estate market. Can you talk to some of the benefits that you see of commercial real estate versus residential or active versus passive, however you like to describe it? But maybe some of what your experience has shown you through the years with. We have a lot of listeners that are on that fence that are kind of that hybrid still. So I like to call out when we have somebody with expertise that's played in both sides. What are your pros and cons? What do you see the benefits?

Sure, absolutely. Well, I tell you what, Jad, my goal in life right now is to just be a strictly a passive investor. So I'm actually working in that direction. I indicated to my partners a few years back, like, hey, over the next few years I'm going to want to be phasing out and know, becoming more of an advisory role and more, you know, passive kind of investor. And so that that plan is kind of working in place. So I just turned 56, so by the time I'm 60, I'll, I'll strictly be probably sooner, but I'll strictly be passive because that's I mean that's where it's at, right? You get that time freedom, you get that money freedom, you get all those kinds of things. You know, I'm a golfer, I want to spend some more time on the golf course. I'm also a guitar player so I, I, I, I've been, you know, a band recently, so I'm doing some of that stuff so just trying to, you know, do some of that more enjoying life. And, and my mom is, you know, she's in her late 80s now. I want to spend some more time with her and the rest of my family and that sort of thing. So just kind of working in that direction and thankfully I'm able to do that because of the kind of, not only the systems and processes and the team that we've built here at Bellrose Storage Group, but also my other passive investments out outside of the, the company. So, so yeah, commercial, you mentioned commercial versus residential. I'm, I'm a big fan of commercial over residential for one simple reason is that the income and the value, the value of a commercial asset is really driven by the income that you can create. And that's not the same in residential. So you know, let's say you have two residential rental properties, one right next to the other and you know, one's throwing off $1,000 a month, the other one's throwing off $500 a month. Well, in residential world if the houses are comparable, right, they're going to be valued at about the same, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. In fact, I have one of the guys I invest with rents his properties out by the room. So instead of renting out the whole house, he rents out rooms and he, his cash flow is through the roof. But guess what, he's not getting the valuation on that property. So it's great for cash flow, right? I'm a lender to him and I love it. I know my position's very secure and I'm getting those monthly checks, but he's not really going to be able to realize the value. If you did the same thing in a commercial property and you got a commercial valuation done, the one property would literally be worth twice as much as the other because it's throwing off twice as much income. So you know, with our company here at Bellrose Storage Group, that's part of what we do is we buy these underperforming self storage facilities that are mom and pop owned and moms and pops, you know, they're not, they're not using the latest Technology, they don't know the industry best practices. You know, they're not going to the conferences. You know, they're not really paying attention to the trends in the industry and that sort of thing. You know, their one KPI chad is key. Their key performance indicator is. Am I full?

Yeah.

Because the last thing they want to do is run some kind of Google Ad campaign or Facebook ad campaign or have a web presence or have to deal with any of that marketing and technology stuff. So they keep their rates artificially low so they can keep their occupancy high. And they're the ones spending a lot of time at the golf course, but they're not maximizing the value of their facility. So we're coming in with our professional management team, our technology platform, our marketing, and we're not afraid to create a little churn. So we'll push rates on customers. Some will not be happy about it and leave, but when they do, we're able to replace them with a higher paying customer. Which is a beautiful thing because as I just alluded to a minute ago, as we're able to increase the net operating income at our facilities, we're able to increase the value of the facility and generate great returns for our investors now.

Yeah. What's your hold times usually? What's your strategy around hold times for.

Yeah, if it's, if it's a straightforward value add deal, in other words, there's, there's not a whole lot of moving parts, there's not a lot of hair on the deal. You know, it's probably like a two to three year kind of transition. If there is some kind of expansion opportunity or if we can convert, you know, part of the property in, you know, from a warehouse into self storage units, those things can take a little longer. Or if it's, if it's, you know, kind of in rough shape and there needs to be a lot of capital expenditures done, that's look, that's more of like a four to five year time horizon.

Gotcha, gotcha. No, that's good. In, in the self storage industry, it. I'd be curious your perspective on this. I hear from a lot of self storage operators that the industry is 75% mom and pop, so there's a lot of greenfield. Is that tide changing? Because it seems like self storage has been hot for a few years. Is that that market share shrinking up very much or is there still a lot of space out there?

