TwnSqr with Paul Wakim — Real Estate Investing with RealDealChat

Welcome to the REI Mastermind Network, where host Jack Hoss gathers amazing stories from leaders in real estate investing. In each episode, our guests will tell you what they're doing that works, what they've tried that failed, and best of all, you'll learn actionable steps to take your real estate investing to the next level. Now, here's Jack with another value-packed episode.

We have Paul Wakim, with Townsquare. And I'm gonna make sure to have the link in the show notes, but it's going to be twnsqr.com to take a look at what Paul and his team are building there, which is a great option for those who are especially wholesaling and you're trying to dispose, dispo your properties and you're trying to find a great avenue for that. So Paul and his team will help you with that. So again, it is twnsqr.com. Paul, I really appreciate your time here today.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Jacque. I'm looking forward to it. We were talking a little bit before the show, and I'm a listener to the show, so I'm a little bit giddy to be here and talking to you. It's a little bit weird whenever I go on podcasts and I'm like, I'm going to see that in my podcast feed.

That's awesome. I appreciate you listening. I And frankly, it's kind of more rare than you realize. A lot of people who come on the show aren't necessarily familiar. So it's great to have somebody who is. So Paul, you know, I have— I told you I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to any kind of technology on this side of things. So I have to find— let kind of give us a truncated story here. What made you come to the conclusion that Townsquare is something that was needed in the real estate investing community?

Yeah, it's, uh, it's been a long road to get here. Um, it started out with a real estate photography company that was really the impetus for my career in real estate and real estate investing. Um, and then I had the bright idea that I would teach myself how to code. I taught myself some very, very rudimentary Python, um, and Jupyter Notebook and Pandas skills to, uh, build what I called an algorithm to predict who was going to sell their house next. Um, through that, uh, very intriguing pitch, I attracted my great friend and co-founder, our CTO Mitch, uh, to come and work with me on a better version of that prediction algorithm. And then through many different iterations, all through COVID, a bunch of different pivots, we landed on the, uh, the bright idea that there needs to be standardization and professionalism and clear indications of good deals and a way for real estate investors to connect in this last frontier, as I call it, of real estate that is really like investor-to-investor, small single-family or, uh, small multifamily real estate. There needs to be some standardization, professionalism, uh, and technology added to this last frontier. So that's what we're innovating going on, but it was, uh, probably a 7-year-long process since I graduated from college in 2016 to get to this point. And started with a photography company that then brought me to, uh, real estate tech.

Yeah, that's especially interesting. Did you find— you've, you mentioned you had to kind of— you started with that initial idea and you've had to kind of dial in. That's the whole concept of Agile or even Scrum project management. You know, you're trying to get those user stories and trying to develop it as you go. Um, in, in your situation here, uh, you've, you kind of went from a very— you said photography all the way to this.

Yeah.

What were some of those early-on lessons that, that drove you down this particular path? That, um, it'd be interesting because there had to have been some sort of milestones or something that changed your course drastically to get from point A to point B. Yeah.

So specifically in the, the beginning of my career with the photography company, I was the only photographer. It was a real estate photography company. Uh, my wife still runs that business, but I was out interacting with very clearly motivated sellers because I was photographing their homes. Um, very, very high quality real estate agents who were treating their customers fantastic and doing a good job for the sellers. And then real estate investors who were flipping houses or had giant portfolios. And whenever I was going in between appointments, I was listening to podcasts and really just immersing myself in every bit of real estate, and then specifically off-market real estate investing information as I possibly could. It was, it was my life every single day for 2 and 3 years, and it's really what pushed me into this space. And I don't think that I would have been able to recognize maybe I could build an algorithm, or maybe an algorithm needs to be built, if it wasn't for the direct in-your-face exposure, 12, 15 hours a day, to real estate professionals, motivated sellers, and all of the data in the real estate marketplace.

So could you kind of summarize then, you know, I, I hate to put you on this because everybody can go to townsquare.com and, and learn what your platform actually does. But you've mentioned the algorithm a couple times here now. Could you talk through the process? Let's say I'm a wholesaler, I get a property under contract. How does your platform help me out?

