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David: Alright guys, welcome back. Today, Mike and I were both here in the studio, we just finished up a meeting, so it's actually Monday morning, regardless of what time you guys are listening and every Monday, we come in, we get the whole team on a live, not live but like a zoom call essentially and that consists anywhere from you know five to seven people typically and we talk about what's going on in our business. A lot of things typically happen in real estate over the weekend, so the reason we choose to do our calls or weekly calls on Monday morning is very beneficial because it lets everybody know what's going on, what had happened over the weekend, but also what is high priority to start the week. We also have a weekly call with our team Thursday afternoons. So we strategically put these Monday mornings and Thursday afternoons because it's separates them out as far as we can essentially in terms of you know being twice a week but not like right back to back and also we don't typically like to work that hard on Fridays. Let's be honest. So, you know by having these calls Thursday night it's kind of like hey, how we wrapping up the week, what are we going to be working on Friday and the weekend, so on so forth. So it is Monday morning, we just finished our call and you know, we don't do a whole lot of podcasts on our business and kind of an inside look. So today I wanted to just talk a little bit about maybe an inside look into Mike and I's business.

Mike: Yeah, and part of the reason I really like the Monday morning call is not everyone shares the same level of motivation on your team so to get everyone and say hey, it's Monday morning, what are we working on this week?

David: Yeah, 9 am is not too early, but it's also not too late.

Mike: And to give everybody a list of okay, here's what's going on, remember this property? remember this property? What's going on with this one? What's going on with this one? It really just is like, oh, yeah, I've got to do this and it just makes sure that things start moving on Monday morning because again, that's- it's tough for a lot of people. Oh, case of the Mondays, when you're back working that corporate job, you can definitely relate to that. So when we have people on our team, this isn't their passion like it's ours necessarily.

David: You know what's funny Mike? Like, obviously this has been a long time, 10 plus years or maybe not that long, maybe seven or eight years since I've had a boss, right? but I always dreaded Monday mornings. I'm excited to come into work Monday mornings because I know a lot of stuff got completed over the weekend and it's just kind of cool to update, you know, our own internal notes, which we called to start management meeting notes, you know, Mondays and Thursdays on hey, where are we progressing? Where have we maybe not talked or touched on this particular property for 3 or 4 days? Is there any action items that we had set for the last meeting that we haven't got to? You know, so on so forth. So, it keeps everybody in the loop, not only on what deals we're working but closings are coming, what wholesales we can expect, where we may be in a rehab for a rental or a rehab for a flip, just everything.

Mike: In addition to touching base-

David: Touching about everything.

Mike: We modeled it after the traction book or the traction model by Gino Wickman has a book called traction and in that they talk about each thing should really be brought up in the context of issues, discussion, solutions. So, we framed our meeting on that so we kind of talk about okay, here's our rental business or our property management business, what are the issues? What do we need to discuss and what it solutions? So it's kinda that way as well, it's kinda like okay here's what's going on, what's our action items. You know, we kinda have that model for each unit in our business because we have multiple business units. We have our our rental side, we have our wholesale side, we have our rental rehab side, we have a rehab rehab side. What else do we do? That's pretty much it at this point, right? We work with lending.

David: Turnkey sales, we do some brokerage, we have a [inaudible] business Mike.

Mike: Okay, we've got a lot.

David: We've got a lot of stuff going on, right yeah.

Mike: Which is why we have an agenda and a meeting because there's so many little things we need to talk about, make sure that we're trying to keep up and keep moving forward on all those aspects of our business. So, let's talk a little bit about what is actually going on this week in our business Dave. That's kind of our thoughts here is just to share what it's like to be a full-time investor, right?

David: That's right.

Mike: So our property management side, we have pretty much fully outsourced property management at this point. Yes and no. So, they do the day to day, they do the rent collections, they do the accounting for us, all that stuff which is a huge relief. We still get some of the maintenance items, so we talked a little bit about those things, it's like oh, what's going on with this property yada yada and the reason for that is because we want to kinda control our-

David: Costs.

Mike: Our maintenance costs.

David: Our maintenance costs, right.

