Podcast Episode 106 Transcript

Episode 106: Funding Your Dream Life Through Passive Income with Mike and Ligia Deaton

Are you ready to bring your real estate game to the next level? My name is James Prendamano. I'm the CEO and founder of Prereal. And over the past 25 years, I've closed over a billion dollars in transactional real estate. Each week I'm meeting with outstanding and investors, highperforming individuals and visionaries operating in the real estate space. These are the people that are actually out there in the real estate game right now getting it done. This podcast aims at bringing anyone's game to the next level. This is the prereal podcast. Welcome everyone, to the Prereal podcast. We're joined today by Mike and Ligia Deaton. They are the founders of Deaton Equity Partners. There's a lot of common threads we're going to talk about in today's show. We actually took a program together and we'll get into that and we'll explain. But they're apparently living the dream, it seems like. Guys, you guys are pursuing your entrepreneurial dreams at this point, right? We are giving it our best shot. Beautiful stuff. So real estate is not one of those careers that most folks just fall into. There's typically someone somewhere along the line that's led them into their real estate careers. But before we get there, can we talk a little bit about life before real estate? Yeah, love to. It's an important part of our story. Life before this was probably what is common for most people out there, at least for me, religious from Romania. So that's a very atypical life. And that's a whole other podcast we could get into. She grew up in Romania under a dictator and communism until she was 14 and all of that. But at least for me, I grew up pretty standard American upbringing, or at least for my demographic. I wouldn't say we were probably lower middle to middle class. I never really lacked for anything. I had a lot of friends, grew up my parents stress, get good grades, go to university, get out, get a job, work, retire, all of that. And so that's what I did. I went to university, I got out, I got a job in corporate America. I was working in tech companies. I had the fortune to work for big companies. I started with Motorola when they were a giant in the industry, and they gave me a lot of opportunity to do what I wanted to do. And so I started climbing the ladder there. I moved to Nokia mobile phones when they were king of the mobile phone industry. That's actually how Lija and I met. I went overseas to open a factory in Romania, and Lydia happened to work for Nokia as well. And we met literally the first day in the office and sparks flew. So that kind of is our story. But then I transitioned into Microsoft for a little bit. And most of my career is in operations and supply chain, so I have a really heavy operations background as far as that and you can get into yours your work life. Before we met? Yeah, before we met, I definitely worked in a corporate office, and after I met Mike, we started dating and got married, moved here, and I got a job with a healthcare company. We lived in Plano, Texas, back then. And yeah, we just both worked in corporate America when we met. It was 2006 when I went to Romania. For me, it was a rebirth of sorts. I was coming out of a marriage, running away of sorts. I was kind of really wanting to start over fresh. I was an expat, so life was really good for me. I mean, all of my housing and accommodations were paid for. I was starting up a huge organization, and so we were hiring at a time when the US was going into a recession and people were getting laid off. Lyja and I had the opportunity to travel Europe. I mean, our life was really good. Nokia was a wonderful company to work for, very people centric. There was definitely demands of the job, but they put people very high up in the value system. I'll say we had a fairy tale three years in Romania when we met, just with the things we were able to do and experience. And then when we moved to the US, we fell into that just standard corporate grind where we were working, traveling, mortgage, all of that stuff. And so our pivotal moment came in 2016 where we both got laid off and we were both without a job. And the immediate gut reaction is, I got to get a job. And so I started to look for things, but just had that nagging feeling in my gut that this is not what I want to go back into another big corporate company with a tough company culture and what have you done for me lately? And really no job security. I mean, a lot of people have that miss understanding that working for someone is more job security than entrepreneurship, but they're not looking out for you most of the time. And so that was really what sparked something different in us to step back and go, is this really where we want to go with the rest of our lives, or is there something different? And so that kind of led up to our launch into something different. So I'm curious because many people experience what you're describing, but they never really capture the essence of it. They never address it head on. They know that they're not