Tales of Off Market Real Estate: A Buyer Break-In, Renegade Title Agent, & Bedbugs

Mike DeHaan: [0:00] Real quick, guys. If you want to take your real estate investing business from 6 to 7 figures in the next twelve months, and you wanna do without being a slave to your business, then you have to check out our scale community. You can get the full details at collectingkeys.com/scale. But very basically, it is a community of like minded investors who are working to become the absolute top tier investors in their market. Along with three coaching calls per week led by Dan and myself, we also have a whole bunch of videos and materials that go into all the different SOPs that we use to run our business on a daily basis. This includes how we manage our sales team, how we hire, how we do our marketing systems, how we get the best assignment fees possible, how we do renovations, how we do all the different kinds of creative financing. And if you are serious about taking your real estate business to the next level, it is absolutely something that you should check out. So go to collectingkeys.com/scale, see all the details, and see if you're a good fit.

Dan Austin: [0:59] Now we have multiple solutions to the money problem, multiple exits when it comes to wholesaling a deal with a tough dealing with a tough title company, and we've gained all that through experience, and honestly just talking to other people, because you learn about some wild shit that happens just by being around other people that also like to talk shop and tell you about their latest ordeal.

Mike DeHaan: [1:22] What's going on, guys? Welcome to today's episode of the collecting keys or real estate investing podcast. If this is your first time here, I am Mike DeHaan here with my cohost, Dan Austin. And on this Wednesday, Mike and Dan show episodes, we talk about real estate investing business and whatever else we feel like for the week. So welcome everybody. You are in for a ride today because Dan is feeling mouthy.

Dan Austin: [1:48] We are welcome to the Thunderdome.

Mike DeHaan: [1:50] Let's roll. We just literally spent forty five minutes talking before the show about all kind of things that we probably can't record Yeah. Because they're personal opinions on situations and people, and, you know, you can't put those things out there.

Dan Austin: [2:01] Yeah. We put 90% of it out there, but that 5%, we don't wanna get canceled.

Mike DeHaan: [2:04] Yeah. Exactly. Well, we don't want I mean, it's a small industry. Right? And you can have opinions around Very good. People are doing in the space. And, you know, everyone has those conversations behind closed doors just so you know who's down with what and what tactics are perceived okay amongst larger population.

Dan Austin: [2:22] That's why you join the scale community and you get unfeathered access to our opinions. Which good or bad?

Mike DeHaan: [2:28] We don't record it here, but we instead record it on private phone calls directly for those members on our community coaching calls.

Dan Austin: [2:35] Exactly.

Mike DeHaan: [2:35] But we've had a productive week though. We actually had our biggest seven day span that we've ever had from this past Monday, which was yesterday to the Monday before we had 11 closings, believe it or not.

Dan Austin: [2:47] Seven days. That means we had Seven days. More than one closing on the same day. We did. Several. And you know what the cool thing about that is, is like, didn't really affect my day to day.

Mike DeHaan: [2:56] No. Heck at all.

Dan Austin: [2:58] Well, I guess the one that we sold our property, there's like a maybe wait, you signed for that one. I did. There's maybe a few emails back and forth because we had to, you know, dial in that wrap.

Mike DeHaan: [3:06] Yeah. Well, we had the wraps that we had. So in fact, I didn't even count that one. So we count that one, we actually had 12.

Dan Austin: [3:11] There you go.

Mike DeHaan: [3:12] That's not closing necessarily. Well, I guess it is the sale, but it's property that we already own. So does it count? It does for Instagram math.

Dan Austin: [3:19] I'm rebranding. It's called a delayed wholesales where you buy a property, hold it for two years and then sell it.

Mike DeHaan: [3:24] That's actually a really good idea. You could totally sell the course with like the delayed I mean, dude, I see all sorts of dumb shit out there. Saw someone was doing a like a subtail two or something. I'm like, what? Basically where you it's where you buy a subject to and then you sell it. Woah. Oh, wow. But so we had a big span though, tons of wholesales that managed to close around the same period of time. And then we had a very messy deal on it was a it actually was a gonna be our largest assignment fee. It actually turned into a double closing. Because two days before it was supposed to close, the title company decided that they were not going to give us title insurance because it's in this rural part of Washington State, and they don't like investors, wholesalers, whatever. And they were basically like, oh well, we're not going to give you title insurance with assignment fee that you have on here. And then we're like, okay, well that's fine, we'll just close on the property, whatever. But then they knew they know that we're gonna sell it to this next party. And so they just literally made it their mission to try and make this deal not close.

Dan Austin: [4:35] Right.

Mike DeHaan: [4:36] And I was like, who the fuck is this attorney in bum fuck Washington who's like literally trying to tamper with this deal? Because they were doing stuff like, okay, cool. So you're gonna try and close on the deal. So we were gonna assign it to our lending company that has all of our reserve money. And they were like, oh no, you can't do that because the lending company we see in the operating agreement does not have the main business practice to be buying properties. So why are you buying properties? You shouldn't be doing that with LCO. Was like, what's none of your business?