Mike: Because that is- can be a big profit center for a lot of property managers. It can also be a big- just a big loss leader for your rental properties if someone decides hey let's just go ahead and replace an AC unit instead of getting it fixed if it just needs a fix. That's several thousand dollars.

David: If it just needs a fix, you're talking a difference of 3, maybe 4 grand in differences, right.

Mike: Right, and that's an extreme example.

David: So we choose to do that though which is great. We choose to control the cost of and the quality of the rental properties that we have. So, let's talk about our meeting notes. So again, we try to keep our meeting to an hour, right? We do them twice a week, Mondays at 9 and then Thursdays at 3 in the afternoon and we have our meetings literally agenda scheduled out in advance. So, let's talk about the sections Mike before we dive into each particular section.

Mike: Yeah.

David: So you had mentioned property management. Well, Mike and I's number one goal is to get you know, 150 rental properties, right? We got up to almost 70 at one point. I think right now maybe we're down to 40 and the reason is we're selling off a lot of our properties, not all of them of course, but a lot of them that you know, essentially we maybe had 20 grand in equity in it or 15 grand when we bought it, and now all of a sudden it's 30 or 40, and it's because the market is so hot and our goal is to get rental properties and create passive income but you also can't be hard-headed and the reason I say that is because if a property is making you anywhere from four to seven thousand a year in passive income and you can capitalize an additional fifteen maybe twenty thousand right now, how many years would you have to wait in passive income to get that 20 grand? and if you're only making three or four, I mean that could be five years, six years, right?

Mike: Right, when you talk about- 6 or 7 Dave, I mean think about our numbers, we shoot for $400 per month per property so that's only 4800 dollars.

David: That's what we shoot for, our average is probably closer to 3, 3 and a quarter.

Mike: Right, so you're talking about 400 times 12 is 4800, so that's 5 grand per year.

David: That's 5 grand. If you can make 20-

Mike: Right. So you can make 30, 40-

David: 30 or 40, right.

Mike: Then it gets very very interesting to possibly sell it and reinvest that into two other properties or three other properties or whatever.

David: Right, right but we we lead with the property management because also, you know, if you have a vacant house, you know, that's something that's really important. In my opinion, like getting that vacant house leased is probably more important than anything else that I can do that day or the team because there's the opportunity cost there and when you get up to maybe having you know 30, 50, in our case we had 70, we're probably down to maybe 40, 45 right now. It is the most important thing. Keep your eye on the assets because they are not assets if they're not rented, right? So that's where we start, so our meeting is broken down into maybe five or six different segments, property management being number one. Next, we talk about our rehabs for retail meaning our flips, okay? Again, time is money right? When we are doing our flips, Mike and I use none of our own money, literally none. We're always borrowing the purchase plus the rehab. In some cases we're paying annual, I'm sorry, in some cases we're paying monthly interest. In other cases, we can get the interest tacked on in the rears and we just pay it all back whenever we go to sell or refi that property. So rehabs for retail or fix and flips is the next item. Again, time is money so we want to make sure we're talking about these flips at least twice a week.

Mike: Okay, so what's going on with a couple of our flips too? cuz this is what kinda motivated the idea to talk about our meeting, right? So we've got this is something that is so confusing to us and we're-

David: Let's circle back.

Mike: Okay.

David: The reason I wanna talk about the segments.

Mike: Okay.

David: And then we'll drop into that one but I like where your heads at. We only got a couple more. Next is rehabs for a rental, right? Or the rental properties that aren't essentially ready to hand off to the property manager. So when Mike and I buy properties, we're always buying direct to the seller like 19 out of 20 times, right? Almost every single time, 19 out of 20 is direct to seller marketing, right? So when we buy these properties, we're- we don't pay retail, that is no secret. We don't pay retail, period, okay? So with that being said, we're buying properties that typically needed a lot of work. People are just going to say hey, I'm willing to give you a 30 to 50% discount on my property. If it's top-notch, they know that they can get more, but when a property needs 20, 40, 50 grand worth of work, they're willing to give you a discount on it because you're solving a ton of problems. So next we talk about the properties that we have just bought from direct to seller marketing that are in the queue to be rehabbed or have some sort of maintenance being done. That essentially is the next high level of priority. So the re- the rental property management's first then our fix and flips, next will be the rehabs to go into the portfolio or maybe even to be sold off turn key. That's the third level of priority for us.