fulfilled. They know that they're not living their dream or their best life or whatever today's buzzword is for it, right? But they never address it. So was there any coaching or was there anything else going on at this point? Or was it just kind of the shock of, hey, we both got laid off, and that realization of, it's funny you said that people talk all the time about corporate America and security. To me, it's the opposite. I tend to agree with what you're both saying. Being an entrepreneur requires an immense level of discipline, and there's a lot of risk, but you really are completely in control of tomorrow. If you're not putting food on the table and if you're not living the life you want to live, there's really nobody to blame but yourself. And in corporate America, as things or the markets shift and these factors shift that are entirely out of our control, you could be the best damn employee they've ever had. When it's a time to contract, it's a time to contract. It is what it is. So for you, was there any other coaching or anything going on at that point? Or was it just that moment where you both happen to be laid off and you went, I don't want this anymore? Yeah, a little more of the latter. So we weren't really actively under any mentors or coaches at the moment. I would say for us, several things lined up at that moment. And so I have two daughters from my previous marriage. They were adulting, right? So they were both one was in college, the other was just about to go to college. And so, in a sense, we were empty nesting that was set aside, taken care of. We didn't have to worry about mouths to feed other than the two of us. And so for me, that was a big part of what locked me into a career path, was having a family and a responsibility, and it held me back from wanting to take a leap to do something different, because I did have this security mindset that kind of came into place. The fact that we were both out of work rewind a year or two. We had revisited Robert Kiyosaki. You said, everybody's got somebody that kind of launches them into real estate. Well, in a sense, he was for us, we revisited a few of his books, and it was all about cash flow, getting into the entrepreneur side and the investor side of the quadrant and all of those things. So a few years back got me thinking about what could we do to generate just cash flow so that we didn't have to work for a salary so much. That led me to just more research. I stumbled across a couple of guys on podcasts that were talking about this land investing. They had gone through Mark's course that you and I both went through the land geek. I bought his toolkit, but I was working at the time. I just tossed it on the desk and it started collecting dust. And in that moment, it was really about being anxiety ridden with interviewing for other companies, not knowing what you're going to get when you step into another role. Are we going to have to relocate to the West Coast or somewhere else that we didn't want to live. And so all of those things, just that and being in touch with what we were thinking and feeling, we were like, let's just take a moment. We had money in the bank, fortunately, so we had means, we had a runway with which we could last out, I got a severance, we had savings and so it gave us that cushion to be able to take a pause and say, is there a different way? Can we try something for a little bit of time? If it doesn't work, what's the worst case? We go back to work for somebody else and get a job and just restart. But those things really all lined up at that particular moment in time and we just had the open mindedness to sit back, listen and talk about things. And another key factor for me at least is that in our relationship, lydia is my biggest cheerleader and she's open to pursue whatever it is and has ultimate faith that we're going to be able to do something. So that also gave me the confidence to try something radically different, really than I'd ever done before in my life. Now, at that point, your real estate background is limited to buying and or selling primary residence. That was it pretty much, yeah. My dad was actually a general contractor when I grew up, so he built homes in the Alforce area and he was an entrepreneur and I just never picked up the bug. It was really drilled into me go to college, get a job, do those things. And so, yeah, that was very much we had talked about maybe getting a rent house and things like that, but just had never pulled the trigger and so yeah, really had no deep real estate experience. And now your partners, I think it's in over 200 units, is that correct? And you're doing the land investment thing. It's fascinating. And we're going to dive into Deaton equity partners and Elevated purpose and other site. You have an open plains properties in a few minutes. I just wanted to jump if I could. Lagia culturally, was your experience with America limited to when you had met Mike? Yes, pretty much. And I worked as a pair when I was, I think in 2005, I worked as an au pair for a family in Florida. I'm always fascinated by these types of chats. As you came to