Identifying Future Sellers with 95% Accuracy with Paul Wakim, Ep. 471

Welcome to Multifamily Insights. I'm your host, John Casman, and I want to thank you for coming— wait, let me try that again. And I want to thank you for checking out another great episode. Listen, if you haven't done so already, be sure to hit that subscribe button. And if you are an avid listener of this show, make sure you hit a review, leave us a rating, hit that button so you can do that for us. We'd love to hear what the show is doing for you and your investing goals, but also any tips or insights you might have to help it work just a little bit harder. We've got a great show today. We're going to be talking to Paul Wakim. Paul Wakim got started in the real estate industry in 2016, right outta college when he and his then-girlfriend Shannon started a real estate photography business. I should mention that she's now his wife. Paul was absorbing tons of knowledge about real estate from podcasts, agents, and investors, and he ultimately decided to get his real estate license in 2017. Now later on, he met his great friend and Townsquare co-founder Mitch Tracy while rock climbing. In mid-2019, Mitch quit his job to come work on Townsquare full-time and refine and drastically improve the algorithm that they built. Welcome to the show, Paul Wakim.

Hey, thanks for having me, John. I'm happy to be here.

Absolutely. Hey, Paul, I went over your bio at a very high level and kind of mentioned Townsquare, but didn't really explain what Townsquare is. So why don't you take 2 minutes and fill in some of those gaps?

Yeah, totally. So you definitely hit on the most important parts of the pre-Town Square era. It's kind of how I think about my life is, you know, I went from college and then started this real estate photography business with my girlfriend and then became my wife. And then we decided like a year after getting married that it was a good idea to start a tech company. So yeah, you did a good job of giving the high-level pre-Town Square stuff. But in 2018, I taught myself how to code in Python. Very rudimentary coding is the best way I can describe it. But I had this desire to figure out who was going to sell their house next. And through being a real estate agent and having direct exposure to high-end real estate agents, really high-caliber real estate investors, and their clients, the homeowners, the buyers and the sellers of the properties, I kind of derived this insight that the— I knew what was driving people to buy and what was driving people to sell. So I thought if I could pull that out, those key things out of the data, well, then I could make an algorithm because everybody seems to be selling for the right or for the exact same reasons, this exact same 5 or 6 reasons. So I, like I said, taught myself how to code in 2018, built a very, very, very rudimentary algorithm for the county around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I grew up and where I was at the time. And it allowed me to buy my first two— well, some of my first two properties. One I successfully bought for a dollar. We could go into that. It was a little bit of a crazy transaction. And the second one I bought over WhatsApp over an 8-month period from a seller that was in Qatar. So a little bit of a wild ride to get started in my real estate career. But then, yeah, you hit the nail on the head. I met Mitch rock climbing rock climbing gym in Pittsburgh and decided that I would tell him all about my real estate technology aspirations. And that's what really kicked off Townsquare. Since 2019, we've gone through— I don't even want to try to count— 6, 7, 8 different iterations of the business trying to find the ever-elusive product-market fit, as the venture capital industry calls it. And I feel like we have found it over the past 5 months. Thankfully, it's been a long time coming, but just this morning I was counting up users, and we have hundreds of people paying for the platform, which I'm super excited about. And, uh, lots of really exciting things on the horizon that I'm more than happy to talk about. But yeah, it's a little bit more color on my background.

Hey man, I love it. And just to give some context there, you talked about, uh, first— I mean, one of the first things you said was your background. You, you kind of were in real estate photography, got your license, became an agent. And just from being in the industry, talking to people all the day, talking to other professionals, you started to recognize trends of why people were selling or predicting when they were going to sell. And that was an opportunity. You said, you know what, let me figure out, you know, how do I capitalize on this? How do I create an algorithm that can help us identify when someone is going to be ready to sell? So let's start there because, you know, when we talk about the other things, we'll certainly get into that on Town Square and how you built all that up. But going back to kind of that initial aha, you mentioned there were 5 or 6 indicators that let you know someone's going to sell or wants to sell. What are those 5 or 6 indicators?

