Who's on Threads, Realistic Marketing and Sales Expectations, A Flip Gone Majorly Wrong

Mike DeHaan: [0:00] So if we look at the lead generation of direct mail versus SMS marketing over the course of 2023, we are almost exactly the same, which is for a good while. So we've had 1,504, So 1,504 direct mail leads, 1,547 SMS leads. So that's a difference of what, like 43, like really close. Mhmm. But our deals closed, I guess our our signed contracts and something they have in escrow right now for direct mail is 58, whereas with our SMS, it's 18. Right? So, like, the re x, fore x almost of direct mail being signed around versus SMS. What is going on, guys? Welcome to this episode of the collecting keys real estate investing podcast. Today is Wednesday. So this is the Mike and Dan show where I, Mike DeHaan, and my cohost here, Dan Austin Hey. Talk about real estate, investing, business, and whatever else is present on our minds at the time. And I know you've been threading it up over there for the last week, Dan.

Dan Austin: [1:12] Oh, God. Should we give the update on Mike and Dan's opinion on Threads since it dropped last episode?

Mike DeHaan: [1:18] I don't know if my opinion is the same as yours, but this is by the time this episode comes out, Threads will have been out for like a week,

Dan Austin: [1:24] a

Mike DeHaan: [1:25] couple weeks at that point. But it is all the talk in the tech space, I guess, and the, you know, kinda social media space is Mark and the question is, is Mark Zuckerberg Yep. Basically ripping off Twitter entirely with Threads or is it just, you know, slightly different?

Dan Austin: [1:41] I don't really give a shit if he rips off. It's like the best business people. Right? You copy and paste. Good. If it's bad if it ends up being better than Twitter, cool. I think it's garbage.

Mike DeHaan: [1:50] And but he's also he already stole Facebook from the Wink of Ostpiel soon as so we know he's not above it. Allegedly. Allegedly. I don't know, man. On the movie, it was pretty clear what he did.

Dan Austin: [2:00] Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, I whatever happened there, who cares. Right? Obviously, because Mark Zuckerberg was the right person to to take it to where it's at now apparently in my opinion because he got there. I don't think that we have a lost twin to have done that based on what I've seen, but

Mike DeHaan: [2:14] For sure. But let let's start with this though. Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard about threads, which is Meta, Facebook, whatever the hell they're called, new social media platform that is basically Twitter built on top of Instagram. So it's like tied to your Instagram account, but it is a text based social media platform that looks eerily like Twitter sort of how it works and operates.

Dan Austin: [2:40] Yep. It's like Twitter with like 10% of functionality.

Mike DeHaan: [2:42] With 10%. Yeah. Because like you go on there and every single person that you see is not people that you follow or have ever heard of before. And I don't really know if there's any cohesive thought or anything into like a feed.

Dan Austin: [2:56] So I I was a little more positive about it being a new app when it first came out. Like I wasn't anti threads or even whatever. But after using it, sparingly I'll I'll admit, I have found it to be a combination of a shitty Instagram because people are still posting pictures and videos Yeah. So it's not just text based. A lot of it's reposts from Instagram and then to use your words, a non cohesive stream of just gibberish, like text based gibberish posts where if you go to Twitter, like in my opinion,

Mike DeHaan: [3:31] that like the posts that

Dan Austin: [3:32] you see that are text based or whatever, they at least invoke an emotion, good or bad. Twitter tends to be more like negative emotion, that's how they invoke engagement. But good or bad, it evokes an emotion, and there's some content that's being tweeted out, and then some sort of comment thread that are somewhat entertaining to read. This is just people spewing shit into an echo chamber that is meaningless.

Mike DeHaan: [3:54] It does seem that way. Because not only is it like you're seeing stuff from random people, you're seeing stuff from random people that has nothing to do with like any of your followers, that have no likes, no shares, no anything, and you're like, oh here's what you know, George from Dallas thinks about this random thing.

Dan Austin: [4:14] Right.

Mike DeHaan: [4:14] But it's funny because I've noticed that people are, at least from what I've seen and maybe this is where it ties us up, are exclusively posting like mindset stuff or things that are like kinda provocative. There is a lot of that. And like quotes. Yeah. Quotes, like weird things. I don't really get it, like what the whole purpose of it is at this point. Like taking, you know, usership from Twitter or whatever. Maybe this is just some beef for the the Zuck and Elon boxing match. I don't know. But you cannot like doubt the interest in it though because it got what? A 100,000,000 followers in the first like three or four days, which is insane.

Dan Austin: [4:53] Oh, so now here, I have an argument against that though. Like that is a lot of followers, but is it really a lot of followers in the grand scheme of things? When you look at meta and like their what do they have for active users? Like a billion? Is it 2,000,000,000?

Mike DeHaan: [5:07] I have no

Dan Austin: [5:08] idea, honestly. A lot. Right? And the argument being that all you had to do was open up and click basically port Instagram over. It basically just port all your profile and shit over Instagram and they had, you know, had so there's an argument, I don't know the actual truth to this, that it's actually not that many users if you think about how easy they made it.