Yep. So just to be 100% clear, I'm glad that you asked for clarification purposes. We stopped doing all kind of prediction, any kind of prediction in, uh, 2020 because the pandemic really messed up the data. The people that were predicted to sell weren't selling, and the people that, uh, were not predicted to sell ended up selling, and then everybody sold. So we stopped doing prediction. Today, what Townsquare is, is a marketplace for active professional real estate investors, for them to post their properties they have for sale, find properties that other users have posted for sale, send their properties to their network of buyers or people on their buyers list. And then the fourth thing is share their deals, their for sale properties with other users on the marketplace. And we do that through, uh, some technology that we call post sharing that really just mirrors the world of JVing, where if I have a deal in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I'm from, I can take that deal to another user after I've sent it to my buyers, after I've sent it to the marketplace, I can take my deal to another user and say, hey Jack, it looks like you have buyers or a network that I could leverage in Pittsburgh. Let's work together, let's split the profit on this to help me sell this deal. If one of your buyers comes to my deal via Townsquare, I agree to give you X fee or whatever percent. So those 4 things are the things that you can do on Townsquare right now, and we're, we're trying to build it all with a foundation of professionalism and standardization so that you can very clearly see as a buyer or as somebody that's interacting with another user if the deal is a good deal or a bad deal very quickly.

Okay, with, with all of that, you know, it seems like, uh, there's going to be a lot of communications and everything involved. So there, there, there's that aspect, and it's, it's great that you have a platform like this. When you're trying to make any kind of joint ventures, do you have like some boilerplate agreements that they can leverage within the platform, or is there user agreement that's associated with that? How does that look, or is it just that that relationship is established? Would be interesting.

Yeah, so we'll take that example where let's say you have a network that you've built and you have made available on Townsquare in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania market, and then I have a property to sell in Pittsburgh. Um, if I bring my deal to you, Jack, and you say, yeah, sure, I'll share this with my buyers— we don't want to ever push— Townsquare never wants to push that relationship in any kind of direction. If you say, yeah, Paul, I've known you for the last 25 years, I'll share it with my buyers, and, you know, good luck, we'll see if my buyers are interested, we don't have to make any kind of deal— great. You don't have to sign a contract. We want you guys to make that decision yourself. If you say, listen, I don't know you from the next guy. I want 70% of your profit. I have the best network of buyers in Allegheny County around Pittsburgh. Um, take it or leave it. This is my deal. Also great. We just provide the tools for you to do that. So whenever I bring my deal to you, a room, as we call it, is opened. It's essentially a chat room. And in that chat room, I can upload documents. You can upload documents and we can sign documents right on the platform. So to answer your question explicitly, no, we don't provide anything other than the technology that allows you to upload your documents and make those agreements.

Talking to technology, do you find that real estate investors, realtors for that matter, were a bit behind when it comes to technology? So how has the adoption of your platform been going?

Yeah, so prior to this iteration, this version of Townsquare. The, the first real version of Townsquare that wasn't the algorithm was in the retail real estate space. That is, we built technology for retail real estate agents and their sellers. And I would say that because there's no real regulation in the off-market world, the, the real estate investing world, people rely on technology so much more and they have to be so much more savvy to really get ahead than real estate agents do. It's just my opinion. It's what I've seen. So real estate investors are a much better, uh, customer for us because they are usually privy to technology and how web-based applications work. Whereas real estate agents, they just required a little bit more handholding and a little bit more, uh, service. That portion of the business actually didn't end up working out, but it wasn't because real estate agents didn't understand the technology. It was for other reasons, and we had to pivot. But to answer your question, yeah, I— thankfully, we've had very little issues with real estate investors understanding technology and how to use a web-based application. It's been great dealing with the, uh, the cowboys on the frontier, as I call this sector of the real estate industry.

Yeah, it's kind of interesting, especially with, you know, you talked about finding some standardizations. I saw that you have Zapier integration, and a lot of modern CRMs are going to be able to integrate with Zapier. So I think it's really important because we, we have a tendency of trying all these different things, and if there's that, if that's not integrated, that's things when I find that I stop using it because Having to go to multiple tools and dealing with certain things can be a problem.

Yep. Yeah. We, uh, we're in a group, thankfully, of some other real estate technology entrepreneurs, and all of us are on the same wavelength that Zapier is a good way to integrate and it definitely helps. But my goal, to your point, Jack, my goal for the business is for us to be tightly integrated like a Lego set of all of the different technology that just fits together really nicely so that a real estate investor or a wholesaler's entire process can be taken care of with a suite of tools that all mesh together really well.

Just to remind everybody, it's Townsquare.com. Just drop all the vowels out of that when you type it in and you should be good to go.

That's right.

So Paul, uh, I'd be interested in your individual real estate investing experience then, because I'm sure that has a lot to do with how you shaped this product. Can you talk a little bit about what you've done in the past regarding your personal investments?

