National Rent Control, Opinions On Higher Education, And How Entrepreneurs will Resist This Recession

Mike DeHaan: [0:00] So I think that the recession, like, sort of world view and, like, how the world and and entrepreneurial space and investors react to it is going to be completely different this time around versus I mean, it's already a little bit different. I think it's gonna be very, very different versus, like, 2008. Because a lot of us that are, you know, in, like, the real estate space or investment space, we have been told now for the last, what, fifteen years that fortunes are made in a recession. And if you are active during a recession, you will be freaking crushing it in ten years. All of us have been just force fed that. So now we have, like, this huge population of go getters that are like, this is the recession time. It's time to put the foot down

Dan Austin: [0:49] Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [0:49] And get after it. And I think because of that, things will rebound really quick, or they'll never really get that bad because you're gonna have all of these people actively making moves trying to get their piece of the pie of, like, the next big run up.

Speaker 3: [1:02] Welcome to the collecting keys real estate investing podcast with your host, Mike DeHaan and Dan Austin. From wins, losses, horror stories, and tactics for optimizing your business, Mike and Dan take a real uncensored deep dive into the ins and outs of running a full time real estate investment and wholesaling business.

Mike DeHaan: [1:25] What's going on, guys? Welcome to this episode of the collecting keys real estate investing podcast. This is the Mike and Dan show where I, Mike DeHaan, and my business partner slash cohost, Dan Austin, talk about business, real estate investing, and everything in between. And I guess the top news that we've been going through today, and Dan and I are trying to figure out is, I guess, we both just got a headline at the same time about the new rent bill in the federal government. But, I mean, I don't know, dude. Whenever it comes up like this comes up so I I read about it very briefly earlier, and it sounds like it's like Elizabeth Warren and all the other, like, I don't know, extremists, democrat. They call them progressives because that's supposed to sound less obnoxious. I don't know. But they are pushing for, like, basically nationwide rent control, and they wanna subsidize rent across the country. But, dude, it's all positioning, man. They'll never do that. All those bastards, they No. They make fat money off of their real estate holdings. They're not gonna restrict themselves.

Dan Austin: [2:26] I know. We get everybody gets all animated and upset about this shit, but, yeah, politicians don't do anything that's not for themselves.

Mike DeHaan: [2:32] Of course, they don't. Why would they?

Dan Austin: [2:33] It's just they're not progressive. Like, I don't know what you'd call it, but in Republicans are the same. I have a friend of mine who's a very very staunch Republican or at least used to be. He sent me an image of the debt to GDP. Was it debt to g no. It was the no. Debt ceiling. Sorry. Of a graph of how it's grown over the years, and it shows, like, red, blue, red, blue for who was in office. And and the only thing that was just going about that graph was that it grew every year. But but Republicans are conservative with their money. Now. They've raised it just like everybody else, but they they still say the opposite of each other. It's just bullshit.

Mike DeHaan: [3:08] I know. Well, and the problem is now with, like, the media is the main things that come up because because here's the thing, everybody. You should know this. The media is is 100% run by our government now, like, exclusively. Right? You know, even though they're technically not supposed to be, it's pretty private, whatever. It's all bullshit. It's all run by the government. And so the stuff that comes to the top is the things that are gonna elicit a strong behavior and are gonna cause some sort of swing in, like like or some sort of reaction from one political side or the other. So the rent control thing is a good thing for all the people that are super anti real estate investors, super, like, into the whole rent issue, quote, unquote, to be like, yeah. Let's have a conversation about this and talk about why the other side is bad. I don't know if you saw the extreme Republican pitch that was done the other day. It was like maybe it late last week about how they wanted to get rid of all, like, income tax and get rid of all, like, Social Security and all the tax that we people pay.

Dan Austin: [4:09] Mhmm. And Get rid of it.

Mike DeHaan: [4:10] Only only have a 30% sales tax. That's it. Beautiful. Just on on everything. Just like a flat 30% sales tax.

Dan Austin: [4:21] And then, like, provide specific loopholes for very special people that don't Exactly.

Mike DeHaan: [4:25] And you're you're sounding like you're sounding like a liberal, dude. That's the kind of shit they were saying about why I wasn't okay. But then, like, you know, there are there are points on both sides. Right? Because, like, if you are the higher up, you know, you pay more taxes. If you don't have those loopholes, and that's why they have the loopholes is so you don't pay as many taxes. But then, obviously, a 30% increase in cost of everything would absolutely decimate the low income people. They're already living day to day.

Dan Austin: [4:48] Republicans hate

Mike DeHaan: [4:49] poor people. They they all hate poor people. Every Democrat hates poor people. I know they do. You know? And and ultimately, if you if you wanna look at the sphere of American politics, it's not about, you know, Democrat versus Republican. It is a classist society. It is them versus everyone

Dan Austin: [5:08] below them. Yeah. It's wild. And and I I was listening to some guy talk about this, and he basically said, he's like, you can't get elected by taking shit away from people. You have to give stuff to people. So if you were, like, running on if you were running on a position of, like, you know what? We need to tighten the belt. We're gonna, like, we're gonna, like, increase taxes and, like, reduce our our debts, our spending. We're gonna, like, make it hard for everybody. Nobody can vote for your ass.

Mike DeHaan: [5:30] Yeah. They're gonna vote for

Dan Austin: [5:31] the guy that's like, hey, bro. You want some free shit?

Mike DeHaan: [5:33] Exactly. Right. Yeah. So, anyway, somewhere from politics, I don't like to talk about politics.

Dan Austin: [5:39] Yeah. That was a loud opening on your part.

Mike DeHaan: [5:41] Well, because it's it's like just an outrageous fuck. And people like, I don't know. It's not my thing, but here my general belief is that everyone in the government does not give a shit about you or your needs. They only care about themselves. So you can have your opinions, and you can go to the people that say that they're gonna help you, but just understand at the end of the day, they're not because they don't care. So that's how it works. Yeah. That's my favorite politics. You know anyway. So business wise though, we've had we've been getting hard to work on disposition for all these properties for the last couple of weeks, and we finally are in a position where it looks like most things are gonna be closing here.

Dan Austin: [6:22] I know. We got a lot close. I'm stoked. We even had one, like, come out of the depths of nowhere. What was that one? Sturtevant.