Mike: One thing I think about too is that our rehabs, we've got two tiers. So our rehab to retail like Dave mentioned.

David: That's second, right and there's [inaudible].

Mike: Rehab to rental. Well, the way that I view rehab to rental, that is a vacancy. So David mentioned earlier like your property management- your vacancies, that's one of your top priorities. Well to me, those rehab to rentals, every day or week or two weeks that that sits without being completed, that's a vacancy. That is a property that is not bringing in money, it costs you money.

David: It's a cost. It's not an asset, it's an expense.

Mike: And it's not just an imaginary cost, there are real dollars involved. Even if you have no loan, you should have insurance on the property and you're going to have taxes on it. It's unavoidable.

David: Right.

Mike: So you have expenses with this property that is a real cost if you have a vacancy, that's why rehabbing those rentals, got to be quick on them as well. It's very very important.

David: Right, so after we talk about the- so again, lets recap. Property M=management, fix and flip, rehab to rental, right? or rehab to keep essentially it's the cherry-picked deals. Next is our wholesales, we talk about hey, what deals are we closing this week? Are we making profits on this particular deal or are we going to be keeping this particular deal from a closing? Also, what leads are really close? We talk about what's under contract already and what's actually, you know, soon to be under contract and then we just talk about everything else in wholesale like, you know, who's behind on leads, who needs help? How are our cold callers operating? How are our cold texters operating? Are we doing enough marketing? Is there enough leads that are coming in to hit the property acquisitions team, so on so forth. Next we talk about brokerage and we talk about student success, okay. So brokerage, Mike and I have a business that does brokerage. Mike's the broker here, I am not but we do have some agents that work for us and sometimes they will need some support or just talk about what's going on, what's being listed.

Mike: Again, it's another part of the business we try to put little effort into it because it's not our hey. Again, it's part of the business because it's part of the business. When we buy and list and sell properties, it's part of the business. You're going to be involved with real estate agents, with brokers, we thought let's go ahead and open the brokerage but again, we are not working to build that business as aggressively as we are other parts of our business. So again, it has to be on our front of mind or part of our you know, part of our meeting but it's kind of back of mind for our business.

David: Right.

Mike: So we move on, then we talk about coaching.

David: Then we talk about student success. Hey, what is going on with the students? How can we reach out to these people and help them, you know, ideally what we'll do is we'll be like who have we not talked to in 4, 5, 6, 7 days, let's call them. Let's see what we can do to help you know, improve their marketing, their offer generation, their appointment setting, their analysis of deals or whatever.

Mike: Yeah, what issue are they having?

David: Right.

Mike: What issue are they having in their business? How can we help?

David: How can we help?

Mike: What direction can we help point you in so that you can figure out yourselves?

David: Yup, and then we kinda wrap our meeting up with a couple little small notes. So, we talk about our upcoming purchases. Those could be wholesale purchases, they could be landlord rental purchases, they could be fix and flip purchases, they can be purchases that we'd want to rehab and then sell turkey but regardless, we talk about what's in the upcoming queue for this week or next and is there anything that we need to do to purchase that, is there any outstanding items? Next we talk about just the company and the company issues. Do we have any issues? Let's discuss them. Let's come up with solutions for those. We also have a little time block for full disclosure, is anybody doing something

Mike: This is important to me and I think that it's important to- there will be to you if you have a business partner. Block off a minute to just have a full disclosure conversation and just bring it up with the fact that you're both in real estate and yeah you want to work together but if you want to do something on the side, if you talk about it ahead of time and you just say hey Dave, I got this lead from my grandma or whatever, I'm helping my cousin do this, just say no.

David: Yeah, we don't ask for permission in our full disclosure- sorry about that- typically. Instead it's hey guys, I'm doing this and it's like great, I would never not want Mike to go do another rehab or add another rental to his personal portfolio, but it would suck if I found out that he's doing it behind my back. So, do it in front of the partner or a team.

Mike: But no, the thing is if you do it without discussing it, it's kinda like well I wonder where that lead came from?

