The Otter.ai Invasion, Changes in Real Estate Finance, and the Collecting Keys $10,000 Challenge

Mike DeHaan: [0:00] For profit businesses are the opposite. Their goal is to make as much money as possible and to do that over a very long period of time. So, you know, if you have a long term vision, you should do what a lot of these businesses are doing and look to acquire hard assets because they are seeing, you know, over the next like, they are making three year decisions.

Dan Austin: [0:18] Right.

Mike DeHaan: [0:18] Like, they're not saying we're looking to buy this real estate so in three years, we can have an exit. They're looking at ten, fifteen, twenty year Yep. Projections on these things. And, you know, like, that's kind of the like, a lot of people, they try to find their secret sauce about how they're gonna make their money. Honestly, if you just copy what successful people are already doing, whether that's like investing or that's in, you know, business or whatever, you will ultimately be successful if you have the same time frame as them and you execute even, like, a little bit similar to what they're doing.

Speaker 3: [0:50] Welcome to the Collecting Keys Real Estate Investing Podcast with your host, Mike DeHaan and Dan Austin. From wins, losses, horror stories, and tactics for optimizing your business, Mike and Dan take a real uncensored deep dive into the ins and outs of running a full time real estate investment and wholesaling business.

Mike DeHaan: [1:13] What is going on, guys? Welcome to the collecting keys Mike and Dan show where I, Mike DeHaan, and my cohost here, Dan Austin, talk about real estate, business, investing, and everything else in between. So, man, we have an epidemic right now, though. This is a a big pet peeve of mine that has been going on extensively. And very interesting indicative thing of kinda just like the time we're in where everyone is trying to consume as much as possible and be as, like, optimized as possible without actually, like, having to do anything. Right? So anyone who has been on Zoom calls over the last, like, little bit, if you're involved in any show communities like Dan and I are, what is the otter bots, dude?

Dan Austin: [1:58] Otter AI bots in every zoom call. I have a couple. So I have a actually I have a couple of theories on this one ninety nine point nine nine nine nine percent of people with Otter ai don't actually know how to use it or know that how to make it work. And they have no idea it's going to meetings without them. Yeah. Honestly, like that's most people that they they heard, they're like, oh, otter.ai, it'll it will transcribe my whole meeting. Okay? Yeah. So they get it. And the second thing I have is that nobody actually goes back and reads the transcript. Why would you read the transcript?

Mike DeHaan: [2:29] Of course, they don't. Yeah. It was yeah. So if you guys don't know what I'm talking about, first off, you should get involved in more business groups because you will know instantly. Yeah. But, basically, right now, you hop into any sort of Zoom call that has, you know, a larger presence of, I would say, like, you know, business people, whatever, and you'll get these little attendees that will say, like, you know, mike'sotter.ai. And it's this platform you can get that will go to your meetings for you. It will listen to the meeting. It will it's supposed to, like, take notes and give a transcript for the entire thing.

Dan Austin: [2:58] It's highly accurate. It's good.

Mike DeHaan: [2:59] It does a good job. And I signed up for an account, you know, signed up for it read, like, the little getting started with this, how it works, went and like, set it up so that it only goes to our investor program group coaching calls. Right? So that way, we can have some general notes that we can put into our, you know, like, records for the meetings, not just to actually record all the other group coaching calls. And so that's good. But I go on some of these some of these meetings I'm on. There's, like, 11 different otter. AI.

Dan Austin: [3:26] There's three people in the meeting and 11 Otter AIs.

Mike DeHaan: [3:29] Yeah. Yeah. But the because but the problem is that happens because when you go to set it up, if you don't tell it to not go to all of your meetings, then it goes to all of your meetings. So I think you're completely right. A lot of people don't realize it's doing that.

Dan Austin: [3:39] They don't know how it works.

Mike DeHaan: [3:40] But then here's even the more annoying thing is there are people that are skipping meetings because they're gonna pretend like they're gonna review the transcript, so attendance has dropped. And also, too, after the fact, every single Otter dot ai emails everybody on the meeting with the notes. So now I have left The funny thing is

Dan Austin: [3:55] they're slightly different, though, if you notice that.

Mike DeHaan: [3:57] They are.

Dan Austin: [3:57] They're slightly different. Yeah. I've looked at that before. Because, yeah, that is frustrating. Like, after the meeting, and everybody's Auto dot ai emails you. And the other thing I was thinking about was Zoom, at

Mike DeHaan: [4:05] least, you should be able couldn't shouldn't you

Dan Austin: [4:07] be able to restrict those members? Like, only let so many admit attendees? Can you restrict the Otter AIs? Do you think?

Mike DeHaan: [4:14] I don't think you can right now because this is a thing that only started like three weeks Exactly.

Dan Austin: [4:19] Like, Otter AIs, I've heard and used Otter AI for like a year, But it feels like literally the last month, all of a sudden, people know what it is.

Mike DeHaan: [4:27] Yeah. And it's everywhere. You know, there's just a funny thing. But like I said, it's, I think it's just like the new technology. It's people that are trying to consume as much. Because, like, for all the people that don't know this happening, I guarantee you there's a ton of others that are like, oh, I'm not gonna go to that meeting. I'm gonna leave it, like, leave me double booked

Dan Austin: [4:43] Right.

Mike DeHaan: [4:44] Because then it'll record, and then I can, you know, be Productive. Like, review the notes on the meeting. But the problem is, you have half the attendees doing that. You might as well not even take notes because the quality of the meeting is going to drop significantly when there's no people there to have a freaking conversation.