Yeah, totally. So the, the two deals that are the most exciting to talk about— really, there's three of them, but the two deals that are the most exciting to talk about are some of my first ever deals. Um, whenever I finished building my version of the quote-unquote algorithm— it really wasn't an algorithm by any means, it was just some code that found houses that were in distress. Um, but whenever I finished building that, I found two properties. One was one of the first deals I had ever done. It was an extremely distressed property down the street from where I was living, and I spent 2.5 years or so working with my attorneys to purchase that property and clean it out. And then I ended up selling it to my landlord at the time. Um, and the— my claim to fame, I guess, on that property is that I was able to buy that property for just a dollar. We got $186,000 of medical debt cleared off of the property. I believe that's how much it was. Don't quote me on that exact number, but it was definitely over $180,000 of medical Medicare debt that was leaned against the property, plus a bunch of other debt. We got it all cleared off through a complicated process that took 2.5 years, and then I ended up buying property for a dollar and then selling it to my landlord, um, who owned the house up the street that I was living in at the time. Uh, so that was one of the more exciting deals. It took me forever to do it. Um, then the, the second most exciting deal was, again, my technology predicted that this guy who was probably a mile away from where I was living at the time, that he was going to sell this duplex. And it just so happens that's where I walked my dog a couple times a week. So I went over to his house and I put a sticky note on the door just hoping that somebody would see the sticky note. And it just said, hey, my name is Paul, I'd like to buy this house, um, please give me a call if you're interested. Maybe 2 days later at the very most, maybe even that exact same day, this phone number that was like 20 digits long called me And I was like, this is definitely spam, deleted it. And then a couple minutes later I got another call, still ignored it. After that I got a voicemail and it was this guy with a Qatar phone number, like where the World Cup just was.

Mm-hmm.

And long story short, we ended up, my wife and I, we ended up purchasing that house over a 6.5-month period, all over WhatsApp and communicating with the seller from Qatar. Who was in town for a day or two whenever I put that sticky note on the door. We bought the house over WhatsApp, ended up house hacking it, renovating it, and then selling it to our tenants a couple years later. Other than that, it's been a lot of whole tales and wholesales and some other rental properties. I've also done some ground-up construction where we built 4 high-end townhomes with a business partner of mine. But yeah, it's, uh, my career in real estate has been primarily photography, a little bit of investing, then I found these issues that I wanted to solve with technology. And then for the last 3 and a half years or so, I dove headfirst into technology to try to solve those problems.

Right. Well, could you share any stories associated with this platform? What, what have you seen now as you've been developing? I mean, frankly, it's a bit of a community at this point, I would have to think.

Yeah, definitely. That's exactly what we're going for, is we don't want Townsquare to just be a tool where you upload your upload your property, upload your list, and then you send it out, and then you just cross your fingers that you're going to get offers. We want Townsquare to really be exactly what you just said, Jack, a community where real estate investors can leverage each other's strengths and really build businesses together. And, you know, it's just like they would in the real world. I have done JV agreements with partners where they have had more buyers or a bigger network or better standing with the most qualified buyers in the market than I have. And I've been willing to partner with them so that I can leverage what they have and I don't. So yeah, we are building, trying to build as best we can and as fast as we can, a community of real estate investors who can work together. Some interesting stories, I guess, are that we've gone through quite a few pivots to get to where we are today. We, uh, we started out without algorithm, then we went into the retail real estate model. We learned a whole lot trying to build retail real estate technology for real estate agents. Um, we— I always say the biggest learning I've had is in that pivot away from retail real estate. We had about 77 or so properties come through that version of Townsquare and sell and work with real estate agents through that platform. But definitely the biggest learning that I've had since we pivoted away from that is that we should have pivoted sooner. We should have thrown in the towel sooner rather than just trying to beat our head against the wall. Definitely shouldn't have given up, but we should have said this isn't working sooner. And it's, uh, it's probably one of the biggest lessons of my entire business career is knowing when to stop.

Well, the, the initial vision of this was— would you say it was pretty broad and you kept narrowing it and becoming more and more niche, or Did the product in the end become larger than you initially planned?

