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[James A. Brown]
Welcome to our year-end episode of This Month in Real Estate Investing, where we separate the noise from the news. I’m your host, James Brown, and I show people how they can make safe, secure returns through real estate. In this episode, we’ll be breaking down a variety of real estate investing news items, including rent control drew a line, 1031 and bonus depreciation survived, and recession proof assets failed.

Don’t forget, if you’re watching live on YouTube, you can share your thoughts and questions during the show. Let’s start the show. All right.

Our guests today are Paul Anderson, Joseph Vodick, Claude Diamond, Alina Herman, Domenic Donino, and Gabrielle Simmons. In that order, well, I’ll just read it off. Why don’t you guys introduce yourselves, share your background, and what types of investing you focus on.

We’ll start with Paul.

[Paul Anderson]
Good morning, everybody. I’m Paul Anderson. I am the founder of Vertical Funding Capital.

What we do is we specialize in helping commercial real estate owners, residential builders, place capital so they can have their projects. Gosh, my background in real estate probably starts when I was about eight years old working in the basement of my dad’s real estate brokerage. I’ve been around everything from residential sales, development, finance, construction.

What I would think, if it sits on dirt, I’ve probably been involved with it. As far as my investments go, I would like to think I’m fairly diverse, but probably not as diverse as some of the other guests. I’ve got some short and long-term holds.

I’ve got some vacant land holdings. I’m involved in two syndications right now and some commercial projects.

[James A. Brown]
Fantastic. Thanks, Paul. Joe?

[Jospeh Bodek]
Hi, guys. I specialize in these options, two forms. Wholesale these options that work quite a bit like traditional wholesaling and sandwich these options.

I also teach wholesaling. I also teach a program that I invented called the Ultimate Automated Lead Machine, which is a guide on how to work with wholesalers to get their dead leads and turn them into cash deals using these options. I’ve been in the real business for a while.

I was birthed in the real estate business. Actually, my dad was one of the biggest builders of residential properties in the country. I worked for him for a number of years before I went on my own, went into creative real estate and learned a lot from a fellow here today, Claude, who was one of my old mentors.

It’s always good to see him. Thank you. He’s very good at what he does.

That’s pretty much what I do. I work with a lot of students teaching them basically how to work. My major is these options.

That would be my specialty.

[James A. Brown]
You’re in good company. Awesome. Claude.

[Claude Diamond]
Can you hear me okay?

Yep. Okay. You asked for my background here.

Let me take you literally. I’m in Winter Park, Colorado. I also live in San Diego in North Carolina.

I’ve been doing real estate for 32 years. I’m only 36. I’ve written nine books on real estate sales.

My big thing right now is sales. I think no matter how many strategies, and I love lease. This house I’m in right now, I leased purchased for $5,000 down.

Today, it’s worth $3.2 million free and clear. It’s one of the best deals I ever did with Joe was talking about options and lease options. I love that because that was my main strategy because I didn’t have a lot of money when I got started, when you’re watching the rent and stuff like that.

The one thing I find that most well-intentioned knowledgeable investors are missing is sales skills. Sales is the million-dollar skill. A lot of people talk about a lot of strategies.

A lot of people talk about a lot of money for marketing and stuff. No matter how smart you are and how much money you spend on marketing, can you speak to another person directly and convert them, get a contract, get a deal quickly? That’s my big mission today, teaching people how to be a little different in sales.

I invented a system called GUTS, Great Untraditional Unorthodox Techniques of Sales. My phone number is right down there somewhere. Free books to anybody who wants to learn my sales system.

Just send me a text and I’ll send you the books for free. Was that too long? I’m sorry.

[James A. Brown]
That was fine. Alina.

[Alina Herman]
Hey, guys. I’m Alina Herman.

I’m here in the Chicago area. I’m actually an immigrant, first-generation. I moved here in 1999.

I’ve been all my life in real estate. I grew up in never-ending remodeling when I moved here. I was actually fixing the house back in Ukraine, doing some tech work, IT.