Dan Austin: [5:07] It's none of your business. Right. It's like, what if you were just like a business buying the property you were like renting? If we were gonna run our office out of there? Exactly. I don't know,

Mike DeHaan: [5:15] it's none of their business. And so we had to basically put all this money into our collecting keys account to be able to buy it from that. There And was like all these different hiccups and like stupid things. There was a couple of other things too. Can't even remember some of the other challenges that they were.

Dan Austin: [5:29] Yeah. The one thing and then they got upset because like there's just too many entities involved. We're like, dude, we own all of them, but you keep telling us we can't use each of them, so we have to keep pulling them out. I I mean, granted, we do have a lot of entities to choose from, where most people I don't think, I think that what they were probably banking on is that we'd be like, oh we're screwed, we can't buy it this way because we don't have them, or like, guess what, we've another LLC right here, we've got another LLC right here.

Mike DeHaan: [5:51] Yeah. They kept coming up with like weird stuff. And you're right, they mentioned several times, they they were getting uncomfortable, there's too many entities involved. And we're like, you keep telling us to change it. Yeah. Thank god. What do you want? Seriously.

Dan Austin: [6:04] It's just bunch of jackasses. The thing about this one too is it's like, this is a great example of like, where they're putting their nose where does it belong. Like this seller was a guy who, he wanted to sell these house, he wanted to move them fast, he knew what he was, he's like, I knew, I know I'm taking a hit on these. He's like, I know I can get more money for these. But he's like, I don't have time, and I don't have the money to do the work. I'm buying a new house, getting a new job, having a baby like Kevin, all these things going on. Mom just passed away, and he's like, I literally know I can make more money, but like, I need these gone by this date for a lot of reasons. So we're like, we could do that, We just, we're gonna have to have it for less money than you could sell for on the market. And he knew that. So, it's like, it's not the title company's job to like tell us that we're trying to like scam this guy because we weren't. Yeah. It is what it is. That's how we operate, and that's what he needed, that service.

Mike DeHaan: [6:53] Yeah, everything was open, and he even knew that we had another buyer that was gonna be buying it.

Dan Austin: [6:58] We took him to the house. We introduced the guys. He was there with us.

Mike DeHaan: [7:03] They just didn't like the fact that we were like having this transaction on this deal. Yeah. Was such a stupid situation.

Dan Austin: [7:10] The admin was upset that we're making twice her salary on you know, this one deal. Yeah. It's called real estate investing.

Mike DeHaan: [7:18] Yeah, I guess. I don't know. But anyway, so that was fun. Had to scramble and come up with, you know, 300 something grand to get that figured out, is, you know, fortunately having a lending business, we were able to do that. Not that we had a couple other ones that we've just been working on forever. Did we talk about the freaking buyer that we had that broke into the property and junked out all of the other don't know. Have we talked about that one on here yet? I don't think we have.

Dan Austin: [7:42] I don't think so. That one's crazy.

Mike DeHaan: [7:44] This is just more turmoil for why this space is so insane. You can't even make up some of this stuff. And so the story with this one was we're working on this with our partner in that market. You had the connection with the buyer, we've sold deals to this guy before, there's no problem. So basically we recorded, not recorded, we funded and did everything like the previous Friday. And then come around Monday, the deal had not recorded yet because they were still waiting for the signed docs for the seller who did not live in the area. And basically, the seller's brother was a tenant in there and was supposed to be moving out, but it hadn't recorded yet so he hadn't

Dan Austin: [8:27] So technically, he didn't have to be out. Right?

Mike DeHaan: [8:29] Technically, he didn't have to be out. Like, even then, there were some challenges and things like that where, like, we're gonna do a lease back or, like, what was that gonna look like? We didn't know. We were still trying to figure it out up to the last minute, which is very common. The buyer, as far as he was concerned, he's like, I have sent the money and I've signed the document. This house is mine, which is not true. And so what the buyer decided to do, huge dirtbag move. Yeah. And the super legal, I can't do this regardless of if you own the property or not, just like in general, this is a human rights issue here. Goes to the house, kicks the door in. I don't know how he got into the house.

Dan Austin: [9:04] Maybe pick the lock.

Mike DeHaan: [9:05] Pick the lock something.

Dan Austin: [9:07] I don't know.

Mike DeHaan: [9:08] Junks out the occupant's entire life, right, and the buyer's like, oh, was a bunch of junk in there. I don't care if it's diapers and cat shit. It's not your stuff to take yet.

Dan Austin: [9:17] Yeah, it's not your junk. One man's junk is another man's treasure.

Mike DeHaan: [9:20] Yeah, junks out, while the document's at work, junks out the entire thing and changes the locks and goes, cool, this is my house now. But bro, you don't even fucking own the house yet. What are you doing? Yeah. And it was like a whole situation and ended up paying the the seller like $8,000 in reparations so he doesn't like, you know, sue us or sue the buyer or like do all this nonsense. And I'm just like, a renegade person, who's like the third party Yeah. Just decides to make a stupid decision and causes a huge problem for everyone involved and like literally commits a crime.

