How To Network With More Seasoned Investors

Mike DeHaan: [0:00] Think that when you're new, your value needs to come in the realm of being more open and be willing to be more, I would say vulnerable about stuff and providing a different perspective than probably the veterans have. Because I know with different things that I've gone to, sometimes there's like the newer person there that like they just ask a question or they frame things in such a way that you're like, I never thought about that. What's going on, guys? Welcome to today's episode of the collecting keys real estate investing podcast. Today is Wednesday. It is the Mike and Dan show where I, Mike DeHaan, and my cohost here, Dan Austin, talk about real estate, investing, business, and everything in between. And we are in October 2023,

Dan Austin: [0:56] And Lots of beer. It's a good month if you're if you're a beer drinker.

Mike DeHaan: [1:01] I mean, to be fair, like, do live in great beer country with so many breweries.

Dan Austin: [1:05] We do.

Mike DeHaan: [1:06] And as I have been around to my, you know, doing my typical date nights, going different breweries, things like that, the Oktoberfest choices are actually very good. Usually my preference. They're abundant. They're abundant.

Dan Austin: [1:19] Yeah. You know what's interesting about local here to Spokane for any of our listeners is we have a oh my god, I just lost the name of the brewery, what's our brewery here in town that I just forgot where we used to get beers in college?

Mike DeHaan: [1:30] Oh, in college it was Northern Lights, no lie. Northern Lights,

Dan Austin: [1:33] The no thing that surprises me about that is they've been around a while, and a lot of times things like over time, the novelty of them go away. But you know what? They still even like they're a big company now, like they still continue to bring the heat on some of their beers. Like I still always impress when I get one of their beers. I'm like, that's not bad.

Mike DeHaan: [1:51] Yeah. For sure. Mean, we got Osia places in town. I think we have like the third or fourth most breweries per capita in The United States. That does not surprise me because

Dan Austin: [1:59] we have that in like vape shops. Like a hot shop. It'll be like brewery, vape shop. Yeah. And then like a pot shop.

Mike DeHaan: [2:06] Yeah. They're all very close to

Dan Austin: [2:07] each other. Know. We like our vices.

Mike DeHaan: [2:09] There's a pretty underrated food scene here in general. Like we got we got good food. Like if you're if you're really into like super authentic like Asian food, definitely don't come here. But yeah, we've been busy busy getting after it. We've had a huge sort of uptick in responses month by month coming into October like we normally do. Trying to get some stuff across the finish line. We've been getting some pretty sweet deals. We actually had a good sort of story of, I would say, like dedication to the pursuit of the lead with one of our guys here. We got a deal that came in, and it was like a seven week time of was the lead that came in seven weeks from contact to contract. And it was like 30 something phone calls, like 50 something text messages. Our guy got ghosted a bunch of times, had to like renegotiate the deal. We finally got it, signed around, write a role. And it was like one of those is like a business owner, when you see the process actually be followed and followed through with, it's just like, love it. It's great. Yeah.

Dan Austin: [3:08] You gotta stick it out and it reminds me of how many times or how many CRMs or just whatever people are using to hold on to their leads

Mike DeHaan: [3:15] Yeah.

Dan Austin: [3:16] You know, out there have deals in there that'll never become deals for those people because they're they're not following the process. They're giving up too soon.

Mike DeHaan: [3:23] Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it's easy to do especially when you're like a one person operator

Dan Austin: [3:27] Mhmm.

Mike DeHaan: [3:27] Which you know, a lot of people who listen to the show are, maybe you're it's like you and a ZEA. Mhmm. And you get these leads that come in and you call people and they don't answer and you're like, know what? I'm just gonna go and like think around with my data and do other stuff instead. The things that

Dan Austin: [3:40] Sure.

Mike DeHaan: [3:41] Don't actually make you money, but you feel like they will.

Dan Austin: [3:44] Right.

Mike DeHaan: [3:44] And on this, like, to start out, the lady ghosted him for almost ten straight days before she finally answered. And then she literally just responded. The first response back was we had texted. She just said, I'm busy. Call me later. I think it was like it was like, call me tomorrow. And then she ghosted for another three days before we finally got her on the phone. And then we found out that she had a massive flood in her basement and needed to get rid of the property ASAP.

Dan Austin: [4:09] And we're like, boom, bingo, now we're good. That's pretty slick. So she had a massive flood in the basement from the first contact or prior to us contacting her? So she engaged with our SMS marketers first

Mike DeHaan: [4:21] and basically all it said

Dan Austin: [4:23] is Okay. And had a flood after that?

Mike DeHaan: [4:25] Yeah. Well, I think it was probably before because the only engagement she had with our SMS team was it just said, I really need to sell. That was all she said.