America, was there really that feeling of land, of the free and opportunity, is that real? It is, but I also looked at from outside a little bit, I was detached because I wasn't really back then totally immersed in the culture, but it was yes, I had that feeling and this particular family I worked for, they were entrepreneurs and all the time we're talking about what can we do, what can we invent what could be the next thing that we do? They were thinking all the time, talking all the time, so I was kind of surrounded by people that wanted more or wanted to just be more and have more than just what they have. And those opportunities just didn't exist for you. Correct? No, it's amazing. It's fascinating that we one thing that I wanted to add, when Mike said for me, it was easy to my risk tolerance is a little bit higher because we used to leave paycheck to paycheck, and I didn't develop myself as a person that needed a lot. So for me to jump and take the sleep of faith and try something new, even if we fail, it wasn't a terrible idea at all because I didn't need that big cushion. I'm used to living from paycheck to paycheck. It's remarkable, the excuses and the reasons that we all create in our minds to not act and to get that refreshing perspective where you just genuinely don't have that opportunity in other places. I think we forget how blessed we really are to be here and the opportunities that we have in front of us. So you guys have kind of this moment where you've had about enough, although it sounds like Motorola and some of these other companies were pretty good to you, and you had flexibility and you had freedom, but it was time to take control of your destiny, if you will, in a more meaningful way. How do you go from that to 1200 units? Right? That's a heck of a lead. So let's talk a little bit about what happens next. Sure. Yeah. So in that moment, we really took a moment to listen and explore our values and what we wanted out of life. And really what it all boil down to was time. We wanted time with each other, we wanted time with our families, we wanted time to do things that we wanted to do, which for us, it's a lot about having experiences. It's traveling, being outdoors and doing things. And so we wanted to start our own business and we wanted it to cash flow. And from what I knew about the land investing, the ROI was just crazy at the time. Right. Triple digits, annual ROI on product and things like that. We had this toolkit and we just decided, look, let's allocate a seed startup fund from our savings and give us some time, and we'll just see if this works. And so to get from there to where we are today, there are some general themes, and you touched on one earlier. But we knew that we needed mentors and coaches. And so that's why we signed up for Mark's program. We just said, look, let's go be apprenticed, or let's apprentice under someone who's done it and accelerate our growth curve. And so we had some coaching through Mark because it wasn't an overnight success. We definitely were in the red for quite some time until with land investing, as I'm sure you know, at least the way that this program was back then, it was fairly much self funded. So you go out and one of the things we really liked about land was the barrier to entry is very low and so you can buy properties for hundreds of dollars, you can buy very expensive ones, but you don't have to. And really the sweet spot is in there in a very affordable bandwidth. One of our philosophies that we have picked up on is just the fact that money loves speed, right? So if you can just keep flipping and cash flowing and turning your inventory, then that's where that comes from. And so it took us about two years. We moved from Dallas Fort Worth to Colorado right about the same time. And so we were able to build up our, we'll call it a passive income stream, but it's really a portfolio of notes. It was in no way passive. I mean, we were actively working the business and still are a lot to this day. There are things you can do to make it very passive. But yeah, it took us a few years. We built up a nice income stream and we were back then had just kind of gotten back to a nice six figure income that maybe didn't replace my salary at Microsoft, but it covered what we needed to spend and we were able to put a lot back into the business. And so that was probably 2018 and we got a huge tax bill and we were like, holy cow, I am not paying all these taxes year after year. And so that sparked us really looking for ways to diversify and that pulled us into commercial real estate and depreciable assets. Got it. And so same thing there, we just said, okay, well if we're going to do this, let's find a program, a mentor, a coach. When we started we were thinking about, okay, a duplex or fourplex more recourse type loans, if you will, to do things. And I started doing a little bit of research and almost everything I looked at, people were transitioning out of that into larger scale syndications just to get the scale. Because when you step back and you think about buying a bunch of rent houses or duplexes and getting