Podcast Episode 64 Transcript

Episode 64: Turning The Key: Learn How Full Service Agencies Can Help Achieve Financial Freedom

Participant #1:
The fascinating thing that I think we do is we say, hey, come join our calls. You don't even have to be an agent with us. Call me. You don't have to be an agent with us. We lead with value. And unfortunately, what happens is people tend to do more deals and work closer with us when they're with the brokerage. But it doesn't need to be that way. We don't really care about that 15K cap, but it is what brings people in the door and gets them to work closer with us. But it doesn't have to be that way. We will still partner with you still help you because we just lead with value. And as you know, it's very simple. It's hard to do some of these things, but you just follow these concepts and you're consistent for a long period of time. That's the beautiful thing that I see with real estate is almost in every aspect of it. Every year it gets better.

Participant #1:
Remember once of the show we're joined today by Matt Teifke, Matt is a real estate broker entrepreneur out of Round Rock in Texas, a submarket of Austin. From what I understand, Matt is doing a lot quite honestly of what we do up here in New York. They've got a really well rounded company running the full gamut, buying, selling, leasing, coaching, construction, finance, and, of course, the traditional real estate parameters. We're excited to share some of the insights of what Matt has really gleaned and what Matt is seeing as creating the success that they've had. And, of course, talk about what real estate holds for the future. So, Matt, thanks so much for joining us today. Absolutely, man. Thanks for having me. I appreciate that intro and let's get after it. I'm excited to be here. All right, baby, let's go. We often talk to the guests about how they ended up in real estate. I think we share a bit of a similar story, but if you would just give the audience a few minutes on, how did you end up in the game? Is this something you've been around when you were younger? How did you end up where you are today? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm 13 years in. I'm 30 years old right now and was blessed to be around it at an early age. My mom, single mom, raised my brother and myself, and she did a really good job of investing. She was buying one or two properties a year. Really. The way I saw it was she put everything that she made outside of her job and taking care of my brother and myself into owning real estate. Very fortunate and blessed to have done it in a great market here in Austin 1520 years ago. But at the same time, she was surrounding herself with a team, a good realtor, a good property manager. Her realtor would actually go knock on people's doors and find her deals and make commissions that way, and she was buying below value. I remember early on, this is something that stuck with me when I was trying to get started. I'd see a house listed at 200, and I'm trying to get a deal done, right. And she's like, let's offer him 120. I'm like, mom, like, no. And then I realized, wow, sometimes that actually works. And she did get those lines in the water. So she did a good job of being aggressive. I definitely learned that from her. And I was just around that early. I went to College and got my real estate license when I was in College. First year, and I got that rookie of the Year award. I was taking 18 hours of school, but more focused on real estate than anything and surrounding myself with people to learn. Soak it in. I was first one in last one out. My whole goal was always to learn the industry and then figure out ways to own property. And so I did that all through College. I graduated, I worked for a commercial broker. Then I went to go get my master's degree from Texas A and M. They have a Masters of real estate program and did that year and a half all along. That time, I started buying properties one or two a year, just like my mom and graduated, started a property management company, ended up selling that about six months ago. We built that up to over 300 single family homes that we're managing. And then before I sold that, I started a real estate brokerage. And at this point, we have right around 100 agents. We also own 30% of a construction company. And the whole philosophy that we have is I think it's very unique, and it's very cool because it didn't really happen. As a clear vision, it just happened over following what we're about over time. And what I like to say is we want to be at a brokerage where you as the agent, come to get the most out of real estate for yourself, not for your clients, not for investors, for you. And I think there's a percentage of agents that get their license, if that's what they want. And we promote that. We let people wholesale. We partner with our agents. We've got eight flips going on right now with eight different agents. We put up all the money. We let them build their own brand, their own team. There's a cap, $15,000 cap is the Max. They can make us as a brokerage. And we're not really worried about the money we make on the brokerage. We're essentially trying to find entrepreneurs that we can help grow and train and look at them as partners. And we're not focused on how much money can we make on the brokerage. But how do we get around a lot of good people and grow together? And it's been pretty special, man, before the pandemic, we had twelve agents and so we grew all through that and heads down, working hard. And one thing I always thought was I'm so passionate about real estate, but I realized I'm not. I'm just passionate about what real estate can allow, like what it did for my mom, what it's done for me, what it's done for other