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Mike: Alright guys, welcome back to the discount property investor podcast. Your host Mike Slane today and I've got a very special guest, I'm very excited to welcome TJ Kosen on. TJ how are you doing today man?

TJ: Hey I'm doing great Mike. Thanks so much for having me on, it's good to be here.

Mike: Yeah welcome welcome. I'm excited to learn more about TJ and what you guys are doing freaking dominating down there in Texas, at least that's what I hear, just crushing the game in all things real estate, right? How's it going down there?

TJ: Well first of all, who's lying about us man? I gotta- I gotta call them out on Facebook. No it's going good, it's going good like it's a hot market but it's a solid market, we love working in Dallas. So we do a pretty high volume of flips, wholetails and probably maybe 30, 35% wholesales. We do marketing all in DFW, so DFW is like freaking huge. We're 6-7 million people, plenty deals here but we also do some campaigns in like the whole state or like selected counties and we're doing some stuff in North Carolina so we're having fun, we're having fun.

Mike: Oh wow. Cool, so you guys are the virtual game too. I was about to ask if you were driving to all those properties across the state.

TJ: No.

Mike: The quick answer is no and that's great.

TJ: When we close on stuff, we usually have one of the guys in the office put eyes on it but if we're just wholesaling, we kind of do the- and again we don't do a ton of wholesaling but when we do, you know, we try to do as little work as possible, make as much money as possible. I think that's what you're supposed to do, isn't it?

Mike: Well I mean not if you go to school and listen to the man. That's the exact opposite.

TJ: Well yeah I wouldn't know a lot about that. I haven't had a real job since- I was a loan officer in 2006 and I did that for like 6 months and I think I was pretty good at it but it's the last time I had like even a real job and I'm not even sure if that counted as a real job.

Mike: I think I was about the same, I honestly- I'm so bad with time. I mean I don't even know, I've been in this game for yeah about 8 years, 9 years full time now so that puts us around the same time but yeah it's so much more fun and I agree with you man. You just kind of try to work as little as possible but accomplish as much as possible, right?

TJ: Yeah there's- I mean there's different stages I guess, the business kind of development and I think we're probably in a pretty similar stage in the business where like you gotta go through the hustler stage, the like figure stuff out stage, the work your ass off stage- work your butt off stage or whatever. And then the next kind of- phase two is probably business building and then working on focusing on people instead of product and that's- I think that's so much more rewarding. And then probably phase three is like kinda more taking yourself out of the business and working on like higher level stuff and that's you know, that's obviously a third level struggle but being in phase two is kind of nice because you kind of pick and choose what you want to do. You put people in the right seats that you don't want to like work on and kind of you know, expand as much as you can I guess.

Mike: Yeah I think you're right man. I think- I love the way you phrased that, phase one, phase two, phase three. And I do, I think phase two has been really fun for me, you know. Phase one, you're right, is really just a hustle and a grind, and I just had lunch with a buddy and he's a couple years behind and I said man you are so close to that hump or over the hill you know, to where it's like once you get a couple years in, you're in that phase two right? And that's when it kind of gets easier, it gets a little bit more fun, you're a little bit more relaxed day to day I think.

TJ: I think you change your mindset from a kind of a transactional almost self employed kind of thing where you know, you're trying to hustle, you're trying to get the next deal, you're trying to do all that, but you're really putting yourself in all the different seats versus when you change and it's a big leap, it's a big leap isn't it? But when you change from 'I gotta do all this different stuff myself' to well how do I build up people and put people in the right place and have them do stuff that you know, maybe just don't want to do or maybe I'm not good at? And you know, it's kind of a kind of a leap of faith and it's also kind of you get their best way by doing I think more volume 'cause I like to say two things in the business: one, I'm not trying to outwork anyone, we work really hard and we do a lot of work but we try to optimize what's working for us. And two, I work under a lot less stress the more deals we have. If we have just a couple of deals on the board then I'm stressed because if one of those deals goes south, it can take out a month or can you know, if it's really bad, it can take out a while but if you have you know, 20, 25 deals on the board, the kind of not so good ones kind of weed themselves out and you don't really feel them too bad and the really good home runs that you know, you pat yourself on the back when you do them, but realistically the only reason you got them is 'cause you're doing enough volume to be able to kind of stumble into them. The harder- the more you work and the more like optimized I think your work is, the more really lucky you become like you stumble on the lucky ones once in a while, now they're fun.