Yeah, it's, uh, maybe it'll seem kind of obvious, maybe not, but it's really any sign of distress or big life change. So, uh, the most difficult one for us to recognize was when somebody changes jobs. Uh, you know, a job change, whether it's because of a relocation, that's pretty much an immediate trigger that somebody's going to sell their house, or, uh, if somebody gets promoted. Uh, so that's, that's a big a big factor. But then on the negative side, there's a lot of, you know, somebody's going to sell if they have a lot of credit card debt, somebody's going to sell if they have back taxes or they have an unpaid mortgage or they're going into foreclosure or they're in pre-foreclosure. We had access to credit card debt records and if the house was in a state of blight, those kind of distressed factors that were available from Thankfully, they were available from our county tax assessment office. So we were able to take advantage of that data that was given to us publicly and then make predictions on that. And the way that we make those predictions was we looked at all the people that had sold their house in the last, I don't know, in the last 5 years, I think is what we looked at. And we kind of built a data profile for each of those people. Think about it like an Excel spreadsheet, one row on this giant Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of columns. One row is one owner. So we saw, you know, what were the common columns between all of the people that sold in the last 5 years. So we built that profile for what, what is a, what does a seller look like in the last 5 years, and then we applied that to data that we had on people in the current day and time back in 2019, right before COVID hit. And it allowed us to make predictions up to 95% accurate, meaning we could pull a list of 500, 1,000 people, and we were confident that in the next 6 to 12 months, uh, 95% of those people would sell their property, most of them being, uh, distressed single families or small multi-families. But nonetheless, it worked out and it allowed us to start this, uh, career of being in the real estate technology space.

I think that's huge insights, right? Because we talk about motivated sellers all the time. If you're looking for off-market deals, if you're looking for leads, you're doing lead generation, you're trying to qualify leads, you're talking about starting that process the other way. Instead of picking up the phone, sending out those mailers, sending out the text messages, the emails, and hoping to catch that fish, you're talking about recognizing those signs. What indicates someone being motivated? Well, job, changing jobs, getting a promotion. On the flip side of that, maybe you're high in debt, you need to consolidate, you need to you know, liquidate some assets. Having those different situations may cause someone to sell. And what you're talking about is being able to take all of those factors and then figure out which ones are the most important to get you a 95% confidence rating to say, hey, within the next 6 to 12 months, we think this person is going to sell. I mean, that seems kind of wild to me, right? Because obviously it's, it's great to have some of this data, these data points. And there's two things that are really wild to me. One is the 95% confidence that you can predict who's going to sell. The second part is how in the world did you get your hands on that kind of data? You know, it's almost scary in a way, right? Like you're tapping into people's, you know, personal debt and credit card debt and other things like that. So maybe you give us context so we can start with the 95% confidence rating. But then I want to also talk about like how you actually— I mean, is that information available for all of us? So I think that maybe there's some information there that we can talk about.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm really happy that you asked because it actually— I should answer the second question first.

Okay.

Because the second question really relates to the first. So anybody who understands programming at a high level can go out and get a machine learning algorithm off the shelf from open sources like Google, and there's people that are improving GitHub projects, which is like a repository of a bunch of different developers working on the same project. You can go get an algorithm off the shelf that works great if the data is great. So the, the difficulty in machine learning and in artificial intelligence today is data. How much data do you have is number one, and then number two is how structured is that data. So we were able to go to our county public records and very, very, very easily access that county-level data because we lucked out. Um, Carnegie Mellon University is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where we were building the algorithm. And Carnegie Mellon did a project, and so did the University of Pittsburgh. All of the undergrads for a couple years did a project with Allegheny County where they gathered all that data and they structured it and they labeled it perfectly for us to build an algorithm on. So we got an off-the-shelf algorithm, tweaked it a little bit. You know, it's not like we just, you know, pulled a book off the shelf and then poured a bunch of data into it and aha, we have 95% accuracy. But we put a lot of work into perfecting that off-the-shelf algorithm. And at the time, we weren't really aware of how lucky we were, but we were really lucky that Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh took the time to structure and label all of the county-level data in such a way that we were able to make that algorithm run really smoothly. You can think of it like, uh, if you put, uh, E85 gas in your car, it's going to work, it's going to be okay. But if you put like 100% octane, you know, crazy race fuel in your car, it gives you more horsepower. We had the best of the best, perfect data going into our algorithm, which allowed us to get that 95% accuracy rating. Now, where did we get the data? We got it from the county. All of that data that I mentioned was publicly available and queryable. We were able to go and pull it down from the county. And yeah, it worked out perfectly that we were able to go access all that data just programmatically in one place.