people. And so we hustle, man, all that to say is I've worked about as hard as you could imagine at this for 13 years. And in a weird way, I do honestly still feel like just getting started and then just hopefully keep doing things as, you know, there's some simple things to follow, but be consistent. Do what you say. You're going to do it for a long time and things work out. And so we're just trying to do the best we can. Obviously, no experts on everything. We've never been through a downturn, but hopefully we can just keep building that brand and reputation and get around a lot of good people. So we were talking offline before we started, and I had said, I think we share a similar story, and it sounds like in some sense, we do. I also was kind of dragged around by mom single mom, and she got into the brokerage side very early, not really the investing side, but the brokerage side. So I've also been around it my whole life. And some of those lessons that you were talking about. I was smiling, thinking back to that mentality. I think that sometimes real estate agents forget that we almost have too much knowledge sometimes, and you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Right. So for a mom to go out and make those 120 offers on those $200,000 listings, you never know. You really genuinely never know what the other person situation is, what their goals are. And what is important to you is not always and often times not what is important to your counterpart, your client, your agent. People are motivated by different things. People have different goals. And we've found as we've gone through this, I've been in it now for 20, some odd years. Three, four, five years, six years, 26 years. Actually, I'm getting old, man. It's very much about real estate is not about selling, right. People don't quite get that. It's about connecting. It's about cultivating a relationship, building trust. And once you've gone through that process first, then the other stuff comes naturally. It really is an organic process. So I have a million questions. You guys are doing commercial and residential, correct? Yeah. So one part that I skipped was I worked at a commercial brokerage for three years called Edge, and it was a pretty high end retail shop. So I did work for both gym, exporting goods and worked there right out of College right out of my master's degree while my wife was building our management company. So at this point, we allow our agents to do everything and I have a little bit of knowledge in almost every aspect of real estate, except for office space. But we do have agents that only focus on commercial. We actually had an agent last month. He did 52 million in sales volume, and we cap out at 15K. So that's pretty much all his money. But I was super impressed and good on him for doing that. That's more than a lot of brokerages do in a year. Sure. That's amazing. So when you were at edge, you mentioned some tenants there. Were you doing tenant rep work, retail, tenant rep? Yeah. Did all the Vegas ICSC in Houston, Dallas ICSC for three years and very corporate. I enjoyed learning and being around it, but it wasn't me, but I stuck around one because of the company culture that we had. And two, I was just learning so much. So you guys are big believers in coaching, something that I've talked about a lot on the show, how just unbelievably impactful the right coach can be on an individual personally and in their career. I was very late to the game on the coaching side to be candid. What was your first experience or exposure to coaching? Yeah. So we started testing this out about a year ago. My first experience was probably just hearing about what other people were doing and how much money they are paying and what they are getting. And me kind of being a little bit upset or frustrated with what people were getting into in some sense. And so we kind of came up with our own program because some of these things, you'll go pay $50 and not that there's anything wrong with the dollar amount. But it was these specific ones. Like, man, I could have told you a lot of this stuff, and I would have and I do for free. I literally sit down with you and coffee every week if you want to and show you some of these things. So we try to come up with something a little different, which was $1,000 month to month, and we're in your corner. It's catered to you, and everyone has different programs and different ways to view things. But even to this point now, man, we actually have two guys that are essentially working for free right now for the next three months, 8 hours a day, and they're just gambling on us and the knowledge. So there's all these different ways. There's people that will pay for it. There's people that come and just work for you for free. But for me, yeah. I think it's valuable. When I was getting started, I had a mentor 1 hour every day, taught me real estate, whatever it is, as long as you're just focusing on improving and just like anything as you know, you get around the right people. And it's just a trade off of dollars for the value you're given. And you just have to figure out Where's the best spot for that. We're all about it. I still have people that I'm learning from, and that teach me. I don't necessarily pay for coaching, but I figured out in some ways how to go get it for free. Just go figure out how to add value for people, and then they'll turn around and add value back for you. Yeah. There's no doubt about it for me. I started off with kind of a systems coach, and I graduated to a mindset coach, and it's just been absolutely invaluable. And like you said, I'm taking a lot of that knowledge mentoring the folks in my company. But we actually had one of our partners get licensed as a coach