Mike DeHaan: [5:28] I mean, yes and no. Because like, so people were comparing to how quick ChatGPT got to a 100,000,000 users, which was like several weeks. Right? Well, now that school's out, it's like massively Yeah. ChatGPT has for sure. But you could also say that they made that very easy because you could go there and you could just log in with like your Gmail account, like everyone does everything anyway. Yeah.

Dan Austin: [5:47] But you didn't even have to create a new account with ChatGPT or with with threads. You just literally just fuse your Instagram account and then they assigned you a random ass number.

Mike DeHaan: [5:55] Yeah. Number, whatever that is. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, people still had to opt into that.

Dan Austin: [6:00] I guess that it's it's a good argument that it's a lot of users, but I just don't think I don't know. Yeah. Unless and this is minimum viable product. Minimum viable product. So in two years from now, could be a sick ass app. Mhmm. But for now, I'm like, I'm not getting any entertainment out of this because I can't even like follow it, dude. Like, here's here's random person on my feed. Happiness is not the goal, it's a byproduct.

Mike DeHaan: [6:22] That's what I'm saying.

Dan Austin: [6:23] No qualification of what that's tied to. Give me a picture of like a funny meme at least with that, you know what I mean? Like, some kid smashing his dad's toe with a hammer or something. I don't know.

Mike DeHaan: [6:35] Yeah. Right. But I mean, it is is interesting though because like every sort of tech company starts with that minimum viable product. Right? So I mean even Facebook, which is like kind of the old one, they started with For sure. Just at Harvard, and then just at universities, and scaled that way. I remember when Twitter first came out, it was 2008, and I don't know what all the use cases were, but where I heard about it was because there were teachers at my high school that were starting to use Twitter and it was a way for like teachers and faculty to basically have like a running chat about what was going on at the school. So I'm pretty sure that Twitter was not meant to be like a giant thing at the start. It was meant to be like a sort of a localized thing.

Dan Austin: [7:17] Maybe or an enterprise thing?

Mike DeHaan: [7:19] Maybe. Yeah. I don't know.

Dan Austin: [7:20] You know, for internal communication, kinda like Microsoft's Yammer or whatever the hell that crap turned out to be.

Mike DeHaan: [7:24] Exactly. Right? But I got other modern apps too. You know, TikTok, before it became TikTok, was a different app called Musically.

Dan Austin: [7:31] Mhmm.

Mike DeHaan: [7:31] Right? Which was only, like, kids dancing. Like, that was the whole thing, and then it became TikTok with, I guess, modern content and all that sort of stuff. So, I mean, who knows? Right? Like, with right now, it's threads in its current form. Two, three years down the track, it could be something completely different. Possibly. But Though we don't even know

Dan Austin: [7:50] I will argue and then we should stop this conversation. But I will argue that like TikTok, like that's a completely different type of app. Yeah. Really Right? Like Musically, all of that. This is like, like I said, it's a mash up of the worst parts of Instagram, the worst parts of Twitter put together. So it's not like a new concept. Yeah. So I don't think it's gonna be great. Anyways, Back check me in six months.

Mike DeHaan: [8:10] Yeah. Right. Yeah. And it does need to be a new concept. We talked about this the other day. What is is it Steve Jobs? So I think I think Steve Jobs actually quote like stole this from an artist, which is hilarious. He stole the quote? He stole the quote. Yeah. So I I learned this. Steve Jobs is attributed to saying it, but it's actually came from like the cost or something like that. And it is that the great artists copy, the best artists steal. Something like that. Either way, the point being, the people that are really good at shit, they steal it from everybody else. Yeah. And Steve Jobs was notorious for that with Apple.

Dan Austin: [8:40] I don't I don't disagree with that. But I mean, stealing the exact same thing is not the same.

Mike DeHaan: [8:45] Yeah. Just steal it and make it better. But yeah. Anyway, so let's move on from that. Let's talk some real So we have an insane amount of mail going out this week and it is gonna be such an interesting Yeah. Sort of endeavor because I don't think we've ever had this much mail all shipping and hitting at the exact same time. Usually, kinda stagger it a little bit kinda because of the fourth of July and some delays with some of our partners and things like that. We ended up stacking up a bunch more than we normally do. So we have like 15 different markets ship out last Friday.

Dan Austin: [9:22] Like over a 100 k plus pieces.

