Slow Market Playbook: Don't Cut Marketing, Use Seller Financing

By Mike DeHaan, Dan Austin, Dylan Koch · November 10, 2026

Revenue is soft, flips are selling for less than you underwrote, and the first instinct is to get lean. Mike DeHaan and Dylan Koch spent this episode arguing the opposite: marketing is the one expense that produces revenue two to four months out, and cutting it is how a slow quarter turns into a slow year. They also walked through how seller financing can bridge the gap between a seller's price and today's rates, what happened when a friend's sub-to loan got called due, and the expensive lesson Mike learned early about lender fees.

Why is cutting marketing the wrong move when revenue drops?

Dylan laid out his own situation honestly. He has four projects either listed or in rehab. Two have taken significant price drops. On one, he says he'll be lucky to break even; on the other, he bought right enough that he'll still make a little money. Add vacancies and unit turns on the rental side, and the year is not tracking the way he forecasted.

His default reaction, he admits, is to cut expenses and get as lean as possible. The problem is the math. In a two-person acquisitions business, you might shave a couple thousand dollars a month in overhead, while the numbers on the rehab side are far bigger. Mike points out that in a shop Dylan's size, marketing is the main overhead, it's easy to adjust, and the return is exponential rather than linear. The hosts have long talked about a three to five times return on marketing spend, versus the 20 to 30 percent margins a lot of larger businesses operate on.

Mike's broader point: people have called it a tough market for as long as he's been investing, which is since 2015. If he had waited for a better entry, he says he would not be where he is today. Be greedy when others are fearful. With fewer buyers competing, you may waste a little more marketing dollar, but the return per deal can be meaningfully higher.

• Marketing spend today produces deals two to four months from now, so cutting it creates a revenue hole you can't fix later.
• Dylan's rental adjustment: be quicker to lower rents or offer concessions, because vacancy is the biggest profit killer in rentals.
• Dylan cited a stat he saw that mortgage application volume is lower now than in 2008 and 2009, which he reads as an argument for growing while others retreat.

How does seller financing bridge the gap at 7.5% rates?

Dylan's acquisition framing is simple: you can't change the interest rate, so the default question should be "how do I make this work," not "I can't make this work." He's making an offer on an auction property and a full seller-financed offer on an eight-unit. His pitch to a seller: I can't pay your price at 7.5 percent, but I can pay your price if you carry the note at a lower rate.

Mike teased him about sounding like a sub-to guy. Dylan was clear that he means full seller financing with title transferring, not subject-to.

The underwriting detail is worth copying. Dylan modeled a 30-year amortization with a five to ten year balloon, which penciled around 20 percent cash on cash. Then he stress-tested the exit: a 70 percent loan at year five, underwritten at 7.5 percent. Even with five years of principal paydown, the back-end numbers got a lot worse. His conclusion was that the seller-financed structure needed at least a seven-year runway before the balloon for the refinance math to still hold.

What happens when a sub-to loan gets called due?

Mike said he's gotten a couple of calls recently from people whose subject-to loans got called. In one case, a third-party servicing company was collecting payments and paying the mortgage, but didn't adjust escrow correctly after a tax increase. The short payment triggered the lender to pull the loan file, review the property, and notice the LLC had changed on title. The lender reached out, the borrower came clean, and the loan got called, even though the property had been held that way for several years.

Mike's take on the advice floating around that you can lie or fight your way out: once you're caught, you're caught, and you need to deal with it. Dylan added the obvious lender incentive, which is that a servicer sitting on a 3 percent loan that changed title has every reason to find it and reissue at today's rates.

Does the market you buy in matter more than the cash-on-cash number?

Mike described a friend in Austin who has been investing there roughly twenty years and is still aggressively buying, even properties that don't cash flow well, because he's bullish on Austin long term. While they were in Vegas, that friend got a duplex under contract for $200,000 that the prior owner bought in 2021 for $460,000, a $260,000 haircut. Mike says it won't cash flow great because the taxes are still riding the old valuation, but the thesis is that someone was willing to pay $460,000 once, so someone probably will again.

Both hosts pushed back on chasing price-to-rent ratios in markets nobody is moving to. Dylan mentioned a local investor who bought a duplex in Springfield, Ohio in 2002 and sold it twenty years later for the same price. Mike's view is that the reason the ratio looks good is often that nobody has moved there in a long time, and the renters are people who are stuck for personal or economic reasons.

On goals, Dylan's warning was not to let a revenue target push you into bad decisions. If you hit $900,000 at 50 percent margins, that's a good year. Spending $200,000 to force the last $100,000 is shooting yourself in the foot.

The full episode has more on goal setting, how Dylan got to 50 units since 2022, and Mike's early flip where he paid about $30,000 in lender fees he didn't understand and lost roughly that same amount on the deal. Worth a listen if you're deciding what to cut this quarter.

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Educational content from the Collecting Keys podcast. Not financial, legal or tax advice.