What Were Our Top 5 Episodes of 2023?

Mike DeHaan: [0:00] What is going on guys? Welcome to today's episode of the collecting keys Friday focus. This is our Friday episode where we do a deep dive on some kind of topic of interest either from our group or a listener or something that just came up during the week that we're just been talking about. And since this is officially the last episode of 2023 for collecting keys, I want to do a little breakdown of what our top episodes were for the year. So if you were kind of looking at our catalog and trying to decide what exactly are some of the better episodes to dive into or at least some of what some of the more popular episodes have been, this will set you up on the right track. So this is your first time here. My name is Mike DeHaan, and I run a real estate investing and wholesaling business. And Dan and I, we have started the collecting keys podcast as well as our scale community, which You heard us announce this past Wednesday, which we've actually been running for two years. We just rebranded to scale. But you can find information about that on collectingkeys.com. And our goal with that group is to teach people to make massive income and not just passive income through their real estate investing business. Because let's be honest, even though a lot of us get into real estate to build long term wealth, none of us wanna be wealthy now. And that is actually possible if you build your business the right way. So go to collectingkeys.com and check out our scale program that's right there in the front page. See if you are a good fit for it.

Mike DeHaan: [1:31] Anyways, for this episode, diving into our top episodes of 2023, so you can go and look at what some of the most popular episodes have been. And specifically, I'm going to go through the top five that we have had for the year. I will say that these are the ones that got downloaded the most over the course of the year. So there might have been ones that were like more popular in kind of the short term. But if you look at the course of the year, these are the ones that got downloaded the most. And that's funny, as a result, realized some of them are from earlier in the year. So they probably got the most downloads because they just had more time to get downloads. So we'll redo this one again, the style of episode again next year and you know, see how that changes. So our fifth most popular episode, I will start from the bottom here on the top five. Our fifth most popular episode was number one zero seven, which is titled from taking two years to your first deal to 1,000 units with Matt Picheny. And so if you missed this one, this was an awesome episode with Matt, where he talks about the immense learning curve that he faced getting into multifamily properties and how it literally took him two years to get his first deal as is sort of indicated by the name there. And the things that he learned across the way to really start to rapidly scale because once he got that first deal, he was able to scale up to 1,000 units, a vast majority of which he is a general partner on. So he is a legit owner of those properties in just a few years. And it is a great testament into the value of investing in yourself, investing in your education, and taking the time to learn to be successful before just like jumping in and making a bunch of rash decisions. And ultimately setting yourself up to probably go slower over the long term even though it feels better in the short term.

Mike DeHaan: [3:14] So episode one zero seven with Matt Picheny was our fifth top one for the year. Number four was episode one zero nine, using direct mail to find multifamily properties with Ryan Corcoran. Keeping on the multi family theme, which is always a common theme amongst professional investors anyway, because a lot of people they have this illusion that they need to do bigger deals to make more money, which I will tell you actually isn't true. We have made some very very healthy fees on some single family homes and made some incredible amount of money on single family homes. So a lot of people have a limited mindset or they have been swayed by kinda like the different sort of people out there talking about how you have to go bigger all the time. Don't think it's true if you wanna make massive income. But that being said, targeting multi families is still something of some interest to a lot of people and is a great way to accumulate some larger, more scalable assets for yourself. So in this episode with Ryan, we dive specifically into his marketing strategies for how he finds these kind of multifamily properties. If you guys have never heard of Ryan or connected with Ryan before, he is a wholesaler and investor based out of the Northeast and he has a very successful business up there and has done a huge number of deals with these larger multifamily assets. I believe in this show he goes into how usually he's doing between thirty and fifty units, all targeting direct mail, all going direct seller, and he's wholesaling these deals and also adding them to his portfolio.