I would say, first of all, awesome question. I've never been asked that. I really appreciate it. Whenever we first made this pivot away from retail real estate, we thought, okay, Townsquare needs to be a catch-all for all off-market properties regardless of quality. And we thought that if we could capture every single off-market property, every single wholesaler's property, every single landlord's property that could ever possibly be for sale on our platform, then just the sheer inventory alone would attract the masses. And that big, broad, let's be everything to everybody vision also didn't work out. And thankfully, because what we learned from the first pivot, we decided to move away from that. As well. So I guess to answer your question, what we've learned is that being niche is probably the right way to start something rather than to be big, broad, let's satisfy everybody. So right now we're focused on a very small community of real estate investors who have 1, 2, 3, sometimes up to 20 properties to sell every month and are looking to partner with other real estate investors and don't want to just work on their own. That, that is much smaller than, hey, anybody who said they don't want to work with a real estate agent, or anybody who says they have an off-market property, or anybody who's a landlord, come post your property on our platform. That didn't work.

Yeah, the reason I ask is that it seems like especially a lot of people that listen to, to the show, they're getting into real estate investing for the first time and they're trying to find they're trying to navigate this whole concept of real estate investing. And more times than not, we, we have this shiny object syndrome where we're constantly chasing the rabbit, and you, you're chasing multiple rabbits, you're not going to even catch one, you know. We gotta— so there's, there's a, there's some power in finding that focus.

Definitely. Yeah, we, we launched the updated version of Town Square that I've been rambling on about here, where real estate investors can connect with one another. We launched that in July of this year, middle of July this year. And thankfully, to your point, we have realized that chasing multiple rabbits at one time, doing anything but dispositions for active professional real estate investors, um, there's no— there's nothing else we should be working on. We have to stay the course on that because otherwise we find ourselves in 2020, 2021, and the beginning of 2022, where we're trying to be everything for everybody, and that just hasn't worked.

So are the investors using your platform in surprising ways, in, in a way that you might not have originally seen within—

with—

that was within scope?

Yeah, thanks, Jack. Another awesome question that I've never been asked. I appreciate it, man. Um, yes, exactly. So originally, whenever we built the platform, uh, an investor can post a property. We call it creating a post. And you can click the little button in the top right-hand corner of that post that says Contact Seller. And that could be for a buyer, that could be for really anybody who wants to check out the property and communicate with the seller of that property. So whenever we built that Contact Seller button, we thought, okay, this is going to be the way that buyers communicate with the seller. What we found out very quickly and really delighted to know is that other investors who, because they were coming to the platform to form a network, they started forming these connections themselves by saying, hey, I'm not an end buyer, but I think somebody in my network could be a buyer. And they were using that contact seller button to say, listen, I'm not going to buy this, but I think somebody in my network, a friend of mine, an investor friend, a buyer on my buyers list would be interested. 'Can we talk?' So that use of the Contact Seller button that was really for purchase offers, um, has become a catch-all for everybody to form connections no matter who they are, what position they hold in the real estate investing sales cycle.

Knowing that, is there any changes now that are coming because of what you've learned there?

Oh yeah. So I was just talking to a customer of ours before we got on the show here, and, um, What I, what I described to him and what I say to mostly everybody who knows Townsquare from the time whenever we launched it in July is, in the world of technology startups, there's this term MVP, minimum viable product. In July, we put out our minimum viable product. I'd like to say that's what we planned on doing in July, but, um, that's what we did in July. We put out the minimum viable product and, um, we got a boatload of feedback, and we saw interesting things happen like what I just described to you, where investors were building the connections in a way that we weren't expecting them to build them. And we've taken all that feedback really from July until the beginning of September, middle of September, and since then we've been building and essentially rebuilding the entire platform. And then in— I'm not sure when the show will come out, but in early 2023, we will be relaunching essentially a whole new platform with technology that, um, quite frankly, I don't think the real estate investing industry has seen before, and totally revamping based on our very much valued customer feedback that we've heard over the last 5 or so months.

So that's, that's awesome. You know, it's great to, to hear such an agile environment that you're, you're changing positions and adapting. You know, it's great to hear that you have a situation where you're already identifying how the use cases is driving your production. I mean, that's really cool.

Thank you.

So yeah, I'm going to ask you about your partner. You know, you mentioned you have a partner in this endeavor a few times here now. Could you talk about your partnership and what type of uncomfortable conversations you might have had before you went into partnership together?