Mike: Yeah I couldn't agree more. I really do think that yeah you create your own luck. Luck is one of those things that yeah we talk about a lot and I don't try to be too motivational on it but yeah it is, it's just it's true. I mean you just have to work and eventually you get lucky by working hard enough and doing enough volume.

TJ: Yeah, absolutely.

Mike: So what do you do mostly? I mean I'm coming from kind of a newer investor mindset, at least I always try to talk to the newer investor on the podcast and I'm thinking like wholesale. So are you talking about wholesale specifically or wholesale or rental acquisition or the flips? I mean what do you guys focus on and what's your kind of bread and butter down there? What do you guys doing most?

TJ: Yeah dude, I love that question and what- probably the same as you guys 'cause you guys do a ton of rentals, you do some flips, you do some other stuff. I think the best way for newer investors to get started is you use the word focus and I actually have it on my computer screen right here, focus in big letters. Cause it's easy to get the shiny object oh man I can do that and I can do that and I can do that, and each time you do something different, you kind of lose effectiveness I think in what you are already good at doing. So I think it's really critical for investors in the space to really start with something that they want to do 'cause realistically it all makes money, there's all a pathway for making it make money. It doesn't mean you can't lose money in different avenues but it all makes money. You know wholesales make money, flips, wholetails, rentals, all that stuff makes money but it really, you know, you gotta pick a path to maybe someone else- I don't know, maybe get a mentor or something, I don't even know. But maybe you follow someone else that knows what they're doing or get some tips and say hey do one thing first and like focus on that and then start adding on these extra things here and there. So having been in the business a while, we focus on different stuff really. We're primarily rehab so we do a ton of fix and flips. We do a decent volume of wholesales but we do those more when we interest deals either but they don't really kind of fit our by criteria or if we're just feel kind of overextended on the flip process, maybe we'll wholesale a couple more than general. And then the niche that we really love though in our Dallas market when stuff is super hot is the wholetail market which is the kind of combination between retail up here and wholesale down here. And what we've noticed especially in our market 'cause I like to look at our business itself as being a marketing company more than a real estate company where real estate is just the product. So we do a lot of- all of our deals are direct to seller, probably same as you guys but we really focus on those KPI's even more than the flip KPI's because if you blow it out of the park with a flip, that's awesome but it can you know, it can skew your KPI one way or the other, and if you take a wholesale and make 5K on it and your marketing cost is 3500 bucks, now KPI wise, it's driving down your average right?  But you and I both know that you got to close on the smaller deals in order to pay the bills so KPI's can be kind of a skewed metric.

Mike: Oh they're so tricky man. We never really fine tuned our KPI's like we should.

TJ: It's- because it's kind of a moving target and so yeah getting on that I guess, talking about the marketing company, I like to say that we don't repeat the product because the product is always relatively unique to the house, you don't know exactly what you're getting but you repeat the process. So if you like you and us both, if we have the marketing like fine tuned and working well then we know it's going to spit out deals, and then once we get the deal, the real estate side of it's relatively straightforward. You just figure out what you want to do with the house once you got it. And then on the rehab side, since we do a pretty good volume of rehabs, we really try to product defy the rehab site as well as we can too where we're really putting in the same stuff kind of over and over and over again, like we have our color palette we like, we have our tile selection we like. Our rehabs I mean they're not exactly- I mean they're sexy in terms of they look good but they all look exactly the same.

Mike: They're boring you at this point aren't they man?

TJ: I put up 20 rehabs like man that looks just like that one like that's kind of the point.