Mike DeHaan: [6:30] Oh, yeah. I know. This is this is a great follow-up by one of our sales guys, Dave. He we had a deal that, for all intents and purposes, was not gonna happen because it's in the state of Maine where we do some business. And, like, basically, up up there, if there is a was it a tax foreclosure? Then the person

Dan Austin: [6:51] Yeah. If there's a foreclosure by a local government.

Mike DeHaan: [6:53] And this is a good education on making sure that you, you know, get properties into escrow and appropriate timelines so they can start title work. Because we learned that in the state of Maine, it's a tax foreclosure. The previous owner has five years to challenge it. So, basically, you can't get clear title on the property for five years after that happens. And so the people that we're looking to buy the property from, they bought it with cash. They probably didn't even do a title check. They just, wrote the dude check, whatever. Or, like, wrote the county, you know, bought it off the tax auction. And now they're looking to sell it because they did. You know, it's distressed property. It has these tenants, all that sort of stuff. And we went and got an escrow, and, like, there's no clear title. So we're not gonna buy it. You know, we can't assign to anybody. No investor's gonna buy it if all of a sudden you could buy this property and this previous owner from several owners ago comes out can come out of the woodwork and be like, this is actually my property and state claim to it. And the fact that a state or county would even have it where it's like a five year process like that doesn't make any sense.

Dan Austin: [7:57] I know. It's silly. It's because like and I was talking to the guys over there. It's because of like, they're worried that, you know, Maine is not super populous. It's like that there's some, like, backwoods, like, home you know, a good old boy system that they could just take your house, and maybe that's happened in the past there in Maine, and so they wanna protect their citizens from that good old boy system of like, hey. You didn't pay your garbage bill. We're taking your house.

Mike DeHaan: [8:19] Oh, gotcha. I was gonna say yeah. I mean, I guess I understand that a little bit, but I guess I assume because it was in

Dan Austin: [8:24] In modern society, it makes no sense now.

Mike DeHaan: [8:27] It doesn't. I was thinking because Maine because, like, you know, it's a less pipe like you said. It's like someone maybe that's how how long it takes to walk to, like, Florida and back. If you're, like, a main a main local going on a great journey

Dan Austin: [8:40] Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [8:40] You need to be able to they need to make sure they account for your time away on your on your great adventure outside the state of Maine. Well, I'm glad it came back around

Dan Austin: [8:48] because I feel like that was a pretty thick deal too because because of the situation, we had negotiated a pretty good price on it, and we had a a pretty decent spread.

Mike DeHaan: [8:57] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it should be great. But yeah. Anyway, so how how it came back around is Dave followed up with all of the various people that we had tried to figure out with this this transaction. Because, basically, we can get the situation cleared if we get the previous owner to sign off on the sale. And we had had a bunch of different people involved, the seller, the title company. We tried to reach out to the previous seller that got foreclosed on through social media. Nothing worked. And then we had tried to reach out to the ex wife of, like, the previous seller a couple times and just hadn't come around. And then Dave just happened to catch the the ex wife, and she was great. And she was like, cool. Yeah. I'll help facilitate it. Like, I've been supporting him.

Dan Austin: [9:37] Yeah. She's like, I've already talked to my ex husband and all that.

Mike DeHaan: [9:39] Yeah. So she was kind of queued in with everything, and lo and behold, it seems to be coming together. So I think that, yeah, big lesson there for everybody is the fortune is in the follow-up. Follow-up. You know? And, know, you we're starting to see that with some of our our instant investor students too in our in our group coaching program. We have several people that have starting that are starting to get some long term follow-up stuff coming in. You missed the live call group coach coaching call we had a couple days ago. But, yeah, Dylan, he got a deal that was, like, three hundred days in the pipeline that just came around. Nice. Right? That's that's pretty huge. We've had several guys that have had deals they've been working for, like, six months that are coming in. And I'll tell you what, I think that once you kind of understand the initial lead generation and marketing process and sales process of this business, the one thing that will allow you to be successful and to stand out amongst everybody else is having consistency on that follow-up more than anything else.

Dan Austin: [10:36] Really good structured follow-up. And it's like anything with any sales process. When you first show up, you don't have a book of clients. You have to build your book of clients. Mhmm. And that's what you're doing. And if you start getting leads to your clients and you don't follow-up with them, you just wasted all that time and all that money in your case for marketing. Like, you gotta do the follow-up. Just do it.

Mike DeHaan: [10:54] Yeah. I mean, it takes it takes work, and it sucks. And if it's something that you really don't wanna do, go and hire people to do it for you. I mean, that's what we did. That was one of the times that our business really changed and started to escalate was when we went and we brought in a full time lead manager that went through all the old follow-up, all the old leads and just scheduled stuff for our acquisitions manager. And that happened. Like, our business changed immediately, and we were, like, printing opportunities.

Dan Austin: [11:17] Believe it or not, there's people out there that you can hire to do that that actually that's what they wanna do.

Mike DeHaan: [11:22] I know, which is, like, always the most mind blowing thing to people. I think for for everyone that starts to work for themselves and they're like a solopreneur, right, one of the hardest things to understand is that there really are people that enjoy doing every aspect of your business that you hate. Yeah. Whether that's like that's like the bookkeeping, whether that's the sales part, whether that's the marketing, whether that's setting up your freaking, I don't know, URLs for your web stuff on the back end. There's people that enjoy that, and that's what they do. And you can hire them, and it's probably for less than you think these days because we live in a global economy where you can hire

Dan Austin: [11:58] people all over the world. Very true. All over the world.

Mike DeHaan: [12:01] So yeah. I mean, you know, we we even had an interview today, which I'm it's gonna be coming out in, a little while, but I'm freaking excited about it because we had an interview with this guy who used his virtual assistants for his, like, underwriting. Like, like, for his big deal. Like, he uses them to underwrite, like, 100 unit apartment complexes.

Dan Austin: [12:20] Yeah. And, yeah, self storage and all that sort of stuff. And I think the fascinating about that is is, like, you know, we always talk about, like, underwriting being like an art and a science, but really, there's some part of it that is, but a lot of it is systematized. And you can if you can systematize it, you can have somebody else do it. 95% of it is systematizable, then and you have that 5% nuance which you can review at the end of it after you pass it off to a virtual to do it.