Mike DeHaan: [9:24] Yeah. Was yeah. So like that was what $72,000 worth of mail going out across all these these markets. It's all gonna be hitting this week. And, I mean, it's been quiet so far because it hasn't quite usually, starts hitting about Wednesday, which is done on Friday, and is going to be the ultimate test of the sales team and, like, our lead follow-up process, which is something that we've been working on anyway. So I'm excited to see how it goes together. But something like I've been getting regularly asked by new people, hit me up on Instagram all the time at Mike underscore invest. They always ask what kind of marketing we use. And when I say that we use primarily direct mail, I immediately get so much pushback. And people are talking about the cold calling services they use, the SMS services they use. My favorite is when people reach out to me and they just very presumptuously say like, what cold calling company you guys use? I don't freaking use cold calling, bro. We haven't cold called people Right. For So my response, I'll go to direct mail. I try to sell it, but I wanted to take a look at, like, kind of our KPIs. So our main marketing is through direct mail SMS, and then we do, like, online retargeting and those sort of things. So if we look at the lead generation of direct mail versus SMS marketing over the course of 2023, we are almost exactly the same, which is for a good while. So we've had 1,504, so 1,504 direct mail leads, fifteen forty seven SMS leads, so that's a difference of like 43, like really close. But our signed contracts and so they have an escrow name right now for direct mail is 58, whereas with our SMS it's 18. Right, so like the re x, fore x almost of direct mail being signed around versus SMS.

Dan Austin: [11:12] Mhmm.

Mike DeHaan: [11:12] And the thing that's so interesting to me is people really like the SMS and the cold calling because they get a lot of leads, and so you feel busy. Your cost per

Dan Austin: [11:22] lead is much lower. The cost per lead is

Mike DeHaan: [11:24] so low, and obviously that's why we do it. We also have a team to work it. If you're like a person that's starting out, and you're generating a shit ton of leads that are gonna be really hard to convert, you're just making a job, man.

Dan Austin: [11:36] Yeah. Well, if you're like me, you're sitting here, you're like, well, it produces one third of the amount of leads, and it's cheaper, I'll just five x my spend on texting, but that's not going to get you anywhere.

Mike DeHaan: [11:46] And that's also not how it works.

Dan Austin: [11:48] Right? Exactly. There's a curve to lead, like, dollars spent versus leads that come in. Yeah. You can't just text everybody in the world.

Mike DeHaan: [11:55] Yeah. I mean, you can try to, like, text

Dan Austin: [11:56] more people, but the

Mike DeHaan: [11:57] problem is it's highly regulated. Right. And if you're doing it correctly, you can actually only text a certain number of people per day

Dan Austin: [12:03] Go ahead.

Mike DeHaan: [12:03] Versus mail. Like, we could send 100,000 pieces per day if we wanted to.

Dan Austin: [12:07] Yeah. They're okay with you killing trees and just filling up people's mailbox because it gives the mail people a job too.

Mike DeHaan: [12:12] Yeah. Right? So but no, it's just such a interesting viewpoint because one of the things with direct mail, one of the biggest pushback people always have is like, well, the cost per lead is so expensive, it costs so much to do it. Mhmm. But it's about the ROI and the deal flow that you get from it and not the lead flow. Too many people focus on the lead flow, and I don't care if you get, you know, a 100 leads, right, if you're not able to close any of them. Totally. You know, and part of that can be your sales process, right, you can go ahead do sales, but also just with the nature of SMS leads, if you think about the story of that lead. Right? You are invading that person's day. They're probably driving or they're at work or they're doing something else, and they get a random text message and they decide to engage with you or not or the Filipino that you're hired to do that or whatever company you've hired to do it. And sure, you will get deals from it, but more often than not, it's somebody that doesn't actually wanna talk to you. Yes. Right? They are kind of being cordial. Whereas if you look at direct mail, the story is they receive the letter, they take it into their house, they have the time to sit there, and they open the letter, you know, they read it, they pick up their phone, they call you, and they are saying, I am willing to have a conversation with you already. So Mhmm. You know, the rapport has already started

Dan Austin: [13:27] from that. About selling my house.

Mike DeHaan: [13:28] About selling my house. Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, it comes down to quality versus quantity.

Dan Austin: [13:34] Yeah. Exactly. There's a quality of lead. There's like a ladder. And I wrote it down here. This is what I think it is. It's like as far as lead quality, and these aren't all your the only channels that exist, but the general channels you hear people in this space using, first would be lowest quality of lead is SMS. Mhmm. Step up, I give cold calling only because your cold caller got them on the phone and talked to them, so it's not like so that person at least feels like there's a person, and they're raising their hand like, yeah, I'll have another conversation with another person, not just a text. Texting's easy just to be like, yeah, sure, I'm gonna f I'm gonna mess with you. Mhmm. You know what I mean? And the next would be direct mail, would be the next quality of highest quality lead, and then finally would be like a web lead or something coming in from an online channel. Those are typically the hottest because they not only like searched you out and found you online, then they chose to engage with you. So that would be like your hottest and those

Mike DeHaan: [14:28] are like call them immediately. Exactly. But the problem with online leads is it's hard to have any actual control over who you're marketing to and who is converting on those leads because I mean we we put a decent amount of money into online marketing and we get some great deals from it. We also get lots of people who are like retail leads, right? You know, or they're people that are going in on Google and submitting to every single company which could be great potential motivation but it's also a very competitive lead, right? Absolutely. And you know it's direct mail is you can target it, right? The person's already opted in to engage with you when they call in. And just by like the scalability of it, I don't know if there's any other to foreign marketing that's more scalable than that, as passively. Another couple points I