Mike: Yeah.

TJ: That's cause it sells.

Mike: I was just- I was actually gonna ask that because I mean rehabbing to me, like I don't think we've had the same success as you. It's been more of a challenge. I just- I don't like the rehabs. I don't like dealing with the retail buyers, the retail agents. It's just not something that that we've really enjoyed, we really like the rental side of it more.

TJ: See that's kinda funny 'cause I'm bad- I mean I'm not bad, we're good at rentals but I'm bad like up here with wanting to have more rentals and we talked before the show a little bit where like I need to build up the rental portfolio more. We've had a bunch in the past that we've done decent on and we have some but now we like- I guess I get a little greedy with transactional income with turning over another deal and they can count the big chunky piece.

Mike: Yeah, the big spreads are fun man, that's the sexy right? Yeah

TJ: I guess so.

Mike: Yeah that's the sizzle man. People love the big numbers. So to me, I really like the analogy of a piggy bank. You got Donald Duck behind you or Scrooge McDuck, the river is back there, right?

TJ: He's my hero.

Mike: I love it.

TJ: He's my hero dude.

Mike: He's swimming in a pile of money man, that's what I like. I like piggy banks. So Dave gave me this analogy and I absolutely love it is we look at every house as a piggy bank and it forces you to save those paychecks. So every time you buy a rental property, it's basically just another piggy bank or kind of in your picture there, it's another coin. Like every single one is just another one that you're forcing yourself to save as opposed to spend. So that's really where my passion lies and again I'm kind of interested, I want to hear a little bit more about- 'cause you are doing it all which is amazing but you've got the focus and the shiny object syndrome, you mentioned that a few minutes ago.

TJ: Yeah.

Mike: So what is your focus TJ? I'm hearing so many things and it's because again, we all in real estate, I feel like the longer we're in it, the more we're doing, you know?

TJ: Yeah absolutely.

Mike: Yeah so I mean which one is your focus in your business or in your market? I mean which one do you really- is it those big paychecks? Is that the thing?

TJ: No, it's a- you know, it's a fantastic question and I guess taking a step back, our focus is the direct to seller marketing.

Mike: Okay.

TJ: So our focus is getting- again, going back to I consider the company almost a marketing company not a real estate company.

Mike: Okay very good.

TJ: And so that's- those are the KPI's we look at. We look at the cost per deal, we look at the cost per lead, we look at the responsiveness of the seller. We rank our leads based on different criteria and different follow-up kind of criteria. And we focus on that because we've been doing it long enough where the real estate side is really like I said, going back to the flips, is really kind of boring because they all look the same when we- they all smell the same when you get them and if you're doing your job right, they all look the same when you get rid of them and hopefully they smell a lot better. So we really try to focus on the leadgen and the marketing, the operational side. And then the product itself we really do kind of a just product by product analysis. So I think our niche that we like again, is the wholetailing niche because we find it very profitable on the sales side but now we have a handful of BRRRR's, we have a handful of rentals, we have some self storage. Our most profitable things are definitely our flips, our second most profitable in terms of like immediate ROI are the wholetails, and our wholesales, we're not- we're probably not the best at wholesaling because we do close on a lot of deals ourselves because we see the other profit potential for one of the other exit strategies so we kinda again, not really wholesale unless it just doesn't fit into our kind of buy box or maybe we're like tapped out capacity wise on the flip side but that's- I mean that's tough to do, we can do quite a few deals. We have something like 17 I think on the board right now in one's phase or another, so we don't get tapped out on that side too often. The wholetail is strange enough what in our market in Dallas, we get the most questions about really because people don't really understand it. So retail is obviously you know, putting on the MLS, blowing it out, it's easy to comp because you take 3 properties that all look like pretty much like yours like on the nice side and figure out the pricing on yours and sell it. Wholesale pricing is pretty easy too right? Because you're not closing on the property, you don't own it, so it kind of is what you can sell it for, like ideally you know 80% minus repairs, in some crazy hot markets 85% minus repairs which I don't really understand and some slower markets probably still down to like 75% minus repairs. If you're a weird rural, something out in the middle of nowhere, I don't even know what it is. It really is kind of what you can sell it for as long as you're setting the expectation with the sellers. But the wholetail is such a kind of in the middle market that we found a great niche where we really like it and we do a lot of those.