Dan Austin: [4:33] Oh, yeah. She was in the moment, dude. That's why you gotta get in front of people though, right? Get them in the moment when they're emotional, that's why you gotta follow-up and you got to market over and over to people.

Mike DeHaan: [4:42] Yeah. So, yeah, that's all she said, and then it got put into our system, into our CRM in front of our closers, And then he had to follow-up with her for, like, almost two full weeks before she texted back. And then three more days before finally got her on the phone. So it was a huge process. But it should be a pretty sweet deal, though, because, like, we have it at 04:45 to fix up the damage in the basement. It's like about 50 k and then it's an ARV of 600 all day long. So it should be

Dan Austin: [5:05] a pretty

Mike DeHaan: [5:06] solid $50,000 deal plus.

Dan Austin: [5:08] Yeah. Those are always good wins right there. Mhmm. Yeah. And like if you're listening and you think you got a good follow-up or you're being too aggressive on your follow-up, you're probably not.

Mike DeHaan: [5:16] You're definitely not. Like, that's I don't think I've ever met anyone, but it's between like our colleagues that also operate these businesses or people are in instant investor program, like in other groups that we've been involved in, where I'm like, you know what? I think that you're following up way too aggressively with these people.

Dan Austin: [5:32] You've never yeah. You've never said that.

Mike DeHaan: [5:33] No. Like like, theoretically, it's possible. But unless you just like have a problem, and you're just like calling people 10 times a day, which even then, I mean, there's probably like, I guarantee you they'll answer.

Dan Austin: [5:45] If they tell you like, hey, piss off, dude. I wanna talk to you. Leave me alone. Stop calling. That's different. And then if you keep calling, that's that's called just being aggressive and annoying. That's called harassment. That's called harassment. Yeah. But if they're like not contacting you, there's sometimes a reason why. And so just keep getting ahold of them, trying to get ahold of them, and maybe they'll pop up for you. Yeah. Absolutely.

Mike DeHaan: [6:04] But now it's been it's been, you know, good to good to see that come together. We have some clothes, we've got some different stuff and, you know, I was able to actually walk an appointment last week which was You

Dan Austin: [6:14] haven't even been outside in a long time. That's a big deal.

Mike DeHaan: [6:17] I forgot that the sun's a real thing. With this virtual business, I don't leave my house. Only, you know, I I literally get into my car before I get out of the garage, and then I think the only time I'm in the sun is when I'm walking from the parking lot into Trader Joe's to go grocery shopping,

Dan Austin: [6:29] and that's about it. And you could honestly just, you know, do Instacart, so you should should get a little more efficient there.

Mike DeHaan: [6:34] You know, I should respect my time more. I'm an entrepreneur. What am I doing if I'm not 100% effective all the time?

Dan Austin: [6:40] Absolutely. Pay people to do that. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [6:43] But no, it's funny. I think it it was legitimately my first appointment that I've walked in probably a year and a half. And, you know, it was a situation here in local Spokane. We have some partners here that weren't interested in in what this guy was serving up. So I went and met with them. And, you know, what's really liberating Is when you have like a business that turns around enough opportunity that you can go into a seller conversation and like legitimately not care about the outcome. Mhmm. Right? Especially when you're face to face. And very quickly I was like, I don't really care what happens with this. Like, I would love to do deals with this guy. And I think that that energy just kind of like gets passed off to the seller. And all of a sudden, like, it's always like the first time you see him, it's like, are gonna be, know, they're worried about they're gonna try and be sold or like, what's the whole thing? And then I'm just like, I don't know, whatever. Like, let's have this talk about this deal. Let's see if it works for both of us. The tension's immediately zero. And it's actually very pleasant to do that. Right? Yep. And so but the the basically what stands with all of it is he has five properties looking to sell right now. He has two that he wants to sell on contract. He has two more that are fixed reuppers that he wants to sell cash. And then the third one he currently has on the MLS and he has a pending offer. And if that one falls through, he wants to sell it to us because he needs to close by the end of the month because he's doing reverse $10.31 exchange.

Mike DeHaan: [8:06] But like how it ended was he wants to figure out the ones on the market right now. And after that, we're gonna chat and we can probably get, you know, probably at least one or two, if not all the deals signed around.

Dan Austin: [8:17] Yeah. And I think the approach to that too that makes it feel also less stressful maybe in the conversation is, I don't know, pre qualifying the guy as as as reasonable because you said, hey, here's the deal man, like, I need to be able to buy this and cash flow on it, if we're going to do seller financing. If I can't cash flow on this thing, then there's no point in having the conversation, right? I mean, and he understood that, and so it's like, how can, so at that point, it's like how can we get you a price and money every month that works for you and works for me? Exactly. And if there's no number in the middle because he's proven to be somewhat sophisticated and also knowledgeable and understanding the situation, like because of that, like if there's no number, then you just walk away. Mhmm. Yeah. Maybe maybe he'll find an investor that'll pay more, I don't know.