Mike DeHaan: [12:44] Yeah. Exactly. And, I mean, it's funny because I guess we even know that, right, to an extent. We've done that. We've just never thought to use them for, like, complex stuff. Just like it's like that's kind of the stigma Right. That you have. It's like, oh, they're like, it's cheap, doing like a foreign country, whatever. But, I mean, it's funny to be preached this, that they're fully capable of doing more complex things than just, like, pushing numbers on an Excel spreadsheet. But for some reason, we had never thought of, like, oh, what if we had them do, like, actual complex things?

Dan Austin: [13:16] Right. I mean, shit. Do you even have to have it via virtual? Like, I was thinking like this. I was like, what if you just like you could find a realtor or anybody in any single market. It doesn't even have to be your home market and be like, hey. Every deal you underwrite, that's good. I'll give you a $150.

Mike DeHaan: [13:29] Maybe. I don't think people would do it for that cheap. I think you'd need to be significantly more expensive.

Dan Austin: [13:33] Okay, Pam. So if you're buying a 100 unit apartment building, so you pay them a thousand dollars. Who cares?

Mike DeHaan: [13:38] Yeah. But even then, like, well, I guess I guess here's the tricky thing too, and this is maybe me being a little bearish on just, like, the American economy. I I feel like it would be easier to find people that would be good at that in, a foreign country than it would here.

Dan Austin: [13:52] Right. No. You I mean, there's a lot more people willing to do it, but and willing to do it exactly how you say it. My point is though that and and he talked about this. A lot of his virtuals are just virtual. They're still local to The United States, and they're still get doing high quality work for a reasonable price.

Mike DeHaan: [14:08] Well, only only a few of them. Like, I I think that most of the ones that were, like, overseas because he said he might find most of them on Filipino hiring websites.

Dan Austin: [14:16] Mhmm. He did. Yeah. Yeah. He has two Yeah. From the Filipino hiring websites.

Mike DeHaan: [14:21] Yeah. So, yeah, point being though

Dan Austin: [14:23] Semantics, Mike. Semantics.

Mike DeHaan: [14:25] Yeah. It is. But, yeah, anything you can systematize, you can hire people to do. And there are people out there that will not only do it, but they will actually enjoy it and will probably feature really neat things. So big, big learning lesson there. And follow-up is a big one, and that's one of the first things I always recommend people look to hire out as they start to grow a off market investment business. Whether you're looking to flip or wholesale or buy for yourself, you know, you can find a lead manager that can help with all those things. So, yeah, we had that come together, and then we've started to make some waves moving into a couple of different markets. So we're looking to launch a new operation down in Florida. I'm super excited about. Florida.

Dan Austin: [15:02] It's gonna be nice and warm down there. Are we moving are we moving there right now? That's what we're doing.

Mike DeHaan: [15:06] I might need to. I mean, we get it up. But honestly, though, that's a great excuse to have a business trip because we gotta go check on the new market in Florida. We gotta go connect with our new partners.

Dan Austin: [15:15] Dude, I've been to Jackson well, I shouldn't say

Mike DeHaan: [15:17] where it's at. Jacksonville is fine. That's why that's

Dan Austin: [15:18] where we're going. Yeah. Dude, that's Jacksonville. There's, like, a thousand people investing there.

Mike DeHaan: [15:22] Yeah. That's fine. We'll do it better.

Dan Austin: [15:24] Man, what a fun town, by the way.

Mike DeHaan: [15:25] Is it actually?

Dan Austin: [15:27] Yeah. It is a really good time. I mean, at least Dan in his twenties fun.

Mike DeHaan: [15:32] Yeah. Okay. That's fair. Yeah. See, I have no idea. I've only been I've been to Miami for a GoBundance conference where I'd you know, which I enjoyed some parts of it. I think it's huge amount of Miami, and then I went to I've been to Destin several times, and I quite enjoy Destin. I think Destin's a beautiful place.

Dan Austin: [15:46] Yeah. Destin's nice. That's like like the the Panhandle, like, the 38. Like, that's like super this in my opinion, like, the sleepy part. I mean, Panama City is pretty wild, but, like, Daytona Beach? Yeah. That's another one. That's that's a good time too.

Mike DeHaan: [15:58] Issue I had with, like, Miami is I felt like the entire city, you know, and I was in, like, a decent, like, Marriott down there. But, like, everywhere I I went, I felt like it was built, like, in the seventies by people who were on cocaine.

Dan Austin: [16:12] That's Florida. That's Florida. Have you ever

Mike DeHaan: [16:15] been to Fort Lauderdale? No. It's just the airport.

Dan Austin: [16:18] Imagine imagine Miami, but just, like, a little bit shorter and, like, way more seventies. Everything's, like, light pink and, like Yeah. Pastel colors, and it's just a bunch of old people, like, tan

Mike DeHaan: [16:30] and And everything felt like it was like a freaking party, like, thirty five years ago.

Dan Austin: [16:35] Yeah. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [16:37] So, yeah, it was super weird vibe and, like Yeah. That's South Florida for you. Yeah. So we got that starting up here pretty soon. We got some partners down there. We're gonna start hitting that pretty hard. I'm excited to start turning that up. And then

Dan Austin: [16:48] Really cool.

Mike DeHaan: [16:49] A few other markets too with different partners that we're looking at right now as well. Sort of going through this. We have this partnership program that we've been building out where we work with different ambassadors in different markets and basically run the entire back office for them. And, you know, it's basically a premium version of our of our group coaching, but I guess more involved in the way that, like, we are actually day to day involved in your business and not just, you know, you're like a recipient of a lot of our systems. I don't know

Dan Austin: [17:18] what you call that. What do we call that? We need like a word for that besides partner. Like, the way I look at like, you say it's like, what did you say? You said like, we're we're running all the systems for you. I say it of like, I call it a black box, and then you have we have all these inputs, and the inputs are the leads, and then on the outside on the on the back end comes, like, super valuable properties.

Mike DeHaan: [17:35] Yeah. I mean, that's basically what it is. So, basically, it's like, imagine if you have, you know, you have some cash and you wanna start finding off market deals in your property in your market, off market properties at a huge discount, and you don't wanna do anything with it. Like, you don't wanna do any work really. Like, you wanna just, like, look at opportunities. You don't wanna have to run marketing, build a sales team and that sort of stuff. You can give us some of that money, and we'll do all that for you, and then you could have the upside. That's basically how it works.