Mike: Cool. Let me harbor on one point which I've always loved and you said that you consider yourself a marketing company and I've always considered myself ever since I'm self-employed rather a marketer. One of my favorite teachers, it was an entrepreneurship class and they said this and it's been burned in my head ever since, it's no matter what business you're in, you are in the business of marketing.

TJ: Oh of course.

Mike: I absolutely love that. You cannot keep your business a secret and I love that you focus on your KPI's. Looks like there was another accident outside our office building. Almost everyday there's somebody that- it's just little fender benders every time you hear the screech. The same thing every time.

TJ: Aw that sucks.

Mike: Yeah so anyways, no matter what business you're in though you are in the business of marketing. I love that, I love that you have that mindset. I do- I am impressed with your rehab operation 'cause like I said I just- we haven't really scaled that up the same way and what I do want to hear a little bit more about your wholetail stuff and I'd love for you to share some of your wisdom on that because I think it's a difficult thing for us. So what do you do with a wholetail? What we used to do, I mean we kind of looked at them as mini flips like we knocked the ugly off of it, you know? Like you'd get a grandma house or a hoarder house or something and you close on it, you'd be marketing direct to the seller like we talked about, no matter what business, you're doing that marketing. So you're buying it off market, right? And then we would take it and we'd clean it out and where we get ourselves in trouble is we tend to oh man we probably should paint it and then it's like oh man we probably do this and it's like oh man we probably should do this.

TJ: Yeah, that happens.

Mike: So what are you guys doing down there? How are you doing it to-

TJ: Oh we do- yeah we do that too, we turn it into flips sometimes.

Mike: Okay cool so you-

TJ: But we try not to, we try not to.

Mike: We're not the only ones struggling.

TJ: No, we try not to. It's really a spectrum, right? Isn't it?

Mike: Yeah.

TJ: Because a flip is easy. If you're blowing it out, making it nice, you match the guy you know, three doors down that sold that's a flip or whatever if it's in a good market or like we do, we get a look that really works and our look works kind of below $400,000. We do the same thing on every single look and above that we'll customize stuff here and there appropriate for the neighborhood. But wholetail is so different because you're not shooting for that top of the market dollar and you're obviously, you need to recoup your transactional costs 'cause you're closing on the deal like you mentioned. You're recouping the cost of capital because you know, either- even if you're doing it in cash, you still gotta figure that in terms of like your profitability. So it's more of a moving target. We- so the way we've done it actually really well is kind of two ways but well there's a lot of advantages to it also obviously. So the advantage that we've noticed is everyone knows the retail market is kind of you know, it's going like that.

Mike: Yup.

TJ: And we'd notice the wholesale market is probably maybe going up at a little bit steeper rate but not really a significantly steeper rate, but the wholetail market is, especially in markets like DFW where the supply is fairly constrained and I mean that's kinda nationwide but I think the DFW's probably maybe more exaggerated. We've noticed the wholetail prices have really kind of accelerated and then a little closer to the retail pricing depending on the product type. So what I mean by that is when we- so like operational wise when we buy a wholetail, we always do exactly like you said. We always clean it up, if it's a hoarder house, we take out all the crap. We give the potential buyer what we'd like to consider like a blank slate for their- them being able to come in and figure out what they want to do with the property. So we're always in- like obviously honesty is huge in this business but we're always like brutally honest in our listings so hey handyman special, needs work and if it's cosmetic you know, cosmetic fixer, we'll not go FHA because haven't owned in 90 days so it's not going to FHA.

Mike: Right.