I always had this plan of technology and real estate. And after getting into the corporate world here in the United States, I’ve done high availability, disaster recovery, all the high tech while still doing real estate. I think that real estate is always fun.

It’s about solving problems and facing all sorts of challenges. My favorite strategy recently has been actively doing fixing flips and buying homes. But we’ve done all sorts of other strategies, depending on the market, right?

The past probably six or seven years, I’ve been diving deep into the mindset. I got my real estate as a coach certification. I had actually been certified neuro-linguistic programming trainer and hypnotherapy trainer.

It all helps to address the mindset. Right now, my technology company is developing on AI. We are helping to convert leads from dead leads or maybe doing the data analytics and purchasing.

So there’s a lot of different avenues that our software is helping real estate investors and real estate agents to generate and convert more leads. So that’s a little bit about me. Lots of multidimensional things.

[James A. Brown]
Fantastic. Domenic.

[Domenic Danino]
Hey, everyone. Good morning. I am Domenic Danino.

I am a real estate investor and lender, going on 27 years in the real estate and lending space. And I offer a rent-to-own-homes program for clients that don’t qualify for traditional finance. Very simple.

I run the gamut on the real estate investor space and the wholesaling, flipping, everything. But my main strategy is rent-to-own and mainly focusing on retail clients. And once they qualify for traditional financing down the road, then we get them refinancing to long-term financing.

Thank you.

[James A. Brown]
All right. Gabrielle.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
Yes. Hi, everybody. I’m Gabrielle Simmons.

I am the founder of Real Estate Dealmakers, which is now Colorado’s largest investor network. I have a background in doing just about everything in real estate. As far as single family goes, my current personal venture is learning more about the commercial space and development, because that’s what I haven’t done yet.

But I got into real estate after becoming a truck driver and started my own trucking company and was making a bunch of money and didn’t know what to do with it. So I learned about sandwich leasing, actually, was the first thing I learned about in the real estate space and buying rental properties. And then I started wholesaling while I was on the road and then decided to come back to Colorado and wholesale full time.

I’ve done a lot of wholesale transactions over the last six years. I’ve also purchased or controlled through arbitrage some small multifamily, short term rentals, doing the midterm rentals, lease to own. I love to see so many of you also do the lease to own.

I feel like that’s not very common. But it’s a strategy that I like to utilize as well. And seller financing, actually, the condo that I live in that I purchased a few years ago, I bought on seller finance terms.

And that’s my favorite strategy to teach and to utilize for acquiring properties. Outside of that, real estate dealmakers is now my main focus. It’s a real estate hub.

My primary duty every day is to be a connector. So our company is focused on being a space where people come to ask any and all real estate related questions to find deals. We have our deal desk division, which is the concierge service for investors and wholesalers.

And I’m just all about collaborating with others in the space as much as possible.

[James A. Brown]
Good stuff. Last but not least, Antonio Holman, our founder and producer of the show. Nope, can’t hear you.

[Antonio Holman]
See, I’m screwing up already. So no, this is weird because I’m like controlling everything as I’m actually on the show, which is out of the ordinary. So yes, my name is Antonio Holman.

I real estate investing media platform. James has heard this a million times. So why have I created this platform?

Because the school system in this country is a disgrace. So when you get old. Huh?

[James A. Brown]
Oh, sorry. I wasn’t hearing you for a second.

[Antonio Holman]
Oh, OK.

[James A. Brown]
Who knows?

[Antonio Holman]
I got a new setup. It might be failing. OK, so so I created United States Real Estate Investor Platform to inform everybody about this path to create wealth, at least to get their foot into the door, to explore a little more more about the industry, to learn more about the news aspects, the data, the freedom you can create for your friends and family.

So that’s why this platform exists. And this show actually does the same thing for a large audience of people eventually throughout the year with fine experts like we have today. So James has been the master, the master, master of ceremonies, as they say, for the last man, two years, just year three.

Man, it’s been a while. Yeah, I’ve enjoyed every moment of it, and I appreciate everybody who’s ever been on this show. And there’s a lot more to come.