Dan Austin: [18:04] Yeah. You're absolutely so that's a simple way to put it.

Mike DeHaan: [18:06] Yeah. And it's funny. I've explained it to some people. They're like, so is it like a franchise? I'm like, well, no. No. Like, kind of, but like not really. So anyway.

Dan Austin: [18:14] As in you don't have to pay us upfront to have access to us like a franchise would. Like, we buy houses, like, give me $80 and then we'll sell you the leads after that. And then you still your success is still in your hands, and we don't help you that much.

Mike DeHaan: [18:26] Oh my god. I know. Like, we buy houses in the home investors groups too. Like, have you like, how those business models work is outrageous. Because that's exactly what it is. You pay, like, $7,080,000 one time, and then they provide you all the leads, but their leads are, like, in a pool

Dan Austin: [18:38] Depending on your market.

Mike DeHaan: [18:39] Yeah. That they give to all of the HomeVestors people in that market. And what's crazy is, like, those are the same leads that we get, but we didn't charge $80,000 one time to get them. They're like they use this

Dan Austin: [18:53] Or a thousand dollars a lead. And then on top of that, a percentage of your profits if you wholesale or flip it.

Mike DeHaan: [18:58] Or flip. Yeah. Right.

Dan Austin: [19:00] Yeah. And then if you hold it, you still have to give a percentage as well.

Mike DeHaan: [19:02] Yeah. Right. If you take all of the financial risk, you put in your own money, you sign a mortgage, you know, sign, like, a hard money loan that has a personal guarantee where you can take your house. They can take your house from you, your personal residence. You do all that, hope you make money, and then you still have to give a portion of it to home investors. That's ridiculous.

Dan Austin: [19:20] It's a little out it's a little outrageous if

Mike DeHaan: [19:22] you ask me.

Dan Austin: [19:23] I mean, if they were, like, super, like, quality leads, I would be paying for them too. Like, if I was, like, if I was, like, lead guaranteed to close. Yeah. Man, let's do it. But that's not the case. It's just any other lead, if not below average.

Mike DeHaan: [19:36] All all I know is that the home investors people that we have met from my experience are not crushing it

Dan Austin: [19:41] at all. Yeah. They're doing alright. They're good people.

Mike DeHaan: [19:43] Well, I guess they're not crushing it from the home investor side. The one guy here locally that's a home investor guy, and he does very well, but he also buys a lot of deals from us. Right.

Dan Austin: [19:51] That's a great point. Absolutely. Yeah. I know what you're talking about. He's a stud. I like him a lot. But it's in other markets too where we operate, the folks that we've seen as home investors people haven't been doing that successfully. Like, oh, yeah, I do one a month.

Mike DeHaan: [20:03] Yeah. Exactly. And so if think about it, it's about that $70,000 across the whole year plus all the other costs, it's a very tough business to be running, and it's not scalable.

Dan Austin: [20:11] Yeah. One month's not necessarily a bad number, but the cost you're paying to get to and the risk you're taking to get to that one deal a month, it's like, you could've just gone and Yeah. Talked to a wholesaler.

Mike DeHaan: [20:19] Exactly. Honestly.

Dan Austin: [20:20] But if you wanna access the deal at $50.60 cents on the dollar, and you wanna just set the price, like

Mike DeHaan: [20:24] Exactly.

Dan Austin: [20:25] Come talk to us.

Mike DeHaan: [20:25] We can get things teed up for you, and it'll be a lot better. And you'll have more say in it, and you'll have more control. And it'll be more fun too because you're not also reliant on this weird ghost of a machine. It's like kinda back there apparently selling you leads. So yeah. So I'm working on building that out. And then what else we got? We just brought a new staff member, our first American staff member to focus on building some of our internal teams, which will be a good game changer for us. As we've been working with our new business coach, that's been one of the things that so here's something. Let's go on the business coach topic really quick because this is something that I've been thinking a lot about. I have been the biggest skeptic slash, like, hater of I don't say, like, mindset coaches, but, like, coaches that aren't for, like, a specific thing, like, specific forever. Mostly because my experience with some of these, like, people, I don't know, like, the mindset gurus that are just, like they're basically a psychologist who sits there and, like, well, how do you feel about that? They try to get you to actually do it. Like, actually, like, think about it and come up with your own solutions. But we found a guy that you know, his podcast is gonna be coming out here relatively shortly.

Mike DeHaan: [21:32] That's how we connected with him. And the stuff that he says, like, it's kind of stuff that we already know, but there's something about having someone that not only helps you frame it in a way that is tangible to your business, but also helps you look at it in a way that's actionable and not theoretical that is unbelievably valuable.

Dan Austin: [21:50] And helps give you confidence to do it. It's just like you and I talked about this, like, we both have a trainer. Right? So, yeah, we know how to work out. I can go work out. I can program myself, but I don't want to. I don't need to and because I can I can pay this person to do it better than me, to be honest, and also to be, like, consistent and to take that out of my brain and not so I don't have to worry about it? And so, like, I'm paying for that guy all day long. There's a lot of different coaches I'd pay all day long as long as they're giving me good, actionable advice because they do give you the confidence that you're going in the right direction.

Mike DeHaan: [22:20] Yeah. Exactly. And they're good. And I think that that's the key is, you if know, the pharmacy ring give you that actionable advice because there's so many people out there, especially, like, you know, there's a certain person who were in good abundance with him, so I don't wanna put him on complete blast. But he got huge purely because Brandon Turner, like, put his name out there, and now he has, like, his whole fleet of coaches that he trains. And I've met a lot of those coaches, and they're sure. They're nice guys. But I'm like, what do you

Dan Austin: [22:45] You talked shit to one of them about people.

