The AirBNB Revenue Collapse, Perks Of Business Credit Cards, When Deals Are Too Good To Be True

Mike DeHaan: [0:00] A latest group called RevPal with the title Airbnb revenue collapse top 10 cities. And it's showing a lot of these cities, Seaverville, Tennessee, Phoenix, Arizona, Austin, Texas, Myrtle Beach, blah blah blah. All of these, like, four... 3040% losses in Airbnb revenue. What's going on, guys? Welcome to this episode of the collecting keys real estate Investing Podcast. Sorry. I just walked in on Dan talking some crap here on some of our friends who Just saw a

Dan Austin: [0:35] great post from Billy when Tara Fern signs herself up for the platinum card, I have to but I don't have one so have to stand outside the Centurion Lounge. I was like, that's some shit Mike would do to me. I thought his post was funny. His story, it's hilarious.

Mike DeHaan: [0:50] So this is our friend Tara Fernandez from a few episodes ago. What episode was she? Should look actually if I'm gonna talk about her. Dozen or so ago maybe? No, dude. We're logged a lot further back of this. She was episode 83. We're pushing the one twenties now. Oh, wow. But yeah, she... Her husband posting on Instagram about how she got a business card, like a platinum card, and

Dan Austin: [1:12] was allowed in the The platinum, it gets you into the Centurion Lounge, yeah yeah yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [1:15] Yeah, but he wasn't allowed to go in because he didn't have a card, so he had to stand outside.

Dan Austin: [1:19] Dude, I walked in, I was like, I had a first class ticket. Right? And I'm not a well traveled person like you, but I had a first class ticket on Delta. And this is when we flew to Florida, so I went into the lounge. I had like a little layover. I gonna grab a beer or something. And I walk in, and and the guy's like, excuse me, sir. Do you have whatever? And I like, yeah. Here's my boarding pass. He's like, first class. He's like, the only way you can get in here is if you have one of these cards. He, like, rolls down this, like, pamphlet that has, like, six American Express cards on it that I did not have. That's funny. I was like, alright, I guess I'll go to my gate.

Mike DeHaan: [1:47] Yeah. It's usually that or if you have First International. So First Class Domestic, they

Dan Austin: [1:52] don't give you lounge access anymore. That was my expectation because last time I did that, I guess you're right, I was international. Yeah. Whatever. Anyhow, it's kinda funny. I felt very small. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So then I've tried to apply for all

Mike DeHaan: [2:04] the credit cards. I mean, it is worth it. Right? Like, honestly, if you're a big traveler to have stuff like that, not only just for the Right. Points that do travel hacking, but they have their own customer service lines. So I was just in Maui last week, you know, and just hanging out there for the week with my family. And on the way, you know, everything was good. Flying there, easy. Flying back, everything was looking good. And then we got to the airport and freaking Hawaiian Airlines. So I didn't wanna take the red eye back because I hate the red eye. So we had booked it through Delta so that we would... They booked us a flight on Hawaiian to go to Honolulu, and we take the daylight flight back through Seattle. And we show up there, and Hawaiian's like, oh, there's a problem with your boarding pass. I'm like, what do you mean? There's a problem with that boarding pass. I freaking have it right here on my phone. Like, you know, here's my seats. It's confirmed and everything. And they're like, oh, that's through the Delta app. I'm like, I know. But it says the Hawaiian flight right here, you dumbass. Right? And I was sitting there trying to figure out

Dan Austin: [3:01] You dumbass.

Mike DeHaan: [3:01] What's the situation now. I was actually very polite. Did you read? I was actually very polite. I tend to not get worked up in these situations like people do. Right. But, lo and behold, what had happened is somewhere in the system there was a computer glitch where basically the Delta had booked my flight. It had not translated over to the Hawaiian registry correctly, and they had our names on file with seat assignments, but we could not get a ticket for some reason. So, like, that plane had two seats reserved for us, but we could not physically get a ticket. And the ones that we had officially were not valid. So they're basically like, you can't fly. And I was like, well, what do I do? And they said, well, there's not really much we can do for you. So you gotta call Delta. And fortunately, because I have the Delta reserve card, there was all the nonsense on the East Coast with the insane weather making all of the Yeah. I was wondering if

Dan Austin: [3:55] that was gonna affect your flights.

Mike DeHaan: [3:56] Yeah. Well, critch is crazy, because I was so far trying to leave Maui, but all the support lines were just majorly backed up. But because I have the card, have like my special number I call. Nice. So I called it, I was talking to someone in seven minutes, they were able to get us rebooked and everything, ended up having to take the red eye back, which sucked, but, you know, I had an extra day in Maui, not that big of a deal. Right, could be worse. But like that alone, you know, everyone's like, oh, well it costs like $500 a year. That alone, rather than having to sit on hold in freaking Maui for like six hours, it's worth $500 a year. Absolutely.