to put a little bit of structure around it. And we created an Institute because you can't sit with everybody every day. Right? So the value of time for us has just been number one. So we're trying to do things in a scalable way. Is it okay if we dive into some of the structure of your company just so I can and the audience can understand exactly how you guys have this set up. So you have the cap, which is interesting. You guys are going out and sourcing all of the leads on the agents behalf or the agents sourcing leads. Can you walk me through just a typical someone comes in with a listing. What does that kind of waterfall look like? Yeah. So it's always changing very fast paced. We're very, as, you know, probably entrepreneurial. So there's multiple structures that we're working on. We have a girl right now that we pay $30,000 a year salary, and she's actually on an 80 to us, and she's 8 hours a day generating real estate leads. And this is relatively new. We're trying to figure out how to efficiently get more leads coming in, and she's the one that's helping us do that. The goal with that is once we have that implemented and we have a structure, we know how much you're spending and what it generates. We want to take that same structure and offer it to our agents on a 70 30 model where we actually might help them with their CRM, maybe help them with some marketing. They take 70. We take 30. No cap. So that's where we're trying to go to. But the 90 ten is pretty much you're kind of on your own. Pay for your own signs. Pay for your own cards. We're going to support you. We're going to take your calls. We do three trainings a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 1030. But the 90 1015K cap is, hey, come here. We're the type that's like, you want to work a little bit. That's great. You want to work a lot? We're here to support you. We're not going to call you and tell you you need to have more sales volume. But we're the first people to say, hey, do you want to own real estate. Let's go buy some stuff together. So, for example, I think that's why we're growing and we are very unique. Like we've talked to multiple big brokerages that have tried to buy us or partner with us, and we've gone through their structure and they're like, each agent is worth $3,000 per year. If we can get $3,000 per agent per year, we're good. And I can't even allow myself to think that way. One, it's a small number, which is not the most important thing. These are massive. That's one of the biggest brokerages there is. So I respect them and they're way bigger than us. But we don't think like that. We have agents that cap out that don't cap out. We've got multiple ones that we make 50,000 each on a flip, and that makes the split mean nothing. The fascinating thing that I think we do is we say, hey, come join our calls. You don't even have to be an agent with us. Call me. You don't have to be an agent with us. We lead with value. And unfortunately, what happens is people tend to do more deals and work closer with us when they're with the brokerage. But it doesn't need to be that way. We don't really care about that 15K cap, right? But it is what brings people in the door and gets them to work closer with us. But it doesn't have to be that way. We will still partner with you. We'll still help you because we just lead with value. And as you know, it's very simple. It's hard to do some of these things, but you just follow these concepts and you're consistent for a long period of time. That's the beautiful thing that I see with real estate is almost in every aspect of it. Every year it gets better, like next year, I know more people. I have the ability to raise more money. I make more money, like it's all about just being around. And what I say is you got to get that staying power, get the ability to stay in the game. And there's always a big deal or something new or exciting right around the corner. But you got to be in it. And I just personally have never seen any way to be successful in it the way we're doing it. Other than being full time, you can be part time and do passive and do all this other stuff. But I've only found success by just trying not to miss a beat and being super consistent over the years. So you guys are doing and I love the model. I think we had talked also about disruption and how the industry is just ripe for massive disruption in the future. That old model of putting a dollar amount on an agent. I don't think it's sustainable. Honestly, I love that you guys are kind of building an army of people that are out looking for not just listings that they can broker, but deals to participate in part of our model, as we franchise is precisely that. We're going to have a fun backstopping the opportunity for agents to participate in the deals at different levels. So I was wondering, how much structure have you put around that so far? Are there different levels for participation? If an agent brings a deal or what does that look like for you guys? So the way that we've done it so far and this is in this model, we've probably done 20 deals. Call it 16 flips four that we've kept with these agents in this program. What we do is it always is a little bit dependent on the deal, but this hasn't changed yet. If we are going to put up all the money, which we will, we'll get the loan in our name. We'll put up all the money and the agent goes and runs that project. We're here to support and guide them, but they run it as far as checking in, making sure people show up, we get paid back, and then we split the profits 70 30. If you don't want to go that route and you want to put money in yourself, then we just divide it up for how much money you put in. So you put in 40% of it, you own 40% and we'll get the