two or $300 a month in rent in order to stack those up and make anything substantial, it takes quite a bit. And so we just said, okay, well let's shortcut the process and go right into syndications. And so we started shopping around for who would we want as a mentor and same type of formula. We started up another arm of our company and focused on multifamily syndications. We found a group that allowed us a lot of flexibility to be able to deploy our capital, to be able to join as general partners on deals right away, rather than some groups are a little more hierarchical about their process where you have to just start at one level and work your way up and network and find things. We wanted something a little bit different, and so that has enabled us to much more quickly join deals as partners. I would say last year, twelve months or so, we've been sponsoring our own deals. So we're out there finding deals in addition to raising capital and bringing investors in deals, which is a lot of fun because it's great when people and people are making a lot of money these days in multifamily, just, I mean, rents are crazy, valuations are going up, things start to cool down a little bit, but things have really been good. So it's great to bring family and friends in the deals and have them feel the power of cash flow and good returns and a little less risky than the stock market, at least these days, and things like that. That's largely our formula, was just find good network, right? Your net worth as good as your network. And so we're joining groups, networking with people. Huge lesson learned for us is exactly that. Make sure you know who you're partnering with, because regardless of looking at a deal on paper, if the people running the deal don't know what the heck they're doing, you're not going to get the returns that are on the piece of paper. So we're very selective about who we agree to partner with and which deals we join. But the power of good networking and coaching and finding people that can help shortcut and accelerate your process has just been invaluable for us. So, yeah, it's everything. I've personally closed over a billion dollars in transactional real estate in my career. I've been in real estate my entire life. Nice. But as I started to explore, there's kind of this business as a way of gobbling you up a bit. And I have had my head down doing deals for so long that I really didn't pay much attention to what was on the side. I just was focused and driving forward and through the podcast, which for me was like my worst nightmare, trying to speak in a public way. And the show ended up picking up steam, and we've got listeners in 60 countries and things I never dreamed would happen. This was an experiment for me to just try and push my boundaries a bit and to get more comfortable. I started to meet this amazing network of folks, folks like you that have jumped into the real estate game in one way or another. And I've learned so much from the folks that I've met. And Mark, someone who came on the show, and he's going to talk about land, and I'm going, okay, closed thousands and thousands and thousands of land transactions, but boy, oh boy, does he have a system that is remarkable. And as an entrepreneur, as I was going through flight school, my inclination was to tweak this and improve on that. And I could do it this. And it was a little tough as I started to go through the program about how rigid they were with the approach. But as you get through it, you really start to understand why they've built a model where if you want to, you can pretty much have it on cruise control and do as little as you want. You can legitimately run a portfolio, bring in a couple of hundred thousand a year, and work a few hours a week legit. And it was so foreign to me, in spite of all of this deal experience, that you can go out and buy properties for 4681, $200 apiece. And they've got kind of a secret sauce, which I'll leave out for those who are interested. They could certainly check out the landgeek and mark site, but they've got a formula for contacting and negotiating these deals. And, man, it's exciting when you start getting those responses and the letters are coming back and the calls, and people really are looking to just unload this land at 25% of the market value. I was shocked, to be honest. We were too, quite frankly.