Yeah, totally. So thankfully, prior to Mitch and I going into partnership, going into business together, we were great friends. We still are great, great friends. We, we've definitely grown a lot, and I'll shed some more light on that. But to answer your question specifically, I'll never ever forget for the rest of my life Mitch and I struck the agreement that we would split the business 50/50 while on a bike ride next to the river in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We pulled over and I said, listen, man, are you really thinking about quitting your job to come and do this crazy thing in real estate investing with me? And he said, yeah. And he stuck out his hand and he said, 50/50. And I said, 50/50. And then that's really how it has been since day one. We have all of the correct paperwork and incorporation and all Delaware C-Corp and all of that stuff in place to make it official. But yeah, that's how the conversation went, is very much a friend-to-friend handshake. Let's do this. And then it's really just been, I like to say, heads down and thumbs up since then. We've just been grinding as hard as we possibly can. I hate to use that word, but it's really just been a grind since the middle of 2019.

So what type of strengths does he bring and vice versa? Like, what— how is the relationship there?

Yeah. So Mitch is a— I say he's a genius. I don't know how else to describe it. He's by far top 3 smartest people I've ever heard talk, ever seen, ever met in person without a question. He's the technical brains. Mitch comes from a big data organization, warehousing and processing background. Background. Whenever I met him, he was working for a large company in Pittsburgh that was doing data processing, data storage, data warehousing, data organization for the likes of Uber, Facebook, JPMorgan Chase, giant companies. And he was leading teams of people to do that. So Mitch brings all of the technical know-how. If you look at Townsquare.com right now, and if you've seen it in the past, absolutely everything has either been built by hand by Mitch himself, single-handedly sitting there typing out on the keyboard, or under his direction with our team of developers that we've just hired in the last 2 or 3 months. So Mitch brings the technical expertise that I was trying to teach myself, but the spark of our relationship was, listen, man, you don't know how to code. I know how to code. I'll take over the coding part and let's do this.

Yeah, no, that, that makes sense. Well, this, this has been a great conversation, Paul. I— there's—

thank you.

And, uh, I just want to put all the cards on the table here. When you go to townsquare.com, is there a cost associated with it? Can somebody get into it with low or minimal costs? Like, what can they— how can they see if it's a good fit for them?

Yep. So, um, like I said, we're working on some huge updates to the platform based on the feedback that we've received since July. And probably by the time this episode comes out, you will be able to sign up for a free account and have access to all of the properties on the marketplace and pretty much all of the features that I've talked about today, totally for free. Um, And then on the paid side, it'll be $149 per month. And then we're thinking about coming out with a less expensive account. We haven't totally decided on that yet. Maybe by the time this show comes out, there will be a less expensive account. Maybe there won't. Um, but we're $149 per month or $1,180 per year, um, for full access to all features. But definitely by the time the show comes out, unless it comes out tomorrow, there will be a wide open free version of the platform for people to really take advantage of mostly everything that I've talked about today.

Sure. No, and you go over to townsquare.com, you— there's a button for pricing right there. It kind of breaks down the different tiers today, and hopefully that'll be something similar. Very easy to navigate site. So everybody head over to townsquare.com. I'll make sure to have that as a clickable link in the show notes. But before I let you go, Paul, I did have those rapid-fire questions for you.

Awesome. Yeah, let's do it.

So first off, uh, here's your chance to bust a real estate investing myth. What is one real estate investing myth that has always kind of bugged you and you wanna, you wanna bust here today?

Yeah, I think that, um, a lot of unpersonalized mass marketing is pushed on people. That, you know, cold calling is too expensive, or forming relationships and door knocking with a seller is too difficult, and you should just empty your bank account and spend as much money as you possibly can on pay-per-click or on mass marketing mail or whatever somebody is trying to pitch to do. And I know there's a lot of people that are saying the same thing that I'm saying right now, but there's also a lot of people that say, just spend a boatload of money on nationwide PPC and you're going to get deals from it, or spend a bunch of money on mail and mail everybody in your county, or mail everybody in your neighborhood. I'd say that's a humongous myth, and forming relationships with the people that you want to do business with, whether that's a partner that you want to partner with or a seller that you want to buy a house from, or anything in between, the personal connection and getting to know somebody sitting in their living room, it's a— it's the best way to start. There's no question about it. Spending all of your money on mail— I've done it— is not the right way to start. It's impersonal and doesn't form the connections that you need to be successful, in my opinion.

Yeah, no, good. You know, and everybody's trying to squeeze every penny they, they can, especially when it comes getting into real estate investing. And I, for some reason, networking is one of the least expensive ways and probably the most productive way. And I, people just don't seem to take advantage of that as much. And I, I don't know if it's because of our day and age, you know, as we're being less and less connected. So when you make those connections on a personal level, it has a bit— I, I don't know, it seems to have a bigger impact now.