Dan Austin: [4:26] Right. It's when you need it, and it's worth it. Yeah. Yeah. I would say from a, like, a business, like, hack standpoint too, like, we have the business platinum, which I don't know if that has the, what perks that comes with separate from the reserve card, but if you're looking for business card, which you should, if you have even a small time wholesale operation, get a business card, because it builds your credit, and I think we had, was it Brendon Elliott on the show, you had read him a Mhmm. I don't know if, has it dropped yet?

Mike DeHaan: [4:53] Yeah. He was talking about how he does like the massive, basically cash advances on him, 0%, and you set to buy houses.

Dan Austin: [5:00] Yeah. Well, he's got his whole hack stuff, so if you haven't listened to that episode, like listen to it, there's some stuff there, I'm not gonna cover that, but from building business credit, that is super important, and we do have the business platinum. The reason why we like the platinum is because you're paying 5 or $600 a year, but you get a ton of perks, including Centurion loans access, But also, have the unlimited balance. So it's very nice from a business standpoint. You wanna go buy your marketing, then you can go out, buy your marketing, have some income rolling, and then pay the balance off, and you have so much you're allowed to carry over month to month. You can't carry it all over month to month, but as you grow your business, and the more you use, the more they'll let you kinda put on the card and carry over, and you don't have to get stuck with, like, when we first started our business, we had like $3,000 limit, which you can't do shit within your business. So Mhmm. Go get a credit card like that, the American Express, which you can still use for personal benefits, and then we rack up points on it, and it's funny because like a lot of our business expenses end up being like a 1.5 times multiplier, so it's kinda cool from that sense, and so now you're getting points that you can use for your business or your personal life, you get all the personal and business benefits of the card, and most importantly, you're building like business credit that can help you, then you go out and get a business line of credit, and you actually have credit history associated with your actual business name, and it's easier to get more additional lines of credit.

Mike DeHaan: [6:16] Yeah. Exactly. And I mean, and it's adds a... Leaving like an ROI and some of money you spend after a while. Because like Yeah. You know, the different things you can get for it, even you get a cash back. I mean, we each took... We had a shit ton of points from our previous few years of business that we'd never touched. So what do we each take, like, $10,000 cash return on it last year? So we couldn't figure anything to do with the points. So we just just took a shit ton

Dan Austin: [6:37] of money. Yeah, I don't remember that.

Mike DeHaan: [6:39] Yeah. Yeah, we did. It was like last December, we just took a bunch of points off and just cashed them in for literally money,

Dan Austin: [6:46] and we're like, Christmas bonus, just from having this Or use that money you're spending on your business, like, to buy flights to a mastermind like KeyesCon or something

Mike DeHaan: [6:55] like that,

Dan Austin: [6:55] you know, because you're gonna get direct conversions anyways from your Mastercard to like Delta or something like that. Yeah,

Mike DeHaan: [7:00] Exactly. And now we we announced KeyesCon for our instant investor group. So we're doing an in person mastermind for everyone that's in our instant investor program down in Scottsdale, and no doubt we'll be using some of our business points to book those flights because why not? That'd be silly not to. Yeah. But yeah, you wanna come to KeyesCon, you should join this investor program in the next month and you'll make the cut off to be able to come down and hang out with us for a few days.

Dan Austin: [7:24] Yeah. And here's one thing I'll say as well about that is like if you aren't in the semester program, yes, you're gonna miss out on the KeyesCon unless you sign up now. But if you're a listener and you're like, would be interested in going to an event, even so, let us know, because then it'll let us know that we can and should curate some other additional events for other folks. So let us know what the demand is out there because, you know, it's gonna be, what do you call that, off the chain?

Mike DeHaan: [7:46] Off the hook.

Dan Austin: [7:47] Off the hook. What are your

Mike DeHaan: [7:49] kids saying? It's gonna be fire? Or is it like is it like too old now?

Dan Austin: [7:52] Nah. That's... Yeah. You gotta be like 30 and above to say fire. I don't know what they're 30 and above to say

Mike DeHaan: [7:57] like No way.

Dan Austin: [7:58] Don't they say like cap? Is it is it cap? I don't know how to use that one

Mike DeHaan: [8:01] yet cap. Cap is like if you're lying. You say no caps.

Dan Austin: [8:04] Oh, No cap. It's gonna be off the chain. Don't worry. Yeah. Oh my god. That makes no sense here if that means you're whatever. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [8:12] But... Yeah. So so that was my adventure travel coming back. It's just always always something. I was grateful to have that card though because like seriously, I would have... The extra day in Maui would have gone from being perfectly tolerable to being super shitty if I just had to be on hold the entire time.

Dan Austin: [8:27] Well, here's here's good news though, that you made me aware of is maybe next year when you go to Maui, can stay in an Airbnb for cheap because everybody will be trying to get rid of their shit because apparently Airbnb is not a good business model.