Dan Austin: [15:21] I can make about it. You can build a business around direct mail. Correct. Can't build a business around just texting. You can't build a business just around cold calling. Know people in the past have said that's what they do, but the job you're creating for yourself is just so massive Mhmm. To do it. And then the second point about direct mail is, if you are a person who's dipping your feet in and this is your side hustle until you exit your w two, or you just wanna do this as your side hustle, it's the one lead source that you can send out, go to work, go to bed, do whatever, and come back, and then like, oh, there's some leads for me to call. Mhmm. Yeah. You can pick up the phone and call right then and there. So it's a little bit more passive on the effort it takes for you to continue to get leads. Exactly.

Mike DeHaan: [15:59] Yeah. Yeah. That makes great. And I will say that the best companies use a combination of all of these or right? Or what we do is how we kind of have our our pyramid, I guess, is, you know, we have like our broad net, which is the SMS, which we kinda use to hit everybody. And then we have our targeted stuff, which is the direct mail to keep our budget in line, target people that have recorded issues. And then you have, like, kind of like your brand credibility marketing, which is the online marketing in our case. So most of our stuff, we don't do like cold PPC, we do web retargeting for a bit of like visit our website. And that gets you in front of more people quicker once they're doing their due diligence. And you build that stack out. And that's how you have like the most effective marketing scheme. Right? But starting out, know, just pick one and optimize it and if you were to pick one, I would say direct mail. Yes. Because you're going to have the highest quality conversations and that is where deals come from.

Dan Austin: [16:55] Well, there's what decades upon decades of good data Yeah. On direct mail for any industry what it comes with. So I would say that it's and it's just simple, right? If you get cold called, how do you feel? Yeah. What's your disposition? If you get cold texts, what's your disposition? So just think about that. Don't there's no magic behind it. You're a human just like the people you're trying to text and cold call and mail to. Exactly.

Mike DeHaan: [17:20] Yeah. And you don't need to make it complicated. Everyone always wants to know what our secret is to get our our mail answered and just consistency. And in all of our stuff that we send, we have a very basic value proposition and we point them to our branch so they can do the due diligence. That's it. Boom. You know, nothing nothing crazy. It's just jump shot and bounce pass basketball. You know, we're not doing any fancy plays. But, yeah, so I'm excited for all that start hitting. I'm super excited for some of the new markets that we started off, which have already been off to a great start. And we're gonna start closing some deals in those here pretty soon. And then we already have, God I think what three commits to start up with our partnership program here in August with potentially a fourth one that I talked to today that I'm super excited about.

Dan Austin: [18:05] It's who we're repping, man. People are liking the service and they're telling their friends.

Mike DeHaan: [18:09] They're telling their friends. Yeah.

Dan Austin: [18:11] We get a lot of referral based, I guess, clients. Yeah. Most of our clients cover referral based because our existing people

Mike DeHaan: [18:17] Yeah.

Dan Austin: [18:17] Like it. Exactly. Yeah. Well, I that's

Mike DeHaan: [18:19] the best sort of business marketing you could have is somebody who enjoys working with you that tells their friends. Absolutely. 5.7. A good client's worth 5.7 referrals. We gotta figure out who said that first because you've heard

Dan Austin: [18:30] that several places. A good referral's worth 5.7 clients. Yeah. There you go.

Mike DeHaan: [18:34] Exactly. So Or sales. So good stuff going on there and I'm excited to keep that rolling. One of the biggest things I guess we've been just trying to figure out with all this lead flow is the sales process. And like kinda like the sales training piece. We had a good talk with Steve, our business coach this morning about sales training. And it's so interesting that like, when it comes to off market real estate, it's such a unique kind of sales. And if you look at the people that traditionally do well, either, you know, our competition or people that have worked for us or like even people in our instant investor program, the ones who do well, I would say that there's kinda like a there's obviously people that have had no sales experience. They always kinda struggle because they don't not do it. Mhmm. But then also up there with that same level of struggle is people that have done like only b to b sales. Yeah. Because they don't get how to talk to consumers. Right? Like if if Right. Their experience is selling like widgets, they can never quite figure out like, oh, listen. They don't actually want to buy your widget. You need to like hear about their problem and figure out how your widget can solve their problem, which is probably something they teach. But it's just different when it's like a divorced person.