Dan Austin: [9:55] There's some dumb people out there, I kinda wanna encourage the seller just to call the police and be like, I just have somebody break and entering into my home and Yeah. Take all my stuff. Take my all my stuff. It's like, that's crazy. Like, the fact that you would even think about doing that I know. Just tells me that you're a dirtbag. Like, totally dirtbag, complete idiot, and don't know anything about real estate investing. Like, you don't do that. It's not your house because you signed a document. It doesn't mean anything.

Mike DeHaan: [10:19] I know. Yeah. It's like, nice job, buyer. We sold you like six properties. That means we're not selling you anymore. So, good for you. You have to

Dan Austin: [10:26] Ever again. Idiot. Right? And when that happens, I'm totally open to blasting a guy like that out on the internet and just be like, let people know like, hey, this is the kind of guy, if you wanna operate your business with this type of person, feel free, but I'm not going to. Yeah. So Yeah. Just trash. You know, I heard a great quote a couple days ago, and it applies to off market real estate, it's every deal is an ordeal. Like, it's so true. Like you and I talk about this, like, I've never heard somebody put it into three letters, like every deal is an ordeal. It's so true. Like every deal can become problematic, even the simplest ones, you're always doing stuff. Real estate in general, because it is time based a lot of times with contracts, so you have like dates and times that you have to do certain things by. Entitled companies, no matter what they're doing, closing companies, no matter what they're doing, they always work on it last minute, so they're under the gun and then they want all their information last minute and you're like, you coulda told me that two weeks ago, but never happens that way. So like, everything just because of that is is an ordeal and then you throw in like crazy buyers that think they can just do whatever they want.

Dan Austin: [11:25] Okay. Crazy sellers that don't even know what to do next. And then like just dummies all the way through this created just massive ordeals. Just got used to it. Just become numb to it and you just deal with it.

Mike DeHaan: [11:36] Yeah. I mean, and the key is knowing kinda what rules you have to follow, like what kind of questions to ask the seller that probably doesn't know Yep. Their own circumstance. So you have to ask the title company. Because also to you, title companies are kind of like lenders. You don't necessarily wanna give them too much information because they might start to inquire deeper on the seller's, you know, estate issues. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Dan Austin: [12:03] Yes.

Mike DeHaan: [12:03] And you just wanna like sort of tread that line so you can get some of these deals closed. Because if you're completely ignorant to the process about how real estate transactions work, around how title processes work in different areas, around like the complexities that can actually arise, you're not gonna know how to have solutions for them. And 99% of this business in off market real estate, whether you're wholesaling, you're flipping, you're doing buy and hold. If you're going to direct to seller, 99 percent of your business is knowing how to solve these problems or at least who you have to talk to in order to solve them, and there's really no way around that.

Dan Austin: [12:35] Being solution based is absolutely key. I think we have a so I think it is it this Friday or was it last Friday focus? Or maybe it's two Fridays from now. I don't know. I don't even know what date it is today. But we have a Friday Focus coming up with a scale member, Shane, who had a similar issue coming down to the wire, had a, I can't remember, oh, a buyer's lender could not fund the deal, he's wholesaling it, could not fund the deal, and so it's a great episode, but listen to his kind of a solution, really cool solution, but like, just basic wholesale deals, this happens, and if you gotta be solution based to solve the problems, and it's about kind of experience and learning from others on like, what options you have, and what tools you can pull out of your tool belt, like in this case, what we're dealing with, where we had the double close, it was like, hey, the title company's acting really weird, what do you guys wanna do? Cool, double close, let's go. Got Like the first time we ran into that though, was like, what do we do?

Mike DeHaan: [13:24] I know, if I remember.

Dan Austin: [13:25] We gotta, oh, gotta double close. Where are we gonna get $300 from right now?

Mike DeHaan: [13:29] Yeah.

Dan Austin: [13:29] You know what I mean? Now we have multiple solutions to the money problem, multiple exits when it comes to like wholesaling a deal with a tough dealing with a tough title company, and we've gained all that through experience, and honestly just talking to other people, because like you learn about some wild shit that happens just by being around other people that also like to talk shop and tell you about their latest ordeal.

Mike DeHaan: [13:47] Exactly. Or by listening to Shiloh Collecting Keys podcast where people actually are going through these things on a daily and weekly basis.

Dan Austin: [13:54] I'm gonna start tracking ordeals now. I'm not tracking deals anymore. We've done 500 plus ordeals. Yeah. That's just my new metric. I'm gonna just call it ordeals from now on.

Mike DeHaan: [14:04] Yeah. I mean, at least. I mean, we probably have like, five that weren't bad.

Dan Austin: [14:09] Yeah. Yeah. They're still they're still an ordeal.