There's a saying or maximum or whatever, right? Anytime you want to venture out and do something, your circle of friends in your network, more often than not, we'll think you're crazy. Right? They're kind of like this. Well, this was even exponentially greater than that. People are like, you're doing what? Yeah, okay, well, and now we have people approaching us, wanting to join in with us somehow, like, hey, can we get on your deals? Can you show us how you do what you do? And those kind of things? But, yeah, we were skeptical at first. That's why we gave ourselves a finite amount of time and a budget, and we went in, and it took some time. I mean, our first deal took us about six months. We bought inventory. We just were having trouble selling it and reselling it. But, yeah, those letters come in and it's astounding sometimes. I mean, we've had people literally give us their property and just say, if you'll figure and we try to be problem solvers for people, like, if they have issues with probate or their paperwork is not quite ready or whatever, we try to step in and solve that problem for them with the county. We're by no means experts, but we can find answers. We can do things. And you put in your sweat equity, and it's worth a lot to people. And so there are people that just are tired of paying taxes or their spouse passed away. They were going to do something, whatever. There's all kinds of stories out there. But yes, it's amazing. I mean, there's no shortage of hate mail as well for insulting people with your low ball offer, but you take your lumps. Yeah, look, I've rationalized this perhaps, but I feel that for every negative response, we really are solving problems for people. There are people that don't have a pathway. They don't have the time, the expertise, the knowledge, whatever it is, to get out from underneath that delinquent tax situation or whatever it may be. They just want to be done with it, and they're very happy to receive that letter. It's my favorite part of the day, honestly, to get the mail and to kind of flip through the bad addresses to get to those few that are responses. But it's again, an amazing program. I could not speak highly enough about it. And when I was on your website doing some homework the other day, I noticed on your land site you had some stuff in Castilla where we just did a bunch of stuff in Alamosa and I went, oh, okay, I'd recognize some of this verbiage. I think we may have been in the same program together. Yeah, we've played around in a lot of different counties and we love the mountains, we love pine trees, and we gravitate towards a lot of Colorado properties is where we do things, and then northern New Mexico and Arizona stuff. It's a lot easier to sell a property when you're passionate about it than it is like West Texas dirt or something. It's hard. But I will say we have never gotten stuck with a piece of property and we've always made money. We've always made a lot of money. So it's amazing. Sometimes you'll buy something even maybe site unseen. You do a little bit of homework on Google Earth or whatever, and you get a feel for it, but you think you have a dog and there's somebody that wants I think Mark has a saying, there's a pig for every barn. And it's proven true so far for us. But yeah, it's a fun program. I mean, I encourage people all the time to try it. You can do it part time, you can do it full time. You can have your kids jump in and help and it just takes that one deal to really light the fire, right? It's a lot of fun, no doubt about it. So let's talk a little bit about the multi families again. Is it your passion to be on the passive side or do you like to work in the deal? Right now? We're doing a lot of working in the deal, so I like to be very active in underwriting properties, making sure deal pencils out, even. I have strong operations background, so I really get into asset management and making sure property managers are driving a business case the way it needs to be. And so we find ourselves also from an investment. We're raising equity for deals as well. So, yeah, we're very active right now. It's not the long term goal, obviously. I don't want to retire in the traditional sense where you kick back and you're playing golf and sitting on the couch or whatever. I mean, I like business. I like deals. I like being involved. I envision something a little bit different down the road. A few more buy and hold type properties that can cash flow longer. I mean, when we got into multifamily, I think because of the mental path we went down where we were talking about duplexes and smaller deals, we had a buy and hold mentality. And once we got into the world of syndications, we figured out pretty much nobody's buying and holding. It's all the five or six year business model, cash out, refinance somewhere in the middle and sell and flip into the next property. So it's a very active business model to be a part of. And there's a lot going. I mean, we've been talking lately. So we have some active deals ongoing. We have a deal that we're working to close here in the next few weeks. And it's stressful. I mean, you're trying to pull money in, you're getting the equity for one deal. Interest rates are going up. A lot of the bridge debt is variable right now, and so you've got to figure out how to rescue your business plan. And fortunately, rents are going up far exceeding a lot of things there, which is actually contributing to the interest rate problem. But it's all good. We love it and we're able to work at our own pace. And here, about seven months ago, we bought a place in the mountains of Colorado. So that's where we live now. And we laugh almost every day that we're living in a vacation home. I mean, we sit out on the back porch and look at pine trees. We've got deer, turkey, fox, just literally in the backyard. Bears. Yes. Lady doesn't like the bears.