Dan Austin: [19:45] It's different it's a different sales process. Yeah. You have to be a little bit I guess it's a less predictable process. So unpredictable. Because if then if you think about it this way, if like the b to b salespeople, what you're saying, Mike, are like least likely to be successful if that's all their background because a, you don't have to be that good of a salesperson if you got a good product, honestly. Yeah. But what you do is you and I've seen this in in these different businesses is, you know, you have sales guys, they move company to company, and they go into the company, they have to learn the widget they're selling. Mhmm. So once you learn the widget, in our case, the widget is getting people to sell us their house, then you can be pretty proficient. So you might get the salesperson taught how to do some creative deals, you're gonna you're gonna get them taught like why, like, we buy the way we buy and the different distresses the seller has. You can get any salesperson up to speed doing that. But where it's challenging, it's being able to adapt in an environment where the person you're working with is not a business professional and is unpredictable.

Mike DeHaan: [20:42] Yeah. I mean, yeah, you talk about the the seller, right? Which not a business professional and is unpredictable. Yes, the seller. And real estate is kinda like that in general. I'm sure realtors know about how unpredictable clients can be. Mhmm. Now take that client that's unpredictable as a realtor, and instead give them seven years worth of financial issues. Got it. You know, that they haven't been able to figure out. Give them drug problem, which is a common thing that we deal with. Give them a property that is causing them insane financial distress or they're super emotional about it.

Dan Austin: [21:11] Yeah. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [21:12] Right? So you add this whole other level of, I don't say irrationality that comes with it, like emotionally charged whatever, which is so hard to sort of like learn how to deal with. And it's one of those things when you're coming trying to figure out how to do training and stuff for it, there's like always a gotcha. Right? Or like a Yep. You know, an exception to whatever rules you think you come up with, there is always an exception. Even for us, hundreds and hundreds of deals later, we're still running into stuff where I'm like, I've never seen that before. Never heard that one. Yeah. You know?

Dan Austin: [21:48] Yeah. I think I got a message like on our notification talking, one of our sales guy was talking about having to meet a client's handler at a liquor store to get something signed.

Mike DeHaan: [21:57] I'm like, what does that even mean?

Dan Austin: [21:59] What is their That's what I said, I screenshot it. I was like, a client's like, it was like handler? And I was like, at a liquor the liquor store didn't surprise me. The handler did. We have people who have to meet at bars to sign documents. That's normal.

Mike DeHaan: [22:10] Because the only place you can find them, right Is at the bar. Yeah. It's such a weird business, man. But, you know, that's also why there's the opportunity. And I would also say, think that's also why not very many people have tried to do this kind of business at scale because it's really difficult to optimize. Mhmm. You know, and there's always just exceptions to every rule. But that's also why we can make $5,060,000 dollars on a deal where a realtor would make, you know, 6,000. Right? For sure. Because we're willing to conquer that issue. So that's been a big focus has been trying to optimize that. And it's tough too because like for a lot of other sales things, can find like trainers and those sort of things. But the problem is, is I look at a lot of the people that label themselves as like sales trainers. Steve Tran, right? It's kinda the big one. Correct. And I remember not too long ago, him talking about how much his wholesale business sucked. I'm like, so like your business was shitty and now you're gonna try and teach my business how to do better?

Dan Austin: [23:07] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's not a lot of good options out there.

Mike DeHaan: [23:10] No. Yeah. No, like at all. Know, and like most of the people that I look at, you can always tell by their, you know, their content and stuff too when they like have, they're showing like the hard sales techniques that they use to get off market real estate. I'm like, bro, I know you haven't done that many off market because if you talked to a motivated seller that way, you would turn them off in two seconds.

Dan Austin: [23:32] Yeah. Everybody sounds super good when they're telling you how they talk to this Dude. Theoretical seller. I'm like, no. First of all, the seller's gonna not be able to hear half the shit you say. They're it over the phone and they're gonna be dumb and not know how to get their phone off a speaker phone or something like that. Yeah. And they're definitely not gonna they're just gonna hang up on you. I know. Or the conversation is not going to flow exactly how you're saying it's going to flow. It's just it's not how it is.

Mike DeHaan: [23:57] Many of these are truly motivated sellers and they have these issues. The number one thing that they've probably faced personally that has been causing the problems is that they don't feel like anyone listens to them.

Dan Austin: [24:09] Very

Mike DeHaan: [24:09] good. Right? They've probably tried to talk to the loan people who won't listen to them. Probably tried to talk to like the tax people who won't listen to them. And their problems are self inflicted, but ultimately, they don't feel hurt.

Dan Austin: [24:20] Right.

Mike DeHaan: [24:21] Right? And so if you try to come in and like hard sales these people, you're never gonna be that successful. And it's why it's funny. One of my just freaking, all the gear is out there, man, there's like this current trend going around where you have these people that are like closing sellers, like on calls, and they'll do like these like live calls, you can go watch and they'll like close people. And there's always like this kind of prolonged conversation where there's the person on the other end of the phone, they're able to flip them and get them to agree to the deal. And people get really into that. And I'm like, how do we know that's not like an actor? Just then they're not just doing like role playing. A paid actor? Oh, yeah. You know, or like a friend of theirs and they're just role playing this whole thing purely for the content. But people don't think that way. People get so bought into the the glamour of it. It's freaking trash.