Mike DeHaan: [14:11] Definitely, like, less than 1%. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Hey. We really appreciate being a listener of the collecting keys podcast. Did you know that we also are on social media and on YouTube? You should go and shoot us a follow on those as well. You can find both Dan and I on Instagram. I am at Mike underscore invests. Dan is at investor man Dan. You can also find short clips from the show at collecting keys podcast on Instagram. And if you wanna see our faces talking while you're listening to this show or you wanna check out some of our crazy animated adventures we've been putting together into some funny little web cartoons that sort of show the crazy stories that guests tell on the show, then you should go over to YouTube and check out the collecting keys channel. Shoot us a subscribe over there. It really helps in human grow our audience. We really, really appreciate it. Well, anyways, enjoy the rest of the show you guys. We appreciate you all. Anyways, so yeah, that's been, you know, some of our dramas recently. And I'm excited to hear that one machine too because that one was interesting. And I think that will be coming out in when this episode comes out. Two weeks? Three weeks. Two weeks. Oh, three weeks.

Dan Austin: [15:10] Three weeks. Okay.

Mike DeHaan: [15:11] Yeah. Cool. Aside from that, how's everything else going? I know you've been working on growing the Simply Leads stuff. Great. Great takeaways from that. So if you guys have missed this or you don't know Simply Leads, we acquired a marketing company that was our primary outbound marketing company. I know when we did this like two months ago, three months ago. We have been going in and trying to optimize it with our little bit of entrepreneurial business owner experience, but I know there's been some challenges.

Dan Austin: [15:39] Yeah. We've been we've been focused on scale now. I think we started this kind of process like six months ago. We we relaunched the business to do SMS and cold calling for other We're doing it for ourselves. I think we did that March 1. And it's been great, honestly, like, just taking the same systems and the same like processes that we've implemented in our business that we talk to people about, like, when we're coaching them, it's like marketing, sales, operations, finance. Like, you have these four pillars of your business, and then it's just scaling things. One thing I've learned about business is revenue fixes all problems. Mhmm. At least in the immediate, and so it's like, what do we have to do to grow revenue? Marketing and sales, just like in a wholesale business, just like anything. And most of the people that are coming, this is why it's fun, most of the people that come to me that I'm talking to, they're like, I need more marketing because I need more sales. They understand that it's a funnel. And outbound marketing is like, it's the top of your funnel, right? Like, would say that more top of your funnel would be, I don't know, like driving for dollars or something like that, then that feeds into your outbound marketing.

Dan Austin: [16:39] But calling and texting leads are gonna be the top of your funnel. You're gonna get a bunch of them, and you're gonna neck those all the way down to ones that are actually good, and then you're gonna have mail in there, which are already gonna be better than cold calling leads and texting. Yeah. Mail's fricking expensive. So you have a mail budget, and then you have a calling and texting budget, and most of our clients coming in, they're like, I just need more. I've already got my mail unlocked, but I need more leads because I wanna scale my business. And so that's Yeah. That's what we're helping them do.

Mike DeHaan: [17:06] Yeah. And I think one of the benefits is because we have been running this kind of business for a while, we kinda know what has been effective for us, and it's easy to set things up that are effective for other people too, a result. Totally. And one PSA for people around this, cause we get a lot of people who come in. This and this is this honestly drives me freaking crazy. We got people who come in and they go to cancel after a month. Not because they're unhappy with the service. They literally go, I am getting too many leads and I cannot handle this. So I feel like I'm wasting my money.

Dan Austin: [17:38] We just had a dude, week into marketing with He was like, I have too many leads, I can't do this. Like, was like, what did you

Mike DeHaan: [17:44] want? Know.

Dan Austin: [17:46] He wanted more leads, but yeah, that is that is a tough thing. But remember, like, calling and texting is a, it is like, you're gonna get a lot, right? Like just with our service in general, we're gonna get people, we usually get people like 50 to 60 leads a month on top of whatever they're already doing, and so then you have to be able to filter those. Out of those fifty, sixty, 30 of them are probably gonna go away pretty quickly, right? Like, they're just not gonna be great leads. That's just the name of the game, right? And then you're gonna keep filtering down your funnel till you get like those two to three people that are probably going to become a deal. Yeah. That's just the name of the game in general with marketing.

Mike DeHaan: [18:20] Yeah. And something that people need to understand about these outbound style leads, we hear this a lot too, is people saying like, I want the leads to be warmer. Understand that's not generally how leads that are generated by you encroaching on their day. Yeah. Right? By you sending them a text while they're in a meeting at work, or you calling them while they're at their daughter's ballet recital. Right? Yeah. Those leads are never gonna be warm. Like ever. Even if they are a highly motivated person, they're still gonna be kind of cold and standoffish. Because you know how when you're eating out with your family and someone calls the phone, immediately thought it like, who the hell is calling me right now? Yep. You're doing the exact same thing. Yep. Right? And so your job as the investor, as the business owner, is to be able to get on a call, diffuse that situation, and figure out if it actually is worth having a further conversation or not. And that's different than the direct mail that we do, which we always recommend people kind of stack in with the outbound stuff. Because direct mail, think about the story of the lead, they receive that piece of mail, they have time to look up your company, if you have a logo and website and do that, which I suggest that you do, they choose to pick up their phone and commit to making a phone call or doing outreach to you, of course that's gonna be a more motivated lead because they chose to make the first move.