loan. I know people probably get good rates all over, but I think we have some of the best rates on the we're doing hard money on a lot of these and we're getting 1.6 .5% interest 90% LTV it's pretty good. And our agents that are tapping into it, they get the credit for that. Where here in Austin, if you were to do that, just starting out, you'd be 12% interest, two and a half points. So it makes a difference. And if it's your first deal, you're not even 100% confident that they're going to be able to close. Right? Our guys, they close good rates. We don't have to give them any more paperwork. They have everything. So that's kind of how it's been structured, how we scale that? Totally unsure. Literally. Right now, I think we have nine, eight or nine. We'd probably do a few more, but you start getting tapped out. But, man, as you probably know or probably would agree with if I had this program when I was getting started out, I would have been doing so many deals. So it's really cool. We're trying to get people what we would have wanted or be different through brokerages that I've been at and make it the best version that we can. So one of the keys to becoming a multimillion dollar agent is leverage, right? Understanding how to leverage your time, your resources and certainly capital. You guys are coming in and you're providing the cash into the deal, the deposit money. And whatnot are you doing? Renovations on these things? Yeah, very few of them. We're doing small renovations, but they're usually and they're usually not really crazy. They're 35, 45, 50,000 renovations. Sometimes we really like these little 15, 10, 15 flip it real quick. Make 50K something like that. But we try to be smart, too, with the timing of the market. Like, I'm a big believer in trying to be conservative the best way we can. I don't really like buying 600 $700,000 properties, especially when the market is hot. Obviously, it depends on the value versus what you're paying, but we like to have ones that for some reason, something did go wrong. It might be most of them wouldn't be great rentals, but they wouldn't be too bad. And then in our market, the way we approach it is anything that we can keep as far as the mortgage and the payments and everything kind of work out. We're going to keep it. If not, that's really the only reason that we're flipping it. We'd love to keep everything we could, but we just try to keep the ones that are self sufficient. So on the cash in part, are you guys doing, like, friends and family raises or where is that capital coming from? Is it just purely your capital that's going in? Yeah, it's all the money. So what's really also interesting is with our brokerage. We're not pulling any money out. Alex is my partner. Amazing story, man. He's 27 years old and at the age of 20, he was full blown heroin in jail, and he's seven years sober. He works out every day. He's freaking jacked, and he doesn't even get stressed out because he takes care of himself. And there's a million moving parts. I couldn't do anything that I'm doing without him helping. I'm out there just meeting, networking, doing one thing. He's training people interns. I honestly think he works five jobs, but all the money that we make from the brokerage, we have a big spend on social media. So, I mean, almost have, like, a media Department. We got four full time people salary positions. And that money that we make from the brokerage goes to marketing and goes to buying properties, and we put it all back in, and we just keep doubling down anytime we can. So that was my next question after this question. So I'll come back to that. You're putting the cash into the deal, much of which you're pulling from the revenue of the company. And then what about financing? Are you going to institutional? Guys, you're doing hard money. Are you going and getting hard money? Are you guys lending to yourself as hard money? What does that look like? Yeah, we're getting hard money on most of them. And then we have some pretty good community bank relationships for these larger, like, bought a little mobile home park, 14 units. We're buying a 17 unit apartment in the next 60 days. Those will go get community banking, 20% down. Anything else we will do a hard money. That kind of six and a half. One point. We've done some cool deals, man. We flipped eleven duplexes and we were going to wholesale it, but we had some issues, so we closed on it with hard money. And then the next day, we sold it and made a good profit. And we've wholesaled some really large land tracks. We've gotten money through those aspects, too. We've actually made a lot more money on those deals than on our brokerage or anything else. And that money really supports that goes into the business as well. Sure. So deal sourcing and lead sourcing. You had mentioned four full time people working on your social media outreach. I believe the digital space is the single most important place that you can invest time and money. Now. As an agent, I think that it is the absolute future. So walk us through. What does that look like? These four people, what is it exactly that they're doing? They're placing ads. They're joining groups. Yeah, all of that. And then there's another thing we can talk about. We got the action. So we have some true deal sourcing with people here that are dialing. I mean, we have six acquisitions and dispositions full time, 8 hours a day, cold calling. But as far as the way we have approached social media, it's truly been up to this point, a branding play. We've got filming, editing, recording, commenting, joining the groups. We're on every platform, Instagram, TikTok, everything, YouTube videos, every day, podcast. And the focus hasn't truly been. And maybe this is the