And was that— is that exclusive to your county, Allegheny County, or is this typically available in most counties?

AC: So all of that data will be publicly available, but in what degree of clarity will it be available? Some counties may have all of the credit card debt that has hit the court steps, but it might not be structured in such a way that you're able to go out and write a computer program to pull it down. It might be in PDFs, and you can't read PDFs very easily with a computer program if it's in a table that has a webhook that you can write an algorithm or write a program to go out and pull down and then download onto your computer in a very nicely formatted table, well then that's a lot easier. So most counties have all of this data available, especially around big cities. But it's really a matter of how easily accessible is it, and then once it's accessed, how well structured is it. And I should say, John, that I'm not, I'm not in this space anymore. There are much smarter, much better companies out out there than, than my co-founder and I, because we wouldn't have been able to do it outside of Allegheny County for that exact reason, is that it's very, very difficult to structure and label the data in such a way that a computer can learn from it.

Yeah, no, I appreciate you clarifying that because that did seem a little shocking and surprising to me to hear that you were able to kind of comb through, find all that information, and have that level of confidence based on that information. But appreciate you giving us that clarity. Let's talk about kind of what Townsquare is today. You mentioned that you know, you've gone through multiple iterations of figuring out what the company is and where's your sweet spot as far as the, the product that you offer into the marketplace. So talk to us about that.

Yeah, thank you. So we, we started with that algorithm. It wasn't called Townsquare at the time. And then COVID hit and all of the data got messed up because nobody was selling their house. Pennsylvania actually shut down the real estate industry. You couldn't go see a house, you couldn't close on a property for 3 and a half, almost 4 months. So all the data got messed up and we kind of looked at each other like, okay, what are we gonna do now? So we decided to go back to the drawing board and create a retail seller platform where we were helping retail sellers who wanted to connect with retail agents. We were helping them do that in a really creative, really, really awesome way. Something that I'm super proud of, but it didn't work full stop. It, it just didn't work. And we saw that in our KPIs and after trying to connect retail sellers with retail agents for about a year or so. Uh, we pivoted completely in late 2021 to where we're at today, which is a marketplace for all off-market properties. Any off-market property, any off-market deal to be posted in a professional way by professional real estate investors. Think of it like an off-market MLS of sorts. Um, I say that sparingly though, because it's a lot more than just a marketplace to dump all of the properties. It's a marketplace built with some tools on top for professional real estate investors to support their businesses.

So I get it from the acquisition standpoint because obviously buying off-market, you can get properties cheaper than you can if it's being blasted on the MLS or if it's openly being marketed. What's the advantage for the owner? Why not list it on MLS? Why not list it in a more public forum as opposed to going to Townsquare?

Yeah, uh, so first is that we're trying to keep it exclusively for active professional real estate investors. My experience in selling off-market properties, uh, is very much mirrored by our platform. And my experience has always been, uh, if I'm going to sell a property, I'm going to call a real estate investor friend of mine who is an attorney or has a best friend who's an attorney who knows exactly where they're going to get their money from, knows exactly how much work needs to be done to the property property, knows a contractor, and can close in really like 20 days or less. So we're really trying to appeal again to that professional class of real estate investors so that when somebody posts their property on our platform, they know the people that they're going to be communicating with and the people that are going to contact them are professionals that will make it an easy transaction. You might be able to get more on the MLS, but you know, then you have to deal with MLS buyers and agents are involved most of the time on the MLS. Which, you know, to agents' credit, they do a really good job representing their buyers and they do a really good job representing their sellers. But in my experience, if I'd wanted to sell a property quickly and to a professional, I can do that by calling a friend of mine. We just don't want that to be a call to a friend of yours. We want it to be on Townsquare where you connect with another professional that's on the same level or more experienced than you.