Mike DeHaan: [4:39] And so we do a deep dive on his strategies behind that in that episode. The third place one is episode 97, becoming a cash flow master with Drew Wiard. And on this episode, pretty self explanatory, we dive into one of our good friends who is honestly a tactician in figuring out how to create passive cash flow through his real estate business. And one of the things that he dives into is these interesting strategy that he uses that works very well in his market and in several other markets around the country of using these land contracts, where basically what he does is he almost like double leverages the property because he brings in a private money partner basically to purchase the property and then he will sell them to a end buyer with who's getting basically a bank loan or these different things or getting their own kind of financing and he leverages the private money's debt to alleviate himself from having to do a lot of the the maintenance on the property without having to go and get like bank loans of his own. He's able to move a lot faster and maximize his cash flow so you can kind of play with the numbers on each side of the deal. This is not a play that works in every market because not all markets allow these kind of land contracts that he does. But either way, it's a very interesting deep dive into how he sort of set up this business and also how he did it while maintaining a very challenging w two job as a he was like a senior pharmacist or rep at a hospital. Like, he just had very high up job as well that was very demanding. He was able to build an incredible amount of cash flow through his portfolio with all these different strategies. And And honestly, need to get Drew back on the show.

Mike DeHaan: [6:22] He's a good friend of mine. He's gotten really into buying businesses and stuff recently. He has bought several different like bookbinding businesses and some kind of paper business in the Detroit area. It's all virtual for him as well. And that'd be an interesting conversation to have because he's a true entrepreneur. So if you'd me to have Drew on the show again, send me a DM on Instagram at Mike underscore Invest and just let me know that that would be interesting to you. So that was episode number three. The second most popular episode was one zero five buying houses with 0% interest debt with Brandon Elliott. And I will say, I think this one was a very click baity title and is why it got a lot of people super interested in it. In this episode, Brandon talks about how he uses these credit cards and does this like credit card stacking, where he uses like one credit card to get approved for these other credit cards and is able to pass off these like cash advances on these 0% interest credit cards to buy houses basically with 0% debt. So he's all leveraging these these crazy credit card offerings. Full disclosure, I have never delved into this myself. I do not have any experience in what he teaches, but he was very convincing with it and I do know people that have gone through these similar process and have had some success before. So give me something to look into. But yeah, it's like a whole different level of finance that I've never really played around with myself.

Mike DeHaan: [7:44] It just seemed like it was a whole different skill set and for me personally, I did not. At least I felt into it. But it was a great conversation nonetheless and he also has his own podcast, which we're checking out that I've been a guest on a couple of times. So that was number two with Brandon Elliott. And then lastly, our most popular episode for 2023 was episode 95, how to systematize a real estate business to massive scale with Steve Rozenberg. And Steve was actually our business coach for this past year. We are not working with him again in 2024, not because we had any issues, we actually had a fantastic experience with him for 2023. But, you know, we just sort of reached a phase where we realized that we had learned kind of the most that we can from him, sort of with his skill set, but Steve was a really awesome person to work with. In this episode, he talks around systematizing your real estate business. He specifically uses his experience as an airline pilot to talk about how exactly to, you know, scale it and the level of detail that you can take when putting your business together. He's a very bold personality, he's a very very well connected guy, he needs to know everybody in space, like he is a master networker. I mean, you go and you look on like Brandon Turner's website, you go and look on Bradley's website, you go and look at all these major people, everyone seems to know Steve. So it is a very, very awesome episode and he is a great person to connect with if you're looking to scale your business. And as a result, that was our most popular episode for the year, 2023. So no real surprise there.

Mike DeHaan: [9:15] Anyways, guys, so just to rehash, if you wanna go through our five most popular episodes for the year in order from most popular to number five, were episode 95, one zero five, 97, one zero nine and one zero seven. And again, this is like slightly time weighted because these episodes are all older. I think if you look in like the first seven days, we've actually have had several that have been more popular than these since then, but you know, numbers don't lie, so it's not going off. Anyways, guys, go check out those episodes. Let me know if you guys agree that those are some of our best ones. If not, then you should let me know that too, because I always been trying to make this show better. But you can let me know that by DM ing me on Instagram at Mike underscore invests. And besides that, guys, if in 2024, you want to start to scale your business so that you can get to 7 figures and beyond and create massive income for your real estate business, not just passive income, go to collectingkeys.com and check out our scale community and we'll be able to get you there faster than you might think. So anyways guys, thanks for listening and I'll talk to you guys next year.