Mike DeHaan: [8:39] I will say, this is such a such a funny thing. So if you guys have been on social media at all over the past, I guess like this peaked this past week from when you're gonna hear this episode, there was a chart that went around, I need to pull it up here to get the exact name of it, but it was from a analyst group called RevPal with the title Airbnb revenue collapse top 10 cities, and it's showing a lot of these cities, Sevierville, Tennessee, Phoenix, Arizona, Austin, Texas, Myrtle Beach, blah blah blah, All with these like four... 3040% losses in Airbnb revenue. This got posted, went viral tons of places, I saw tons of like mainstream articles about it. I shared it, and then people were suddenly very quick to reach out about how if you look at like AirDNA, which I, you know, is another Airbnb data source, that these numbers are actually incorrect compared to what AirDNA says. And I'll... Let's say it this way. I do think AirBNBs are starting to struggle, and a lot of them are collapsing, and that mostly comes from the direct conversations that I've had with people that have struggling Airbnb's, which is a lot of people. I know there's still people out there that are crushing it, but I'll say if you see people talk about this and they're like, well with my 8,000 Airbnb's, they're all up. Listen, they're the freaking outlier.

Mike DeHaan: [9:56] It's like Elon Musk arguing that salaries aren't going down because he's still getting richer. Right? They are the 1%. Yeah. Like it all is about what the median people are doing. The exception, not the rule. Exactly, what's going on with them. The funny thing is too, so everyone was sending all this stuff from your DNA, but the problem is is they're not comparing apples to apples. Like... And and no one seemed to understand that. I don't know why. Because this chart that was getting shared, it's basically showing May 2022 to May 2023 as, like, three month average. Averages are basically, quarterly averages showing these drops. And everyone was arguing with these AirDNA numbers that were just showing May versus May. So they're basically ignoring the twelve months that this chart's using, and just trying to compare one month to the other month. And ultimately what I've decided after going back and forth with several people is just do your own freaking research, and whenever a third party tells you anything, just think about why they would wanna share that with you. K? And consider that in your analysis. Because I always think about this. Yeah. And then and I'll argue this on both sides. I don't know what this REV company does, REV Pal, but AirDNA is highly highly incentivized for you to think that Airbnbs are just fine and dandy so that you keep using their service for as long as possible so they can keep making money off of you. If they show you that Airbnbs are tanking and everyone stops leaving their service, their business goes away.

Dan Austin: [11:24] So true.

Mike DeHaan: [11:25] Right? So just keep that in mind whenever you are using data from any of these companies.

Dan Austin: [11:29] You know what I find super fascinating about this graph or this table is the actual numbers. So May 2022, which are presenting as good numbers. Yeah. What is this... If I'm reading this right, was it saying that in May 2022, if you were an Airbnb owner in Austin, you made on average $46.25 in revenue? In revenue. Yeah. Because that's not a lot.

Mike DeHaan: [11:51] No. I mean, with taxes, that's not even gonna cover your property taxes on most properties, because that's your top line revenue.

Dan Austin: [11:57] It's not even gonna cover your cleaning fees half the time, you know what I mean, once you talk about all your stuff. And so when you include all your expenses, just like this last weekend, we had a big event here in Spokane, our Airbnb did, $2,000 in four days.

Mike DeHaan: [12:10] Did they really?

Dan Austin: [12:10] Yeah. But, like... And you can compare that, and you'd like, dude, I made so much money. Look at this, which a lot of people do. It's like, yeah, but come here in freaking February, that shit, we're ain't making nothing. You know what I mean? It's just like Yeah. Because we had a big three on three basketball tournament that comes through town, like 30,000 people flood into town, and they pay to play in this tournament. So it's like, course we did great that weekend. We have other events that we just crush on the weekends. And so I'm just fascinated with May, which I think in most of these places like Phoenix, even May's a great month in Phoenix because it's not super hot in the summer, but for people that wanna come down for the heat, and there's a lot of events, including baseball and all that to come down to, that in Phoenix, you'd only be making $5,500. I'm like, that seems low Yeah. Compared to what some of these people tell me that they make.

Mike DeHaan: [12:55] Unless this is another class situation of some pundit mixing up revenue and profit. Right? That's good, true, because they are...

Dan Austin: [13:02] Well, Airbnb revenue collapse. Yeah. Could be profit collapse. Because I guess if your profit was but there's no way that they would know that because they don't necessarily know what your expenses are, so that would have to be even still if they subtract the cleaning fees out, which can be absurd. Know, like arc cleaning fees sometimes is as much as a nightlier stay, if not more sometimes, depending on the time of year. And so, like, if your mortgage, easily in Austin, Texas, is $4,000 a month. Actually, that's

Mike DeHaan: [13:29] a very valid point, because they're only gonna have access to whatever numbers they can scrape off of Airbnb, which won't take into account any of your fixed expenses.