Dan Austin: [19:40] They warmed up. Right? Like they read your letter like you just said, they checked out your website, they kinda looked at your letter for a couple days, yeah, gonna call these guys. They did all the warming up themselves. Outbound, you're warming up. You're getting them in the lead or into your funnel and you're saying, are you willing to have a conversation and do you wanna sell your house right now? Those are the we're trying to figure out. And like real estate agents know this, this is what they do. So like, they just talk to anybody that owns a house. Like anybody that owns a house to a real estate agent is a lead. So, for them, it's the same thing. Like, hey, this guy's wanting to have a conversation, and they wanna sell their house in the next three to six months. I'm definitely gonna, if I have to, I'll buy them a cup of coffee, whatever, right? So, the same thing goes for off market real estate, right? Like, you're going to have to get these people into your funnel, you're gonna have to warm them up, and then when they're ready, you need to be the person in front of them, and that's where then you kick in your follow-up process. If you call these people the first time, and they're like, oh, they didn't answer, yeah, that's, you gotta do a lot more follow ups than that. That's why a lot of people actually call us and say, hey, can you do lead management? And we're like, yeah, sure, we can do lead management for you. That's what because you that's the key, that's the key funnel piece coming in, and then who is doing all the follow-up. That's where most people fail in the execution of any marketing leads.

Mike DeHaan: [20:49] Yeah. And it's funny because I feel like if you go and you look at any sort of other business, right, there's a lot of information around nurturing people. Even as like other like realtors, they talk about getting involved in their community, going to places where people will sort of get to know you. For some reason on the real estate investor front, we should put it on like that doesn't matter. Maybe it's because we're like marketing the people that we know have financial distress or personal distress a lot of times. Mhmm. You feel like they should be needing to move faster. But understand that whatever situation they have they're calling about, you've already been dealing with that for like fucking years. They're not just gonna suddenly change their mind because you called them today. Right? You know, if they do, that's an outlier. That is a very very rare situation where you get somebody that calls you and wants to move forward in that They've very immediate

Dan Austin: [21:36] had that tax lien for two years and they've got two more years before the county forecloses, so they're not in a rush, right? But you're gonna have to warm them up over a period of time. Sell them on what you can provide.

Mike DeHaan: [21:45] Yeah, and engage them enough times that when they wake up on a nice Saturday morning and they're like, know what? I am gonna get that lien figured out today it is getting ugly. Gotta be the first person to think about. You gotta be the one that happens to call them on that day, when they decide to make that decision.

Dan Austin: [22:01] Yeah, that's a big part. I was actually talking to a guy who was thinking about joining the scale community, he's like, so, you guys are marketing in the same market as me. I'm like, yeah, they're like, how does that work? Like, if you teach me how to do what you're doing, I was like, dude, like we ask that all the time, it doesn't matter. Like, half of this game is being in front of those people when they decide to sell. So you could send them one postcard one month, and I can send them a different postcard with the same everything on it the next month, and they call me instead of you, and it's just because they picked up my postcard first. And that's one of the reasons why we also don't stop mailing people once we start, right? We just keep sending it to them, because we know there's a reason why they're on our list, and at some point we wanna be the first people they see or call when they're ready to make that decision.

Mike DeHaan: [22:39] Exactly. And we have several people in the scale community that are local here to us in Spokane, in Northern Idaho, and all the time, they are posting about their wins, and new negotiations, new deals, things that they're finding. We're all marketing the same list. That's not even in our system.

Dan Austin: [22:54] Yeah. It's not even a lead in our system. Like, they didn't call us? Same shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I actually I was telling this guy too, was like, I don't see other wholesalers as competition in our market. I just see them as like, I don't wanna call them partners, but basically possible partners, we're all working together, we're kind of like on the same team, and we're all blasting out marketing that's similar. Like, there's nothing that's more cutting edge. Like, some people are doing the offer checks, those are great. Some people are doing offer cards, some people are doing handwritten letters, it doesn't matter. Outbound marketing, calling and texting, like, all doing the same thing. And everybody, at some point in time, has too many deals or or leads or they need more money, they're gonna wholesale deal, and I'll be happy to buy it, flip it or keep it as a rental property and vice versa. I might be able to wholesale it to somebody that's a good friend of ours that might need a flip right now. So it's like we're all working together.