Mike DeHaan: [22:47] Yeah. I did. That was yeah. Well, he was like he's like, yeah. I'm I'm one of these guys' coaches. And I was like, okay. So, like, I don't think that makes sense. Like, what exactly do you provide people? And he got wicked offended. And I was like, honestly, dude. Like, tell me how what you do is valuable. You literally sit there and it's like, well, I help people kind of, like, change their mindset and talk to I'm like, so you're like a psychologist? It's like, well, no. Because, like, a psychologist has a license. I'm more like a life coach. I'm like, okay. But, like, why is that worth, you know, $80,000 a year? Honestly. He doesn't know. Exactly. And then especially too, he's like, well, they have one hour a month or something that they meet with people. I'm like, you pay they pay you, like, $7,000 to, like, talk, like a meeting to talk about some bullshit with their feelings. Like, I guess for some people that's valuable. I think for 99% of people, that does not make sense.

Dan Austin: [23:35] Yeah. I mean, people want it to make sense and people tell themselves that it helped them because they just freaking forked over a pile of money. But really like what it did. The one thing I liked about our our coaches, and it's not necessarily a tangible measurement, and I don't don't hold them to it, it's like, if you don't make double what you're paying me, then Yeah. You can have your money back or actually, he didn't say that. He said then I'll keep working with you until you do.

Mike DeHaan: [23:56] Yeah. Exactly. Totally. Put your money where your mouth is.

Dan Austin: [23:58] You know? That's at least something like that's like a it's not like I said, it's not necessarily tangible, it just feels tangible. Right?

Mike DeHaan: [24:03] Like Mhmm. If you

Dan Austin: [24:04] don't feel like you've got double the value out of this that you paid me, then I'm gonna keep working until you feel that way.

Mike DeHaan: [24:09] Yeah. Exactly. So and he has a track record. Okay.

Dan Austin: [24:12] Cool. I like that.

Mike DeHaan: [24:13] That's the other thing too when people look at coaches. We want someone that actually has a freaking track record of doing what you're trying to do. You know? It's like the kinda like a hypocrisy of these university professors that are teaching, like, oh, this is how to build a, you know, a a business for to sell the private equity company when they've never done that in their life. You know? They have no idea.

Dan Austin: [24:35] Yeah. You wanna know the biggest farce of one of my college education, I feel like, is the entrepreneurship class I was required to take as part of a business degree. Yeah. Right? I'm like, really? Like, you are at a university and you're teaching entrepreneurship? Like, come on, man. Come on.

Mike DeHaan: [24:51] Yeah. I mean, even in our engineering classes that we took. Like, if you look at all the engineering classes that you and I took at at GU, there was maybe, like, one, Like so we had a couple people that were working engineers that taught classes, like, on the side as, like, a side gig. Those guys are fine. But if you look at the actual Gonzaga staff that we had, there was,

Dan Austin: [25:11] Yeah. They're all

Mike DeHaan: [25:12] Yeah. There was just one dude that was actually doing engineering. Anyway, and his class was freaking hard, and he was an asshole, but in a way that was totally respectable because he was like, I have other shit to do than sit here and answer your stupid, like, student questions. I'm over here trying to, like, send sound waves through letter of the hell he was doing in the other

Dan Austin: [25:31] I think I know who you're talking about. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [25:33] Yeah. You know exactly what I'm talking about because I failed all of his classes. Yeah.

Dan Austin: [25:38] They were They're hard. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [25:40] But the other ones, I was like, why are you trying to teach about this theoretical engine like, the engineering business class that we had.

Dan Austin: [25:46] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, the one thing I do remember from that that business class was the time value of money. Because I think all that whatever that equation was that you the compound interest equation, it was one of those finance equations. I was like, okay. I can remember that. Oh, it's future value. That that's what it was. It's the future value equation. Like, that was, like, the only thing that was worth it. That's a good equation. But to your point, the academic system is bullshit. It is bullshit. Can we both agree on that? I mean, our listeners might not agree on that. Now this is a guy with a couple advanced degrees. Like, I think it's bullshit.

Mike DeHaan: [26:15] It

Dan Austin: [26:15] is. I think it will disappear or dissipate over time as well.

Mike DeHaan: [26:19] Yeah. And and the problem is that the thing with higher education that you used to pay for was you were paying like, you're going to Harvard. Right? Sure. Harvard has some great professors, has some great courses, whatever. Realistically, what you're paying for is you're paying to go and be around the people that could afford to go to Harvard and could get into Harvard.

Dan Austin: [26:35] Yes.

Mike DeHaan: [26:35] Honestly, same with Gonzaga. When we went to Gonzaga, it's an expensive private school in the Northwest. It's small. The value of our education to this day is not the electroengineering degree that we both got. Obviously, we're not doing that anymore. We have a freaking house flipping business. It is the value that Yes. Being a Gonzaga alumni in the Pacific Northwest carries. You can go and and that it's kind of exclusive to here. Like, if I go to Florida, no one gives a shit. But if Yeah. But, like No. We can't. If I go around the Spokane area, around even the Seattle area, Idaho, whatever, and I'm a Gonzaga alumni, I now have more credibility to people that recognize that. Right? Because it was a difficult school to get into, difficult school to graduate from, and, honestly, it was an expensive school. So it shows a certain income class. Right?

Dan Austin: [27:19] Yes. And if you don't go to a college that's a little bit exclusive, you'll never meet your Dan Austin.

Mike DeHaan: [27:24] That's true. That's true. Yeah. Well, I mean, but, like, honestly, though, like like, us connecting is the value is value that came there. But Yep. Now with all of these schools trying to make themselves more accessible and they're, like, lowering their barrier to entry and they're starting to, like, increase, you know, their demographic area, their geographic area, providing more scholarships, it reduces that. And, also, to the massive increase in class sizes they're all having, all of a sudden, like, you know, the program that was 400 people that was really tight knit 15 ago at whatever x y z business school in Harvard is now 2,500 people. It's not nearly as valuable anymore. But they're still gonna charge you way more money.

Dan Austin: [28:03] And the best part is they they went and then the most universities went so woke Mhmm. That they actually went unwoke because, like, there was a big lawsuit recently that showed that they were discriminating against Asian people in certain schools like Harvard. Actually, Harvard is one of them. I was like, damn. You went so woke that you were trying to be extra woke that you completely excluded an entire race. Yeah. It's funny. That would be considered a minority.