Mike DeHaan: [9:04] And the great thing about having a pipeline and having that consistent source of opportunity come through, is if it's not gonna be mutually beneficial, I expect cool, not for us, go to somebody else. Opposed to when you're starting out, it's so easy to try and wanna like force these deals and squeeze these things out and it's like why? I mean, I understand when you only have five shots a month, you gotta take what you can get, but when we have five a day, you're like

Dan Austin: [9:29] Right.

Mike DeHaan: [9:30] Yeah. Totally,

Dan Austin: [9:31] and I always say, like, you can't like talk somebody into selling you their house at a bad price. Yeah. You can talk them into selling to you, right, over somebody else, like you can build trust, you can build rapport, you can offer them solutions that fits their needs, but you can't like trick them or talk them into it or sell them on doing something that they fundamentally don't wanna do because it's a bad idea. Mhmm.

Mike DeHaan: [9:52] Yeah, you're totally right. And that's one of the things that I hate about like this current movement of like the hard sales coaches in these like wholesale businesses. They're trying to treat it like you're selling something like cars or selling something like solar panels. What I'm starting to see is a lot there's like these guys, they're all the same. They're always like in their mid forties. They're juiced to the gills. You know, their traps are up to their ears, and they always like to talk about how, you know, I don't drink alcohol anymore because I used to be an alcoholic. Yeah. I don't what. I'm not even gonna say what I was about to say. Everything is about family I'm fucking Vin Diesel from Fast and Furious. Right? I don't work with fat people. Yeah. Don't work. Yeah. If my staff doesn't have a six pack, you can't work for me. You know, and and then they're always like focused on solar sales or like, you know, sort of different traditional sales. And you're starting to see an uptick in these followings amongst, like, real estate investors. Mhmm. And our model is different. The transactions that we do, even though you view it as selling solar panels because you do five, six, seven of these a month or, you know, maybe more, or even even if you do like 50 a year. Right? Or like say 20 a year. Most people will buy or sell a house two to three times in their life, maybe.

Mike DeHaan: [11:02] If they're lucky. Right? It's not like something where you're trying to get someone to do a transactional process that you're also gonna hook them up with the funding to buy your fucking solar panels that are a scam in Yes. Washington But like, you know, there's a lot of other implications that go along with that transaction. And for some reason, that's getting ignored by this, like, beat the chest sort of sales trainers that are just everywhere on my social media right now, and I don't know why I can't escape them. That drives me crazy.

Dan Austin: [11:28] Well, the algorithm knows you better than yourself.

Mike DeHaan: [11:30] Now that's the problem. I paused on one of them, and now they're like, this is all you wanna see is another ripped bald guy talking about how you have

Dan Austin: [11:37] to Seriously.

Mike DeHaan: [11:38] How you know if you yeah. They're the same. It is.

Dan Austin: [11:41] It is the same, and it's different, right? You're talking about selling solar panels and cars, are generally things people don't need to buy, and that is where people are like, they're trying to play on your emotions and do that, I guess you could try to do that in real estate, but that's for a lot of people, it's shelter Mhmm. Or it's their retirement, or it's some sort of major financial burden or financial uplift for them, and like you don't wanna, I don't know, just bluntly take advantage of them and try to hard sell them on some shit.

Mike DeHaan: [12:07] For sure. Right? Well, the problem is is that when that that method, it completely eliminates the key point about why we knew that wholesaling business kind of existed, is providing value to people. Right. Being able to provide value to the sellers. And you know, it's funny because it's such a controversial model, there are a lot of people that think it's, you know, for taking advantage of people because we buy houses at a discount, different sort of things. And 99% of the time, the people that we work with, they really don't have any other options. And basically, the trade off is we buy a house for a margin, and we take on additional risks so that they can go and move on with their life. But with the hard sales model, it just kind of pretends like that part doesn't exist. Instead, you need to convince them to do that for some reason or another.