Dan Austin: [5:00] There's nobody participating unless the robots the robots start talking to each other. I will say I was in a meeting where there was quite a bit few Otter AIs recently, and the host actually mentioned how he was having a meeting and he said, well, one on one. Right? And he said, hey, let's take this offline. Let's just chat on our cell phones. Mhmm. Calls him on the cell phone. After the meeting time, the Otter dot ai gave him a transcript to the meeting with their call. How?

Mike DeHaan: [5:29] I don't know. Like, he must have it on his phone.

Dan Austin: [5:31] He has to have it on his phone, but he didn't use, like, okay, so if I called you on my cell phone, would you expect your Otter AI to record the conversation? Because I'm calling your number. No, of course not. Exactly. So how did and what it said, though, was, hey, low audio or low audio volume, and said that they can't, like, guarantee the quality. So my guess is, because he was in his office, the microphone was still on through otter.ai, even though the meeting was closed out. Right? And so it was still picking it up from a microphone. That's crazy.

Mike DeHaan: [6:01] And what it probably did too is it was like, it probably figured out it's like, oh, you're gonna go on the phone now. I'm gonna keep listening. I mean, people are fully embracing this because of the, you know, the ability that it has, like the capabilities that it presents. But, man, we are all everyone was worried about Big Brother before. Big Brother is now

Dan Austin: [6:20] The government now has a robot that actually do a job better than the government can, and so they can really listen to you, and and then, like, man, imagine if they had this during, like, 09:11 after. What was what was that rule? It was like the Patriot Act or whatever they call that. Yeah. Where they were like, you can listen to all your phone calls. Like, now they actually have a way to listen to it and actually process the information very quickly.

Mike DeHaan: [6:39] And not only that, but everyone is opting into it, and everyone is paying for Right. Exactly. And and anyone who thinks that that isn't happening, I'm sorry, but you're ignorant there. Right.

Dan Austin: [6:50] You ignorant.

Mike DeHaan: [6:51] Yeah. Yeah. The second that, you know, this company started doing this, I mean, probably way before the government was like, hey. So what, you know, what if we gave you like a shit ton of money and let you kinda like do whatever you want with your taxes? Would you be interested in giving us that? They were like, yep. Done. Absolutely.

Dan Austin: [7:06] I still think the government created Bitcoin.

Mike DeHaan: [7:08] Why do you say that?

Dan Austin: [7:09] Well, because there's this, like, person that doesn't exist named Satoshi. Right? I think the government created it for a reason. Like, I'm not a conspiracy guy, but who in this world would create something and not tell you?

Mike DeHaan: [7:20] Satoshi Akamoto? Yep. I don't think it's true. I mean, I don't I don't think it was the government necessarily. I think that it was a group of, you know, kind of anti establishment people that set it up, and never really intended for it to become what it anti established, but the establishment's going to benefit from it. I mean, it will now over like the long term, but the dude, it's been around like 2008. I know. Nobody nobody in the government is that long term thinking.

Dan Austin: [7:42] I I think they were, man. I don't

Mike DeHaan: [7:44] think they meant

Dan Austin: [7:44] it to be what it is, though. I think they meant to do it as a way to actually track black market transactions and find people.

Mike DeHaan: [7:50] I mean, maybe I don't know. Think because here's

Dan Austin: [7:53] the thing is like the whole pitch on Bitcoin is doesn't make any sense to me, right? Like, doesn't make any they're like, well, this is a decentralized mechanism. And it's like, but then like, most people lose their money, because it gets stolen from a centralized platform that trades.

Mike DeHaan: [8:07] Well, now that's fifteen years later, back when it started, that was not the intended purpose at all. I mean, it's because it became institutionalized. I don't know, something that we'll have to disagree on because I think that it was mostly anti establishment people that put that together as a That's

Dan Austin: [8:21] the dream they want you to think, man.

Mike DeHaan: [8:22] I mean, so I think I think it's a dream that they they want you to think and that they started with, but that's not what it turned into because things don't actually function that way. You can't actually have anti establishment things like that in a society where everyone relies on the establishment. I mean, you know, for infrastructure, to general security, you know, every sort of transaction, all logistics, that's all managed through the, you know, through the government, through the larger establishment. Right? You try to take the currency away from that, it's not gonna work.

Dan Austin: [8:51] And there's a handful of people in this system, which we all know the CIA is good at, like, making money on the black market by like, selling cocaine and stuff, and, like, being cocaine runners through South America, Central America. So now they just got away. We're like, we don't even have to have cocaine anymore. We can just have this thing called Bitcoin, and we can do this whole pump and dump thing, and we can take all these sorry ass people that lost all their money. We'll take their money, and that'll fund our CIA black operations.

Mike DeHaan: [9:15] Yeah, right. Well, I mean, I guess it is funny, because you look at where Bitcoin has been popular, it's places that the CIA has actively destabilized. See, I'm telling you,

Dan Austin: [9:23] man, there's some wild shit. There's reasons why a place like China are like, Nope, can't have that. Yeah, right.

Mike DeHaan: [9:28] Oh, man. Yeah, China.

Dan Austin: [9:30] It's a lot of thing. I know. It's alright. What do you think?

Mike DeHaan: [9:33] We're not we should talk about real estate today. All leads into this this the Chinese weather balloon stuff right now. This is the other thing that is incredibly fascinating to me. Every time there's there's super, and this is me being conspiracy theorist now, every time there's something that seems outlandish that falls into the news that ends up not being that big of a deal, like the weather balloon thing Yeah. I'm always convinced that they are making this a bigger deal, so that you watch the left hand, so you don't see what the right hand's doing.