fault. I'm not sure, but it's never been to let's funnel all this specifically to get leads. It's more than like, we believe in this. We really want to just give real content. Like, we're not trying to go flash money, show cars. I don't judge that, but we want to be like, here's what we did and here's how we do it. Here's how you can do it, because we believe that we honestly believe everyone can do this if they want to. And it's just been a real value value branding, branding, branding. And we're not trying to get anything from it right now. We like to see a return on it one day, but that hasn't been our focus. We don't try to measure it. I wouldn't even know how to measure it because we'll buy deals from people that they just know that we're legit because they've seen us for four years or our agents join. And that's because they've seen us. It's hard to think about how to measure it, but it hasn't been focused on generating sales as much as and this is just how I frame it. I mean, you might have some advice or a way to view it, but it's just to me. I just say we're trying to brand and we're trying to show people what's possible with real estate. And we are here to support whichever way we can, and we don't need to make any money from that. So folks often don't understand the difference between trading time for money and building leaders that go out and have the ability to sell. Right. So you've got these folks that you're offering value to, and in turn, they're bringing value back to the company. One of the big mistakes we've made in the past is we went too heavy on consulting in the short term. It feels great. And it's nice to have these big consulting contracts. But ultimately, what happens is when you're a decent human being and you're fiduciaries to your client, you inevitably go above and beyond what was the intended scope of that contract. Right? And no matter how much more you're providing in value, you're only getting X amount of dollars in return for that service. If I could offer any advice to the folks out there, it's do not fall into that trap of trading time for money in real estate. The real estate profession is like one of the highest earning potentials of any job that you can have. People don't always make that connection. They think, oh, a realtor. And they have that caricature of, like the 1980s realtor. That's not what this game is anymore. Because the Internet has made so many tools available to us. People are wholesaling. People are following the berm effort. People are fixing and flipping. People are repositioning. People are doing short sales. People are buying notes. There are so many different. I always call it like the mothership is the real estate company for us. But we've now spun off construction, commercial loans, technology, a fund. All of these things come from the mothership, right? It's those connections, and it's spending the time to brand yourself and to get out there and to become a proven entity. It's crazy. It's like you're fighting that fight. At least this was my experience. And then one day you arrive. It's like the doors just start to open. And all of that good work and goodwill and time and energy that you've invested in other people. It just starts to come back to you in droves. That's cool. I just wanted to say one thing. I agree, and it's just really interesting to think about the industry. I know we were talking a little bit about that, but it does seem that that's what everybody's doing is finding multiple avenues to bring in. And I was thinking about this. There's a company here called Realty Austin, and I'd love to hear your opinion on this, too. It's like they're great. I respect them very sharp. They bring in a lot of leads. Their biggest thing is leads, like, I kind of look at them as a lead generating company disguised as a real estate company. Then you got, like, a Compass. They're like a tech company described as a real estate company. We, I think, are going for media as real estate. There's all different ones right, Zillow, all these other things fascinating what's happening. And it does seem like you kind of got to be a little entrepreneurial and have different aspects, and they're all trying to do the same thing. Who knows how that's going to disrupt everything? I feel like this something's going to happen in months or weeks. I don't know. It's like one of these guys going to flip the switch. When is Amazon going to get into real estate? And the only thing I can think about for us for me, because I'm not a tech guy is I feel as if the entrepreneurial agent will be the one that will be fine. They'll just always find a way. But the traditional you're just helping people buy and sell, that's going to become a job or done on the computer. And so we're forced to be creative. And maybe that's why these companies are doing this. But I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. It's just something that I've been thinking a lot about. So without a doubt, there are different companies that are emerging that are focusing in specific disciplines. So, again, technology has opened up such an array of tools for us. You do have the Legion specialist. You do have the marketing specialist, and it goes on and on the tech specialist. We found that there are tech people, and then there are real estate people and software, and we've tried them all. Man, I mean, we've been through. I can't tell you how many different platforms and programs, and inevitably, there are some cool features here and there. But inevitably, when you're a deal maker and you're an entrepreneur, you want to live in that space, you want to live in your gift, right? That's another thing people lose sight of or never even understand is that they need to be living in their