Yeah, I think you talked about really two big benefits that kind of work together, right? One is really the ease of close or almost the confidence to close. So you work with somebody who's vetted, they're credible, you know, they're an investor, you know, they're going to buy it. They're going to be aware of the issues. So they're not going to come back and say, hey, I didn't realize that there was a chip in this tile, so I need, you know, $50 off. You know, they're going to recognize that because they're an investor, not a retail buyer. The second is the speed, you know, recognizing that as investors, sometimes, you know, most of the time when you're looking to sell, you want to sell as quickly as possible, you know, unless you're doing a 1031 exchange or something like that. You typically want to exit and go, you know, chase whatever, whatever properties or ideas that you have. You want to take that capital and move it. So you don't want a deal to drag on for 4 or 5, 6 months if you can get it done in 30 days or less. So those are really two of the advantages that you mentioned Townsquare brings to the table for investors. You mentioned earlier that, you know, you have people paying for the platform, engaging with the platform now. Just walk me through that user experience, right? If someone's listening to this and say, hey, oh, this sounds interesting, what does that process look like for them to come onto the platform and be able to engage, purchase products, or list their own properties?

Yeah, definitely. So whenever somebody comes to Townsquare, you can always post a property 100% for free. Now, we have a closed marketplace for a bunch of different kind of technical reasons that I don't know if we'll have a lot of time to get into today, but you can always post a property for free. If a property is sent directly to you via email, we have email technology built into the platform where a user can send out an email to a buyer or to a partner from Townsquare. If a property is sent to you directly, then you have access to it. But if you're not a paying user, you don't have access to all of the properties on the platform. So from a seller's perspective, you can come to the platform, you can upload your property that you have for sale. I mentioned that email technology. You can upload a buyer's list, a list of contacts, a list of people in your network that you think might be interested in this property. You can send out an email directly from our platform, up to 100,000 emails per month directly from Townsquare. And then the most important, coolest thing that we have is that after you've sent it to the marketplace, after you've sent your property to your contacts in your network, you can see who else on the platform has uploaded their contact, uploaded the contact information of the people in their network, and you can go to them on the platform and share your post with them and say, hey Bob, can you share my property with your buyers? If your buyers are interested in purchasing my property, I'll give you a 20% split of what I make, or I'll give you a 50% split of what I make, or I'll you a finder's fee of $2,000, whatever it is. That ability to share and connect with another user, another professional in your sphere based on a deal, not just based on a friendly conversation, is something that's really, really important to me. If I bring a deal to you, John, and it's in, I don't know, let's say it's in Pittsburgh, uh, you're gonna think of me much more as a much more high-quality individual if it's a good deal, rather than if I just come to you and say, hey, let's have a conversation about syndication and multifamily real estate and, you know, anything in the real estate arena. Because our communication and connection on Townsquare is based on the deals themselves, based on the properties themselves, we're helping investors form even deeper, more valuable connections. And we give you the tools to do exactly that and do all the other stuff that I mentioned.

No, I appreciate that. And that information is really great because I think building those relationships is always key when you're trying to connect, you're trying to do something off-market. I know one concern that some folks may have is, hey, particularly when you talk about bringing in somebody who maybe they have their own network and they're sharing the post is, hey, if they're not a licensed agent, do you start running into any legal issues because this person isn't licensed? And I know those rules vary from state to state, but some states are certainly more stringent on the rules around that. How do you kind of manage or kind of work around those challenges?

So you're definitely right, there are definitely rules and restrictions, and we are very much taking the approach of we're the platform that enables you to do these things, but we are not doing it for you. So if there's a contract between the, the person who has the property to sell and the person that they're partnering with, we don't get involved in the details of that agreement. We don't get involved in how how many emails are sent or who it's sent to. We leave that 100% up to the user to know those rules and use the platform as they know is legal or not. So that's, that's how we handle it. For better or worse, we take a very much hands-off approach. Here's the tool, please use it responsibly.

There you go. Appreciate that clarification. And by all, you know, if you're listening to this, please just make sure you're abiding by your own local ordinances, don't get in trouble trying to do things that you shouldn't be doing, but obviously make sure you understand what you are capable of doing and focus on building the relationships and the connections so you can find off-market deals. I want to go and talk about really kind of JV and partnerships because we started to allude to that. And when you think about joint ventures, partnerships, finding off-market deals, connecting buyers to sellers, talk to us about kind of the evolution in your eyes.