Dan Austin: [25:04] Yeah. I mean, honestly, I probably wouldn't wanna do a live seller call No. For people because like the chance I mean, if I was saying that I could close them, I wouldn't mind doing one. I've had my calls on air before with other podcasts Yes, I remember. Getting my feedback. But I wouldn't tell people I was gonna

Mike DeHaan: [25:22] close because it's just so unpredictable. You don't know that. So the fact that you're right, they're going that well and everything they say works is highly suspect. And also too, if you've been in the direct to seller world, you know exactly how that hour live on air would go. You would call 55 people and not a single one would answer. Yeah. That is absolutely how it would

Dan Austin: [25:42] go. Exactly.

Mike DeHaan: [25:43] All the time.

Dan Austin: [25:44] Right? Like, well, that was today's hour. No one answered. That's how the business It's

Mike DeHaan: [25:48] just a dial tone for the entire time and no one's gonna answer because sometimes it just goes that way. Or you're gonna get like someone that picks up and they're just like, now's not a good time, and then they're gonna hang up and call them back next week.

Dan Austin: [26:01] Or they're gonna open up, answer the phone, and go on a tangent of something crazy and act like you're their best friend and tell they start telling you some random shit about how their ex husband took her boyfriend out. Just some wild story and how depressed they are about it and you're gonna be like,

Mike DeHaan: [26:19] oh Yeah.

Dan Austin: [26:19] Do you wanna sell your house?

Mike DeHaan: [26:21] There's that or they're gonna go like mad racist, like mad in the gutter with the send us up to talking about.

Dan Austin: [26:26] You have to bleep some stuff out when you're on live.

Mike DeHaan: [26:29] But no, it's not how it works on the, you know, cold calling live or the hell they do. We should do a

Dan Austin: [26:34] we should do a cold calling live session.

Mike DeHaan: [26:36] You and me do that? That would actually be really funny because we're not really like Yeah. We've been so far removed from that part of the

Dan Austin: [26:43] business for so long. But just like to show how it really works.

Mike DeHaan: [26:45] Yeah. Right. That's actually not bad. Put it

Dan Austin: [26:47] up on YouTube.

Mike DeHaan: [26:48] This is what we should do. We should take every bit that every guru does and do like the Instagram versus reality of it. Kinda like how Oh. Like travel people do that with like, oh, this is Instagram versus reality. We should do that with with real estate investing.

Dan Austin: [27:04] Yeah. That's actually a pretty good idea.

Mike DeHaan: [27:05] I feel like that's a good idea. So the problem is though is I'd have to get involved with all the gurus and I hate that shit. Just get triggers me constantly.

Dan Austin: [27:12] You have to follow them.

Mike DeHaan: [27:14] Oh. Can't even do it. I have to pretend like I'm one of them. I know. So anyways, so yeah, that's that's stuff that we're working on. Our goal too with it is hopefully we can kinda crack that code and come up with some good sales material that we could release to our instant investor group as well.

Dan Austin: [27:28] Totally. I think that's scripts and all that because yeah, we will be doing a pretty robust sales program. Exactly. I think we're committed to it. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [27:34] I mean, have to. I wish Steve's gonna kick both of our asses. He's he's he's bigger than both of us.

Dan Austin: [27:39] Yeah. Got what he told me, like, he's like, are are you guys done? That's After we told him why we Oh, we can't do what he was trying to get us to do. And he was just like, are you guys done? Man. You're done making excuses.

Mike DeHaan: [27:49] What he said about that? I felt like he was my mom, like when she like said my middle name and I knew I was in trouble, I was like,

Dan Austin: [27:55] oh shit. Yeah. You're just like, oh man, Michael David. Oh

Mike DeHaan: [28:00] dude, yeah. Yeah, was working on that. Then our portfolio side, we have maybe something looking pretty clear with our eight unit sale. Oh, yeah. It's been relatively seamless for the most part. The appraisal came back good. And I've just been I mean, I'm not used to sales being somewhat painless. Usually they're just like freaking Dunkirk all over again. Right? But like this one actually seems to be going pretty good.

Dan Austin: [28:25] Yeah. I think so. We'll find out. It got delayed a little bit because typical lenders waiting till the last minute. We've been under contract what, forty five days, it's supposed to close the end of this week and I get a message from the agent basically saying, yeah, hey, it's gonna be delayed till the twenty first, no reason. No reason why or anything. Was like, why? And she's like, well, the seller said lending's gonna be tight on this. I'm like, we've typical lender. Like, we've known for two months that this house is getting sold and they just picked up the appraisal packet to approve it.

Mike DeHaan: [28:56] Lenders are such a freaking joke, man. Like, they have these super long closing timeframes. But I mean, we do loans, dude. Like we we've done loans. We turn our people in two hours. Yeah. Like it's not inherently complicated. Like especially, you you want to do your due diligence and all that sort of stuff on the deal, on the person, whatever. But even if you're doing that, like realistically, should take, I don't know, a week, maybe. Proof. Yeah. I don't know how they can have forty five days and still delay it, especially right now.