Mike DeHaan: [28:27] They say that we went unwoke. That's that's just the diversity thing. Right? They recognize that a huge amount of the population was Asian. So they said, okay. Cool. We're try and, like, create more diversity by going away from that. That's not any different from some of these other schools that are mostly white and being like, hey. Cool. We wanna bring in more kids. We wanna bring in more Hispanic kids, whatever. But for some reason, because it's a, quote, unquote, minority class, that's considered weird. I don't know. It's fucking

Dan Austin: [28:51] It's all racist, man. It's all nonsense.

Mike DeHaan: [28:53] Point being, though, if you wanna be a real estate investor, you wanna make real money, go find a good coach and pay them instead of, like, go go and getting further education.

Dan Austin: [29:01] Yeah. I think you can pay to get places faster. Yeah. And I think that's okay. I think that is an advantage of the privileged, and you should take advantage of it if you have money or want to take a bet on yourself like Mike and I have time and time again. Like, it wasn't like we were like, dude, we're so like, we're doing so well. Let's go pay a bunch of money to a guy that, you know, we might not make back. Know, we took a gamble.

Mike DeHaan: [29:25] We're like, we're gonna make it back. Mhmm. Exactly. Well, we we have a system. We believe in ourselves for it.

Dan Austin: [29:29] It's gonna yeah. Exactly. So you gotta sometimes it does feel like a little bit of a gamble, but that's how you make money.

Mike DeHaan: [29:35] When also too, if you are in a position where you can't afford to pay for it, you can connect with those people through other ways, you know, through hustle, through, like, bringing them opportunity. You know, I actually did an Instagram post on this the other day of, like, I hate where like, with, like, mentors that people always say, like, oh, if you're gonna want someone to be your mentor, you need to find a way to bring them value first instead of just, like, asking to take them out to coffee, lunch, or whatever. Well, I fundamentally agree with that. It doesn't make any sense because, like, this happens to me all the time now where I have people, like, reach out to me on on Instagram or, like, locally here or whatever, and they're like, hey. I'd really like to hear more about what you're doing. I have this deal I think you'd be interested in. I'm like, that is so nice. I don't want your deal. Like, I have enough other shit that I'm trying to figure out right now. And unless your deal is absolutely amazing, which I know it's not because you're seeking mentorship from me on how to get better at finding that deal.

Dan Austin: [30:31] Man, Mike, keep your door open, bud. There's, like that's a lead source.

Mike DeHaan: [30:34] Well, it is. But after a while, like, you you haven't put any effort into growing your personal brands. You probably don't get it up quite as much as I do.

Dan Austin: [30:41] I do not put my effort in that.

Mike DeHaan: [30:43] But then I think about these people that have, you know, 50,000 followers. It must be constant. Right? But point being is they say, try to bring value to your mentors if you want them to mentor you. Right? But if it's you're trying to bring value in a way that they're an expert and you're not, it doesn't really make sense. You kinda need to find other ways to bring them value, right, through your own expertise, through, like, your own capabilities, whatever that is. Like, for me, back when I was starting in real estate, some of my first mentors, like, both in business and real estate, I connected with through the gym because I was a coach there. I knew how to get in shape. I knew about weight training. And so I would bring value with them that way and sort of build a friendship. And then lo and behold, real estate and business advice would follow after that because we established a connection that was mutually beneficial.

Dan Austin: [31:27] So are you saying, like, you should find a natural way to provide value to somebody instead of trying to do something that's forced and uncomfortable?

Mike DeHaan: [31:34] Yeah. Pretty much. Either that or be willing to pay people. Mhmm. Because that that immediately creates a mutually beneficial exchange. Right. Yes. Yeah. So that's my view on on mentorship, though.

Dan Austin: [31:44] Sorry, audience. Mike was kinda ranting for a minute

Mike DeHaan: [31:47] about that. For a long time. It's been it's been a day, man. I've been freaking hyped up on sales calls all day doing other stuff. But, you know, some days, it feels like we're just going a million miles an hour, and there's no time to do anything. Because I I don't think I did any actual work today. I just had a ton of conversations.

Dan Austin: [32:03] Hell, yeah. That's the way to go, man. That's that's

Mike DeHaan: [32:05] the best kind of work. That's work. Yeah. It is. But it's also like you look back at your big checklist, which I have a whiteboard back here now that has, like, stuff I'm supposed to do on it, and it just keeps getting bigger. That's the challenge.

Dan Austin: [32:17] Here's the have you ever read the book, the one thing? Because you should think about that checklist because not

Mike DeHaan: [32:22] I did listen to your Friday focus last week.

Dan Austin: [32:24] All not all tasks are equal, and should you be doing all those tasks? What is the one thing that you can be doing?

Mike DeHaan: [32:31] That's why we brought in Robbie because he's doing a lot of those tasks now on the internal side. Yeah. He

Dan Austin: [32:35] is. He is. He's awesome. He's gonna do great. Anyways What's going on, man? Anything fun?

Mike DeHaan: [32:40] No. We're selling some stuff, which is, you know, the big cardinal sin

Dan Austin: [32:45] Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [32:45] In the real estate investing space.

Dan Austin: [32:47] And it's gonna be a

Mike DeHaan: [32:48] problem now because, you know, if if we sell I have a my portfolio in Minnesota I'm I'm selling, which I bought a few years ago, which actually be closing the next couple weeks. We cleared inspection, I think. Everything is looking good. So that will drop me down by I have five less units, and then we're looking at potentially selling our eight unit, which means we'll have those eight. So I'm also gonna have 14 less units. And my, like, big door count flex is not gonna be as impressive anymore. So I'm gonna lose all of my kudos amongst the don't do anything crowd in the real estate space.

Dan Austin: [33:20] Yeah. You're gonna be average again, dude. Yeah. Yeah. It is kind of it is kind of a bad thing to sell, but also, like, there's some opportunity in selling too. I think we're doing the right thing.

Mike DeHaan: [33:30] Yeah. I think so. Well, on both of those properties, well, I guess for the eight unit that we own together and then my portfolio that I own on the side, you know, I own that one myself. Is that a position where, like, the return on equity, just like we cash flow decent on stuff. Just the return on equity isn't quite with our game plan. And, like, you know, across my little portfolio of Minnesota, like, my current equity position's, like, 55% or something crazy.

Dan Austin: [33:55] Right.