Dan Austin: [12:53] Right. Well, and I think that just the whole thing that pisses me off about that argument that you just brought up is that it's like, okay, so think about some of the folks that we have to deal with and the who's we jump through to get them to sell their house, like, to get them to the closing table to help them understand, help them out of their situation. Some realtor, and this is not a knock on realtors, but like some realtors, especially if they're young and hungry and don't have any leads, they're gonna be like, yeah, I'll list your house, I can get you more. They don't give a shit that they're gonna sit there with a hundred and eighty day listing agreement just delaying this person's issues, which is financial usually, or they're living in just such despair because their house is falling apart. Mhmm. Like, they're just gonna sit on it, they're not gonna sell it because they're not gonna know how to price it. They're gonna not do anything, they're gonna take a commission if they actually do sell it, and at the end of the day, they're likely not going to net anything more than they would have, generally speaking. I'm not saying that there's not opportunity, but the difference between what a, in wholesale, or with anything, and why people use wholesalers for any widget or product they sell, is because, like, we can come in and we can reduce some of the sales cost, so we're already taking, giving some advantage there, but also we can solve a different problem.

Mike DeHaan: [14:00] Mhmm. Which

Dan Austin: [14:00] for widget sellers, that's distribution. For our sellers that are in distress, it's like being able to take that weight and lift it off them, and solve their problem for them, as opposed to just saying, I can sell your house, but I can't solve your problems. The only tool I have is selling your house. There's a whole litany of problems that we can also solve. So that's why that argument just, to me, falls flat, because it's a stupid argument.

Mike DeHaan: [14:21] For sure, and what we provide, know, we provide flexibility, we provide convenience, you know, the trade off is less money, but especially right now with interest rates and the market getting kind of funny, being able to have a guaranteed sale is actually worth quite a lot.

Dan Austin: [14:35] Oh, especially because you have, I've talked to people all over the country, you could have one house that sells, depending on your market, in like thirty days, and another same exact house that'll sit for one hundred and eighty days. Does your timeline need to be certain? That's not the way to do it because right now, even, and then that's the other thing too, is like if you price wrong in this market, you're in trouble. Right? Because then you start doing the price drop, and then there's always one that'll pop up in between, a new new one that people, a shiny object for the new buyers, and they're like, oh, what about that house? This one's been price dropping, there must be something wrong with it. And now you get in this weird situation and so the risk is a lot higher.

Mike DeHaan: [15:10] Yeah. And now more than ever, especially because people are feeling like they're making a much larger commitment than they were back when it was 2% interest rates. Right. Yeah. Anyways, why not even getting some fun return to senders? We've had a good little, I would say like influx of some some sassy individuals who haven't liked our direct mail that we've been sending out.

Dan Austin: [15:31] Yeah. I'm trying to find my stack of fun ones, must not have them on my desk here. But yeah, I was I got my first rock that was mailed to me. Was that like a cool rock? No. No. You know, like, so my my daughter will walk around her neighborhood and they're like, you can find these rocks that people will paint, They look like really nice, and they have like a nice message on them or something like that. And then it's like, you take a rock, you gotta leave a rock kinda thing. So those are fun. She never leaves them, she just takes them. So we have a collection of really nice painted rocks. Nothing like that. It was just a rock like you would have got out of my yard, like a nice size one. They had to spend extra postage to send it. So they took the postcard, ripped it in half, and then put it in this more expensive envelope with a more expensive postage and sent the rock. I don't know why they did that.

Mike DeHaan: [16:15] You know what we should do? We should send them like a ton of rocks. Right? Well, like actually like a ton.

Dan Austin: [16:20] Oh my god. You could totally do that. I know the address. Just call the local landscape and come and say, hey, can you drop off a load of river rock?

Mike DeHaan: [16:29] I got this. Like, oh, yeah. It's gonna be, I don't know, $50, $60 to drop them off.

Dan Austin: [16:34] I would do it.

Mike DeHaan: [16:34] Yeah. I would

Dan Austin: [16:34] do it just for fun. Actually, what I will do for fun though is mail them two rocks back because that's at least like not costly on their end.

Mike DeHaan: [16:42] Oh, yeah. We can we can do the Pythagorean rock exchange. What's it called? The where they do like the you send the two and then they send four back and then you do eight.

Dan Austin: [16:49] Right. Yeah. Exactly. That's I don't think it's Pythagorean theorem. That's for triangles. I think that's some other math thing. I know. Oh, Fibonacci.

Mike DeHaan: [16:57] It's a Fibonacci sequence. Yeah.

Dan Austin: [16:59] The Fibonacci sequence. Yes. Wow. You dork. Yeah. So there's that one, which actually is that one, I am impressed except for why they spent more money to do it. Usually, I get garbage. We'll send like, know we have a guy that here in Spokane, that will just send us all of his junk mail repeatedly, which is fine, I think it's funny. One of these days I'm gonna catch him slipping and I'm gonna find his address, I'm gonna send him a nice note. We've had definitely people lawsuits, there was another one that I had here that said, it said, what? And like, right, like they had like a conversation with themselves, bright red ink, it was like, what? You live in Washington? I'm never effing selling to you. I was like, okay. Yeah. Dang. Alright. They're from Texas.