Dan Austin: [29:26] Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [29:26] Last year, no, 2021, sure. When they're doing like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them a month. Yeah. Now they're not doing that. The market has slowed down dramatically.

Dan Austin: [29:35] Yeah. Like a loan officer right now on a commercial side might be lucky to be doing one deal a month. Yeah. You don't think that they could just chase this out? No. That's because they

Mike DeHaan: [29:43] work banker hours, man. Dude.

Dan Austin: [29:45] You know banks move slow too. Everybody in that industry moves slow on the traditional financing side of things.

Mike DeHaan: [29:50] And last week was fourth of July, so you know, it gotta take off Wednesday, it gotta take off Thursday. I mean

Dan Austin: [29:56] That's exactly what it is.

Mike DeHaan: [29:57] Yeah. You know, there's people that were taking the time off for the entire week

Dan Austin: [30:00] and I take two weeks off, sorry, everything has to stop.

Mike DeHaan: [30:04] I mean, and and that's if they're fortunate enough to even work out of commercial lenders that's still doing loans. Yeah. Right? Which a lot of them are not right now, especially with multi family stuff because people are so worried about cap rate crunch going on.

Dan Austin: [30:15] Yeah. Like, yeah, shit's not moving at all. No. I we're, I mean, not lucky to sell this because we don't care if we sold this or not. It was more of an opportunity thing. Mhmm. But like people, you don't see shit getting sold right now in that space. Especially this because it's like a good asset. It's it wasn't eight units, not like a 200 unit that's about to like come due on its debt wall, you know, coming to crash down on it. Right?

Mike DeHaan: [30:35] Yeah. Well ours is low purchase price too. Right? It's like what? $6.45? So ones that are getting into like the several million dollar properties are getting kinda weird right now. Yeah. You could buy a duplex. Like, we've we've probably have duplexes that would sell for 500 here.

Dan Austin: [30:46] I know. So, yeah, it's definitely a low priced eight unit. Do you

Mike DeHaan: [30:49] think we could sell any of our duplexes for 500?

Dan Austin: [30:51] Yeah. Probably. I think we

Mike DeHaan: [30:53] could sell Montgomery for 500. Because side by side was it

Dan Austin: [30:56] $3.02? Side by side 3 twos. Yeah. Money all day long.

Mike DeHaan: [31:00] Yeah. We'd have to clean up the the really shitty side first though.

Dan Austin: [31:03] It's actually 75% done. We're ready to rock and roll. Is it really? Just gotta do a new kitchen over there. No way. The bath there's bathroom's done. The basement's done. We just got a kitchen left.

Mike DeHaan: [31:12] We cleaned up all the the piss smells.

Dan Austin: [31:15] All the piss. The tenant that just a perfectly working perfectly working toilet that the tenant just decided not to flush Oh, wow. Piss all in and all over. I've never seen that before.

Mike DeHaan: [31:27] I know. So the story with it, we've these people came with the house. They are on support. They actually aren't. Like, I've gotten them support a couple times Yeah. From the tribal, the local tribal, whatever.

Dan Austin: [31:40] Yeah. But then, like, when they need more, like, they just don't call. I'm like, are they too lazy or are they just not smart enough to like figure this out?

Mike DeHaan: [31:48] But either way, we're getting paid and we haven't had to do like a huge amount of work over there. So we're just kinda like, you know, right. Yeah. I think we'd still sell out for plus 500 though probably. We could still sell

Dan Austin: [31:58] that actual unit's actually pretty clean. It's not bad. It's not as bad as even though you know when we first bought it, the one that we remodeled. It's actually pretty clean.

Mike DeHaan: [32:04] Yeah. Well, that's gonna be the guy where that one was smoking cigarettes everywhere and the dog that never got let out. True. So stories here.

Dan Austin: [32:13] I don't know

Mike DeHaan: [32:13] if you have any other duplex we could sell for that. Probably get we probably get like low 4 hundreds for a lot of them. We sold six for $4.50. Six for $4.50? Six out for $4.50? Oh, and like a lease option. Yeah.

Dan Austin: [32:26] Yeah. So I'm just saying we could we could theoretically sell that again for probably close to 500.

Mike DeHaan: [32:30] I bet we could on that one because they're huge units. They have giant property. Yeah. Huge units, big rents. Yeah. Big rents and, you know, good parking. It's really old, really not awesome property anymore, but it

Dan Austin: [32:42] does fine for us. What I don't wanna buy is this basement blowout of a guy named Jim Martin in our investor program. I'm looking at the picture right now.

Mike DeHaan: [32:53] I know. Yeah. So yeah, we have this guy Jim and we're we're gonna have him come on and do like a little case study and deep dive on this deal once he starts to get through it. But probably one of the in our group call this morning, he had probably one of the worst like flipper surprises ever that I've heard of when they had like a rainstorm and literally the walls of the basement just collapsed. Like just

Dan Austin: [33:15] I'm trying to share it. Don't know if people on YouTube could see it but I don't know if it'll pop up.