Mike DeHaan: [33:56] And I'm like, well, I could refinance it out, but then I'm gonna be stuck with more expensive debt. And I'm like, I would rather sell it in 10/31 into something that's closer, to an area that's growing a little bit more and, like, more of like an a class property. Trading in my cash flow for more of like a long term play, which I'm at a place with business where I'm okay with that. And then same with the eight unit. Like, we have pretty significant equity in it at this point. You know, we've done some rent increases. We've done all this stuff. We've created the value, and it's like, okay. Now it's time to exit reposition and move on to something bigger. Something bigger, something a little stronger, a

Dan Austin: [34:28] little better position. You know, that's what they they say, you know, this is the time to weed out the the weak the weak assets in your portfolio. And not that the eight units weak, but it's like at a point that it's time to it's time to trade up, and we're able to do it in like twelve months, which is super cool. So it's almost kinda like a flip.

Mike DeHaan: [34:44] A little bit. Yeah. But we avoid long term short term capital gains.

Dan Austin: [34:47] Exactly.

Mike DeHaan: [34:47] And, you know, and I would say it's not even necessarily yeah. It's not a weak asset, but it's it's our outlier. It's like the one that's, like, a little bit farther away from town. We don't know the area quite as well. Mhmm. You know, it just makes sense for us to move on and try to get something bigger with it.

Dan Austin: [35:00] So Anybody knows anything in the triple net space in the local Eastern Washington market, please hit us up because we are looking. We're shopping.

Mike DeHaan: [35:07] Yeah. So that's that's that is our plan with that. And then we have our flip that we're gonna lose on. We should be closing it pretty soon. We will be running a huge amount of capital back if all that stuff closes. So, yeah, any commercial investors or anyone with any triple net commercial stuff in Eastern Washington, North Idaho, definitely let us know because we are actively actively looking to roll into that sort of stuff. So off market, on market, whatever it is, we want it.

Dan Austin: [35:33] So,

Mike DeHaan: [35:34] anyway, that's what we're after. And then on top of that, I mean, man, don't know, man. I just feel like things are starting to turn up. I'm getting pretty excited about the way the market's going.

Dan Austin: [35:44] Transactions are moving. 2023 has already started off to be a pretty great year so far.

Mike DeHaan: [35:50] Mhmm. It has.

Dan Austin: [35:51] As far as things are moving, things are picking up. At least for us in our business, I'd love to hear if other people are experiencing that same thing. But and I think as we get deeper into the year, I think it's gonna be it's gonna continue to improve, you know, through Exactly. Till the summer,

Mike DeHaan: [36:03] I think.

Dan Austin: [36:04] That's my opinion. Just based on what I'm feeling now.

Mike DeHaan: [36:06] Yeah. And I think not only for us, I think just the economic situation seems to be a lot more positive Yeah. Going into the year.

Dan Austin: [36:12] People are still arguing about, like, are we in a recession? Are we are we going into a recession? Like, who gives a shit? Like, what what do you wanna call it? Like, I don't think that's going to change the economic outlook regardless of if you give it a technical term or not.

Mike DeHaan: [36:26] Yeah. You know what? I have this theory. It's quick quick tangent before we we ended up here. But so I think that the recession, like, sort of world view and, like, how the world and and entrepreneurial space and investors react to it is going to be completely different this time around versus I mean, it's already a little bit different. I think it's gonna be very, very different versus, like, 2008. Because a lot of us that are, you know, in, like, the real estate space and investment space, we have been told now for the last, what, fifteen years that fortunes are made in a recession. And if you are active during a recession, you will be freaking crushing it in ten years. All of us have been just force fed that. So now we have, like, this huge population of go getters that are like, this is the recession time. It's time to put the foot down and get after it. And I think because of that, things will rebound really quick, or they'll never really get that bad because you're gonna have all of these people actively making moves trying to get their piece of the pie of, like, the next big run up.

Dan Austin: [37:33] Yeah. I will continue to to argue the point that there's still money on the sidelines. Mhmm. Yes. There is like credit card debt and stuff is growing for parts of the population. But when it comes to the people that actually drive the economy, the people that are producing, the people that are buying real estate assets, the people that are buying businesses or producing businesses, they still have pretty strong financial positions regardless of what happened And in the last 12 they're the ones that are going to produce. And so that's why I think it'll it's more of a shorter, less severe recession that's not as broad and it's not necessarily a housing recession, it's just that the rates got too high that people are like Yeah. I'm gonna wait. Yeah. Bye. Yeah. Sure. There's some pockets of people losing money. Fuck. Yeah. There's some cities, you know, Phoenix that are dropping significant in value because they got really high. They got over their skis a little bit, but it doesn't mean anything. It's like they're talking about jobs right now. All these tech companies laying off the tens of thousands of people, they're still these tech companies are still above the employee counts that they had before COVID started. It's just mind boggling.

Dan Austin: [38:39] They're laying off tens of thousands of people.

Mike DeHaan: [38:41] Yeah. When even then, the way that have you seen the way that a lot of those layoffs are actually going? It's not like you get laid off from, I don't know, Walmart where they're like, hey. Cool. You got two weeks. Get out of here. But, like, someone posted I saw it on Reddit. It was like Oh, yeah. Layoff email that they got from Google. And it was like, you will have until 10/23/2023, and that will be your last day. We will be escalating your stock, so you're gonna be able to get that paid out. We will be paying you eight months severance. We're doing auctions. You're not freaking getting laid off. You're just told you get to fuck around for the next ten months.

Dan Austin: [39:15] Exactly. Because you know they're not doing any work. They're gonna go find another job while they're getting laid off and collect dude, that reminds me. There's this I saw this tweet from David Sachs. It was a screenshot of this dude who posted his new passive income scheme. It was hilarious. So the guy's like, I currently have 10 software engineering jobs, all virtual. He said, I'm making about 1,500,000 a year, and it takes about six to eight weeks before they find out I didn't do anything. Oh my god. Like, that is hilarious, dude. But what I mean, what other company could you do that other than a tech company that is so soft that they give you ten months advance notice to not do shit before they lay you off? And they fully expect those people to not do shit because they already weren't doing shit, and they're just pricing it in. They're basically saying, hey, we need to save 15,000,000,000 this year. At five of that billion, we're gonna give to these people so that we look really good and so that people wanna come back. The best of the best will wanna come back to work for us when we're in the hiring boom. So they're just pricing it in.