Yeah, that's a great question. There's still a ton of space out there for mom and Pop operators to be taken over by companies like ours. And that's one of the huge opportunities that we see in self storage is that we have. The demand is increasing, right? You have baby boomers who are downsizing, but they hate. They hate to give stuff away or throw it out, so they store it, right? But. But then on the other end, you have millennials. Millennials. It's the largest generation in our society right now. And they're in their mid, late 30s, going into 40 years old. So they're in their prime spending years. So they're buying the houses, they're buying the furniture, they're buying the baby stuff, but they still want their toys. They want the mountain bikes and the kayaks and whatnot, but they also want a smaller footprint, right? So they are using storage strategically as part of their overall housing strategy. And so that's a big demand driver, plus just the growth of the population of the country, right? So we have all these demand drivers that are in place. And guess what? On the supply side, municipalities aren't really big fans of self storage, so they're really kind of stringent on handing out permits to build self storage. So we love classic supply and demand imbalance, right? We have demand that's growing, growing, growing, and we have supply that's constrained. So that means that occupancy and rates are going to maintain at a nice high level, and the data supports it, Chad. So over the last 40 years, self storage occupancy across the country has gently meandered between like 80 and 90%. And so if you think about the last 40 years, right, we've gone through lots of ups and downs in the economy and all kinds of crazy stuff, but self storage has just been pretty darn steady through those good times and those bad times.

It seems like one of those things, once you get a unit, it becomes a sunk cost that you almost don't even realize in there. I mean, regardless what happens with your own economic situation, it. It seems like storage stays on. As you know, it's coffee, it's storage, it's roof over your head. You know, that it holds tried and true through all the different ups and downs that we go through. It seems like, but interesting. So I was looking on some of your material, and one of the things that you mentioned for passive investors is to operate with the safe method. Can you talk about the safe method a little bit and how that interests the passive investor, how they might be able to implement?

Sure, yeah. I'm so glad you asked about that, because the safe method this is an ebook that's available for free on our website bellrosestoragegroup.com and what it is Chad, is it's really an accumulation of kind of questions and really things that I've learned along my journey, mistakes I've made, but also good choices I've made. And so what we did is we boiled it down into really a due diligence kind of checklist for passive investors. Because really what I'm hoping for people out there listening is that if they're thinking about getting into these kinds of investments, take that step.

Start that journey because it can really be life changing. But what it is just real high level is Safe is an acronym, right? Of course investing isn't safe. There's risk in all investing. But if you use the safe method, you might be able to de risk the deal a bit. So it's an acronym. S stands for sponsor, A stands for asset, F stands for financials, and E stands for exit. So Chad, I can't tell you how many investors I talk to who skip right past the sponsor and they just start looking at the deal metrics. And that's a big mistake that I see, see people making unfortunately. So the ebook gives all kinds of questions. Just of course it's not exhaustive but it's just a kind of a get started list of questions that you should be asking your sponsor. You know, what's their background, how long have they been in this asset class, you know, what's their track record? Tell me about your team because I can't tell you how many. You know, I'll see deals come across my desk and it's like so and so gmail.com is the sponsor. It's like, it's like who is this person? Right? So like here at Bellrose Storage Group we have a whole team, you know, out there looking for the best deals for our investors. So I just want investors out there to make sure they know who they're working with, they trust them, they like them. There's, you know, they kind of get that mind meld going. And I'll tell you how important this is, Chad. So we have an investor that's been with us for, geez, probably over 10 years now. This guy has a nine figure net worth. So he's, he's worth over $100 million probably at this point, you know, several hundred million. But he told us because initially like he, he took a while to get to know us before we even really did a deal. And then we did do a deal and it went well. So of course he liked that. But when he comes back to us, he says, you know, the biggest risk to me is off the table now because he, he's like, I know you guys, I trust you guys. I know you're going to be transparent with me and tell me the good, the bad and the ugly that's going on. And that's just part of our philosophy here because we're investors too, right? That's how I would want to be treated by a sponsor of my deal so that I, that I invest in as an lp. So he told us flat out, like, you know, if I like the deal, I'm going to invest with you guys because I trust you. So that's a big one. And then a is for asset, which of course, you know, it's really important to know what you're investing in. That and that sounds very fundamental. But if you can't explain what you're investing in, like to your, you know, your teenager or maybe your mom or something, then you might want to, you know, rethink it, right? So like, I would love for, you know, crypto investors out there to really explain to me, like, what is it you're investing? What's driving the value of this? You know, I don't even, I don't know. But I do know what drives the value of self storage. I know it drives the value of multifamily. You know, I know what drives the value of a hard money loan on a fix and flip deal. So, so those are all things that, you know, I can get my head around. I can explain it to my kids. And I think it's, it's just a good little vetting process to really understand what you're, what you're investing in.