Dan Austin: [13:37] Yeah, and if they're taking into account any gold data from their Airbnb owners, who are all liars, then that's really a poor statistic here, this whole graph's shit.

Mike DeHaan: [13:45] Yeah, yeah. So yeah, mean, like I did, it just goes back to whenever you see anything like that that elicits a strong response from people, analyze who's sharing the data, and what is their ultimate motive with it. Right? Totally. Because like, I need to actually probably look at that company and see what they do. Because I bet you that they have some reason to be against Airbnb, and they're going to try and, you know, share something that would be inflammatory towards Airbnb investors or to rent investors, and obviously, AirDNA is gonna be the opposite. And I mean, here's the thing, everybody, it's all game. Everyone wants you to do whatever is going to make them more money. And the only way that you can really know for sure what's going on is by like doing your own research. And by doing your own research, that doesn't mean going on like watching YouTube videos or typing into Google. That means like talking to people that are actually working in the trenches in those markets and that style of business, and seeing, you know, not only just talk to them, but just talking with them, the specifics. Right? Because they could also be lying to you. That's really the only way that you can do it, honestly. Like, if if you go back to movies like the Big Short for the two thousand eight collapse, I'm sure that they, you know, in the movie they exaggerate it a little bit, but the things that those guys recognized to start to see that there was going to be a shift, is them going and visiting Florida, and they're like, why is every single house on this street for sale?

Mike DeHaan: [15:13] Just like little stuff like that, that seems weird. And then... Or when they go and they are at the strip club, and the stripper's talking to them about how she bought eight houses with zero you know, zero money out of pocket.

Dan Austin: [15:24] Money day up. Yep.

Mike DeHaan: [15:25] And they're like, that does not make sense. Like that is a red flag right there. Yep. And... But if you go to any sort of mass data company, just know that they want you to believe something for a reason

Dan Austin: [15:34] and there's always a motive behind it. Totally. Yeah. They're they're doing something or they're funded by somebody. Exactly. Yeah. That's the thing is like if it seems to be, at least for us, if it's too good to be true, it usually is. And, you know, we've tried to like look at things, and they're like, oh, that sounds awesome, and

Mike DeHaan: [15:48] then you're like, I think

Dan Austin: [15:49] that's too good to be true. And we found out either the hard way or just by doing our research that it that it's just... It is too good to be true. Even sometimes when we get deals under contract, we're like, that was too easy. Mhmm. Like, was just telling the guys on the phone this morning, the kickoff meeting, I was like, actually, one of our sales guy, Bryce, he was act... He actually made this observation, and I was like, yeah, there's kind of like three tiers or three bands of sellers that they fall into, and then there's, you know, subcategories. The first one is like that low hanging fruit that comes in, and they need to sell, they meet all your requirements, get in a contract super fast. You get it under contract the same week. Mhmm. And there's this other band that's like the six week follow-up, they're reasonably motivated, but they're just kinda not sure, they're maybe talking to other people, and then you finally get it locked up, and it's like a six to eight week thing. And then there's this other band, which is like, after two months, it could be two years, it could be a year, you just... This consistent follow-up, they forget about you, but then two months later, they're back on. So there's these big bands of sellers, and sometimes, that first band, which is like they call you and they sell right away for the number that you want, are liars, and they're not real It's too good to be true, they're not... They're trying to sell a house that's actually not theirs.

Mike DeHaan: [16:53] Yeah. Right. Which is literally a situation that we're dealing with right now. Well, I guess we'd be trying to figure out just general in life though. I'll dive into that whole situation here in a second. But just general in life, whether it's business opportunities, investment opportunities, and the thing is even smart people fall for this. I could not fucking believe all these dumbasses that we know that are like highly successful people that were paying $50,000 for an automated Amazon store What? That was gonna give you a 100100% return in a year. It's like, come on, That sounds dumb. Like, you know you know what I'm talking about. All those those people that were buying that Yeah.

Dan Austin: [17:27] No. I just didn't realize they were having to pay that much for them. I was thinking maybe it was hopefully a lower cost solution, but I I know people that are trying to sell those. It's like trash.

Mike DeHaan: [17:34] It's trash. They're like 30 to $50,000 and then monthly commitments to buy inventory for these automated amp. Like, sounds too good to be true. It's stupid. Right? Yeah. Someone goes and tells you that you can buy all these houses with zero money out of pocket and this is what you're gonna make and it's super easy. No. Pace Morby, you're fucking liar.

Dan Austin: [17:50] Not true.

Mike DeHaan: [17:50] Right? Like, you know, just... You can go you can go and like look at everything. Fitness, seven minute abs, not true. Don't buy the little spring thing they try to sell you, you know? Doesn't happen. But...