Dan Austin: [10:00] Yeah. I I I concur. I don't know anything about the Chinese balloon thing, whether it's from China actually, or that it was actually a weather balloon. I find it highly suspicious, one okay. Let's start to they they shot one down with a Sidewinder missile that cost $400,000 to shoot, and it's a balloon. All you gotta do is poke a hole in it. Right? They freaking destroyed I

Mike DeHaan: [10:22] think they're a little bit more robust than that.

Dan Austin: [10:25] But but really, honestly, it's a it's like a hot Yeah. Like hot air balloon. It's a hot air balloon, essentially. Right? But it's got whatever I don't know what they're using, dude. Like I said, I don't know anything about, like, all the helium or whatever, but like, the ones that they sent over, I suspect the one the pictures I saw anyways. I don't know if these are real pictures. Who the fuck knows? Like, it was, like, huge. Right? So it's not like a weather balloon where you fill it up with helium and it and it goes up. Like, I they launch those all the time. Right? That's, normal. But what I what I don't understand is why they shot it with a $400,000 missile. I mean, it would be pretty cool to do if you're the pilot when you could've just used your cannons to poke holes in it. Second thing is why are they not recovering it if it's actually spy balloon? Wouldn't they wanna actually recover and understand, like, what this is? And then they could say, hey, American public, this actually wasn't a spy balloon. This was some other crap.

Mike DeHaan: [11:11] I think they did recover it though, didn't they? Because they shot it down over North Carolina.

Dan Austin: [11:14] No. But they've shot down several now. Did you know that we're on like

Mike DeHaan: [11:17] a shooting spree now? Yes. But the other three, they're saying we're actually privately owned. And they were quote, I've come from not not what they say. At first, they said they were not ruling out extraterrestrials. And now they're saying that it's not tied to extraterrestrials, which makes me think that it is tied to extraterrestrials.

Dan Austin: [11:34] A balloon, though? Balloon, though?

Mike DeHaan: [11:36] No. I I don't know, man. No. No. Because the other ones that they they weren't balloons. They were unknown objects that were basically holding position in the air or something. I don't know, dude. I'm like everyone else. I just get my news from Instagram at this point.

Dan Austin: [11:48] I think what happened is like the here here's my belief, because like, I'm usually not a conspiracy theorist, because I think the government's too dumb to run on conspiracy. Right? Kinda like your point earlier on Bitcoin. And so what I think probably happened is, like, the Space Force and or Air Force, whoever's in charge of, like, making sure that we don't have people coming in, like, flying into our airspace without knowledge, I think they're on high alert now, and there's just some cowboys out there that are like, I'm gonna get a kill. I'm gonna shoot a balloon down, and I'm gonna be a hero, and now they're just shooting everything in the sky.

Mike DeHaan: [12:18] Maybe. Right?

Dan Austin: [12:19] Because you're leaving it up to like, a single person to make these decisions a lot of times. Right? Like on the moment when it comes to that. Right? So it's like, like, I would I'm like, I could shoot a missile at something I would. Yeah. Someone's like, yeah, if you feel danger, it's coming right for me had to shoot

Mike DeHaan: [12:34] it with a missile. I would I mean, I don't know, dude. I think it's all just positioning, though. If you think about all the nonsense with it, because it went all the way across The United States. Yeah. Finally, it gets over into, the red states, and they're like, bam, we're gonna get it. We'll stick it to China. Yeah.

Dan Austin: [12:47] Got them. You know?

Mike DeHaan: [12:49] All the liberal ones in the middle, they're not gonna be brave enough to do it, but we will.

Dan Austin: [12:54] Well, maybe I

Mike DeHaan: [12:55] hate it.

Dan Austin: [12:55] So you're saying it was a shutdown. Was it North Carolina? Is that where Nikki Haley is? Was she the governor? Is it North Carolina, is she South Carolina? I don't

Mike DeHaan: [13:01] know, man. You're speaking a language I don't even know. I don't know any reps. Just douchebag one douchebag two.

Dan Austin: [13:05] So now she's gonna announce that she ran for president runs for president, so maybe that ties into the conspiracy. Gosh. Now we're getting I don't know, man. Under here. Yeah. I don't know. Alright. Let's switch to

Mike DeHaan: [13:15] real estate. I hate politics. I like the the outrage that people have and the fact that people get so into these things. I find it extraordinarily fascinating. It's like, it's the tribal mentality that we now have that exists in our virtual world. Right? And it's makes it so easy to control the general population. Right. You know, if you look at it, it's incredibly brilliant how it sort of, you know, from, like, the higher end house sort of built out. But the problem is what it does is it creates a bunch of noise and a bunch of distraction, And nobody focuses on things that actually matter, like how everyone can go and buy houses and become wealthy if they work

Dan Austin: [13:53] hard enough. Yeah. That's too much work. Where's my transition? Elon Musk is building houses. Did you see that? That's actually pretty legit.

Mike DeHaan: [14:01] Is he building a house?

Dan Austin: [14:03] No. He's building houses. So he is partnered with Lennar Home Builders in, I think, Austin, where they have the Mhmm. Gigafactory. And so he's now building workforce housing. For his people. For his people.

Mike DeHaan: [14:17] Yeah. So what happens when that workforce housing drives into oncoming traffic because the self driving doesn't work correctly?