This still feels like the beginning, even though we’ve been doing this for a few years. So thanks for everybody being here. Thanks for tuning in.

And I want to see some comments. I want to see comments. So if you guys have a bone to pick with anything anybody says, please leave a comment.

All right. Nice.

[James A. Brown]
Cool. Thanks for everybody being on here today. I really appreciate you taking the time.

I know it’s like between Christmas and New Year’s. I love the show, and I think it’s valuable for us just spitballing between us, but then just sharing what we’ve learned with everybody that’s listening. So let’s dive into the news.

So this is a little bit different than our monthly show. This is kind of our year-end wrap-up. So each of these subjects is kind of things that we saw multiple times pop up over the year.

So I’m just going to read off kind of the title, for lack of a better word, in a quick summary, and then we can jump in and comment on how it affected us as investors and what we plan on doing going forward into 2026. So our first subject is a policy move that froze new development nationwide. So early this year, tariffs made steel and aluminum way more expensive, and a lot of new construction just stopped.

And at the same time, stuff that was already built suddenly looked more valuable. So kick-off question, from your perspective, what did you notice change in your businesses or other people that you saw around you? Who wants to go? Claude, let’s go.

[Claude Diamond]
You know, when they close the door, I open the window. Change is inevitable in this business.

I’ve lived long enough to see a lot of different changes in real estate going up and down, interest rates going crazy, and all sorts of things. I got more into land. So the topic you brought up, it didn’t affect me as much.

Land is easy. I bought recreational developed land in areas near golf courses, ski areas, beach, areas like that. And I have enough cash flow.

You know, I advise people to get into this business and build up their passive income eventually, so that they can invest in low maintenance type of investing. And I’m at a stage in my career, you know, in the beginning, all I did was I was a bill collector, a maintenance man, you know, a recovering attorney, and things like that. And, you know, we had to do all the hustle and struggle.

Today, I just do land. Land is easy. I write a check once a year for taxes.

If I buy the right land in the right area where I see growth, I can make a tremendous capital growth. We have some properties here in Colorado we picked up with cash and options for $150,000 to $170,000. And they’re worth $600,000 now.

And, you know, so to me, if the marketplace changes because of tariffs or government interference and restrictions on development and stuff like that, we have to change along with it. We have to have the ability to adapt.

[Alina Herman]
I want to go back to the article, actually, to point out how this is going to change a lot in commercial real estate for about next decade. Not like we haven’t had the changes with the fact that, you know, work from home changed a lot. But what is actually going to happen, it’s doubling down on the tariffs, doubling down on the cost of the new real estate development, and that will impact affordability.

We do not already have a sufficient inventory, and we steal an aluminum going over 50% tariffs. This is a lot. And from my research, I understand that we are not going to be able to recover and provide the same amount of steel of aluminum with local manufacturing.

We just do not have capacity in the United States at the moment and to develop the capacity to gain the same amount of steel and aluminum would take us another decade. That said, we should expect that new construction that requires anything related with, you know, high scrapers or anything that requires steel, mostly in aluminum, to build will remain not that affordable. So, that said, I would wait and see and probably place a different investment strategy, just like Ruth said, just changing the strategy.

That’s all.

[James A. Brown]
Yeah. Paul, are you building anything right now?

[Paul Anderson]
You know, we’ve got, we’re working with some people that are building and, you know, the last couple of months have gotten a little bit better, but in the middle of the year, because we couldn’t price anything. And so, you know, residential, what we saw in our marketplace, which is a very, we are one of the most overheated markets in the country right now, residential really kept moving right along because we had such strong demand here. So, a little bit of commercial stuff went on pause, especially big projects that, you know, a lot of the commodities, like I was talking to you all of a sudden, you can’t get pricing on steel and aluminum.

These are massive long-term projects and it’s just really caused everything to pause. And then on top of that, you have the government shutdown where, from a lending standpoint, they don’t have any of the economic data that they’re usually advising through. So, it’s really created some headaches.