gift. And the technology becomes so clunky and difficult to use that it becomes a task. It doesn't seamlessly kind of flow with how a real deal maker goes about their business. So we brought on full time programmers, and we're developing all sorts of neat technology that fits that adaptable flow that an entrepreneur and a deal maker just has ingrained in their DNA, and it keeps them happy, right? It keeps them out of the things that they really don't want to be involved in. They don't want to touch. There's a lot of good platforms out there, but we're building all that stuff ourselves now because of exactly what you just said. We feel like there's so many different companies that are focusing in just different areas. We're just trying to build a better mouse trap. Now we're trying to take components of all of it and put it together and make a super brokerage of something that has investment funds that has the people that are out as Legion specialists, totally separate from your actual deal maker that are using the best slickest tech that we're developing in house because you can and you have to, right. The market's not going to always be like this, bro. I've been through now. I've been through the 2008 crash for us locally. It was 911 was a really difficult time for us personally, but also in real estate. Superstorm Sandy was another devastating blow personally and in the market. And, of course, the global pandemic, coupled with the decentralization of real estate from all major cities, that is very real. And it is happening. And it's why some of these other markets are exploding. So the bad market is coming. It always does. It comes in a different form, and it comes sometimes out of nowhere. But it will come. And when it does, we want to be as balanced as we can to make sure that we can not only endure, but prosper through those challenging times. Right? Every challenge creates an opportunity. Yes. Hey, man, I agree. I respect your opinion. Hey, who knows? Maybe we'll tap into partnering together on some of that stuff because I know, like you said, we're real estate guys, I know we need tech, but I don't even know the first step to get involved, and I honestly don't really want to. I'd rather just partner with someone one day. Never know. I instantly start thinking about that. Like, well, maybe we came up because essentially, that's exactly what we're trying to do, but we're doing it here. We're in a good market. We've got it dialed in. But to take it outside of this market, we need more good people to help us out for sure. So absolutely. I want to make sure we talk offline. And that's a mistake that we also made. Matt, is we want it to be the best in each area, and you can't. There are people that are just focusing on these little five degree pieces of the real estate pie, and they're crushing in that five degree space. We're relying externally on the places we don't have passion. I love technology. It's a complete dinosaur. I was the guy that didn't want to email, and I've embraced it wholly and fully. Now, my CMOS played a huge part in that Peter, who you spoke to earlier, and Rebecca has played a huge part in that. And we're bringing in house parts that we're super passionate about, things that we have a really deep understanding of and the rest of the stuff we're partnering, right? Just like you said, it's funny, because I made a note on the sheet, set up a separate call because I'd love to talk to you about some more of this stuff offline. But before I let you go, could you talk a little bit about the market down there locally? Pre Corona currently. And what you see post Corona? Yeah, man. Opportunity City. That's what we call it. My parents moved here in 1091. Austin has always been a hot market even since then. And what everyone always says is that it really is a market that goes up, levels, off, goes up. It never really dipped even in 2008. Who knows if that stays true, but it's relatively affordable compared to a lot of places in the country. You can buy houses here for 300, 350,000 and some of these suburbs. And even in parts of Austin, there's just a massive amount of jobs coming here. Very diverse job sector. We got University of Texas, we got the capital government. There's a big tech component, financial services. It's a very hip, cool vibe, energy, vibe, music, good food. People love it here, man. And Tesla announced that they were coming. They're not the first big company, but that was a big change. Tesla says they're coming. Samsung is doing a $17 billion facility in Taylor, Texas. You got Apple doing a $5 billion Oracle moving their headquarters here, Facebook, Google, Amazon, everyone's coming here. And there's a good talent pool because there's a lot of people that want to be here. Everyone, in my opinion, knows Austin is the coolest place to be in Texas. Texas, in general, is a really business friendly place. So it's friendly for businesses. There are jobs, which, as you know, that's all it really is in real estate is jobs, jobs, jobs. And the fascinating thing is Tesla's coming in, right? They're not even hiring yet. Really? Like, we haven't even gotten close to. They're still building the building. So what does that look like? I don't know. I'm a big believer. I'm drinking the Koolaid, and I think this is going to be one of the best places to be over the next 20 years. On a real estate perspective, it's not a cash flow market. It truly is an appreciation market. You're buying these houses for $350,000. They're renting out for 20, 00, 17, 20% down payment. That won't cash flow. So I thought we were hot before Covet. I remember now looking back at the prices. I'm still baffled. And that wasn't even that long ago. But being around it, you think about real estate 20 years