Dan Austin: [14:24] Right. Yeah. Well, no. I mean, I just think that's interesting. It's like that's like a very old way of doing things. Right? It's like big businesses that would come in and basically take over a town because they're so big, or the town was created because of a business. Maybe it's a factory, maybe it's a logging industry, a lumber industry, where they have like Yeah. To be out somewhere, and then they would build all these houses because people wouldn't have nowhere to live. And so then, as the employee, now you're paying the company pays you a paycheck to do work, but then you have to pay for the house, and then you have to pay for the food because because, like, back in the seventies and those those time frames were, like, you would have, like, say, a a sawmill on the middle of nowhere. They would have the company would own the grocery store. The company would own the housing. The company would own basically the town. There'd be, like, 2,000 people living in the middle of the woods in proper town with paved roads and everything. Right? And so, like, it's kind of an interesting model. So is it more of an investment for for Tesla to do that because they're just gonna get their paychecks back? It's funny. So that's like going back to, like, feudal times. So if you

Mike DeHaan: [15:23] go back if you ever go on tour any part of Europe, like, there you'll see a lot of repeated patterns of that where there will be, like, the local entrepreneur that owned the construction company that was building the house and the church. And exactly like you described, they also owned the pub. They also owned, you know, the markets. They also own those sort of things. And what happens is is exactly that is they pay the people, the people go to their store, give them their money right back, and it basically becomes this cycle where the person at the top can just, like, basically never have an actual expense, because it ought it always misturns around.

Dan Austin: [15:54] Right. Because it's like and it's like, if you think about it as like a capital investment, you're gonna spend, say, you know, a billion dollars of profits on building houses that you then mortgage to the people at, say, 5%. Now you're basically, instead of going and issuing debt at 5%, you're issuing debt, basically, and houses, and you're mortgaging them to these people, and then you also get the appreciation of that. So maybe over a five year period, maybe instead of just getting the 5% debt, you're getting like six, seven, 10%, maybe more because it's Austin in appreciation of the the asset value. So it's a good investment for Tesla,

Mike DeHaan: [16:28] my opinion. Yes. It would be interesting to see what that fundamentally looks like at the numbers. Because when you get to that scale as well, you know, 1% difference on your margin can be

Dan Austin: [16:38] It's massive.

Mike DeHaan: [16:39] Incredibly huge. Massive. And they, you know, they have whole finance teams that have, you know, 8 figure overheads just for staff that they pay to analyze all that stuff and figure out.

Dan Austin: [16:49] Yeah. It speaks a lot in my opinion because I my guess is, I don't know what if I divided let me get my calculator out here. What is 1,000,000,000? That's a lot of zeros. Oh, my calculator doesn't do a billion. It only does a 100,000,000

Mike DeHaan: [17:04] frickin Apple. Yeah. Like a like a t I 81. Okay.

Dan Austin: [17:08] So what did I say? Think it like a 172 divided by a 172 houses. So average. Okay, that's not right. Whatever. I'm gonna skip over that. Delete this out. My math's wrong. But my point being

Mike DeHaan: [17:21] is Yeah. It's Luke Luke, drop it. Josh, that bit Cut that out, doc. Cut that out.

Dan Austin: [17:27] Anyhow, so it speaks to the fact okay. So so Tesla say, I don't know what they're spending, but let's hypothetically say it's a billion dollars on real estate. It's probably not. It's probably like a 500,000,000 or whatever. Well, let's just say a billion rounded up, you know, a billion on real estate for for their employees. So yes, they're doing it for their employees because they need people to be able to live and stuff. But really, is it an investment? Because it's also in the same twelve rolling twelve months that JPMorgan Chase said they're gonna drop a billion in real estate and other banks, people that haven't typically invested in real estate are investing. And they're not like doing like $30.40, 50, you know, billions, big chunks of money, but it's like, you know, a billion. We're gonna I'm doing a billion, he's doing a billion. It's like a test. Right? Or it's like a small, like, you're saying, gain a little bit of margin while you can in this environment, which actually might result into a bigger margin because of market shifts. Right?

Mike DeHaan: [18:19] Yeah. I mean, I I think that's that's a super big indicator, like, a bullish indicator for real estate in general is the fact that you have all these major players, these major for profit players that are getting involved in residential real estate.

Dan Austin: [18:31] Single family homes.

Mike DeHaan: [18:33] Yeah. Because whereas, like, I don't think the government necessarily has that much of a longer term view because they're just such a cluster. Or the ability. They could not do it. Or the ability is too many, you know, too many hands in there. They're don't have aren't aren't equally aligned. For profit businesses are the opposite. Their goal is to make as much money as possible and to do that over a very long period of time. So, you know, if you have a long term vision, you should do what a lot of these businesses are doing and look to acquire hard assets because they are seeing, you know, over the next like, are making three year decisions. Right. Like, they're not saying we're looking to buy this real estate so in three years, we can have an exit. They're looking at ten, fifteen, twenty year projections on these things. And, you know, like, that's kind of the, like, a lot of people, they try to find their secret sauce about how they're gonna make their money. Honestly, if you just copy what successful people are already doing, whether that's, like, investing or that's in, you know, business or whatever, you will ultimately be successful if you have the same time frame as them, and you execute even like a little bit similar to what they're doing. Right.

Mike DeHaan: [19:35] That's why, you know, what they call like the Warren Buffett effect? Like, there's like whole funds that literally all they do is they just buy whatever Warren Buffett is buying. Right.

Dan Austin: [19:42] They just follow him. Yep. Right. Which makes sense. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [19:45] I mean, why wouldn't you? He's the most successful investor ever. Just mimic him. Yeah. And assuming that he maintains his track record, which he probably will, you will do okay.

Dan Austin: [19:54] Yes. It makes me think on this topic too, with other players kinda coming in with money into the single family residential real estate. What does that speak to the forecast and expectations for inflation? Because inflation numbers, yeah, people are saying they're getting better, but, like, where is better versus good versus best? Yeah. Is it going to be like two years at like 5% inflation? Because 5% inflation, people are like, okay, can stomach that. It's better than nine. Mhmm. Right? And so, like, I think about that when you're talking about investing in real estate. What is a great hedge for inflation? Real estate. Right? Mhmm. It's an asset that is protected against inflation because it's going to go up with inflation. Yeah. And so if there's an appreciation plus inflation on top of that, you're likely going to have a pretty good return, and people may not want to invest in the bond market, or have their money sitting in some sort of cash reserves, or short term reserves where they're so they're thinking, well, let's just put it into real estate. Mhmm. And high, probably high or going to be higher demand markets like the Southeast, like Texas, like Austin, those sorts of places, which is where you see some of these banks saying they're starting to dump some money.