We are starting to see things open back up a little bit, but I think we’re going to have a massive problem because we have such massive growth all throughout the country. And now we’ve put these, almost like a vice grip around some of these commodities. And Alina’s point, we domestically cannot produce as much as we need.

So, it would be really interesting to see how projects will move forward.

[James A. Brown]
Yeah. Anybody else got comments on that one? I with commercial and a lot of us aren’t in that.

Let’s go to our next one. Oh, go ahead.

[Paul Anderson]
I was going to say, unless it’s a data center and nobody cares about those costs and they just keep building and hand over for us.

[Antonio Holman]
Yeah, we did a big story about that. That’s a whole new animal slash problem that is developing extremely fast and nobody has a solution that I’ve heard yet.

[Paul Anderson]
I don’t know. Those things have to make money because those investors are going to want their capital back out. So, when you start producing revenue and income off them, but that’s probably a whole different show.

[Antonio Holman]
Yeah, by itself.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
Through our network, we actually just brought, there’s a steel manufacturing plant that’s being built in Florence, Colorado. So, about an hour outside of Colorado Springs or so. And they’re part of the real estate dealmakers group.

And just through networking, I connected them with a data center that is going to be building some data centers on their land. And it just works out perfectly as far as they’re having access to steel. And then all the other resources that come with the location that they needed for the data center.

It just worked out perfectly. So, they just signed a 20-year lease to do these data centers. And they’ll be right here outside of Colorado Springs.

[James A. Brown]
Interesting. Yeah. They’re building some mobile modular homes down there as well.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
That’s the same company. Are you talking about Miticus?

[James A. Brown]
Eric Bonick.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
Yeah.

[James A. Brown]
Yeah.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
They built the ADUs and their prefab made out of steel.

[James A. Brown]
Cool. Well, let’s keep things moving. We got a lot of subjects to touch on here.

So, second subject, the compliance nightmare that vanished overnight for a while. I know Domenic and I were going back and forth. FinCEN was going to require every LLC to make everything transparent, right?

So, I was going back and forth. Finally, they decided domestic companies weren’t going to have to open up and become exposed. So, I guess out of anybody outside the country would have to file though.

So, how did you guys feel about that news when you heard that they were going to do that? And did you end up filing or not?

[Paul Anderson]
Which time? It seemed like it changed about every two or three weeks.

[James A. Brown]
I know. I kept going back and forth with my attorney like, hey, is this going through or not? Yeah, it was a wild ride.

[Domenic Danino]
If you’re doing legitimate business, they already have your info, right? You have to get an EIN. You still have to file your S-Corp, your partnership returns and all that.

This was to capture the people that were doing stuff outside of business. So, the only people that were making any money out of it were probably the CPAs and attorneys that were charging filing fees to go ahead and do it for you. But you could file it yourself.

It was easy enough. I had multiple LLCs. I did it myself.

So, it’s not complicated, but it is part of doing business, right? You have to account for anything and everything. We talked about regulatory changes, tax changes, everything, right?

So, that’s just the cycle of doing business.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
It was just a time waste for a lot of us, especially who have multiple LLCs trying to fill that out over and over again.

[James A. Brown]
Exactly. Yeah, I was like, oh, how many do I have to file? Do I have to?

It was like, oh, it hasn’t passed yet. I just waited and waited until finally it was like, oh, we didn’t have to.

[Alina Herman]
This is the first thought that I had when it came out. I remember the conversation I had with my friend from China. He was moving out of China just as they erected the law that Chinese capital cannot be in US dollars.

They consider that property can’t be invested in anything or moved outside of China. I think that they were trying to put a cap on all of the purchases that Chinese citizens were making in the United States. I asked him about this and he said, oh, that’s no problem because they were using some entities from investing in a different country that is not prohibited by China and then those entities were purchasing the real estate or anything, any assets within the United States limits.