So we're very active. And I won't say I'm a control freak, but I like to be in control and I like to have a say in what's happening. We are also passive investors in deals. I love passive investing. And at some point that's probably where we'll be some hybrid in there. For investors, all of our investors, it's the way to go. I mean, you put your money in, you start getting cash distribution checks at some point soon into the deal. And lately deals are selling out for crazy amounts of money. It's probably setting a bad benchmark for when things settle a little bit back to normal. But yeah, passive investing is the way to go. I mean, we're all about cash flow. We love bringing people into our deals. But for us personally, we're taking a little more active role. The way we're working right now is Lydia is really focused on running the land business and I'm a lot more active in the multifamily, in the commercial space that will change over time. It's just the nature of how we stepped into it. It was a clear, easy way to focus our businesses and keep things going. But like I said, I'm an operations guy. We have. A weekly planning meeting to plan out the week. What are the targets, what are the goals? We have a daily touch base meeting in the morning. We have a great working relationship, which is another wonderful aspect of our lives in that we complement each other very well. In terms of the skill sets, I like to take a more strategic, longer term planning view. Ledges down in there, chasing actions, working, things that need to be done. It's a beautiful blend, both personally and professionally. That's amazing. Congratulations on the success in both areas of life because it is so important. You had said something earlier that I had made a note and I wanted to revisit. When you were determining what you wanted to do in this next iteration of life, you sat down and you measured what your options were against your values. And something that is so seldom done, I think many wouldn't even understand what you mean by that. Like literally having your values right? And at least I have them written out and I understand what they mean to me and what the priorities are. And I found when it comes to decisions that in the past I've agonized over and I was unsure of and I didn't have full confidence. When you weigh them against your values, it provides a lot of clarity for me, at least a lot of focus. And it has made my decisioning far easier and it's made more harmony, if you will, in my life. Because for a long time, as I had said, I was head down and home life was in conflict with work, right? Working seven days a week, 14 hours days, constant grind. It is impossible to not bring some of that nonsense home. And in finding these pathways and folks, I'll say if you have the opportunity to work with good syndicators and people that do have the balance, there is nothing better than having the right partners, putting your money to work and knowing that they're executing the plan so you can enjoy those benefits. There was a long period in my life where passive income and passive investing just I didn't even understand how to speak the language. But boy, is it a blessing when you hit on those partners and people you connect with and people you have shared values with that are looking after your money like it's their own because in many cases, it's together and it's just a beautiful opportunity. Yes. Yes, as well. If I can just add on to that. One of the things that drew us into multifamily in particular, was the fact that you are in most cases, and we do a lot of value add type investing where we're going in and upgrading a community. You're touching a lot of lives in bringing better living conditions into those properties. And so it's like a win win all the way around. When you're bringing investors in, they're making a great return on their investment. You're fulfilling and bringing better living conditions to a property that's been run down and all those kind of things. And so that's really one of the things that anchors us into multifamily as opposed to self storage or some other type of models. But that's one of the things that we decided to step because we were trying to decide which of the commercial asset classes, which ones do we want to step into? And that was one of the deciding factors for us, was just making a difference for investors and for a community. Yeah. So no doubt the active side of the business that you seem to be drawn to certain elements of, are you picking just specific geographic areas that you want to invest in? Are you in multiple states? What does that look like for you? Yeah. So we aren't selectively limiting to particular markets. We are open to any market where the underlying fundamentals are strong in terms of the growth, the employment, just the macroeconomic factors, the landlord friendliness or not, kind of the typical things. We have deals currently in Texas and Iowa. We look here in Colorado? We're about 20 minutes west to Colorado Springs. We love that market. So as a nature of having to focus, we are only looking actively in a few markets. But we have partners that look everywhere and opportunities come about. And so I'm not ruling out many markets. There are some markets that you just rule out. I mean, it's the nature of things. The factors don't work in certain things. But as a course of just having to focus, there's only so many brokers that you can form a really good relationship with. Same with property management companies. And then it just takes some time to understand the market fundamentals in terms of cap rates and the macroeconomic forces that are happening and things like that, to really understand if a deal is good or not. Other than that, you're relying on someone else, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But you have to rely on others to bring the expertise. So to that end, before I let you go, if you could take your crystal ball out for a moment. There are a lot of factors at play in the markets now that I think are really unique. I've been through this is my third cycle, so I've seen the ups and downs, but there are some factors at play that I've never seen before. And I'm curious what the