David: It just brings up, yeah.

15:15

Mike: So, there's just too many unknowns, so I think that's extremely important when you start working with partners is to make sure you put a full disclosure section in there just so that anytime you ever feel like hey, I want to mention- and sometimes we bring up what's going on our personal lives too, like hey, I'm going to be really busy, this is going on, sorry guys.

David: Or I'm taking a vacation guys.

Mike: Right, I-m down to get out of the office.

David: So don't call me for a week and a half, I'm gonna be skiing or whatever it might be. So, full disclosure is a big part of it though. Keep your investors, your team, your people in the loop. Let them know what's going on and if it's an outside of business thing, that's fine, just let everybody know so we don't hear about it later and it causes stress, animosity, anxiety or whatever it could bring.

Mike: And 9 times out of 10 when your partner with somebody, I  mean they usually are not trying to screw you over.

David: No, not at all or they'll offer some help. How can I help you with your little side gig? Totally get that.

Mike: It's almost never are you trying to do anything- but again, it just feels that way to the other person and you can't help but feel that way if you find out about it after the fact and it just- just don't do that.

David: Right.

Mike: Just nip it in the bud and say hey guys, this is what I'm doing, letting you know. You know, I'm still going to be doing everything else for you guys, but yeah.

David: That's right. So next we talk about finances guys, we talk about what bills we have come and do with either, you know, a rehab or property management or the purchase or a rehab of a new property, so we kind of take a look at our books and our numbers and we pull up the bank account and we basically try to say hey, you know what do we have going out this week or next? What's coming in? and are we going to be in a good situation? And if not, we should probably adjust the plan. So it's just the numbers and accounting side of things.

Mike: This is a tough one. So like numbers- as somebody comes from the day job thing then moving to self employed and then moving to small business, it's very very difficult to manage finances at these different levels and then to do it- like it is.  I still don't know that we're doing it 100% accurately. We've got-

David: Yeah, but we're looking at it twice a week though and that's the thing.

Mike: I know, it just is- I'm just talking like it is something, it's very- it can be overwhelming so yeah, you got to keep your eye on the ball though and the dollar bills are the ball in business.

David: That's right.

Mike: Got to keep your eyes on them.

David: So last but not least, it goes hand-in-hand with the accounting side of our meeting notes is the NOIS's which basically just means hey what property are we intending or planning on selling in the next 30 days and if we did a lot of work to it, let's file with the county a notice of intent to sell. It's just a simple thing that's recorded with the county but what that does is it allows us the ability to not have to bring in all the receipts at closing but it also notifies anybody and all people that would want to go look and see that we do intend to sell it, so if they are a contractor and they wanna file a lien for whatever reason, they need to get their ducks in a row. Now again, that's very rare that happens but this is public information. You file a notice of intent to sell, it tells everybody hey, we intend to sell this property in the next, what was it 45 days and if we don't already have that NOIS filed with the county, now is the time to kind of review the entire meeting and see what we need to send and we did it today and we found four, four! We talked about this on Thursday guys, Monday today, this morning, there was four properties that we found that we not necessarily overlooked on Thursday, but we're getting to the point where we're getting so close to listing that now is the time to file these. So, those are the different sections, let's do a quick recap. We start with, sorry to be screwing over here Mike, we start with our property management. That's really what our passion is. All of our motivated seller marketing is really to cherry-pick the deals for us to rehab or to rent. Everything else gets wholesaled. So our goal isn't even to market for wholesales, that just happens. How crazy is that? The wholesale deals, they just happen because we passed on it but everything that we market to is: is it worth it to keep? That's the goal for us so it's a means to an end. So, we start with the property management, next we look at the rehabs to retail which is our fix and flips, you know, what happened over the last few days? What can anybody do to speed this up? Are we having any issues with labor? Are we having any issues with materials or ordering of windows, appliances, countertops, these things may take a couple weeks so we want to make sure we're talking about them often so we're not waiting till the last minute to order windows that take 8 weeks, right? So rehabs to retail, next we talk about rehabs for rental which could be properties that we're rehabbing to lease out or could be properties that we're rehabbing to lease out to then list and sell, but either way, it's the next list on the priority. Finally, we talked about brokerage, student success, upcoming purchases and then of course global issues within our company as well as full disclosure and then we ended up- we ended out with the accounting and the numbers and the bills and the expenses and the income and the money that's going out and we want to make sure that we don't get ourself into a tight spot. So, Mike I'm glad that we were able to cover the overview, I didn't mean to cut you off earlier.