So, technically, we don’t even know for sure who owns the country, well, or at least its assets or land. So, I would actually be interested to know, to have a little bit more transparency on that, but I don’t know how asking for ownership on LLC would do anything, especially if it can be layered with different funds. You can layer it in so many ways that you can never find really, truly the answers with just the basic filing for the LLC.

So, just kind of my thought that I had when this came on.

[James A. Brown]
Okay. Our next topic, the smart money drew a map. So, big funds like Blackstone kept investing in industrial and logistics while staying away from office investments, which that came up every month.

What’s going on with offices being empty? So, it was an obvious signal where they think the future is, or at least it isn’t, maybe isn’t offices. So, when you guys see shifts like that, do you see it as a growth play or just a safety move?

Anybody? Yeah, Don.

[Domenic Danino]
I’m going to say you kind of need to look ahead. I mean, I’m primarily, you know, single family residential, right? For all of us in this particular space, I can’t speak for the commercial space, but single family residential, I mean, that’s, it kind of gives you some clues as to where the growth is, right?

So, if you’re looking ahead to buy, whether it’s rental properties or build single family or any business that you’re doing on a single family side, you can kind of see where everything’s being built out and kind of anticipate, okay, that area is going to get growth because somebody has already done the analysis, right? When they opened up a Costco or a Starbucks or a McDonald’s, that’s your clue right there. Okay.

Even though it may not look it now, somebody has already done that analysis to anticipate, okay, where’s the growth? So, I mean, use that as a tool rather than, you know, I don’t know, something negative.

[James A. Brown]
Yeah, that’s a great point. Follow somebody or a corporation that’s got- Follow the big money, right? Whole teams figuring that stuff out.

[Alina Herman]
I think for us as small investors, there’s also a little niche in there, obviously, you know, besides going and trying to do the same thing, the niche would be to look for a smaller commercial, perhaps, conversions into a little contractor shops. Those are fairly popular here, at least in our Midwest area, because contractors do need their space. They need a little bit of the storage, you know, maybe logistics.

So, there’s still, for us as, you know, individual investors, there’s a good indication that this is where the future is going to be in commercial space.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
From a trucking logistics standpoint as well, I think it makes sense and something that I’m starting to look into just because of the need for more of the, like, final mile or last mile transportation that’s needed because a lot of, like, over-the-road trucking has been changed by a lot of our trailers just being put on trains now. And so, there’s an increased need for the last mile sector of transportation where those trailers are being moved by train and then, you know, it needs to be broken down to have local deliveries. So, taking these industrial spaces and turning them into warehouses for Amazon or your smaller companies to utilize as, like, the final mile space to get things in and out of, I think, is another avenue that we could explore, at least, to kind of get ahead of the game.

[Antonio Holman]
Sounds like a dystopian United States in the making, data centers everywhere, logistics buildings everywhere. So, now you have to think about how can those things be embedded? Well, you can’t necessarily embed data centers into multifamily, huge multifamily buildings because it probably caused a lot of health problems and discomforts and things like that.

But how do logistics centers integrate with large multifamily converted office buildings? If anybody’s brave enough or dumb enough to convert an office building, something to think about. Yeah.

[Alina Herman]
I just watched a video how, I forgot what country, they’re using data center heat and they pipe it in through the water to heat the residential. So, their construction, the way they build, it specifically allows for this design to happen because data centers are the most, the most cost in the data center, believe it or not, because I used to run data centers for Fortune 100 company, is heating, the cooling, because the heat that produced is just enormous. And, you know, it’s kind of interesting if you build ground up, this would be a great design.

But again, cost of materials and labor going up, I don’t really see us pursuing that path.

[Antonio Holman]
Interesting. Very, very. Wow.

[Paul Anderson]
Go ahead. I was going to say, you look at some of the municipalities like, what was it, two years ago, Costco wanted to build a new store in downtown Los Angeles and the city made them agree to incorporate multifamily and affordable housing over the top of the building to get their approval.

[Antonio Holman]
Yeah. So, that’s kind of makes me think Amazon’s going to start building multifamily buildings now.