Mike DeHaan: [17:42] They're from Texas. This tax and you know what the funny thing is? Guarantee that dude moved to Texas from California two years ago. Yeah.

Dan Austin: [17:49] Yeah. Yeah. He's a transplant. Totally. So yeah, those have been fun. I've got several boxes. I'm sure I could filter through the box. Those are just things that get pulled off the top of the bin. So I'm sure I could find a bunch more.

Mike DeHaan: [18:02] We need to save all those so can put them in the official collecting keys museum when we build that out. Right.

Dan Austin: [18:09] We should actually we should have like a you know how the what is that? Is the metasphere? What is that what that was called? That what is what were they putting together? The metaverse? Metaverse? Metaverse? Metaverse? Metaverse, I can say that. We could have like a like a museum and take pictures of all the stuff that we found on properties and letters and like all the people that we know that have I mean, we've got some friends that have found some wild shit. Right?

Mike DeHaan: [18:34] We do. I want

Dan Austin: [18:34] But we found some crazy stuff.

Mike DeHaan: [18:36] Yeah. And we could have, like, sex toys, man. That one

Dan Austin: [18:38] was like the first like holy crap I've ever seen. And so we could have a we could sell admission tickets, $1, to anybody that wants to go into our metaverse museum of weird shit.

Mike DeHaan: [18:50] The worst idea I've ever heard. I think I think it would be better if we just gathered all those things when we had a traveling museum that came to all of our Keyes Con events. And so like we just set it up outside of the Airbnb. Just have like little pedestals where we put all of the the memorabilia. We can have the James bat. Do you

Dan Austin: [19:08] still have that? I thought I did. I didn't get rid of it, don't think.

Mike DeHaan: [19:11] Yeah. So it's just the James bat. That was a bat that we found at a house that had the name of our acquisition manager burned into it with a wood burner.

Dan Austin: [19:19] Just coincidentally?

Mike DeHaan: [19:21] I don't know. Well, his name was also burned all over the house or all over the garage. There was some weird Yeah. On.

Dan Austin: [19:28] That was a weird that was a weird one. Yeah. We definitely come across some some wild shit just in general Uh-huh. Weird stuff when you walk into people's houses. But, yeah. We are exactly one month out of Keyes Collins, so that's pretty cool.

Mike DeHaan: [19:40] I know. I'm excited. We're getting our merch and everything finalized. We have our official slogan, don't be a square peg. Yeah. That is gonna be become the the motto, collecting keys. Yes.

Dan Austin: [19:53] Yes. We we have a big like Airbnb mansion that we've we've rented in Scottsdale, Arizona and there will be no square pegging there. There might be no square pegging in

Mike DeHaan: [20:02] the lab. No square pegging.

Dan Austin: [20:04] Not a little bit. Not even a little bit.

Mike DeHaan: [20:05] Not even a little bit. Yeah. All those 17 dudes better better.

Dan Austin: [20:09] Yeah. Watch out. It's a it's a sick mansion. I'm excited to show up. Hopefully, we didn't get catfished on the mansion, but we got that coming or we got that. We got the bartender for the first night to open up and have a nice little get together, a little meet and greet. Got a lot of great, obviously, content planned, but it's gonna be a good time. A little Topgolf in one of the evenings.

Mike DeHaan: [20:28] Got the chef book, you had everything going and I'm, yeah, I'm super excited for it. I always know that that like looking back, some of the biggest changes in business trajectory has been following meetups like that with different groups. And so I'm excited to hopefully be able to provide that same value to our instant investor community that's coming out for it. Yeah. And it's cool because we have like such a good mix too. We have some of like the heavy hitters come out that are doing like tons of deals. We have some newbies that are coming out there trying to We figure it actually just hired our our first marketing manager who coincidentally lives in Scottsdale. Did you know that?

Dan Austin: [21:02] No. His resume said Chicago.

Mike DeHaan: [21:04] No. No. He lives in Scottsdale. He can come out and get Fucking marketing material for Yeah.

Dan Austin: [21:09] Stuff to be Oh, yeah. We've got our yeah. We got him to come out, he can help build out some marketing plan wise there. That's actually perfect. Wow. I did not know that.

Mike DeHaan: [21:16] Yeah. So it's funny. I I realized that today when I was giving him the offer on the phone. I was like, hey. So I was like, yeah. So where are you based out of McKinney? He's like, oh, in Scottsdale. Was like, no way. That's perfect.

Dan Austin: [21:26] That is awesome.