Mike DeHaan: [23:43] Exactly. Yeah, and when it comes to marketing stuff, it's such common knowledge at this point that if you ever like join a community or hire a coach to figure that out, I recommend that you don't. Like honestly, go look on YouTube, go like look on just Google how to generate leads, how to use PropStream, what TradeMode can look like. They're very there's either free or extremely cheap alternatives that you can use to learn these things. Like I saw, I've seen people giving away some of these different courses and stuff. Like it has a hundred hours of how we do our marketing and it's like $50. Yeah. I'm like, first off, you're not gonna watch a hundred hours, don't waste $50 on that. Crazy. Second off, that's how repeated the whole marketing processes right now. And the thing that makes a difference and like what you're saying before Dan of all of us marketing to each other, we all kinda know each other, is who has the better sales and follow-up process.

Dan Austin: [24:33] That's a 100% it.

Mike DeHaan: [24:35] And the funny thing is is, you know, we work with people in the scale community. Three times a week we do these community calls. We harp on that so much. There is a constant resistance from people. Like we we literally have people that are coming in, this group for like a year. All the guys, if you're listening, I love you all very much. I just always like slap my head a little bit and laugh when I see this. It's like people looking at like their KPIs, do you wanna change their data, do you wanna change their marketing? They're one of these things, and I'm just like, what is your sales process look like? If you're not getting leads, that's one thing. You probably botched something, if nobody's calling the phone, you'd figure that out. We'll have people that have like six months worth of leads, and they're like, I'm just not getting deals, I don't know how to get more leads. I'm like, how about you call all the people that are already in your system that you already paid for?

Dan Austin: [25:18] Yes.

Mike DeHaan: [25:19] You know? And one of my favorite quotes that you said, I remember when you said this Dan, I think this is why I've been at KeysCon last November.

Dan Austin: [25:25] I think so.

Mike DeHaan: [25:26] That your old leads are somebody else's new leads. Yep. Right? All the time.

Dan Austin: [25:31] Might as well hit them, and they're paying to get them back into their system, they're probably gonna close them if you're not calling them. Somebody's gonna close them. Because you sent them a letter, you cold called them, you did whatever for a reason. Not like you just pulled it out, it's in there. They're on a list a reason.

Mike DeHaan: [25:45] Exactly. So something to think about as you're continuing to move forward. But yeah, assembly stuff has been fun to build out. It's like more, I don't know, I'd say like standard entrepreneurial business than trying to get a bunch of guys excited to call crackheads every day, which does get hard. I know.

Dan Austin: [26:02] Yeah. It's a lot more fun in the sense of like, I shouldn't say it's a lot more fun, it's a lot more simple, simplified. Lead generation simplified is actually our tagline, in case you were wondering. Yeah. But it's much more simple in the fact that it's like, you're not building something novel like we have been with our partnership program, which is very challenging as you know, as you're kinda leaving the day to day out. And so, getting to use our skill set of marketing and sales into our business on Simply Leads has actually been really cool, because it's not hard. Like, just look at what other people are doing. Mhmm. From like an ad campaign, a marketing and a sales, guess what? When we're working with Simply Leads prospects, like people that want to sign up with us, guess what we do? We're marketing to them, and we're talking to them, we're setting appointments and doing our follow-up with them, making sure that they have all the information they need to make the right decisions. Just like we do on the wholesale side. So it's kind of cool.

Mike DeHaan: [26:52] There you go.

Dan Austin: [26:52] Very relatable. It's a skill that I didn't know I built over the last five years or how long we've been doing this.

Mike DeHaan: [26:57] I mean, it's basic business, right? And I also think businesses like that are pretty fun because you can versus the wholesale side of the business where most of the time you're working with people that we are their last resort and they are making Right. A very hard decision. With something like this lead generation company, we are working with people that are excited. They're wanting to go, and they are like it's like more of a mutually beneficial exchange, it feels like.

Dan Austin: [27:19] Yeah. They're usually in a growth in a growth mindset or growth mode as opposed to preservation, which is our wholesale clients.

Mike DeHaan: [27:24] Yep. Exactly. So anyways, if you're interested in that, you should go to simplyleads.net. Simpli, leads.net.

Dan Austin: [27:33] Simply leads, yeah, .net. We're gonna get rich one day and buy.com. It's pretty spendy. Somebody else has it, they're sitting on it.

Mike DeHaan: [27:39] Yeah. It's like a weird website to use. So don't go to like simplyleads.com because it's something that's like not even related to like lead generation. Is it like for like a window cleaning company or something?

Dan Austin: [27:47] No. I don't even know if it's that cool.

Mike DeHaan: [27:48] Think it's more like weird. A

Dan Austin: [27:50] a weird like EOS style like consulting company.

Mike DeHaan: [27:53] Oh, yeah, you're right. Yeah, I haven't pulled up.