Yeah, I think it's super important. So first things first, it's the only way that I've ever had success in my photography company or in any of these iterations of Town Square. I've always went to— and even in construction projects that I've been involved in where I've built some new construction as an investment with a partner of mine, it has always been with a partner that has something that I don't have or has something that I need or brings expertise to the table that I don't have. And I'm trying to build Town Square to facilitate more interactions like that. And I believe that joint venturing and partnering and having the correct legal framework, to go back to your other question, is super, super important. So yeah, it is the very most important thing to me because it's the only way that I've ever been able to have success in my business career is by initiating a partnership where I bring 50+ percent of the effort to the table, but then I go to an expert or somebody else that has something that I don't have and bring that 50+ percent effort to the table so that I can leverage the thing that they have that I need.

I love the, the context there on the effort and partnership because that's a great insight for all of our listeners, right? What do you bring to the table if you're bringing the effort Who else can you partner with that brings the other side of it? If you have capital, who has the effort that you can invest in to get the results you're looking for? So we always hear people talk about this being a relationship business or that this, you know, investing in multifamily in particular is a team sport. You have to take those things to heart. You know, you have to figure out who else on your team do you need. It doesn't matter how great of a player you are by yourself. If you know you're the ones trying to do everything, you're probably not going to be successful, particularly when you're going up against other teams. So just great Insight right there. Uh, for folks who want to learn more about Townsquare, what's the best way for them to read or learn more?

Yeah, so you can find Townsquare across the internet at twnsqr.com or across social media at TWNSQR. Uh, as most companies, tech companies do, we just took the vowels out. Uh, Townsquare spelled properly is owned by some beach town municipality that is never going to sell it. Uh, so we decided to go for TWNSQR. SQR. If anybody wants to connect with me directly, anybody at any time is welcome to send me an email at paul@townsquare.com, spelled the exact same way. Um, I don't really maintain social media of my own. I have this philosophy of heads down, thumbs up. That is, I keep my head down and I try to stay positive, and, uh, social media hasn't been a good way for me to stay positive and work as hard as I possibly can. So you can find me on LinkedIn if you want to find me on social media. That's about it.

There you go, Paul. And you mentioned two deals we got talk about, right? You mentioned you got one deal for a dollar. Please explain how that happened.

Yeah, it was very, very interesting. So in the first round of programming, whenever I created that algorithm, it was really just list stacking, meaning here's a list of owners that have high equity, here's a list of sellers, potential sellers that have credit card debt. What are the similarities between them? Who is both high equity and has credit card that. That's really what my first version of the algorithm did. And it actually identified a house right down the street from another house that I was renting at the time. And I walked past it all the time when I was walking my dogs, and it was in severe distress, you know, totally overgrown. It looked like one giant hedge next to a bunch of other houses. So I figured out who the family members were, like the second cousin or something like of the gentleman who used to own it, who unfortunately had passed away. And I reached out to them, and it took me 2.5 years, but I went through a complicated process called the conservatorship. I was one of the first people in Pennsylvania to go through the conservatorship process with my attorneys. And at the end of the day, I had a totally clear title. The judge that I stood in front of for a 15-minute court hearing said, "We'll wipe everything clean. It's yours." You have to just pay at least a dollar for it. And I ended up paying a dollar for this property. I paid to have it cleaned out and the hedges cut down and make it look more like a house. And then I actually ended up selling that property to my landlord who I was renting from at the time, right up the street, for $86,000. So it was a, it was a great win. I also had to pay like $20,000, $18,000 in attorney's fees over those 2 years, but it was a win for sure. And yeah, it was the first of many properties that came from that initial algorithm.

I love that story, man. I mean, you basically saw you net around $60,000 in profit, something somewhere around that. And that's amazing that you were also able to take that and use your landlord as the end buyer, which I think is really insightful, right? I mean, you already know this person loves real estate and is a real estate investor. You're paying rent to approach them and say, "Hey, I've got this other property. Do you want to buy it?" That was a great, great way to do it. For people who don't understand conservatorship in that process, can you just give us a little bit more context? You said you found the family who owned it. Obviously, they didn't really want much to do with it. Did they just sign over the rights to it, or how exactly did you get access to the property where you got to the point where you could stand in front of the judge?