Mike DeHaan: [21:05] Yeah. Well, I mean, you're already starting to see that, not even just in the real estate itself, but in large increases in, like, a wider range of real estate based products. So I'm currently in the process right now of trying to buy the short term rental down in Austin, Texas. And in the process, I've been, you know, connecting with a bunch of different lenders. Getting a loan for me is extremely difficult when it's, like, not a cash property or like a rental property. Right? And because I'm doing as a ten thirty one, you know, I'm trying to do it more traditionally just to make things a little bit simpler, like longer term. And I've talked to these leaders, and there's all these very wide ranging products that did not really exist even a couple of years ago as and I think a lot of it is due to people trying to counteract inflation or, like, these lenders being less interested in having money with the government and in, like, the the treasury bills and the bonds and all that sort of stuff they typically hold. So I've talked to several banks now, like local banks that have DSCR loans Oh. Which is very weird. Like, in the past, that was always like a private institution, a hedge fund, or something like that. Like, I don't I had never heard of I don't know if this has always been common in Texas, buy stuff up here in Washington, I've never ran into a bank that would do a DSCR loan, they would do a portfolio loan. Right? But on those, still want to look at, you know, it's like a commercial loan, it's a ten year balloon has like an adjustable rate or things. These are thirty year fixed DSCR loans based on the performance of the asset with, like, actual financial institutions as opposed to just, hedge funds.

Mike DeHaan: [22:31] Yes. Yeah. So so we're I'm seeing those a lot. And then also too, a lot of these different products that they're having that are if you're buying stuff, like and this is for investors. Right? So they're basically saying, I'm willing to bet right now on investors more so than the government. But if you're bringing a significant down payment to, like, lower your thirty year interest rate, actually giving investors lines of credit back on their properties at, like, a pretty significant rate at the purchase price. And I know some people have talked about that, like, in different realms for a while. But usually, it's like, they'll do it up to, like, 70% or, like, 75%, whatever, if you're putting, 50% down. But these some of these lenders doing out willing to do it to, like, 90,

Dan Austin: [23:10] like a home loan. Heck, yeah. I'm down with that.

Mike DeHaan: [23:13] But it's only on the purchase. So, like, if you tried to do it after the fact, they wouldn't like it. But, basically, they will stack it on so it makes it the same as if it was like a 10% down loan. You still have to bring a significant amount down for the a written initial down payment. But at the purchase date, they will give you that line of credit out to 90%, which is all new stuff. And, like, again, I apologize if I'm ignorant to that. That's when it's been in Texas for a while just because they're super pro capitalist. But up here in Washington, I've never seen that before.

Dan Austin: [23:39] Yeah. I've never had to run into that. Have you seen sorry. This is a little side tangent here. But have you seen this method that people teach? I just have been opened up to it. I've never heard of this in my life. It still doesn't make sense, which is use getting a line of credit, a HELOC against your house. Right? So say, for example, like, you have, like, 50% equity in your home. Go and get that 90% line of credit, like, to 90% LTV line of credit. Taking that line of credit balance and literally writing a check to yourself and then taking that check and writing it to your mortgage company to pay down your mortgage. And the idea behind that is is that because the loan is amortized over thirty years or whatever, that by doing that, you'll be accelerating the pay down on that so much that you'll be putting way more towards principal than the interest is on the line of credit.

Mike DeHaan: [24:31] I see what you're saying because the amortization, like, because because with the amortization on a typical thirty year home loan, it's so much more interest at the front end. Mhmm. So basically, the thought you'll pay yeah. But like, I don't know. I think it depends on what your thirty year note looks like.

Dan Austin: [24:44] It doesn't make sense to you.

Mike DeHaan: [24:45] Yeah. But because it's because people are stupid. Like, like, that doesn't make any sense. Like, why would you go and get pull out adjustable rate debt Right. On your house just to go and pay off your mortgage that you definitely had cheaper that's fixed for thirty years?

Dan Austin: [24:57] Well, I don't know. That's a good question too is it doesn't have to be adjustable because once you pull it, you could lock it, and then you could choose to amortize that over, like, like, I know my line of credit, can amortize over ten years. So now you're amortizing that same debt over a shorter period time. And as long as they give you a favorable interest rate like, I guess, here's the thing. I haven't done the math. If somebody out there smart and wants to do the math and show us, please let me know. Like, I would not do this method, but if the math proves it and there's, like, low risk, then okay. I'll high five the dude that came up with this method.

Mike DeHaan: [25:26] Well, is it well, because, basically, what they wanna try and do is they're saying that you will save money by paying less interest in your primary home. You'll pay down principal faster. But I also don't care about that. Me neither. Because I have opportunity with my money. Yes. And I think instead of, like, trying to piece together all this shit, take a HELOC, go and use it to buy four other properties. Yes. And then your ROI will be significantly higher than dumping into your primary residence. You're probably gonna move out of it in seven years anyway. Right.

Dan Austin: [25:48] Yeah. I've never been an advocate, like, paying off your house unless you're, like, retired, and you really just don't wanna have the headache of writing a check, because you're traveling and doing such cool stuff. But like, I would never want to pay off my mortgage.