Dan Austin: [18:01] Yeah. You're you're absolutely right though. It's like, that's just... Nothing good comes without a little bit of effort or work. And yes, maybe you can buy a really great seller finance deal or sub two deal with no money out of pocket, maybe. But that's so rare, it's not you can't build a business around it. Exactly. You can't. And I know people that are doing real deals that understand creative finances, and we'll just use this as an example, and they maybe pop one or two off a year. Mhmm. And it's not like they can't do it more, it's just that that's about what makes sense. Like, there's just, you do a 100 deals a year, maybe one or 2% are creative finances. You can't build a business model around Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [18:37] And people, you know, they think that they just do those all the time, it's just not how it works. It's statistically because there aren't that many sellers where it actually makes sense for them. Mhmm. You know, like it's funny, someone... I got into a debate with someone about this the other day, and someone sent me this video with two of our favorite people. And it was like, how to flip the script on a no seller finance offer. And they had this thing, and it was like this cut video with all these different sections. I'm like, they don't even show the whole story, a. And b, how do we know this isn't just their friend that's pretending to be a seller? Right. Honestly. And just trying to express the narrative anyway. I don't know, maybe I'm just a conspiracy theorist when it comes to all these real estate liars.

Dan Austin: [19:17] No, I just think you, yeah, you just know enough.

Mike DeHaan: [19:20] Yeah. Right. I've been around long enough that I'm skeptic on stuff. But I wanna talk to you on this deal that we have with our too good to be true situation. And I'll be fair. The guy teed it up in ways that made perfectly valid sense for it. So we have this house. It's exactly what Dan described before. The guy called in. He wanted like $75. He basically said, you know, it's in an area that's pretty shitty in town, needs lots of work. ARVs are like low 2 hundreds. Like realistically 75 is probably where he would have been anyway. And then he tops off the call with saying, oh, and I have really violent, nasty tenant in there, so you can't see the house. So I was being completely sad and insane. I'm like, okay, that's fine. For us to do that, we're gonna need to be at like 40. And after a little bit of humming and hawing, he's like, okay, fine. That sounds good. And so we sent him over the purchase sale, and he goes, we can't close that title company. They said, how come do they always close? He says, we can't close with them. She caused me major problems before, so we need to close this other company. And we're like, okay, that's fine, whatever, we'll figure it out. So we go over to the other side of the company, and they flag the deal basically saying it needs to go through a probate.

Mike DeHaan: [20:27] And we're like, well, what does that mean? Like, we've been talking to the seller allegedly, apparently there needs to be a probate that's going on. And so, we went and looked at the records, and two months ago, there's these recorded documents. We went and pulled the actual recorded doc. There's these recorded quitclaim deeds that very obviously have the same handwriting on both sides of the deed with the same pen. At one point, he changed the pen, but the handwriting's exactly the same, and then he changed back to the black pen again. Signed all this sort of stuff that's recorded that I'm pretty sure is this dude just like deeding the house over to himself to try and sell it. And then we did some more back checking on kind of the situation, and the actual owner of the house is in prison. Like the person that was a quit claim from to the current guy we've been talking to is in prison for a myriad of crimes, everything from sex crimes to assault to whatever. And so he ended up in prison in February, and his bond... And this is where this is where I'm getting really woo wooey with this. His bond amount to get out of jail was the exact amount the guy asked for on the phone when he first called

Dan Austin: [21:38] us to $75. That's weird.

Mike DeHaan: [21:40] So I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure there's there's two potential situations here. Either the guy that called us is trying to, like, steal the house from this dude that's in jail and sell it, or he's basically trying to, like, offload this house to get his sex offender buddy out of prison. Yeah. I'm just like, what is happening?

Dan Austin: [21:59] No matter what, he's not doing anything illegal.

Mike DeHaan: [22:02] No way. Yeah.

Dan Austin: [22:02] I'm He's trying not get a sex offender out of jail, or he is like, definitely trying to... He knows the guy went to jail, and he's like, I'm gonna steal this guy's house.

Mike DeHaan: [22:08] Yeah. Right. And then the probate situation comes because the guy who's in jail's dad was the original owner, who I'm guessing died like a long ass time ago, and that whole transfer didn't go out legally either.

Dan Austin: [22:18] So When we heard like, oh, he doesn't wanna use our title. I'm like, I can't imagine like them screwing a guy, oh, what does he mean? Mhmm. Spidey sense, know, kinda kicked on then, and then when we sent it to another title company that we happen to know the title officer at, and she's like, yeah, this is super weird why our title officer was like, you have to go through probate on this one, like, don't normally do that. He could just fill out this form if it was like this, and then I talked to him, and they're like, yeah, so this is not like a normal situation, and we definitely can't insure this one unless it goes through probate. So do you have two title companies saying that they won't insure unless it goes through probate? Yeah. Yeah. We just kinda were like, alright, it's not even... We're not even gonna pursue that.