Yeah. So I actually had to work hand in hand with the family member that I initially got in touch with. And as a thank you for working together, together, I actually paid for the funeral expenses of the previous owner just so that we could make this family member whole. And she was gracious enough to say, "No, no, I don't need more than that." And I said, "Okay, no problem, but I'm more than happy to help you out in the way that you requested," which is I think it was like, a couple hundred bucks, maybe $500 or $1,000, I forget. It was a couple years ago at this point. But we worked hand in hand with this lady, who was like the second cousin or the great-aunt, I forget which one, of the original owner. And I think it was my approach to having attorneys that knew what they were doing and having a really friendly, personal, and caring relationship with the family members that allowed me to go through the conservatorship. The actual legal mechanics of the conservatorship, it's very difficult for me to speak to because That's why I hired professional attorneys. I, I did not want to understand laws that had just come out, uh, and it's— it has something to do with probate. It has something to do with a house that is stuck in the transference after somebody has died. But, um, I guess that's a good, a good segue into hire a really good attorney, because I certainly didn't know how to be a good attorney myself.

Yeah, and we've done some episodes on probate. We'll make sure we link to one of those in our show notes just so you can check that out if that is a process you're thinking about. And I think it's a great point when you are looking for off-market deals, the insight there is really you have to be a problem solver. And that's something that you were able to do that maybe other folks didn't do or weren't privy to, but you were able to solve their problem, which was they needed money for the funeral expense. They needed maybe a handful of other things and you helped them solve that problem. And by doing that, that set you down the path to be able to acquire this property for a dollar and then ultimately net an $80,000 or $60,000 profit. Profit by selling it back to your landlord. So appreciate you sharing that great story there. Let's go on and we're going to change to our round of insights. Are you ready?

Yeah, let's do it.

All right. Give me a failure or an apparent failure that set you up for later success.

An apparent failure, I would say, or definitely a straight-up failure was the second iteration iteration of Townsquare, where my co-founder and I, we learned more than I could have ever even imagined learning about running a technology startup, raising money, communicating with investors, uh, and tracking KPIs. Um, if it wasn't for the failure of that second business model where we were trying to connect homeowners and real estate agents, uh, I'm very confident that I, I definitely wouldn't be as far along with the current iteration Town Square as we are today. I think the biggest failure there was failing to recognize how bad we were doing. Uh, we should have done it sooner, which should not have taken us a year and a half or so to say, okay, we're only getting one person every 3 weeks to say they're interested, and then it takes 3 more weeks to get them on the platform. That's not— that's That's no way to run a company, especially if we're doing most of that for free. So I would say we failed at recognizing that we should have stopped sooner and found something else to do sooner. It would have saved us some money. It would have saved us some headache, but it also made us really, really keenly aware of what it means or what it feels like to know something isn't working.

Give me a digital or mobile resource you recommend for your business.

Um, so I use Miro. If anybody is familiar with a Miro board, um, it really helps. My company is totally remote, and it really helps me flowchart and get my thoughts out in a single screen that I can share with my co-founder, with my employees, with anybody else. Miro, it's, it's a, it's a pie trick pony that really comes in one box. So I can't recommend Miro.com enough. M-I-R-R-O.

Give me the book you've recommended or gifted the most in the last year.

Um, easy, easy question. It's called The Nature Fix. So I don't really do much, uh, except for work on Town Square, and in my free time, I spend it outside in the woods in the desert, in the forest, hiking, mountain biking, trail running. I haven't bought new clothes at a store in a long time. I just get them ordered online because I just don't have time and I don't want to do anything else other than be outside and be at my desk working as hard as I can on Town Square. And that book, The Nature Fix, is written by a lady who used to live in a town where I used to live, uh, Boulder, Colorado. Boulder, if you don't know, is like an island surrounded by, uh, city and state parks and national parks. Like, you literally can't build outside of this circle that is Boulder because there's so much forced outdoors. Um, so the author of The Nature Fix used to live in Boulder and then had to leave Boulder to go to walk Washington, D.C. for her husband's job, and they started having issues in their marriage, if I remember correctly. And then she started feeling down and just like not feeling good, and it dawned on her that everything else was the same except for her exposure to nature. So The Nature Fix is, uh, Florence Williams' deep dive into the science, cold hard science, of why nature makes a big difference in your life. And it's, uh, it's a book that I think I'll read 100 more times throughout my life. I cannot recommend it enough. It tells you exactly why you need to be outside in your free time.