Mike DeHaan: [26:02] Yeah. That sort of stuff, though. Like, I mean, I don't know. I apologize if people are into that. That's like,

Dan Austin: [26:06] it's just like a different mindset.

Mike DeHaan: [26:08] It's like chump money. That's like, that's like for suckers. Well, it is and it's like, it's a broke mindset, honestly, because it is like that you always see these little hacks that people do like, this is how you can save money,

Dan Austin: [26:18] pay an extra mortgage payment a year, it'll pay off your mortgage three years faster, something like that seven years fast.

Mike DeHaan: [26:23] Yeah. If people spend the time that they like, the mental time and the mental bandwidth that they put towards doing things like that, towards, like, learning how to make more money and learning how to grow their skills, is a much higher ceiling than there is a floor. Right. Right? Like, you can only save so much. Can only hack so much. And even though it might feel significant to work to you, where where you're at, realize the earning potential is literally unlimited.

Dan Austin: [26:47] I kind of have this like thing I want to do. Like, I don't know. Let me let me throw this out there to this cyber world. So what if I hired a VA for, like, $5 an hour, hypothetically? Hired a VA for $5 an hour to take off, like, I don't know, three to five hours of workload off of me a week. And then I took that three to five hours extra and tried to go make $10,000 doing something else, or 20,000, or 50,000. I don't know. I feel like that would be an interesting science project there.

Mike DeHaan: [27:15] I mean, that that's literally the definition of having an assistant, is it frees up your time to to go into that. That's delegation. Exactly.

Dan Austin: [27:22] Yeah. But you're talking about, like, if you're taking that same brainpower, and if so, if you were instead of that same brainpower, like, think about it in the context of what are you doing in your week, and the average person can probably find three to five hours a week without even actually hiring a VA. But say you want to hire a VA three to five hours a week, say five, that's $25 a week. And then now go with the purpose, go try to make $10,000.

Mike DeHaan: [27:47] Yeah, I mean, you know, again, this is like, this is what people will say. They will say, a, I don't have things to delegate, which is a lie. Everyone does. B, they don't want to pay $25 a week. See, they don't know how to make $10,000 Yeah, those are all the things that'll they'll come in.

Dan Austin: [28:01] And I don't know how to do any of that right now. But I bet you I could do it by the end of this call and come up with a plan.

Mike DeHaan: [28:05] Bet if you had a say, currently, February 16, I bet this this would actually be a really interesting thing. We should see if we could do this. We say like, okay, maybe like, we'll do like a challenge. We'll say, alright, we have March 1, we both have to figure how to make $10,000 outside of real estate

Dan Austin: [28:21] by the end of month. We just came

Mike DeHaan: [28:23] up with this

Dan Austin: [28:23] on our own right here. Listeners, this is

Mike DeHaan: [28:25] Yeah, I don't have the capacity to do it right now because we

Dan Austin: [28:28] were in

Mike DeHaan: [28:28] growth with business. But we should seriously, we should we should make a note of this and do it in like, the fall. Because that would be sick. Yeah. I think that'd a really interesting experiment of like, have to do something that's outside of our business, outside of real estate, outside our skill set and figure out to make 10,000 in a month. See if we can do it.

Dan Austin: [28:42] That's fun. I like it. Alright. Yeah. So that's what we

Mike DeHaan: [28:45] call the $10,000 challenge. So if you guys do you guys want to be a part of the $10,000 challenge, you can submit your application to clickandkeeppodcast.com/challenge, dude. And we can we can make it a community event where everyone has to go in. And you men make outside your skills, they have to make $10,000 in a month.

Dan Austin: [29:02] And then whoever makes well, no, I was gonna say whoever made if you had 10 people, whoever made the most gets everybody's profits. So you get a 100,000.

Mike DeHaan: [29:11] Yeah, right. Oh, yeah.

Dan Austin: [29:14] I like this challenge.

Mike DeHaan: [29:15] I was actually gonna do. Yeah. That's interesting. Well, I I think though, like, to be fair, joking aside, I do think that when you have the entrepreneur mindset, and you have that abundance mindset, that isn't unfathomable. Like, I'm fairly confident I could do it.

Dan Austin: [29:28] I know I 100% could do it in many different ways. And I think about bringing this up speaks a lot to the folks that are like, work a w two. I'm doing fifty, maybe sixty hours a week in my w two. I just don't have I just don't have time, but I really wanna invest in real estate. I really wanna start going off market. You have time, and you can even work even if you were working sixty hours a week, you could still run this business. You could still figure out how to make $10,000 extra. Your $10,000 extra a year making that in your w two might be impossible, might not even ever be possible. Right? Yeah. But doing it outside of that job and doing it yourself as an entrepreneur, whether it's real estate or not, you definitely it's so much easier. So much easier.

Mike DeHaan: [30:09] It is. Yeah. And I mean, just how there's the basic general skills that you learn. Right? Learning how to, like, do basically generation spot opportunities, you know, close deals. I mean, I've I've made small, like, you know, not insignificant amounts of money just even doing super basic stuff. Like, you know, like, I had someone a little while ago that was like, hey. I heard that you were doing some stuff in Chicago. I'm interested in deals there. And I was like, oh, well, we shut down Chicago, but I have, like, 300 leads. Do you wanna buy them? And they're like, I don't know. And I was like, well, what's your average cost per lead? They're like, about $80. I was like, I'll sell you these leads right now for, like, $40 per It's a great deal. You know, you can you can just have them. And he was like, yeah, done. So I did it. And I made, you know, right, $500 or whatever it was.

Dan Austin: [30:53] Yeah. I mean, like that. I hears

Mike DeHaan: [30:55] what it's mutually beneficial exchange value. Right? Like he had I found his need. Right? He wanted the opportunities. I knew what his cost was. I said, I'll give this to you at a discount. He said, That sounds great. Done.