TJ: If it's conventional you know, we'll say yeah I can go conventional but buyers not like you know, sellers not really likely to do any repairs on that kind of thing. And the times we get into trouble is when we start like you do, you start tugging on the string and next thing you know, the whole sweater unravels.

Mike: Okay what do we do?

TJ: You're sitting there going like ah man, I didn't want to flip this, and then you do and then you make money so it's not so bad. So we've got in trouble obviously doing that. The other times we've- and I don't want to say gotten in trouble but the only other times we kind of missed the mark, since it is more of a subjective price point, is when we haven't really identified the buyer avatar for who's the likely end consumer for the product because we just started closing on stuff and stick on the MLS and making money. And we noticed we make a lot of money on this then we'd make like a little bit of money on this, and we're like what the hell is going on? This is weird, I don't understand. So what we started doing was we kind of reverse engineered and analyzed what we've been like making and then say well who's the buyer for this one and who's the buyer for that one and why are they different? Because the product is different, the product is different levels of kind of screwed up-ness. On the high end, so on the highest end I suppose of wholetail, it's like grandma's house like you mentioned where we're taking out all the trash. In Dallas we have a lot of foundation issues so we generally fix the foundation and then we re-stretch the carpet, we vacuum the carpet, we dust the bugs off the windowsill 'cause they've been there since the 80's and we give the buyer a blank slate.

Mike: You guys have mostly slab houses right? You said you have foundation issues but there's not a lot of basements?

TJ: No, no basements. No basements really in DFW, I think I've seen maybe two since I've been here. I've been in Texas 7 years.

Mike: Okay.

TJ: But slab and [inaudible] both. So crawl space, crawl space is a lot easier to shim up and like raise up when you get little wonky wonks in them.

Mike: Yeah.

TJ: The slab you gotta- that's a different process entirely but it's such a huge business in North Texas that it's a pretty noble risk in terms of when you're acquiring the property. So we always do those things on the front end and then we look at the property, be like well who's going to buy the property? So we identify- in our company we identify four different levels of potential buyers and that kind of dictates our price point and another input that kind of sways which way the buyer is likely to be is the condition of the property and the neighborhood’s the property’s in. So on the highest end, the best house is grandma's house with pink tile but everything's functional, everything works, the foundation is good, the AC, we'd probably fix the AC in those circumstances. And at that price point we're going to target a conventional buyer that wants to come in and do some sweat equity to the house but wants to have some equity when they're done, and they make the most money. So we've made flip profits for wholetail deals and even probably sometimes more than flip profits on wholetail deals-

Mike: Wow.

TJ: -with houses that we're able to target for a conventional buyer which is awesome, which is a great niche to be in. Now, not everything obviously- not everything goes conventional so layer 2 is maybe a cash flow investor buyer that's buying off the MLS and they don't usually want a lot of structural weird stuff. They want kind of a cosmetic fixer and they want to maybe have it for a cash flow property where they're okay with you know, some equity but it needs to be livable and clean and comfortable. And in those cases sometimes we'll put in carpet, sometimes- we don't generally paint, we don't- by the time you get to painting I think you're almost at a flip kinda- you're in a different level flip. But we'll sometimes put in carpet so we'll put in new carpet over like ugly yellow linoleum from 1953 and again, we'll do the foundation and that's pretty much it, and then we're targeting like cash flow buyer. That tends to be a lower price point house so the cash flow number has to make sense. I don't know about you, it always cracks me up when I see like a newer wholesaler put out a deal and say oh it's a great cash flow deal, I'm looking at the numbers on this thing and I'm going like that's a horrible cash flow deal, what are you talking about? The only thing- the only reason you think it's a good cash flow deal is 'cause you couldn't negotiate a better deal to make it a deal for anything. So if you move it, that's awesome, I'm happy for you but it doesn't- I don't- it doesn't make sense to me. So that's like layer two is the cash flow buyer. Layer three is an investor buyer that's probably still at the end of the day like a cash flow buyer but is willing to do a little bit more work to it and each one of these layers gets us like farther away from full ARV. And the buyer that we don't want to target is the flipper buyer. So the flipper buyer, they need to have a projected profit on the back end and they need to make money on it. Well if they're going to do all that then why are we able to sell it for wholetail price? And we've done that, you know we do that very successfully sometimes. Sometimes by just buying incredibly well, sometimes by occasionally misjudging what the ARV is because if our market's going up like this, you know once in a while the ARV is a little higher than we expect it to be, so the flipper buyers can make some good money on it. But those are kind of the four different criteria that we target for wholetail properties and we noticed obviously the higher- the better the property is, the more it sells for. That makes sense but that's where we started noticing like okay we've made four grand. I think our lousiest wholetail was like $3000 and that's a horrible profit for something that you closed on. We're like what did we mess up on this property? Cause our numbers- we're basing the same numbers kind of the same across the board. Like oh we targeted a different buyer for that property than that property 'cause we put another one on the market we'd make like 40 grand on like that's awesome, let's do that with everything. So then when we start identifying these buyer avatars, it really dialed in both our buying criteria and it also dialed in maybe doing a little bit of additional improvement in the wholetail pricing to get it to more of a conventional buyer target. So if you have a house that's we fixed the foundation but it's got busted toilets, I don't know why it's got busted toilets maybe pipes froze or whatever, we'll put in some toilets. And that's really helped us kind of kind of dial in the wholetail like strategy.