I think that's good. I've always said I don't feel like this industry is rocket science. You don't have to be. You can over engineer it by all means, but you know, maybe with your history, where you've worked, you could actually compare it to rocket scientists and tell whether it is or not. But yeah, but you know, it's, don't overcomplicate it. But I like that idea of being able to explain it to your teenagers. Ought to tell you whether you're getting into something too complex or not. So that's, that's a really good way to put it.

This episode is sponsored by Midlock Investment Partners, the real estate investment firm, operator and fund manager. Midlock invests in middle market properties valued between 5 and $50 million in the Midwest and Beyond using a value add strategy. Learn more about Midlock and join their mailing list@midlock.com that's Midlock M I D L O C H.com Thanks Midlock for being a sponsor of passive investing from Left Field. Left Field Investors is a community dedicated to limited partner investors who who are interested in building wealth through real estate investing. The community is focused on education, networking, and engagement with quality operators and partners. We provide tools, webinars, and a forum where members can discuss everything related to real estate investing, including deals, operators, investment strategies, and much more. Coming soon, we're adding a new tool, Sponsor Reviews. This will be a place where our members can rate and review operating partners to further help each other in our investment journeys.

Check us out@LeftfieldInvestors.com you mentioned my history, so I kind of glossed over it. But I did spend some time in investment banking back in the early Internet days. And I remember sitting in our boardroom and a company would come in and they'd be telling us about their new Internet business, whatever, whatever dot com. And they were just all, they were all about capturing eyeballs and all this stuff. And I'm sitting around the table and looking at everyone, they're all like getting excited. I'm sitting there like, how do these people make money? That's what I want to.

Yeah, where's the money?

And you know, so fast forward, you know, of course the Internet bubble burst and all that, but yeah, I never quite was able to get my head around some of those business plans. But I don't know, I guess they were good somewhere.

Yeah. Yeah. So sorry I distracted you, but go back to the. Yeah, yeah.

So F is for financials, which is all about, you know, what are the projections? Are they achievable? Are they reasonable? Has this sponsor hit these kinds of projections and returns in the past? And then also, you know, what are the tax implications of this kind of deal? And also personally, like, what are your, how does this fit into your personal financial goals? Is it, is it, is it meeting your, your goals of, you know, capital preservation, income growth? Is it? And, and is it. What, what does it represent as far as your, your net worth? Are you putting too much into one deal or you're putting too many eggs in one basket? So there's all those kinds of financial questions. And then lastly, E is for exit, right? How do you get out of this thing? It's not like, it's not like you can go to schwab.com and click, click, click and sell your position In a Bellrose Storage Group deal, it just doesn't work that way. So as an investor you need to know, going in about the time horizon, which we talked about earlier about the different deals, that was a great question. So you need to know and understand that and know that your money is probably going to be tied up and not be available for a period of time. And so, and again, you need to know like what is, what is the exit strategy? Is, is the property going to be sold? Is it going to be refinanced? Is there some other exit strategy? Are they going to try to 1031 exchange? You know, so there's all these things that you need to know about how you get your money back, when you get your money back, you know, and how is that determined. And so anyway, just to encourage invest investors to use this, this ebook. It's, it's asset class agnostic. So you can use this same checklist to look at multi family, self storage, you know, whatever, whatever deal you're looking at, you can just use, use all these same questions. Use it as a workbook, you know, mark it up, you know, print out, print out an ebook because it's not big, but just print it out for each deal you're looking at. You know, keep it in a, in a folder, you keep your notes.