Mike: Oh you're good.

David: If you wanna dive into each section, we can or we can just talk about the recap of the call today, either way.

Mike: Yeah, well no, the recap is what I was excited to talk about because it is so interesting. The NOIS, and you've talked about it now a little bit is just something that is so mind-blowing to me and so-

David: How much work it prevents.

Mike: Well it prevents but also it's sort of complicated and not really that well understood by me at least, by you I know because we still- we're always like oh well how many days and blah blah blah blah blah. So, that's what we picked up today is that we need to file four of these NOIS's is because again, we are going to sell them. It's a notice of intent to sell and they're filed so that it allows workers or I guess contractors who have performed work on properties to know that this property is being sold so if they need to attach a mechanic's lien to it, they could. That's the- that's the in my brain, the point of it, right? Is so that people who say, oh wait a minute-

David: It also reuses a lot of- a lot of, I don't know what you would- what to call it, I guess legality from a title companies point of view. So if you say- if you filed this paperwork with the county saying I intend to sell this property, well when they get to the closing they see hey you've went out of your way to tell the entire world, this is public information that you intend to sell if there's nobody that, you know, that hasn't got their mechanic's lien in yet, that's their problem.

Mike: Well, and it's not necessarily a lien, if there's anybody who believes their owed money-

David: Any debtors.

Mike: From you because of something about this property. So that's the whole idea is that anybody who did work on it gets paid because you're going to get a big chunk of money when you sell this house most likely, so some of that money should be directed to them if they are entitled to it. So that's the whole idea but then the process of it is somewhat complicated and that's why it's actually one of the topics on our meeting note is NOIS's because you have to review it so often, you can't just buy it and we've learn this through years of working together. You can't just buy a property and say okay, I'm going to file a NOIS because guess what guys? I'm gonna sell this in the next 6 months. I'm gonna rehab it, I'm gonna freaking sell it, can't file it then. Why not?

David: Yeah.

Mike: Why not? Like, wouldn't that make sense?

David: Yeah, there's a reason why you would file a NOIS, but also they don't want you to file it and then sell your property 8 years later. It's time- time isn't really helping it, right? So Mike, that's a great point and I think what you're getting at is when you file your NOIS, you are assuming that you're going to have it sold within 30 days enclosed within 45 so sometimes we will wait until we go to list it or maybe a week or two prior to actually listing the property. Otherwise, if you get outside of those time frames, you have to file another NOIS, it basically voids itself out.

Mike: We have to wait until that month before.

David: And we have to wait, right.

Mike: You have to because if you think about a retail sale, they always- when they go on the market, it's always 30 days to close. There's never- I mean it's very rare that an agent writes an offer and says, let's close in 2 weeks with this bank. That does not happen, banks are 30 days and that is on a good day. I mean again, these banks take longer and longer. So these NOIS's are tricky when you have to file it within 30 days of the sale and 45 days of the close like it is, it's pretty tricky so we almost always do. We go through it, we look at okay, which ones are we listing? Which ones have we got a contract on if they're not listed, they're off market and we have to figure this stuff out and and plan it out that way. So the NOIS again, it's just something that- it's a- it's difficult for me to wrap my brain around like why wouldn't mechanics want to know hey, if I'm doing a job on this one, these guys are planning on selling this one, I should make sure that I get my myself paid you know, or I should file on it if I don't get paid, you know.

David: Right. We don't ever have issues with mechanics liens cuz we pay our people.

Mike: We pay.