Mike: Bro that's awesome man, I really like that thought process and walking me through it, maybe it will help me on the next one.

TJ: The only reason we stumbled on it was because we screwed it up a couple times.

Mike: Well, we screwed it up plenty. You know, I think that's the problem is that we do. We just don't know where to stop because we like nice stuff, you know?

TJ: Yeah.

Mike: I mean even on rentals, we probably overdo.

TJ: Oh I absolutely overdo my rentals.

Mike: Yeah, in comparison to some other people and I think that's probably our problem with it, but again keeping that avatar in mind is a great way to look at it because I think that would prevent us from even touching something.

TJ: Yeah.

Mike: As if we're thinking hey we're just going to sell this to a flipper or hey we're just going to sell this to the retail buyer, well then yeah you're going to spend more on the carpet, you know, you're not going to go with the cheapest 39 cent Home Depot carpet, you'll get the nice grey that everybody wants, right?

TJ: Yeah absolutely.

Mike: That's really cool man. TJ I love it, I love it. Dialed in is how I would say your wholetail game man.

TJ: Well we try to be, we try to be. I mean I guess the caveat with that is if you have good solid- and it's hard to get wholetail comps sometimes but if you have good solid wholetail comps, don't be pricing above it. Like don't be pricing above other wholetail comps because that's where you can run into issues. So we've noticed kind of a general formula for us for like a retail buyer or like a conventional buyer and even sometimes a cash flow buyer is really full ARV times about 95% minus a conservative repair estimate gets us a good starting price point for a wholetail buyer and then you know, and then you tweak numbers because my rehab is going to be different than the end buyers rehab number maybe. The nicer house is going to sell for a little bit more, the beat up house is going to sell for less, and then if you- if that number isn't right, you're going to look at comps and be like well that numbers way off base 'cause this house sold for a lot less on account perspective so then you gotta look at the comps and dig into those. So it definitely- like you said, it takes more market knowledge and more dialing in but in profitability, it's massively profitable.

Mike: So which- and I'm just assuming profitability wise that the retail buyers are going to be your most profitable ones even when it's wholetail.

TJ: Absolutely.

Mike: Okay alright so it is kind of your- the farther down the scale you go, you're probably decreasing your profit margin, right?

TJ: For the most part yeah.

Mike: Okay.

TJ: I mean you buy better. yeah assuming everything else is [inaudible] like baseline, yeah.