Mike DeHaan: [40:13] Yeah. I mean, yeah, you're not wrong.

Dan Austin: [40:15] It's so tough. 10 software engineering jobs.

Mike DeHaan: [40:18] Yeah. That's that's who's gonna get sued though, like, eventually if that comes back around. Like, that's the kind of stuff that you

Dan Austin: [40:22] can I mean, I hope you posted it anonymously? Someone will figure it out.

Mike DeHaan: [40:26] So, anyway, alright. Lots of lots of changes there. But either way, good stuff all around the real estate space. I'm excited. I think things are looking really, really good going into 2023 overall, the general economic picture, regardless of what this stupid doomsday clock says because

Dan Austin: [40:43] What is the doomsday clock? I don't get it. I must have missed this on TikTok.

Mike DeHaan: [40:46] I don't even think it's on TikTok. So doomsday clock explained. Doomsday clock was set to ninety seconds to minute on Tuesday. Sounds pretty dire, but what does it mean? It goes back to the atomic age and the Manhattan Project, and it was basically, what they do is, like, as the world gets closer and closer to, like, total annihilation, it gets closer to midnight, then they, like these, like, analysts or some shit, like, move it closer. And it's a great way to just, like

Dan Austin: [41:12] Is it like like if somebody's gonna go to, like, nuclear war kind

Mike DeHaan: [41:14] of thing? Just like the world's gonna implode. So the things that are affecting you right now are effects of climate change, Russia's threats of nuclear war, and activity in the Chernobyl and Zapor ZIFIA nuclear reactor sites. That's what this thing says. So Mhmm. Anyway, it's the closest it's ever been since the nineteen sixty two Cuban Missile Crisis.

Dan Austin: [41:34] Yeah. A lot of shit going on out there, man.

Mike DeHaan: [41:36] Either way, kinda It's

Dan Austin: [41:37] time to buy.

Mike DeHaan: [41:38] Here's what I think. Yeah. It's it's time to buy, and it all goes back to, you know, just the the media trying to create some fear to talk about shit.

Dan Austin: [41:45] You know, I'm gonna just throw in my little plug here on the Ukrainian military since we're talking about the wars. And I saw them, like, they're like, there's this thing on the national news about bringing veterans from the war to with, like, broken leg or missing legs. I'll tell you why they're getting their butts handed to him. It's because they're all not in shape. They do not look like GIJs in Ukraine.

Mike DeHaan: [42:08] I don't I don't even know what to say there. I mean, to be fair, I think that's kind of a universal problem everywhere. That is one of the biggest things I've read about, like, American military recruiting as they're saying they're they can't recruit people because people can't pass, like, the basic fitness test.

Dan Austin: [42:20] You're right. I had a good conversation with my buddy who's also a veteran. We were just joking about this yesterday, that's why I bring it because I do I am sensitive to the fact they are getting invaded, which does suck.

Mike DeHaan: [42:30] And let's say that you are a veteran, you have been in combat, so you can say whatever you want.

Dan Austin: [42:35] Yeah. I'd like to just poke fun at other people in the military even though they're at war. It's a sick problem I have. But, yes, you're right. There are some people that pre nine eleven in The US, especially the US military wasn't, what would you call, combat ready. Yeah. And that's when my friend, he was in the military, and he was telling me his experiences versus mine. I'm like, man, that is different.

Mike DeHaan: [42:56] Yeah. I mean, but what did they even do pre 09:11?

Dan Austin: [42:59] In his experience, not a whole lot. Drink a lot. Yeah. Hang out. Do much. Not not much.

Mike DeHaan: [43:05] We had like what Gulf War before nine eleven. Is that the only other conflict?

Dan Austin: [43:08] '91, you had Gulf War. 1989, you had invasion of Panama. You had Grenada in '83. Yeah. There wasn't a whole lot of

Mike DeHaan: [43:16] Yeah. That's all stuff before I was born. So After Vietnam. Now you know. It's your history lesson for today. Alright, guys. We're gonna get out of here. You can stop listening to the ramblings of two idiot investors in Spokane, Washington. But either way, if you do wanna start buying deals, though, you should go to collectthekeyspodcast.com/free. Get a free five step guide to start generating off market leads. If you wanna really start getting deals and, you know, the guys are gonna do it for you, you should check out our group coaching program. Go to collectingkeyspodcast.com. Click on become an instant investor in the top right. You can join our program directly there. You don't have to hop on a call if you don't want to. You can literally just sign up for it there. And, also, too, if you wanna talk about the partnership program that we have, there's a link on there to book a call. And that will literally, like we just talked about, like, the entire, like, business part of it, we'll do that for you in your market.

Dan Austin: [44:07] Yeah. If you don't wanna have to learn that shit, just call us.

Mike DeHaan: [44:10] Exactly. You don't even wanna, like, do sales? Like, we'll do the sales thing even for you. So you just have to go in.

Dan Austin: [44:15] We're like the Ghostbusters of wholesaling. You just call us, and we'll take care of it. We'll come up with our little, like, ghost catching guns and just suck up those leads for you.

Mike DeHaan: [44:24] Just suck them up and yeah. Just turn them into money for you. So either way. Yeah. And you can book a call with us there as well at collectiveusepodcast.com, and go to become an instant investor. Oh.

Dan Austin: [44:35] Got a new T shirt idea.

Mike DeHaan: [44:36] Oh, yeah. That's coming soon too, by the way. Our actual, like, merch store. Daniel's working on it. Our our designer's working on it. So you'll be able to finally get the BDE Big Dan energy shirt as well as collecting keys shirt. So, anyways alright, guys. Well, thanks for listening. Go and leave us a five star review. If you do that and you take a screenshot and send me on Instagram, I'll send you a T shirt. I've sent out, I think, nine or 10 T shirts now. So I told all those people to send me photos, and they haven't yet. So I need to follow-up with all of them to make sure they actually got their T shirts. Yeah. But, anyways, guys, thanks for listening. We'll talk to y'all next week.

Dan Austin: [45:10] See you.

Speaker 3: [45:11] Thanks for listening. Please leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, and check us out at collectingkeyspodcast.com for tips and guides on starting your own real estate investment and wholesaling business.