I love it, man. All right, give me a daily habit that helps you stay focused on your goals.

Yeah, uh, another easy one that I love talking about. I apologize for rambling so much. Um, I have a notebook that I write down my to-do list. I have a bunch of different CRMs and different tools that I use online, but everything that I have to do each day ends up in my notebook that's right here on my desk in front of me. And I break my to-do list out into communications, people that I have to communicate with, and then I break it down into general. That's really anything that isn't communications. So checking on the status of a user doesn't require any communication, but it's something that I have to do today. So I'll make that to-do to-do list every single day, written out by hand on paper with a pen in front of me. And then I take an orange highlighter and a yellow highlighter, and the things that I have to get done or else I've failed for the day are in yellow highlighter. And my wife will come in and look at my notebook and say, darn it, you haven't finished your yellow highlighter tasks yet. It looks like it's going to be a late night. Whenever I'm, you know, getting back from dinner at like 6 PM, the orange highlight orange things are things that are like, I can get them done in 10 minutes or less or 15 minutes or less. So just knock them out. Emails, quick queries into the database to see what the status of a user is. Those kinds of things get an orange highlight. So having a notebook and then breaking my tasks down into communications and those general things, and then breaking them down further into mandatory, you have to get these done every day. Uh, and those quick, I can get get done super fast, put my head down for an hour and a half and I'll get those done kind of tasks is how I, I keep myself laser focused.

All right, give me your number one insight for real estate investing.

I would say partnerships. Uh, partner with people that are in your industry, whether it be multi-family or single-family or land development. Always partner with somebody um, don't hesitate to sacrifice a little bit of your profit to bring somebody more experienced in. If you're the smartest person in the room or the smartest person in your city, there's definitely somebody bigger and badder, probably in New York or probably in LA or Chicago, that you could go partner with. So I would say never ever hesitate to partner with somebody. And I guess that really breaks down to work with experts. If I'm gonna raise money for a multifamily syndication or buy multifamily apartments, I'm coming to you, John. I'm not going to try and figure it out myself.

There you go. All right, man, let's lighten the mood. You are right now, uh, somewhere in southern Utah, but I know you're all over, you travel a little bit, so I'm gonna let you pick the location, but tell me your favorite place to grab a bite to eat.

Oh, that's a hard one. That's a hard one. I would say Probably I'm forgetting the name of the restaurant, but my favorite place on earth is Jackson, Wyoming and Jackson Hole. There's a steak restaurant in Jackson, Wyoming. I can't believe I can't remember the name. My wife and I went there a couple of years ago whenever we were first in Jackson. I'll give you another one in Jackson. There's a little restaurant dive bar right outside of Jackson, Wyoming called Dornan's. I would go to Dornan's for their pizza and calzones, and then I would go later on that day to the steak restaurant that I'm forgetting. In Jackson proper.

There you go. Well, listen, sounds like great places. We've never been to Wyoming, so I have to put that on the list. But I really appreciate your conversation today. You talked about partnerships, you talked about finding off-market deals, and really creating this algorithm to figure out how to predict and identify when people are going to sell. And I think that the insight that jumps out to me is really recognizing that you want to get ahead of these things. You want to get ahead of when that need is, or at least recognizing, hey, let's start building a relationship upfront because we know this person's likely going to sell. So you want to be the person who's able to help them out of that situation and being creative, being a problem solver in that process. That's when, that's what's going to, that is what's going to get you the best deals. So with that said, hey, I just want to say, Paul, thank you again for coming on the show today. If anybody wants to check it out, it's Townsquare, T-W-N-S-Q-U-A-R-E. Townsquare.com. You can check it out there, and we look forward to staying in touch with you, Paul. Take care.

Thanks so much, man. It was great being here. I'm really happy with this conversation, and I look forward to staying in touch as well.