Dan Austin: [31:06] Simple. We're gonna start a discount lead broker company.

Mike DeHaan: [31:11] Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, the problem is, like, if you look at it face value, it's actually a loss to us. Right. If you look at our cost per lead, but at the same time, it's not

Dan Austin: [31:19] we'd already spent the money, though.

Mike DeHaan: [31:20] It didn't matter. Exactly. So it's kinda like a yeah, it's a it's a spent thing. But if you're doing that trying to do that business where you're paying for the leads to sell,

Dan Austin: [31:27] right, that would not be a very profitable business.

Mike DeHaan: [31:30] Oh, man. So anyway, but what what is a real estate show. Want to touch on real estate a little bit. We have some good good general economic talk in there. But, yeah, I mean, businesses is going well, though, for us. We have eight closings already done for the year so far. And we currently have seven more set to close here over the next couple of weeks. So hoping by end of February, early March, we should already be at 15 closings for the year. Yeah. Like that's a that's a pretty solid start, especially coming out of the slow end of 2022. Yeah. So I'm excited about that. And we had a great reminder this past week, week and a bit about how no long how long you've in this business. There's always new stuff that comes up. So we have this deal that we've been dealing with out in Detroit, where the whole thing was mind boggling to me. So we had, like, in the middle of it, like, how these people got in situation was they went to, like, one of those seminars Tough. Like like, ten years ago, where they're like, yeah. We're gonna teach you how to increase your credit card limit and then pay us a bunch of money, and then you're gonna buy these shitty houses for way more than they're actually worth in a horrible town that's just collapsed. But these people, you know, they bought into the dream. They have powerful speakers.

Mike DeHaan: [32:33] They do whatever, and they buy into it. So anyway, fast forward, we had this seller. She lives in Massachusetts. She owns this property in Detroit that she has never seen. K? She's never even, like, seen photos or anything of it. She just she just got, like, here's why it's a good deal. Here's why you should buy it. So she bought it, k, for I don't know. It was, like, $40 or something. Maybe it's, like, less than that, $35. And when she bought it, the property was not rented like it was supposed to be. It was actually in pretty poor condition. Was all just with it. And she paid on it for a while as a liability, but eventually just stopped paying. Right? Just saying like, cool. I'll let the lender take it back. I'll just have it before closed on. Go and we look, she still has title of the property. She stopped paying like three and a

Dan Austin: [33:15] half years ago. My gosh.

Mike DeHaan: [33:17] Right? But the lender never foreclosed. And we're like, what is this situation? So then we turn around and we find out that it was actually sold on a seller finance by somebody else who was in part of the same seminar. And basically, the pitch was, oh, yeah, you'll buy this house for, you know, more than it's worth. You'll sell it to this person for more than it's Oh my And you'll you'll be the bank for them. And they're like a credible borrower, quote unquote, so you'll make money. And it's going to be secured by real estate, and you won't have to be a landlord. So you know what, basically, what they did is they probably found the people that had the money, they said, who wants to be a landlord, who doesn't, here's ways that we can explore money for both of them, and have a profit spread on the middle. Great business. Yeah. And if you look at the paper trail, the company that they bought it from bought the house for like $5, and sold to them for like $40, like, you know, three weeks later. Like, it's just outrageous. So they go and find these cheap shitty houses,

Dan Austin: [34:09] sell them for cheap prices to other people that think they're cheap, and then those people sell them for less cheap, again, on seller financing.

Mike DeHaan: [34:16] Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So there's like this whole hierarchy of just bullshit that goes on. But anyway, so what we had to do, is we connected with this seller, this seller financi, this list lender, right? And said, hey, so we're trying to buy this house, we need a payoff statement for it. I know you haven't paid, she hasn't paid for three years. So what's the deal? And the lady basically came back, and she was like, oh, man. Like, these people that I worked with, my son was killed in Afghanistan in, like, 2012, and I gave them all of my money to buy all these houses. And she has shit tons of them. Right? And all the money from the government that she got for her son being killed, put her in these houses. She's, like, super upset on the phone. Anyway, because she was worried about losing the principal on the loan, she didn't know how to foreclose. Right? She, like, was just never educated on that process. So for the last, like, years, she has been paying the taxes. She has been paying, like, the city penalties for, like, lawnmaidens. She's been doing all this sort of stuff. So she's now owed, like, $85,000 on this property.

Dan Austin: [35:12] Oh my It's

Mike DeHaan: [35:13] only worth, like, $45.

Dan Austin: [35:15] Ugh. Right? It sucks.

Mike DeHaan: [35:17] So she's completely screwed. The seller, like, that we're working with is willing to get rid of the house. The lender wants their money back. We can you know, we had to sort of negotiate there. But ultimately, we had to have two sales sides. We had to get the lender to accept a payoff for 50% of their debt. And we had to have a seller be willing to accept a price for less than the property is worth, even though it is in bad condition. And of course, none of them were happy with it. No. Everyone is losing in the situation. And just because of the nature of it, the deal is so tiny. It's almost not even worth our time. But at this point, it's the principle of like, all these people are screwed. Like, we might as well at least help them out and get

Dan Austin: [35:56] the deal done. You know? I wonder if this like seminar company is still around. That's terrible.

Mike DeHaan: [36:01] So I forget the name of the people. When I talked to the original seller, she gave me, like, the name of them. They're, like, big names that are on HGTV and all these sort of things that ran it. So, like, I I can't remember how often looked. I wonder their names. But it's probably it's probably in the notes or serum.

Dan Austin: [36:17] Is it Toric? I don't think it would be him.