Mike DeHaan: [21:27] So Yeah. I'm super excited for it. And And with all things, you know, I can't expect it to be perfect, and if it is perfect, then that means we didn't try hard enough, honestly.

Dan Austin: [21:36] Now it really is just about the exchange of value with you, like you said, there's newbies and there's experienced people that come, but it really is just an exchange of value between all of, everybody has value to share, right? Because no matter what, this is one cool thing I found about going to business meetups, and conferences, and those sorts of things, where everybody comes there to get better, like they're truly there to get better, like, no matter what level you're at in your business, you're still trying to overcome a problem, and the newest person that's done the fewest deals in that room might be the one that shares the one piece of insight that helps you think differently, or gives you that third person point of view, and that helps you unlock the solution to that. Doesn't mean you're gonna fix your problem right away, but you at least have the path when you go home to fix or solve that problem, or to get to the next level.

Mike DeHaan: [22:19] For sure, yeah. And I think it's interesting what you said there too, like the one thing that someone shared. Something I found from when I first started going to, like sort of like masterminds in person meetups, is like when you first start going to them, you're just like kind of all consumed. You kinda get like church camp syndrome where you're like, man, I felt like I was just enamored with everything, and that sort of like starts to fade after a bit. And now what it turns into honestly is you go to these things, you pay significant money, and you're hoping to get like one or maybe two things that you can put into action and are kind of like, you know, business changing for you. So for example, the meetup I went to with Aaron in Wichita a couple weeks ago in in Austin, I made, you know, two specific connections there that are connections that we have been nurturing since I got back that could literally change like the course of what our business looks like now. And you know, those are people that I would not necessarily have met if I hadn't gone to that event. Absolutely. I mean,

Dan Austin: [23:14] you could have even had an introduction randomly through like like a video chat, but that wouldn't have been the same.

Mike DeHaan: [23:20] It's not the same. Right? Because you're not like you're not put into a position where you are forced to sort of like see each other's value. Have a mutual relationship that is now established because you're both have opted to spend this money to come to this event. And you know, one of the, especially one of the guys that we're diving into, I can't share some of the stuff we're working on with him yet because it's kind of in the works. But like that could very legitimately be something that majorly escalates the growth of our business in a realm that was it is very complicated that we wouldn't even have known where to start otherwise. And he just so coincidentally happened to be at the exact same event that we went to that I went to. Right?

Dan Austin: [23:58] At the exact moment when we were open to that idea. Mhmm. Yeah. We we could have met that one guy six months before, but it's just like

Mike DeHaan: [24:05] It wouldn't have been as impactful.

Dan Austin: [24:07] The timing, everything, it's funny. And I think too, going into these these types of meetups, get togethers with like one, at least one specific goal, being open that that might not be the goal that gets accomplished, but at least showing up and prepared like, I'm, my goal here is to like learn one new thing about sales, one new about acquisitions, or make one new connection, or whatever that goal is, like show up being prepared to do that, but also just showing up and being open to listen and understand like there's something different out there that you might not have known. Because otherwise if you go showing up thinking you need that one thing and you don't get it, you're gonna be pretty disappointed. Absolutely. You know what I mean?

Mike DeHaan: [24:44] Well, I think it's so important too that going to these events is not a passive experience, especially after the fact. You know, I think that nurturing the relationships and being sure to follow-up with the people, like immediately following them while everyone is kind of on the same boat is so so important. And a lot of people don't do that. They'll like fly across the country to go to a thing. They'll have a great time with everybody. Have like the people like, oh, yeah. You know, we should connect in the future. And then they go back, they fall right back to their business, and they don't do anything. It's like, cool. Totally. You just wasted $5,000 and, you know, a week of your time or four days of your time. Get drunk a couple times. Yeah. Can't tell me, Frank. If that's all you wanna do, just do it at home.

Dan Austin: [25:20] Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [25:20] You know? Right. Yeah. Just like hop on a Zoom call or something instead.

Dan Austin: [25:24] I only get drunk by the a players, dude.

Mike DeHaan: [25:25] What are talking about? A players. Is that why we don't drink anymore, Dan? Yeah.

Dan Austin: [25:31] Exactly. I don't even get drunk by myself anymore.

Mike DeHaan: [25:34] No. It's just such an important thing, right, to make sure that you that you keep in mind. And the funny thing is is you'll go to these different meetups, 90% of the people won't do that. Right? They just waste their time. The only thing that you need to do to like stand out amongst that crowd is just like that one extra step of being intentional about reaching out and trying to move things forward with those conversations that you had. Showing up to bring value. That's a really good question If it?