ago, what were the prices? It's even weird now, for me, two years ago, I was looking at these houses that I could have bought that I thought were I was passing on them at 170, and now they're 273, 50. So it was hot. Covet hit little bit of a standoff, period. Like, there was a lot here. It was like two months of just kind of unknown. And then it just lit on fire. Really. It was nothing like I had ever seen. The houses just literally went up overnight. They were going 100 and 5200 over asking. And it was straight up because of supply and demand. If you look back at it, like on our MLS right now, we'll have 5000 plus listings. But when that was happening in January, February, March of this year, there was like, 900 listings in the entire MSA. And so it was kind of like pick your price, and that settled down a little bit. There's not that chaos going on, but things are still trending up. Don't know, man, what's going to happen next. But we try to think of everything in 1520 year mindsets. We try not to buy properties that, like I said, aren't sustainable by the mortgage. And yeah, it's just been pretty up. I mean, it's kind of how it's always been here. I don't know what's going to happen next, but it does seem with the jobs that continue to come here and they say 200 people move to Austin every day. It does seem like it's going to keep going up. But you've been through a downturn. I haven't. I feel like sometimes I'm saying this stuff and I'm the idiot in the room that's like things are going to keep going, and eventually they're not. But all the fundamentals kind of show that you're spot on. So if I may having been through several downturns, I could tell you there are certain metrics to keep an eye on. So we went ahead and traveled all over the country after eight because I wanted to see what caused the secondary markets that were able to sustain and by sustaining back then, if you lost 1012 percent of value, it wasn't the end of the world. There were places that were losing 40, 50, 60% of their value. And we went to some locations that had it was like a zombie apocalypse apocalypse movie. You would walk in and see entire housing developments where, like boats are in the driveway. Coffee pot is still on the countertop. And the keys are there like people just the market shifted. They were no longer able to afford that home. They got into a bad subprime deal and they just picked up and went to a better place where there were jobs. That was the difference. The markets that had a strong job center are the ones that endure, the ones that don't are dead. And we're seeing people decentralize out of these big cities because in large part of legislative threats, that is the number one thing in the SWOT analysis for us. Now, what do the legislative threats look like? Because while it's best intended in many cases, it's become extremely difficult to do business in New York, extremely difficult. People are picking up and they're relocating entire companies like you said Tesla, Samsung. These big companies are now decentralizing to these other places because work at home is here. It's here to stay. The reason that those companies stayed in the big cities was access to workforce. It was the place to be. But as the people migrate out of the big cities, which is here to stay. Also, people got to that point where their habits have changed. People are not going to go back. I'm still baffled when I talk to some people and they're like, Well, this is going to end and everything is going to stabilize. No, this is the new norm. Now, folks, this is the way it is moving forward. They're fleeing to markets like this. The one thing I would say to keep an eye on is when the legislative threats start to increase. Right? And you start seeing far more restrictive zoning, far more restrictive bureaucracy. A lot more red tape. That's when the market starts to become a little bit challenged, because the folks that are leaving because of those threats bring their politics with them often. And that's where it starts. But when this music stops, man, some of these secondary markets and now we're seeing big money go to the tertiary markets, it's going to be open season season. Yes, I hear you, man. I take that advice. Good. One thing that we're super excited about. It's like a small little town way west of here, 17 unit apartment in Lano, Texas. It's a small little town, but it's one of those weird ones where it's already a good deal. It's 1.1 million. It brings in $12,000 ran. It's pretty good for here. But it's like, is this market blow up one day? I think it will. But I've never invested in the market with 5000 people and no major job for us. But to your point, there's a river running through it. It's a cool town. Maybe that does. And that thing will go up in triple in value overnight if something like that happens. Yeah. Interesting stuff, man. So you're a great follow. Do you mind sharing some of the handles for the audience so they know where to find you? Yeah, absolutely. So typekey real estate. We're on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all of it really easy to find. Just typekey real estate. T-E-I-F-K-E. And we're everywhere, man, we get out there. I'm on Facebook. We're super easy to get a hold of would love any kind of subscribers or followers or just anything we can do to help you guys or your listeners. We're here to help, and we're serious. I mean, we'll get back to you. We're real and we're very committed to this. So we want to help people that care about this. I really appreciate your time, Matt. Best of luck to you and to your partner. Congratulations on all the success. And we're definitely going to reach out offline. Thank you, sir. I appreciate your time as well. Alright, bud. Stay safe.