Mike DeHaan: [22:56] Yeah. And and it's a... This is a reason it's really important to make sure that you have a good title company and to review title reports and things like that, where this stuff will be, you know, outlined with legalese, so you need to know what you're looking for. Yes. But what could theoretically happen in this situation is you have, let's say you go through an attorney, and there's attorneys here in town that will do this, where they just kinda turn a blind eye situation, and they allow the sale to go through because they wanna get paid or whatever. And you end up in a situation where you now have paid money to be put on title for a house that you, a, cannot sell to somebody else legally, unless you go to the same attorney again who's willing to push it through, and b, you can potentially get sued by the person that does have legal right to the property, so you'll be out not only the money, but also the house. They'll end taking it back. This happened to one of our competitors.

Dan Austin: [23:45] Imagine you buy it, and you renovate it, and somebody else basically is like, you don't own that house when you go to sell it, and you have to go to title, another title company is like, oh, no, we can't clear this title. Now you're stuck with it. Best case scenario, you get to keep it without somebody coming after you, but you can't get money out of it because even a loan company, like a lender's not gonna lend on it because they

Mike DeHaan: [24:03] want a clear title too. Exactly, yeah. And this happened to one of our competitors here in Spokane last year, and basically the tenant of the house claimed that they had ownership because the, was it the owner because we wholesale them the deal, which is a funny thing. Yeah, we did. We didn't know all these details, but they basically pushed it through with their attorney because they really wanted the house, if you remember.

Dan Austin: [24:25] I do.

Mike DeHaan: [24:25] And the person that we had the contract with had taken deed from the owner's dead father or something, and I guess they had some sort of agreement that was slightly off the books that they were supposed to get the property back at some point, and it just never happened, and then he sold it to our competitors. And that got really weird, because not only did they get sued like eight or nine times, they kept trying to sue him, but they've got so many people show up with a gun

Dan Austin: [24:51] at their office. Dude was not happy.

Mike DeHaan: [24:53] No. He's not happy. So Not happy. Gotta be gotta be careful out there.

Dan Austin: [24:58] Yeah. Check your title reports. Get your contracts in the title, review it before you Mhmm. Get yourself into a kerfuffle.

Mike DeHaan: [25:05] But the funny thing is is I think that that's one of those things that 99.9% of investors never even think about. You know, especially a lot of newbies, they probably barely even know what title is. And like No.

Dan Austin: [25:15] Their gurus aren't out there pitching it, man. They're not talking about that.

Mike DeHaan: [25:19] Well, to be fair, until there's a problem, you don't always necessarily need to like jump into details. Yeah. But like the thing is is as you're doing this business for long enough, that becomes honestly the bulk of the opportunities that are out there right now. For sure. Or ones that have title issues. And this started back in 2021 when the market was booming, where everyone you could sell a refrigerator box in the corner for a $100,000 over asking price, right? Only people that couldn't sell houses for that period of time were people that had major financial issues, or needed a short timeline, or they had legal issues that a realtor was like, I don't wanna play this game.

Dan Austin: [25:54] Right. Right. Yep. Or your typical average person can't figure it out

Mike DeHaan: [25:57] Mhmm.

Dan Austin: [25:58] And they don't know how to get it through probate, they don't know the next steps, and those people themselves don't know how to do it. Yeah. I would say like right now, just because we have so many deals going on in escrow, we always probably every one... Once a week have a probate title issue. And it's usually like, well, there's 13 people on title, you're like, goddamn it. I know.

Mike DeHaan: [26:14] How? Yeah. Well, there's there's stuff like that. Or like right now we have this one where we're having to do a freaking survey to make sure that the land and stuff is actually... Like that the structures are supposed to be on the property.

Dan Austin: [26:28] Mhmm.

Mike DeHaan: [26:28] So they're having to go and check all records, which takes a bunch of time because otherwise it can't legally be sold with its current state. Yep. And like that is the main problem solving right now if you're doing this business at any sort of scale. Yep. And you know, you have to have a pretty firm understanding about how the real estate transaction process works. And if you don't, you're gonna miss out on tons of opportunities because the guy that just like says, oh hey, need to sell my house because I need to move quickly, I got a new job. You know, all the ones that like all the gurus tell you happen all the time, they don't happen all the time. They're very few and far between. Yeah.

Dan Austin: [27:01] That first band is pretty rare. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

Mike DeHaan: [27:04] I mean, especially, I mean, even from when we started, like back in 2020, I mean, the first handful of deals that we did were landlords that were just like, I don't wanna fix the roof. You wanna buy it? I'm like, yeah, sure. Yeah. We haven't seen a deal like that in a long time.