Dan Austin: [25:59] For a lot of people. Like, if you're gonna show up, because you're right, it should be like you're you're going to go there with an intention, but also be open to sharing value. Like, what is that one thing that you can share? What if you feel like you suck at everything? What are you gonna how do you come up with something that you're gonna share? Or you feel new to this group, like you're going to go to KeysCon and you're a newbie and you've never even done a deal yet? Like, how do you show up in that environment knowing that your your value might seem or have a perception of

Mike DeHaan: [26:25] being low? For sure. And you know, that is a great question. And I think that when you're new, your value needs to come in the realm of like being more open and be willing to like be more, I would say like vulnerable about stuff and providing like a different perspective than probably the veterans have. Because I know with different things that I've gone to, sometimes there's like the newer person there that like, they just ask a question or they frame things in such a way that you're like, I never thought about that. Like, that's actually a really good point. And even though it might not bring them directly value, it could bring them value in learning how to explain things better, what's like ways that they need to approach staff, whether they need to approach different, you know, people in their organization. Because if you're around people that have large organizations and you're new, you're basically like at the same level of what a lot of their staff members are gonna be out or interested in new employees. And I know when I've been to stuff like sometimes, you know, obviously, there are new people that go, and they're obviously misfits. We've been to the post events as well. But more often than not, you know, if that person is inquisitive and they are willing to sort of just share about their circumstance or the stuff that they're trying to figure out, you know, mutual value will kinda just come in ways that aren't necessarily expected. Know? It doesn't always need to be like, oh, I'm gonna teach like a mind blowing thing to show value. Especially when you're kind of an established business owner, a lot of the ways that you get value are kind of in like little tweaks or little changes in perspective that you didn't even realize you needed to know.

Dan Austin: [27:54] Absolutely, I like that. That's a really good point. So even if you're new, can show some value.

Mike DeHaan: [27:59] Mhmm. I mean, you just have to be open about it. Like definitely don't try and like fake it.

Dan Austin: [28:03] Don't fake it. Oh, I hate it. Don't fake it till you make it kinda thing.

Mike DeHaan: [28:06] That's the worst. Like, I've been to a lot of different meetups like that where there's always like the one guy who's like, shut up. Like, huge

Dan Austin: [28:12] Right.

Mike DeHaan: [28:13] Foolish shit. You know? And and I've I've been like that. Yeah. It's real estate meetups, larger business meetups, and all those things. And you always sound out like a sore thumb. If you're insecure, just say you're new. No one cares.

Dan Austin: [28:24] Yeah. Nobody gives a shit.

Mike DeHaan: [28:25] Most of us were new, like, not that long ago. Like, honestly.

Dan Austin: [28:30] And everybody was new at some point in time. It doesn't mean that they won't give you the time of day to help you out or to realize recognize the honesty. Like, you know, I appreciate that. So just trying to bake it till you make it, which Yeah. In that environment does not work.

Mike DeHaan: [28:43] Which I think has value sometimes, just not in like networking opportunities. Right? When you're Yeah. Especially if it's like something that is, I would say like focused on your industry, everyone there will know that you're a liar. So don't do

Dan Austin: [28:57] Start throwing out weird ass acronyms and shit.

Mike DeHaan: [29:00] Yeah. Right. But no, I'm excited though. It should be good. Yeah. Right after that, we'll be heading right into the holiday season as well. So we got a lot of lot of stuff coming up here in the next little bit.

Dan Austin: [29:10] Yeah. October's been a good month for us as we talked about kinda getting the holiday season. I think the question is is like, what do you do in your business? And that we'll be able to talk a lot about that as we get closer to like the Thanksgiving, the the Christmas holidays here. But like, for us, October will be a good month of closings as it has been historically just looking with what we have on the board right now. We have a couple in November already. Mhmm. What are your expectations based on the last, we'll just say like the last ninety days of performance in closings, and the last sixty days of the year.

Mike DeHaan: [29:44] Well, last ninety days of performance in closings have been a fucking nightmare.

Dan Austin: [29:47] We've had quite a few closings, but we've had a lot of

Mike DeHaan: [29:50] We've had, we've just had so many headaches, and I don't know why. Like we had we had a deal that was closed, delayed last week because the escrow agent, like the main lawyer said quote, we've been working really hard so I gave everybody the last couple days of the week off.

Dan Austin: [30:06] Yeah. And then you know what? They still weren't ready to close today. Surprise.

Mike DeHaan: [30:11] Crazy. So so they gave them a long weekend because they had a couple days off plus Columbus Day. But

Dan Austin: [30:18] Well, just so we're clear, like, that's not okay. No. Like, when you're doing, like, contractual, like, work where there's, contractual obligations to the buyer and the seller to close on a certain date, and we have engaged with you as a company to meet those obligations, like, there's that's just not okay.