Mike DeHaan: [33:20] Yeah. I don't know if you can share it on here. Oh. We'll we'll post some some photos in the like we have like a

Dan Austin: [33:26] link to some photos. But Some disaster photos?

Mike DeHaan: [33:28] Like, literally, the the walls in the basement just caved in from the water. And, of course, with every sort of water issue, the insurance company is like, socks suck.

Dan Austin: [33:38] I don't know. That's weird. They're like, that water came from outside the unit, so it's not covered. Or you know, I don't

Mike DeHaan: [33:44] know what

Dan Austin: [33:44] I'm just saying. That's shit that they say, like, oh, that came from the sprinkler system, and we don't have sprinkler system coverage here.

Mike DeHaan: [33:50] Yeah. I mean he's handled like a champ. Like he's got his guys out there a great job on it, and they've actually viewed it now as an opportunity since they have to redo the entire basement, they're gonna finish it and make it additional living space, additional bedroom, bathroom, which will add an incredible amount of value to the property. But if she was coming over that, I was like, that I mean, that's up there with like a fire for pretty much like the worst thing that I could think would happen on our renovation.

Dan Austin: [34:14] Well, and like good on him, like a fire, like he said, is at least okay because then you just collect the insurance money. Right? Yeah. I'm just thinking in our market, like when we were really hot and heavy into rehabs, like if that would've happened to us, how quickly could we recover? Because he recovered instantly. He's got guys out there, I saw in his pictures, he's got excavators, they're taking it out. Like Yeah. I don't know if we could recover from it that quickly.

Mike DeHaan: [34:35] But you don't have the connections, I don't think a lot of people do either, and that's one of the unforeseen risks as a flipper, right, that people don't talk about is like those black swan events that do happen. Because this was not on his radar at all. And then it just sort of like, you know, they knew there was like not awesome stuff for the foundation, but it's also common for the area. And then this situation came out. Cinder block foundations. Yeah. But these are the kind of things that like bankrupt people. Yeah. Right? And this is when, you know, they say real estate investing is at its core inherently risky. This is the stuff that they're talking about where Yeah. You just can't predict it.

Dan Austin: [35:07] So

Mike DeHaan: [35:07] Yep. Anyways, we're gonna do a little case study with him as well as some of the other folks in our instant investor group here soon and release that. On Fridays, we're gonna do a deep dive into deals that they have been working on. Just as like a good educational short episode about how people outside of Dan and I analyze deals, how they get deals done, what kind of money they make, how they find them, do all that sort of stuff. Just trying to bring additional value to all the listeners about how other people in the investor world do it. Because, you know, everyone kind of has a little bit of a different way, but also too, it's not rocket science. So if you're trying to figure it out, you'll be able to hear from a lot of other people that just figured it out and more often than not, they're not nearly as, I would say, like locked in and perfect as you'd expect.

Dan Austin: [35:55] Yeah. Absolutely. We're not we're not gonna do like the the deal deep dives where it's all perfect butterflies and rainbows

Mike DeHaan: [36:01] Yeah.

Dan Austin: [36:01] This and that. Like, although those are great deals, those are kinda like the the once in a while, once in a blue moon deals, they're not how you build a business or a system or wealth. Those are just like the little little wins or big wins I should say rather. We wanna like dive in and actually talk about like, this is what we do day to day. This is what people are out there. Real people doing real deals day to day, the good and the bad.

Mike DeHaan: [36:22] Yep. Exactly. And the people that only have big wins, they're either complete liars or they're not they're not disclosing the the real truth. Right? Or they're making it up one or the other.

Dan Austin: [36:33] That's very

Mike DeHaan: [36:34] true. Anyways, so that'll be coming soon as well. So make sure that you guys subscribe and watch those episodes coming up sometime here in the near future. Anyways, anything to wrap up, Dan?

Dan Austin: [36:44] No. I'm good. Cool. Right on. Well, that's

Mike DeHaan: [36:48] the show for today, everybody. Thanks for listening. Please share this with all of your friends or anyone who has any interest in real estate at all. You know, if you're like taking the bus or on a plane, just like ask the guy next to you. Do you like real estate? You don't? That's okay. These guys are interesting. You should listen to them. Know, You if they do like real estate, it's an even easier sell. Just start telling everyone about it, that would be great. Besides that, can go to collectingkeyspodcast.com/free and get your free five step guides are generating off market leads. And then you can also hopefully not have to deal with, basements falling in and the house is renovating. Yeah. But you can't but you never know until you give it a shot. Right? That's kinda what happens after a while.

Dan Austin: [37:26] Basement blowout.

Mike DeHaan: [37:27] Basement and basement blowout. But anyways, guys, thanks for listening. We'll talk to you all next

Dan Austin: [37:31] See y'all.