Mike DeHaan: [36:19] I have no idea. It's some couple it's some couple where, like, she's, like, blonde and, you know, and they, like, have, like, the whole look, and it's just nauseating, but people eat it up. You You know, I'm

Dan Austin: [36:27] talking about I do. It's probably Torka and his wife. Remember them on HDTV?

Mike DeHaan: [36:32] Well, there's just so many of them.

Dan Austin: [36:33] I think they were flip or flop. They were the flip or flop.

Mike DeHaan: [36:35] Yeah. I wasn't them. It was different ones.

Dan Austin: [36:37] Okay. Yeah. They're out of California anyways.

Mike DeHaan: [36:39] Yeah. But anyway, so so this whole situation, I'm like, I've never seen this before where so many people were victimized by this third party. That's too bad. And the mess, the paperwork mess, because there's all these issues with the county we have to figure out. The issues with the lender getting the payoff, getting the sales process done on both sides. And our total margin on it's like $2,500. Jeez. So like, we're basically just making enough for our sales guy to get paid, and then a tiny bit to recover cost of marketing. But hey, at least they'll be able to move on with their life. So that's good.

Dan Austin: [37:08] We did definitely help both parties in this case, because that's just crappy situation. Sucks that they got screwed like that.

Mike DeHaan: [37:13] Yeah. Yeah. But we've just been, you know, you you can never expect these things either. It's just it's crazy. And I but I do think that that the nature of these deals is where wholesalers can make their money. Because sure, they're so much small. We've also had similar ones like this, like aren't quite this messy, but we make like $20,000 on a house that a realtor would never touch. So like we did a house that has similar sort of baggage 37,000 purchase. And it was the kids owned it, and there was all this nonsense. They're squatters and all these things. And we were able to make $20 on the property. And one of the reasons they called us was because they had been trying to list the house with a realtor for, like, years. And realtors were like, nah. Don't wanna do it. I don't want my name on that to make $900 commission. Like, that's that's a waste of time.

Dan Austin: [37:57] That and that's unfortunate because that's the truth. They're not gonna make much money on it anyways.

Mike DeHaan: [38:00] Yeah. So, you know, it's just been an interesting lesson of, you know, I guess, like a reminder. If you wanna be successful in this business, you have to be willing to have hard conversations and solve these problems Yeah. And solve these kind of problems, and, like, put in that additional legwork. Yes. Like, a lot of people think, like, oh, you know, I just I get a contract with the seller. I turn it over to my PC, and everything's good, and my transaction card, everything's good. But that's not how it works. I know. It's fully relationship based, and I think that you could have probably got away with that in, 2013 Yeah. Back before everything got, you know, so digitized, there was all these whiteboard bros out here talking about how you can make real estate money

Dan Austin: [38:39] by But never actually doing it themselves. Right?

Mike DeHaan: [38:41] Never actually doing it themselves. But now you actually have to get your hands dirty with these deals. So it's an interesting interesting sort of story there for everybody. But yeah, besides that, that's rocking, man. I feel like we're in a pretty good place. And we are actively bringing on new partnership clients, our mastermind mastermind, I guess mastermind. Our instant investor program has some good growth, some good activity going. Overall, I'm just excited for how this year is painting together.

Dan Austin: [39:06] People that have been involved or and are getting involved in q one of twenty twenty three are certainly seeing the benefits from my perspective, whether they're in our our group coaching program or our partners or our clients coming on. It's like they are winning right now.

Mike DeHaan: [39:18] They really are. I mean, like, our top partnership that we work with in Augusta there, they just closed $125,000 deal. Right? $125,000 wholesale deal wouldn't be talked about that.

Dan Austin: [39:31] 250,000 for the year already.

Mike DeHaan: [39:32] He's already had a 250,000 for the year. And yeah, this is a dude that back in 2019 was a engineer, and he was making ways to like $60 a year. And he just basically

Dan Austin: [39:42] Yeah, nuclear test engineer for the government.

Mike DeHaan: [39:45] Yeah. Yeah. And he just like tripled his annual salary in two months working with a center partnership program. It's it's funny. And like, as you've been doing this business long enough, honestly, I get more excited about like people that, you know, are part of our our partnership group or they're in our mastermind to do well. Yep. Even then us closing deals because for us, it's an expectation. So I just love to see other people succeed

Dan Austin: [40:03] with see the light in their eyes that they can

Mike DeHaan: [40:06] make $10,000 on their own. Exactly. Exactly. I like that idea, man. We're gonna bring that back around. I think that's super interesting. Cool. Alright, guys, collectingkeyspodcast.com/challenge. If you want be a part of the $10,000 challenge sign up here in the next six months. Awesome. Well, guys, thanks for listening. We really appreciate you all. We have had some really incredible growth of the podcast since the year started. And I'm so excited for everything to come. So if you want to help us continue with that growth, please continue sharing this with everybody that you know, send them to our YouTube page, send them to our, you know, whatever podcast platform they use, tell them look up the collecting keys podcast, even better yet, have them leave a five star review, because that helps us grow even more. So appreciate you all listening. Besides that, guys, if you want to get your free guide to start turning off market leads, go to collectingkeyspodcast.com/free, and you can get our free five step guide start generating off market leads, which will give you the basic framework for business. Besides that, I think that's kind of all of our acute call to actions right now.

Dan Austin: [41:02] I think that's it.

Mike DeHaan: [41:02] So yeah, lots of good stuff coming on. So subscribe to the show, guys. Keep sharing it. And thanks for listening. Talk to y'all next week. See you.

Speaker 3: [41:09] Thanks for listening. Please leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, and check us out at collectingkeyspodcast.com for tips and guides on starting your own real estate investment and wholesaling business.