That's, I think that's great. We try to preach a lot of those standards. We haven't organized it like you have, but we're always about bet on the jockey, not the horse and you know, understanding what your goals are before you jump into something. You know, that was my biggest mistake. I made sure early on getting the shiny object syndrome and everything. So I think it's great. We'll definitely throw that in the show notes and steer people that way. You've kind of alluded to this already, but I was going to ask you, kind of going back to the investor, the LP again, what are some of the bigger mistakes that you see them making? I feel like you kind of covered a little bit with the safe model too. But are there something specific and maybe related to that as I'm underwriting a deal of yours, what are maybe some of the metrics that make the most sense for an LP to pay attention to so they don't make mistakes as they're looking at these kind of things? Sure. Beyond the safe?

Yeah, definitely. Well, again, I think the safe, the safe model is a great kind of framework to help answer those kinds of questions. But specifically in self storage, we of course spent a lot of time looking at the property and what we think we can do with the property, but we're also looking at the market. So that, I think that's important for an investor to look at as well, is looking at the competitors in that market. So, so for self storage, if, let's say we put out a deal and we're raising money for, you know, 1, 2, 3 Main street storage, an investor that's looking at that deal, they should go on Google, of course, and they should punch in 1, 2, 3 Main street storage and bring that up on the map. And then what you can do is go into the Google search bar and in the beginning, before 1, 2, 3 Main street storage, you can put storage near 1, 2, 3 Main Street Storage, and it'll then the map will then pop up. All of the competitors that are in that area. Now, you know, just because there's a lot of competitors doesn't mean there's not demand to fill up all those competitors, but it is something to look at and then what you can do, because of course, most of the facilities will have. Not all, certainly, but most of the facilities will have a web presence. And if, if you go and look at the competitor website, if you see that they're offering, you know, tons of concessions, you know, like three months free, you know, 10 years free, right, you're gonna know that's gonna be a little bit of a red flag. Like, hey, you know, this market is, is probably oversaturated. You know, we have sophisticated databases that we subscribe to that we, you know, we pay money to, to, to. To get that data for us. And so we, so we can calculate what they call a supply index. So we can see, generally speaking, if there's too much storage in a particular market, or maybe there's not enough storage in a particular market, but really it boils down to just, you know, reaching out to those competitors and getting a sense of, you know, are they occupied and what are their rate trends? You know, are the, are the rates trending up, are they rates trending down and all those kinds of things. The other thing we look for, Chad, is are there big REITs in that market? So the real estate investment trusts that you've heard of, Public storage, Extra space, Cube Smart. If those big guys are in that market, again, it's not a deal killer, but it's definitely something we want to know going in, because those big companies, they have pretty much unlimited marketing budgets. And then a lot of times their model is to really undercut rates, to suck up the demand and fill up their store and then they start jacking up the rates on their customers. So when, while they're in lease up, it's really hard to get those customers over to our place as compared to their place. So we need to kind of understand where, where they're at in terms of their occupancy and such. But we spent a lot of time on that. So I would encourage investors to, you know, look at the, ask those kinds of questions of the sponsor because that's definitely a big risk in storage is, you know, is the competitive landscape in a particular market.

That's good. I was going to ask you about risks and that, that I get. It seems like it's a fairly stable asset class. But REITs can definitely play a factor in all of that, I would think.

Totally.

It's funny to me how technology has changed that. I feel like when we were investing in real estate deals years ago, it was you got to get out, you got to go drive by it, you got to see it. Everything else. Now we've got Google technology that we can sit here still important, probably go see it if you can. But it's nice that you've got all that data available to you this day and age that you can sit at your computer, pull up the facility, look at it on a satellite, look at the nearby and get all kind of statistics that go with it. So it's neat pros and cons of how it's changed, I guess through the year for sure.

And the other thing that investors can do is there's something called city data dot com. I think it's city-data dot com and it's a great website for just basic demographics in a certain area. So as an investor, I want to see that there's solid income in that area and I want to see that the poverty is under control and crime is under control because those are definitely things that impact self storage. If poverty's high and crime is high, you know, we know we're gonna have some management problems at that self storage facility. So it's just something to keep an eye out for for sure.

Definitely. What, what footprint do you guys, what regions do you guys try to focus on?