Dan Austin: [27:14] COVID was a good tailwind for a lot of people too though, because there's a lot of landlords who tenants weren't paying, and they were like, well shit, I'm scared, this could go on forever. Yeah. And we were there to save them. And that was a great tailwind, but then what we also found out as we kept going, is that we were able to continue to do business despite any other weak spots, just because we didn't really take no as an answer from title companies and lawyers, went and figured out the problems and got creative, and said, okay, so I know you're saying we can't do it because of this, like what if we weren't able to solve that issue? Okay, we could close, how do we solve that issue? What's step one? Yep. You know, step one is to call a probate attorney. Okay, cool, let's do that. Mhmm. Let's be willing to go after and chase these down and do deals.

Mike DeHaan: [27:57] Yeah. And that's where you make your money right now is you know, putting in those extra effort. If you're not willing to do that, it's probably not the best time to get into this business. Right. And it likely won't be for a long time because those people aren't gonna be going anywhere.

Dan Austin: [28:08] For sure.

Mike DeHaan: [28:09] So, yeah. Other than that though, any other business stuff you wanna report on? I know we're both kind of in an interesting spot right now as we've really been working on getting some stuff systematized. We've been rocking all the the new Rocket Station VAs who has listened to an episode with Greg Brooks a couple weeks ago. We've had them come in and they've taken some good heavy lifting off of the stuff that we've typically ran in the business.

Dan Austin: [28:31] Yeah. They're doing fantastic. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [28:32] We're just clipping right now. Because I I think you've you've gotten all the transaction stuff pretty much over to them. I have all of our marketing stuff over to them. And it's like, well, we should've hired these guys sooner, like honestly.

Dan Austin: [28:44] Right? Yeah, wish I knew about them sooner. They're actually a really, I mean, we've had, we've used BAs since we started. Mhmm. We've used other staffing firms and had mixed reviews, but knowing that this was out there as a resource is huge. Yeah. Rocket Station definitely has... I'm not trying to make this like a commercial, like one of those advertisements, like once I found Viagra, it changed my life. I don't know, you know, like I'm like the lady sitting in the bathtub and her husband got Cialis, so I'm just excited kinda commercial. Yeah. But once we got Rocket Station, it really changed... I mean, did, it changed kind of like our ability to move faster for sure.

Mike DeHaan: [29:26] Yeah. Well, funny. I know we've... It's not not an add at all. It's just one of those things that like when you find something that's like really effective for you, you get excited about it.

Dan Austin: [29:33] Know? Yeah. Absolutely. You're like, damn. Yeah. Especially when you're like, I wish I knew that before. I'm an idiot. Mhmm.

Mike DeHaan: [29:39] Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, it's just interesting transitioning more fully into like CEO and like operative roles and, you know, trying to figure out what that looks like. We just hired a a new, I guess, media team as well that we are gonna be... We can make some additional content on that end. But it's been an interesting process. We never had to, like, go down that whole realm before. But it's ultimately with anything in this business, if you want to do something well and you wanna do it in a decent amount of time, you can pay to do it faster. What we're doing right now. We're just fully fully in that phase. That's always a big thing too when I get people that, all the time, newbies reach out, and they're just like, hey. So if I wanted to get to your... Literally, I talked to you yesterday. It's like, if I wanted to get to where you're at as fast as possible, what should I do? And I was like, pay someone to help you do it. And they're like, oh, well, I was thinking if I'd use this system, and I called this list, and I did those things. Was like, no. Yeah. You're just gonna spin your wheels. You don't know what you don't know yet. Go and find a mentor. Find a team. Find JV partner, whatever, and cut them into the deals, or pay someone on like a hourly rate, or join their group, or whatever to get you there faster, and that will absolutely do it.

Dan Austin: [30:53] Yep.

Mike DeHaan: [30:53] And once you've built your business, that becomes, you know, internal people, right? Or like, you know, you hire like a consultant to come and help you, or you hire like a sales trainer to make your sales guys better, or you go and you hire, you know, a VA staffing company to get you VAs, you don't have to spend three months trying to find the good ones on Upwork for your geo arbitrage, or whatever the fuck. Like, you know, I I just can't let it go, dude. Just can't You're gonna

Dan Austin: [31:16] beat that up. That is kind of a poor marketing scheme.

Mike DeHaan: [31:20] I keep seeing it, and I'm like, dude, you're so much better than that. Come on.

Dan Austin: [31:23] Yeah. Yeah. I agree though, like with what you're saying, and like, it takes an incredible amount of time to master something. So when someone's like, how do I get to where you're at? It's like, man, like, that's a loaded question anyways. Like, that... You you think about all the hard work, and like, are you gonna bypass that hard work by just, like, I don't know, it's too good to be true type thing? No. But you can go faster by paying people, by buying experience, which is what you're like. You said, we've got this media team. I'm excited to see the outputs of that, that's gonna be a lot of fun. But just anything in general, like why would you hire a consultant to do something? Because the time to build expertise in that specific topic, like HR for example, for companies that are medium sized, like getting to our level, right? The reason why they hire HR consultants is because to build an HR team would be incredibly inefficient, and take way too long to figure that out. Yeah. Or to bring in, you know, we've got a consultant helping on our systems side of things, because to get expertise of software development and all that into our business would just take too long to get there. We could totally do it, but why not just get there faster? And finding the areas in your life or your business where getting there faster through paying for a service would help, that's where you really need to dial it in.