Dan Austin: [27:56] But in in better news, if you're even remotely been listening for any time, you'll know that Mike and I had a property with bed bugs, which are challenging to get rid of. Also, think we just didn't have the right bedbug people to get rid of them. And turns out, not only do we have bedbugs, we had bat bugs which are in your attic. So we got some quotes

Mike DeHaan: [28:15] Oh, for like dude. I just realized something. Bat bugs because they're in the insulation. I don't know if that's why. They're in the bat. I understand that. I was thinking like fucking vampire bats, dude. That's what I've been thinking though.

Dan Austin: [28:28] Honestly, that's what I've been thinking though, and I maybe that's a good point, I don't know.

Mike DeHaan: [28:33] I was thinking that we had little ones that were flying around that were like bloodsuckers, they are blood suckers I guess, but I was thinking like the animal, not that they were in the insulation, but that makes more sense.

Dan Austin: [28:44] Honestly though, I don't know. I was thinking bat bugs because they're in the attic, and like bats would hang out in your attic, like hanging upside down.

Mike DeHaan: [28:54] It's because they're in the bat that's in the wall, dude. They're in the insulation. Makes so much more sense. I don't know.

Dan Austin: [29:00] So anyhow, it was like $7,000 to suck out the insulation, this whole thing. And I was like, I am not paying somebody $7,000. I know that we've got some crackheads around here willing to do cash work. So we found some people, still cost us a bunch, but they have this machine that they can suck out all of the insulation. It's like blowing cellulose insulation. So we paid some dudes, we haven't paid them yet, to go up there with a hose and suck it all out. Mhmm. Clean it all out, and then we have to go pay some guys in there to bomb the attic. And this will be like, we're going on over six months now with this freaking bug bug broth. The worst part about it is, is they're like, yeah, we don't see any bugs in the adjacent unit, and I'm like, bro, I don't wanna like, I don't wanna stereotype anything, but it's it's an immigrant that lives there that is like probably scared to tell the landlord that there's bugs because they don't wanna get kicked out. They're section eight. They're they don't speak good English, and so they probably were just and they have a ton of stuff in there. Like, it's packed, yeah, in their house. And I'm like, you guys gotta go in there and check, like really check. And they're like, this is like months into this hotel, they're like, turns out she has bed bugs in her in her unit.

Dan Austin: [30:08] I'm like, no shit. You think the bed bugs just keep coming out of the walls? Like they're living. They've got a host that they've been eating on in this other unit, and they didn't say anything, these people didn't say anything. I mean, whatever, they don't speak English, so maybe they did, I don't know. But it turns out the whole building's infested. Nice. And turns out that bed bugs they're like, they go through the walls, I'm like, technically they don't go through the walls, they just go through the cracks. It's a multi family building and it's like, you just crawl underneath the drywall, go into the other building, so it makes total sense that a bug would do that, So why wouldn't you? I was like, bomb the fuck out of this thing. Like, make this thing like Iraq, like 1991, whenever Desert Storm was. Like, I want this shit peppered with bombs, dude. And if it catches on fire and burns it down, I don't care.

Mike DeHaan: [30:55] You absolutely do care, and we'll just say since now, if it does circumstantially burn down, the insurance company would come listen to this and be like,

Dan Austin: [31:03] yeah. I thought that they had weapons of mass destruction, so we had to bomb it.

Mike DeHaan: [31:07] Classic America. Mean, that's Classic you Classic went to war, man. It just it just spoke to you. I did. Yeah. I mean, just never ending.

Dan Austin: [31:16] This is the this is the

Mike DeHaan: [31:17] thing that people don't tell you about section eight stuff too. It's like, yeah, you can get subsidized rent and all these things. Then perfect. These people that tell you that they have Section Eight issues, and I've never had a problem. Because no one's died in the property yet. Right. Soon as that happens, you're fucked.

Dan Austin: [31:34] Yeah. Yeah, and these are all holdover Section 8 tenants. We've moved two of them out, and so, like, we obviously didn't get to interview them or do anything like they're all relatively quiet, except for the one lady when I was there. She's like, I keep getting your water bill. I think you need to pay it. It says it's $3,000 past due.

Mike DeHaan: [31:51] I was like, what is happening here?

Dan Austin: [31:53] So it turns out the city was sending the water bill to one of our tenants, and she wasn't paying it for six units. I was like, that's cool. So we had a big backlog of water bill there for like it was like two years.

Mike DeHaan: [32:03] Nice. Thanks. But other than that,

Dan Austin: [32:05] they don't really say anything. That was nice of her to tell me.

Mike DeHaan: [32:08] Yeah. I mean like that, yeah, they're easy that way. But as soon, my point being with as soon as somebody dies, as soon you have to get into the property, there will be issues. Especially as to like different rules around how you can handle section eight tenants and like walking through them and like disturbing them and all these things versus your own property. Part of the relationship that you're establishing with the city, section eight people, is that they couldn't get special treatment, and your job is just to shut up and stay out of it.