Yes, we're mostly in the eastern U.S. we're based outside of Philadelphia. But the funny thing is we don't own any storage around here. Our closest facility is down in, in White Marsh, Maryland outside of Baltimore. And it was just sort of by accident. We've made plenty of offers on deals in Pennsylvania and like South Jersey, but it just hasn't hasn't worked out for us, so.

Yeah, so well, that's what we like to see out of our operators. You know, don't just buy in your back, back door because it works. It's, let's make sure it pens and makes sense and everything else.

That's right. But yeah, we're in, we're, we have one facility up in New York State and then we're Maryland, Virginia, we've got a few in North Carolina, we're in Georgia, Florida, Kentucky and we just acquired a facility in.

Minnesota outside Minneapolis, which might seem like a little bit of an outlier, but it kind of goes back to the just our network and our Mastermind community that I mentioned at the beginning. We have a friend in the Mastermind who we've known for, you know, four or five years at this point and he is, he's a great manager. He has actually has his own management company for boat and RV and he came to us said hey, you know, I found this deal but you know, I'm not really sure how to raise the capital and etc. Etc. So we, we partnered up and so it was a, it was a great match because of course we know like and trust Gary. He knows and likes, trusts us because we've known each other for a while and but he, and he's got a great business running these boat and RV facilities. So it was just kind of an easy, easy match. And so his team is already, we closed on it just a couple weeks ago and his team is already knocking it out of the park up there. So we're excited about that.

That's great. You'll have to add network to your safe model at an end.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good.

This is good stuff. I've kept you long enough today. We always like to ask at the end of this we gather podcast list. So if you have a great podcast that you enjoy listening to, we'd love to hear what that was.

Sure. Yeah, yeah, I listened to a few. I'm a big fan of. Hunter Thompson has a podcast called Cash Flow Connections and he seems to get just some amazing guests on there with all different kinds of backgrounds. So they might be in storage or they might be a multi family, they might be an economist, they might be some other, you know, kind of business type guy or insurance or banking or. So I, I feel like he gets a really great mix of, of guests and I feel like he's a, he's has a lot of great experience himself so he's able to ask a lot of A lot of great questions. So I, I enjoy listening.

That's a good one. Very good, very good. Well, the last question that I'll throw out to you is where can our listeners get in touch with you if they want to reach out?

Yeah, sure. Chad, this has been awesome, buddy. Thank you so much. I'm Tom Dunkle. I'm the Chief Investment Officer here at Bellrose Storage Group and I'm all over social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and of course at our website bellrosestoragegroup.com if you find me on LinkedIn or whatever, you can certainly send me a direct message. And happy to schedule a call to talk more about, you know, passive investing or storage or rock and roll or spaceships or whatever.

That's quite the gamut.

Or golf.

I forgot diversity in there. Yeah, golf in there too. Very good. Well, Tom, we really appreciate you coming on today. Enjoy the conversation.

Thanks.

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I enjoyed that conversation with Tom. It was interesting to learn more about his perspective, his history, experience around the industry as a whole, but also specifically about self storage. Love finding operators that have been in this business doing some of this business. I know he wasn't exactly in self storage back then, but had gone through 2007 and gotten wiped out doing the investment that he was doing, but kept going, persevered through it, built it back up, started his distressed debt work and ran that for a long time. Wanted to get something a little more passive probably than distressed debt as an asset class, but built up a business and spun that off and then, you know, kept diversifying. And the fact he's wanting to move to the be a passive investor basically full time in the next few years. Totally get that model. I think that speaks to a lot of the people that are in our community, so could really relate to a lot of the stuff he did. Liked his comparisons of commercial what he likes about the commercial real estate industry. I think that fits with a lot of the model we preach at left field as well, the benefits that that are involved there. And really enjoyed listening his safe model and please go out to his website, check out the ebook on this. I'm going to go get a copy of it myself. I think that speaks to a lot of the things that we preach at left field as well, of focusing on the sponsor, the asset, the financials behind it and your goals and then the exit at the end of it all. Those are very important. I think that all makes sense. And I liked how he said to relate on focusing on the market at the end of the day too so that you aren't just blindly jumping into deals and not quite sure what's going on around those markets. To understand the competition, the industry that might go out of the city if you will. All good information. So hopefully you enjoyed the podcast today with Tom. A really good conversation. Go check out that ebook.

Thanks for hanging out in the left.

Field with us today.

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