Mike DeHaan: [32:33] Yeah. I think that's a level of business maturity as well that you have to reach to sort of understand. To me, there's even guys we know that do very, very well that they'll still be like, hey. I'm trying... I'm playing around with these different designs for this business idea. I'm like, bro, what are you doing? Like, if you like that, that's cool.

Dan Austin: [32:49] But People that are like, yeah, I'm a doctor, know, I make $450,000 a year. I'm really trying to house hack this. They're like, no, stop. I honestly though. Go buy yourself a nice little house, enjoy your life. You don't need to go out and sack a duplex.

Mike DeHaan: [33:02] I mean, all the time. Or like we have I have a guy that I've talked to in the past, he's a medical doctor, and he's hit me up a couple times, and he wants to know about cold calling software. I'm like, bro What are you that's like the most hireable thing you can do. Yeah. And also, I'm just guessing if you're a doctor, your sales skills probably aren't top notch. I'm just assuming.

Dan Austin: [33:23] Your bedside manner's probably not great either.

Mike DeHaan: [33:25] Yeah, right. Unless they're like a orthopedic doctor that works at one of those clinics where they just pump every single person that comes through that has like back pain, they're just like, yep. We're gonna replace your vertebrae. You need a new spine. Different kind of sales. Anyways. Alright. Well, I think that's all from us though.

Dan Austin: [33:42] Yeah. I'm

Mike DeHaan: [33:43] good. We have a new shirt though at store.collectingkeys@podcast.com. Did it drop? It did. It's officially out. Our I'm looking at

Dan Austin: [33:52] I Jets shirt gotta order it.

Mike DeHaan: [33:53] Which should be the motto for everyone if you want to keep running this business. You wanna get to the position where you are looking at jets.

Dan Austin: [34:00] I'm looking at jets.

Mike DeHaan: [34:02] That's so...

Dan Austin: [34:03] Let's see. That is also kind of a pun. Did we ever explain the pun?

Mike DeHaan: [34:06] I think we did an episode or two ago. Okay. But the long story short with this is when we went to our mastermind with our business coach, there was this one speaker that we didn't really care for too much. Well, there's

Dan Austin: [34:18] two speakers that said it, but...

Mike DeHaan: [34:20] Yeah. But one guy said it in a douchey way and that's why it's

Dan Austin: [34:22] something Right. Yeah. Yeah. A different way.

Mike DeHaan: [34:24] He was trying to brag about how how good he was doing and he said, I'm looking at jets, you guys. And that sort of became our joke for how you know you're doing well is if you're looking at Jets. Yeah. That's what you tell people.

Dan Austin: [34:35] It's funny too though, because like I didn't like,

Mike DeHaan: [34:36] I feel

Dan Austin: [34:37] like you definitely did not buy with him as much. I hate hate him. Like, I'm like, I get what he's doing. Like, I got it. Like, he's doing alright. But after seeing his fevers of the other guy's feet, I'm like, oh okay, you're not looking at chips.

Mike DeHaan: [34:48] Yeah, right. Yeah, right. He's trying to figure it out. He's looking at drones maybe. Yeah, he's looking at business class. Business class, he's lucky. I think he's looking at $109 drones from Toys R Us. But... Hell yeah. I'm buying a shirt right now. Go go check out the merch store if you wanna wanna shirt. We also have some good other collecting keys swag on there and represent.

Dan Austin: [35:12] Hell yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [35:12] I'm gonna bring it back until for one month, for the month of July, if you post a five star review and send me a screenshot at Mike underscore Invest on Instagram, I'll send you a piece of collecting keys swag of your choice. Do it. So just for the next month, because I did that for a while and started to get really expensive. But for one month, I'll bring it back. Go leave me a five star review. Send me a screenshot at my underscore invest Instagram. I'll send you a piece of collecting key swag of your choice. But besides that guys, appreciate you all listening. You should share this with your friends and anyone else who you know you know, don't be a French like an acquaintance too, might be interested in real estate, just with them. And you shall also go to collectingkeyspodcast.com/free. Get your free five step guides that are generating off market leads. And then you can ultimately be, you know, making some money and hopefully looking at jets yourself sometime in the future.

Dan Austin: [36:00] So Or at least get a shirt that says I'm looking at jets.

Mike DeHaan: [36:02] Yeah. Right. Just get a shirt and just pretend. It's even But thanks for listening, everybody, and we'll talk to y'all next week. See y'all.