Mike DeHaan: [30:35] It's not. Like like imagine if you went to the bank on like a Thursday and they're like, yeah, we just closed today. Yeah. Need money? Yeah.

Dan Austin: [30:42] You need money? No. Or you go

Mike DeHaan: [30:44] to the grocery store and you swipe your credit card and there's a little thing that says American Express is closed today because everyone's been working really hard. It doesn't freaking make any sense.

Dan Austin: [30:53] It's not okay.

Mike DeHaan: [30:54] You know, so we've had that, we've had just a bunch of different delays and like getting documents from various people.

Dan Austin: [30:59] Payoff statements is always a nightmare.

Mike DeHaan: [31:01] We have this one from like a freaking HOA that's been waiting for their whatever document to release the current owner from their obligations for like weeks.

Dan Austin: [31:11] HOA ones are interesting especially because they tend to be most problematic for condos for whatever reason.

Mike DeHaan: [31:18] Yeah.

Dan Austin: [31:19] And I don't know why, but they sometimes are just a pain in the ass mostly because like the HOA is like always a part time person and they just don't give a shit about selling your condo.

Mike DeHaan: [31:29] Yeah. Totally right. They never do. I didn't I mean, I don't know. There are criminal organizations at end of it. So my wife just snuck in. And if you wanna see a little sample of one of the stickers. What's the hole? She handmade it. So it's not the real, like, refined one yet.

Dan Austin: [31:45] Is that an actual hole?

Mike DeHaan: [31:46] Yeah. If we're gonna have an actual hole in it and then don't be a square peg. Yeah.

Dan Austin: [31:51] Nice. I love it. So Madison, I said nice work.

Mike DeHaan: [31:55] Yeah. So And then don't be a square peg stickers that we'll get in for for swag at KeysCon. But I think they're cool. But yeah. Anyways, we've had those delays with closings. We've had, like, lenders missing stuff. We've had title companies freeing up. We've had honestly, the easiest people in the transactions have been the sellers.

Dan Austin: [32:14] That is a surprise.

Mike DeHaan: [32:15] Which is how you know stuff's getting weird. Right.

Dan Austin: [32:18] Right? Yeah, exactly. Which is so funny with title companies, I know we've been kinda harping on them a lot, but it's like, it's so funny because there's less transactions going on, but for some reason, like when we were doing a lot of transactions during the height of 2021, when things were going bonkers, title companies are on it. Mhmm. They're just like, yeah man, we'll get it closed. Oh, wanna close in four days? Yeah, we can get title done, sweet, let's do it. Now you have thirty days and they just still don't I don't know. It's just people are losing their mind out there, but Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [32:49] Well, it's it's so frustrating because they're they're like the referee of the whole real estate process. Yeah. Right? Yes. And like everyone can be there to play a good game, but the referee decides they're gonna just screw it up for no reason at all. Yep.

Dan Austin: [33:00] Yep. Totally.

Mike DeHaan: [33:01] It's like you don't need to call every single foul.

Dan Austin: [33:02] This is it's like this is off market real estate. No blood, no foul.

Mike DeHaan: [33:05] Blood, no foul.

Dan Austin: [33:06] Everybody wants to get the deal done. Let's make it. Let's make it work.

Mike DeHaan: [33:09] Yes. And now and it's just it's been super challenging. Even on buyers. So we've had real pain in the ass, lot of buyers and stuff recently too. People get weird flaking out, like wanting to change stuff at the last second. I don't know. It's always a challenge somewhere. It's always just how do you kinda like minimize stuff to keep getting things done.

Dan Austin: [33:26] So the question is, with the Thanksgiving holiday coming up, when do you do you market? I mean, Black Friday, you don't wanna get caught up in all the all the ads showing up.

Mike DeHaan: [33:37] I mean, we've historically never paused marketing and as a result, we do pretty well during the holidays. I know that's a pretty big temptation that people have is it could all people don't wanna sell during the holidays, so why should we continue marketing? The thing is, you just gotta, you know, keep leaning to the holidays and then by the time that the the New Year turns over, that's usually when your dividends get paid at that point. But cool. Alright. Well, anything else there, Dan, before we wrap up here?

Dan Austin: [34:03] No. I'm good. Let's get out of here.

Mike DeHaan: [34:05] Cool. Right on, guys. Well, thanks for listening. If you guys want to come to Keys Con, at least the next one, then you should go check out collectingkeyspodcast.com and book a call, and we can see if you would be a good fit for the instant investor program. And then you can come and learn to do what we do and come to KeyzCon next year if you're lucky, if you're so selected. But besides that, we appreciate you all. Please share this podcast with anyone who might find interesting. Greatly appreciate it. And I'll catch you guys next week.