Dan Austin: [32:33] Yeah, they have inspections after the annual inspections, and the funny thing is, is the house will be burned down halfway, walls missing, and they're like, it all looks good, but you need a GFCI by this kitchen sink. Right? Like bro, there's no back wall. Right? They're like, well that's not on the list. The worst thing about our Section 8, so we have I don't know if you've seen where the building is. There's like a pretty big building.

Mike DeHaan: [32:54] Yeah. I've been there with you.

Dan Austin: [32:55] In this no. The Section 8 Building, like the

Mike DeHaan: [32:57] Oh, actually. Section 8 Building. No. No.

Dan Austin: [32:59] Because I don't think they open it to like the public. Like, think it's like a three story building or something like that. Pretty big, and you can't call them. They don't allow you to call them. It has to be email. Yeah. And you're like, how do I even figure this shit out? Like, so they're like, they're behind a firewall, so you can't even talk to them. I feel bad for the people trying to get housing, because it's I think the same thing on their end. It is. They can only email. Like, it's so weird.

Mike DeHaan: [33:21] Yeah. I had a lady that was unable to pay rent. She basically got fired from her job during COVID and was going through that process. And she was like, I'm trying to, like, figure out how to use the bedroom. I can't. And then finally, it was, like, eight months later. It's crazy. I had somebody, like, reach out to me and say, hey. This tenant says they live in one of your units, they're trying to figure it out. We wanna verify that this is actually a person. They don't wanna see the lease. We wanna do all those sort of things. And the funny thing is about this, and we'll we'll wrap this up after that. So they wanted to see the lease that she had. They wanted to see any photos that I had with the property. And that was it. Yeah. They didn't verify who I was. Right? They didn't verify that I actually owned the property. They didn't verify that she was who she was. Right? And so they could have been very easy for me to just like make a fake lease and send some photos that I ripped off Zillow. And they would just start sending me money.

Dan Austin: [34:18] I never even thought about that. That's fascinating.

Mike DeHaan: [34:21] Was like, this is the most unsecured thing that I've ever heard.

Dan Austin: [34:24] We should start going down and picking up homeless people, and have like a unit that we just kinda use as like a daily thing, but we get rent, get like 20 homeless people, and then we'll get section eight to run their credit or whatever they have to do over there, verify however they do, and then we'll just collect $1,200 a month rent for some fake property we don't

Mike DeHaan: [34:41] Dude, that was what that lady did at that seven unit that we have. That was literally what she did.

Dan Austin: [34:45] That's where I got the idea for golly, you're right. It's so easy, these people. It's crazy. But once they, and I will say this, once they're paying, once you get it started though, it's great. Because it's like, the quality of the property doesn't matter. Like, so when you're renting a property, what I mean by quality, I don't mean like you should make them live as well, what I mean is like, in a neighborhood where you need to have like coarse countertops, new LVP, new paint, really well landscaped to get say 1,500 in rent. A section eight, you could go in there with laminate countertops and you know, just standard everything, and you're gonna get 1,500 because they look at what the market rent is for that area. Yeah. So when you're doing your renovation, if you're gonna if you're targeting section eight, I'm not saying like again, they should live in Swalert, but you don't have to have the same exact finish as they demand that full market price. They're gonna give it to you anyways, because that's what market price is. So Yeah. Once they pay, once they but they have to approve it, like, again, you can't be a shithole, but they have to approve what the market rent is, and what you're asking. Once they do, they just keep paying it. That's a cool thing.

Mike DeHaan: [35:45] Well, and the benefit we've found as well with a good section eight people that we've gotten, is honestly they they tend to take okay care of the place because they're really grateful to not be in the alternative section eight property, which is like really bad.

Dan Austin: [35:57] Which is really trashy.

Mike DeHaan: [35:58] Right. Yeah. So if you can provide like a decent one that they feel safe in, they feel secure in, is fully functional, they'll take good care of your spots, they don't wanna be kicked out, and they don't wanna have to go in and

Dan Austin: [36:08] They don't wanna move. Moving's expensive. You think they have money to move? Because section a doesn't give them a moving stipend. They're just gonna pay their rent and moving is gonna be pretty dang it. I mean, it's expensive for anybody, but for for somebody that's low income already, have to drop $1,215.16 $2,000 at least a month to move. That's pretty steep for them. So they tend to stick around.

Mike DeHaan: [36:27] Yeah. So it's a way, good little niche, but tread with caution. Because as soon as you do have problems, they can get bad.

Dan Austin: [36:33] Right,

Mike DeHaan: [36:33] Alright, guys. Well, thanks for listening. You should go and share the show with anybody who might find it interesting. We appreciate it. Anyone who's interested in dabbling in a real estate or hearing some crazy stories, this was a pretty good one for them today because I feel like we had a a good number of just like crazy stuff that's going on recently, which

Dan Austin: [36:51] helps,

Mike DeHaan: [36:52] you know, after a few months of things being relatively chill, that's what happens. So go ahead and share it. It really helps out a ton, and we appreciate you guys listening. Talk to you guys next week.

Dan Austin: [37:01] See you.