Mike: Yeah, you have to buy it right. I mean that's the beginning of this game and everything you do in real estate and yeah I mean that's another truth about real estate too is what you had mentioned about the rehab costs, is that your rehab cost is going to be different than someone else's. So like that's just a truth in real estate like we can- I'll tell you that the rehab numbers are but somebody else is going to say no that's 10 and I'll say no it's 12. I mean again you're never going to be exact with someone else or see 100% eye to eye and that's kind of the beauty of this business too.

TJ: Yeah it really is.

Mike: Yeah it allows us all to make money in it so it's very- it's a blessing and a curse. A blessing and a curse, right?

TJ: Well it's competitive but all you got to- I mean it's a big industry in a big market but that just means that there's more room for more players. So for the newer like you asked, I guess you'd kind of started whole diatribe on asking about like advice for newer investor is really it really does go back to that focus. Even marketing channels, all the different marketing channels work to a certain extent. Like bandit signs work, you can do bandit designs wrong, you put bandit signs in a million dollar neighborhood, you're not going to probably get a lot of calls but bandit signs absolutely work if you know how to make them work for you. Cold calling works if you make sure that you have the right follow up sequence and make sure that it works for you. Same thing with you know, texting or mailers. We're deep in the online space so we do a lot of PPC and Facebook and it works really well for us but I caution people to get in our space because there's a lot of ways to make it not work well for you and waste a lot of money doing it.

Mike: Right.

TJ: If a new investor-

Mike: It can be expensive, that's a really good point man.

TJ: Oh absolutely.

Mike: I mean we've wasted a lot of money on the pay per click for sure.

TJ: Yeah, yeah exactly. For the newer investor you know, pick- I think pick a marketing channel that you're comfortable with, that you're comfortable with thinking that you can figure out and optimize for yourself, and then really go kind of as deep as you can in that channel first before trying to add on extra things. A lot of people with the shiny object syndrome start adding oh I'm okay at texting so let's add on cold calling. Well maybe cuz at least you have the data source then, at least you already have all the data skip trace and all that stuff. But oh man I'm kind of mediocre at texting, well let's add on PPC like whoa that takes an entirely separate skill set. And so that's where I noticed even in our company when we add an extra marketing thing like intellectually I know this is going to take a while for us to figure out because that's different than what we're doing.

Mike: Right. That's great man, that's great advice. I mean I've enjoyed talking with you TJ, I say let's go ahead and wrap it up unless you've got something else you want to share. I'd love to share your contact info if people want to reach out to you, if you're willing to throw that out there for them and we'll stick it on the show notes as well.

TJ: Oh yeah.

Mike: What's the easiest way for somebody who's trying to get in touch with you to find you?

TJ: Absolutely. Hit me up on Facebook, we're super active in the local like Dallas groups. My- TJ Kosen on Facebook so it's pretty straightforward to see. We've bought houses off of Instagram posts so I've had people like shoot me a DM on Instagram and be like hey what do you think? I'm like yeah, I'll buy that house. So TJ Kosen on Instagram. tjkosen.com is our like kind of our personal landing page and stuff so that's easy to find and just super approachable, would love to help any newer investors in- especially the local Texas market but you know, analyze deals, look at deals. We JV with folks sometimes and we're always down to like look at someone's marketing and kind of give some tips on how to get things working well.

Mike: Great, great. Well TJ thank you so much man, I think you shared some really valuable nuggets especially on that wholetailing if that's something you guys are thinking about doing. Anyone in the audience, dial in that avatar man, I think that's the nugget that I'm taking from this one and next time we do a wholetail, figure out who the heck the buyer is first right? Before you-

TJ: Always buy better, that's always the solution is always buy better.

Mike: Oh well there you go.

TJ: Yeah. But after that, figure out who's going to buy your thing when you're done with it because retail's easy, wholesale is easy, the big spectrum in the middle, eh.

Mike: It's challenging man, it really is.

TJ: It is.

Mike: Yeah. TJ, thank you so much. Thank you guys so much for listening and we will catch you guys on the next show. Thanks TJ, have a good one.

TJ: Thanks for having me man.

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