David: Right. But you never know if there's somebody else that, you know, may have interest in the property from before you bought it and they may want to claim on it and so on so forth, so something to be aware of. So Mike, lets- without boring everybody too bad about our meeting notes and our weekly calls and meetings, let's talk about the recap. So these- we try to keep our meetings to an hour and we're going to try to keep this podcast to maybe 25 minutes give or take right? So the meeting, we go through every single property that we have in our portfolio or that's- has an action item, maybe not every property if it's already handed over to property management, but basically anything that has any action items on it or any issues right? So again, we start with the property management, we say hey, what are our categories here Mike? We have vacants, we start with that. Hey, what's vacant over here? We have two different properties right now that are vacant, the property management team is on it so we're gonna follow up with them. We're gonna say hey, any update on these two? Have you got them leased or is there anything that we need to do on our end to help you get them leased? Next, we talk about Section 8 issues or anybody that is going into eviction or in eviction or in collections, right? and we just talk about the list. Who is on the list? Who is- What's been collected recently and is there anything we can do to help with that? What am I missing?

Mike: Well you're getting off track Dave cuz we were talking about- lets try to focus [inaudible].

David: Oh cool cool cool.

Mike: All good.

David: So, from the meeting notes from today, here is basically the summary: closings this week, we have two closings this week. We have Coyle and MarMawry, these are both properties that we are selling, one Thursday, one Friday. Closing soon, we have one on Isolda and another on Osceola, so those aren't closing this week, but they're going to be closing most likely next week. So reason that we have them in our summary is what do we need to do with these for next week to make sure they close? So have we talked to the sellers? Have we talked to the buyers? Have we talked to the title company? Do they have everything that they need from us so we can have a smooth transaction? Next we have leads to figure out and there's one on Kings that we have that we need to figure out. We were waiting to buy this for 2 months so a lien would fall off and a new one came on in that time. It happens, but guess what? That's not abnormal, our job is to solve problems.

Mike: True, it's true.

David: So it's like okay one problem went away, a new one came, we're not stopping. So literally it's leads to figure out and work and see what we can do to get it done. What's next? And then Mike you had mentioned NOIS, we talked a lot about that. We found four properties and we didn't overlook four of them on Thursday, but we weren't ready the list within 1 to 2 weeks of any of these Thursday, but now we had a lot of people working over the weekend and now we're literally within 1 to 2 weeks of listing for sale, Sunshine, Virginia, Glendale and Villa Marie. It's four different addresses essentially or houses that it's like okay, now is the time to file these NOIS's, let's do it, so we have a list of those for our closing coordinator to send the notice of intent to sell to the county and get recorded. Next we have follow up on a couple different leads that are really close to getting under contract, and we're doing a couple of joint ventures with some students as well as just some offers that we had sent out, so we're going to be talking about those and then we literally have four other properties: St. Catherine's, San Jose, Kings Highway and Grenoble under contract to be purchased. The closing date on that is still probably around 30 to 40 days out cuz we just got those under contract in the last one to two weeks, but they're on our radar, right? So we're going to probably make an effort to stop by those properties this week, see if there's anything that we can do to prevent the buyer's due diligence from flagging something. I mean essentially we're going to make sure that these properties are going to be a nice smooth easy transaction, make sure that the tenants are all up-to-date and if they're not leased, we're going to find a tenant in the meantime. So that's it though, that is the summary of our notes and it goes through a lot more detail in the hour that we are talking about it, but everything that is either vacant or being rehabbed or needs to close, we talk about. We talk about it twice a week, we make sure that the entire team is in the loop and that's it. So guys, if you have a team of people and you are not meeting at least once a week, Mike and I recommend twice a week and we strategically put our meetings Monday mornings and Thursday afternoons, so we could space them out as far as possible, but we could also keep everybody in the loop as much as we possibly can, so twice a week we know where we're at with our rehabs, with our rentals, with our wholesales so if anybody needs help, they can speak up at that time. So, meeting notes or marketing, not marketing, management meetings or internal company meetings are super important guys, we highly stress that you do them. You put together an agenda and I think that's one of the reasons why were able to get through these in an hour and not 2 to 3 is because we have an agenda and if we go off the agenda for a minute or two, that's fine but one of us will typically say, hey guys, let's stay focused, you know, put that on the side burner, make a note, we'll talk about it at the end but this is what we're talking about right now and because we have that agenda, it allows us to go through these meetings with a great deal of efficiency. Close us out Mike.

Mike: Alright guys, thanks for listening, we'll talk to you later.

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