Totally. Yeah, it definitely does. Especially whenever you're, you know, in my time in real estate, whenever I was working with a partner on the ground-up construction that I was doing, it was with an older gentleman that was very much old school. And then if I was sitting in somebody's living room trying to buy their house, everybody in those situations, they're usually, they're usually more interested in the personal connection than, you know, getting a letter. So always go for the personal connection is what I'm trying to say.

Sure. Well, what book would you recommend, or what are you reading right now?

Yeah, I, I always recommend, um, this book called The Nature Fix. So I'm— I do a couple things with my day, 7 days a week. I work as much as I possibly can on Townsquare, um, I spend time with my wife, and I work at out. Whenever I'm spending time with my wife, it's usually outside. And whenever I'm working out, usually I try to do that outside as well. And a lot of that has been sparked by this book called "The Nature Fix." And "The Nature Fix" is a story about this lady who used to live in Boulder, Colorado where I had lived for a period of time who then moved to Washington, D.C. and really felt these negative emotional impacts of being in a suburban environment with trees and grass in people's front yards but strip malls everywhere else. And then Boulder, which was this beautiful outdoorsy town, the most outdoorsy town in the country. So, she wrote this book about all of the scientific research that has been done around the impacts of nature and what it does to you, what it can do for children. And, I could go on and on and on about how much the nature fix has impacted my career as a businessperson and my relationship with my wife and the success of our companies. But, I can't just simply put, I can't recommend it enough. It just speaks to very clearly why you should be spending as much time as you possibly can outside.

[Speaker:BEN] Sure. Well, what is the biggest business mistake you've made? And what was the lesson you learned from it?

Yeah, I kind of talked about this already a little bit, so I don't want to sound too much like a broken record, but definitely the biggest mistake was not knowing when to stop on a business model that wasn't working, uh, and that was very clearly not working. And the thing that we learned from not stopping soon enough with our previous business model that worked with the retail real estate industry, the real estate agent industry, is just that, that Look at the KPIs, look at how the business is performing. If it's not growing, especially in the world of real estate technology, prop tech as it's called, if it's not growing 10, 15, ideally 20% month over month, then it's probably not something that's going to be viable long-term as a technology company. So that's, uh, that's the biggest mistake that we have made and that I've learned from is just looking at the KPIs and saying maybe next month will be better instead of just saying, okay, I have this other idea. We should go do this and just suck it up.

If you could go back in time and give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be?

Good question. Partnerships. I, whenever I first started the real estate photography company, my wife now, but girlfriend at the time, and I, we were, we're gonna do everything ourselves, we're gonna figure this out. And the real estate photography company, um, it was very much we did everything ourselves. We had some help from, uh, other photographers in our industry, but we kind of like pushed those partnerships away. And then we realized, okay, if we partner with somebody, then everything will work out better for us. Um, so I would say to my younger self, or to anybody that's getting started, never hesitate to partner with somebody or ask for help from somebody who has done what you're trying to do already. They have been through what you're doing, and they will recognize the hardship that you're trying to push yourself through. So don't ever hesitate to reach out to somebody to ask for their help to further your business and theirs.

Yeah, great. Okay, 60 seconds to give somebody one tip or trick when it comes to real estate investing. What would be that tip or trick?

Yeah, I'd say that if you're working on something in real estate investing or in business as a whole, something for your real estate investing business, and it feels super difficult, but you know that other people have done it, um, if it feels really hard, you're probably working on the right thing. So I know it's a little bit vague and it's not like, use this piece of software and your business is going to be a whole lot better, but if you're working on something that is seemingly impossible or really, really difficult, but you know that if you keep working on it, there's a potential for you to succeed, just keep going. So my tip is just keep working as hard as you possibly can on your business and give it a year. Give it a year and see what happens. And if you're still not making any progress in a year, then maybe it's the time to cut the thing loose, but don't give up until you've really given it a really, really good shot.

Right. Well, Paul, is there a question or concept you wished we would have covered here today?

No, Jack, I don't think so. I think this was great. Like I said, I've been a listener for a little bit of time now, and I can't wait to see— I can't wait to see Paul Wakim Town Square on my, on my podcast feed. It's going to be interesting for sure.

Yeah, no, this was a great conversation, Paul. I hope you'll come back again sometime. And Absolutely. Especially as you launch that next version of Townsquare, I'd love to have an update.

Awesome. Yeah, I'd love to come back on and talk to you. We definitely can talk more about actual real estate investing in the future on future conversations.

No, I appreciate it. Thanks again, and we'll talk to you soon.

Sounds great. Thank you.

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