perception is from where you're based. I'm in New York, so a couple of years ago, maybe five years ago, we started to add legislative risk to every analysis that we did because it became very real. The environment that we had become so accustomed to investing in had now another layer of challenges. Many times well intended legislation, but poor execution, to be fair. And we had to start looking elsewhere for opportunities. And with COVID, it went on so long in the big cities that I believe we have seen a permanent shift in population and a permanent shift in mindset. I think the big cities will continue to see attrition. They don't report it as much as we're seeing it. It is very real that people are leaving the big cities. And traditionally what's happened is the secondary markets, right? So it happened in parts of Florida twice, where it was crazy and it was bedlam and then the switch flipped and it was over, the markets were dead. I'm not so sure that that repeats this time around. I believe that there are enough people that have decentralized and have relocated to the secondary markets, even some tertiary markets, where I think that some of those markets are going to stand up as we head into higher interest rates, inflation, inventory challenges and everything else that's around the corner. I'm wondering what your perspective is. Are the big cities going to take the hit here longer term or do you think that they bounce right back like they have in the past and these secondary markets feel the effects? Yeah, I actually think from the COVID experience that we will see a little bit of a hybrid. And so I think already you've seen in the big cities there was an exodus and just a depression. But you see that coming back, but I don't think it will come back fully. I do think that there's enough companies that have seen the value or the lack of a loss of value of having people work remotely that it stays. And for sure, we traffic primarily in secondary markets as far as the commercial goes. I mean, we're just not able to play with the big boys in New York or Denver even, or something where just evaluations are crazy. And so because of that, we traffic in the secondary and even tertiary markets. But yeah, I do see continued strength there. I think the more interesting dynamic that we're going to see is what's going to happen. And you bring up a good point about legislation. I think there's a lot of risk with the way rents have grown relative to wages that we may see more localized boundaries put around it, whether you call it rent control or whatever. I think it almost becomes inevitable unless the market somehow takes care of itself in a way which is likely. I mean, there are forces at play that are trying to but it's just to your point, this isn't unusual in that employment is so full right now, even though there's a lot of businesses looking for it. But maybe I should flip that and say unemployment is below.

And it feels like I know there's a lot of people who would argue against this, but it feels like people have means right now. They have money to spend. We talk about all the time. I mean, inflation is at its highest point in many decades. A lot of people will tell you it's underreported, it's higher than it is, all this stuff, which is pretty much always been the case. But it's a weird dynamic because people aren't slowing down. And I guess that will come at some point, right? The pain will get enough to where some people will just have to but we know people that are buying cars or taking big vacations, they're just going like there's nothing going on. Yeah, you hit on a few points there, and I think there's reasons and there's factors behind it. I think the decentralization is part of it. Folks took a chunk of cash from far more expensive markets and they're now in the secondary and tertiary markets. They have more disposable income right at their fingertips. You hit on maybe the most selling point when the big companies went from a punitive mindset if you're not in the office, to, oh, this is an opportunity. We're seeing big companies, big law firms, big banks, big institutions breaking leases in the city and going 25, 30% discounts to salaries. None of the issues anymore. Yeah, hey, okay, that works. And when I saw the big funds shift and start buying thousands of single family homes, which is something I'd never seen before either, and I think in part because of exactly what you talked about, I think their legislation is right around the corner in a lot of these markets to keep. Look, we have a housing crisis in this country anyway. You cut it right, rent is too damn high. There's not enough housing units, and there has to be some sort of balance. And I think that that is also right around the corner. And I think the big funds ran from that in advance of it, checked out at record cap rates. Feels that you and I could never play, or at least we don't have any interest in playing in a three and a half and 4% returns. But that's where these big dogs were trading and we saw a lot of them head for the hills and traded in for the single family. So I thought that that was another telling sign. But I think you guys are spot on. I think that there's still a good bit of runway ahead of us, some great opportunity out there. I love the conversation today, guys. Where is the most convenient place or people want to connect with you? Where are we pointing them to? We put a landing page on our website at DeatonEquitypartners.com and we tried to make it just a one stop shop. So we have our contact info up there. We have a couple of publications that you can pull down if you're interested in land. We have a little bit of a primer which has some links to people that have training programs. A quick high level process on how that whole thing works. We've got a bit on commercial real estate and how to get into passive investing. All those kinds of things are right there. So we just make it easy for people. You can go there and then leap wherever you want to go. Well, as always, the links will be below. Folks, Mike Ligia, thank you so much for a wonderful conversation. And best of luck. Yeah, thanks, James. Pleasure. Thanks. As always, everybody, please stay safe.