[James A. Brown]
I don’t want to live right over the top of a Costco. I’d be broke.

[Antonio Holman]
There you go. Amazon, Walmart, everybody. Yeah.

[James A. Brown]
$300 a day. Right. Every time I go in.

[Antonio Holman]
Totally, man.

[James A. Brown]
Oh, goodness. Well, hey, let’s go to our next subject. The rent control line in the sand.

Oh, boy. Washington put up a statewide cap on rent increases, which really changed the math for investors. It made regulation impossible to ignore in underwriting.

So, if you guys invest in places like that, how have you reacted to rent control? Or how would you react if it happened where you were investing or were thinking about investing? Claude, go for it, baby.

[Claude Diamond]
Easy. I moved. Yeah.

I seriously, you know, literally, I changed, once again, the word change. When government starts interfering in me, my wife and I buying a property, financing it, doing the improvements, the repairs, and start. And we live part of the year in San Diego, as I like to refer to it as the Soviet Socialist State of Southern California.

And they started taking away my incentive to do the risk. Then I’m just not going to do it anymore. I’m going to move my investments to other.

I love California. I love living there. A lot of family and friends there.

But I won’t invest in residential real estate like we used to do. I’ll find other places. Pinehurst, North Carolina, excuse me, we’ve been doing a lot there.

Colorado. I know the other young lady is in Colorado Springs or Denver, I believe. I’m in Winter Park.

It’s wonderful here. You know, it’s still free enterprise. So, why are companies leaving California?

Because of too much governance interference. And what they’re going to see is the continued housing shortage with this kind of interference.

[James A. Brown]
Great point. I know like here in Denver, you know, we say we’re being California-cated, you know, or something like that. It’s our laws are changing.

But we haven’t caught up to that in California. So, it’s not nearly as bad. But it’s heading that way.

And we’re all kind of like, should we invest outside? And some of us do both, right?

[Claude Diamond]
We’re, you know, the greatest thing about being an entrepreneur is our ability to adapt. Why are we, I always ask this to all my students that I mentor, why are we in business? We’re in business to make money today, to get contracts today, appointments, to do deals today.

When there’s too much interference with government, with regulations, with taxes and things like that, we’re so adaptable because we’re the entrepreneurs. We’re just going to change. We’re going to move.

We’re going to find different things to invest in. And people are going to suffer, unfortunately, with housing.

[Alina Herman]
Did you guys know that there’s actually a lot of major metropolitan cities already had rent control for a long time, like New York? I’m from New York City, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, San Jose. I mean, there you can, there’s a lot. And what it led to is essentially a shortage of inventory because capital doesn’t want to flow there.

And therefore, it creates a higher demand on the existing market. So maybe if its strategy, as you tell me, if that’s true, its strategy would be, maybe just come in and do a fix and flip. I’m not sure, but obviously not the buy and hold.

But any time that you have a shortage of inventory, the prices would be going up. Maybe plan appreciation. I’m not sure.

[James A. Brown]
Yeah, every time I dive into rent control, the same thing always comes up. The existing landlords, they’re capped, and they’re not going to be putting money into improving these properties. And then the value goes down.

They’re less safe. It just, everything just starts crumbling because you’re not letting the market do its thing. Well said.

Well said, James.

[Paul Anderson]
And capital, to the earlier comment, capital won’t flow to those markets. Right. Yeah, it’s going to stop growing.

Yep.

[James A. Brown]
Oh, Jay Mora just commented. Our Claude Diamond Group. Can you see, buddy?

He says to fill up the national bank.

[Claude Diamond]
Why are we in business? To make money.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
I’m not super familiar with the whole rent caps thing, but like, so does that apply? Or is there like a workaround when you’re renting like per bedroom?

[Alina Herman]
I don’t think it’s ever related. They’re capping how much you can increase the rent. So let’s say you’ve been renting for $1,500 a month, and then you cannot raise your rent more than, let’s say, 7% a year, even though your expenses are not capped.

So your taxes and your maintenance costs or association dues are increasing just as they want with the market. So what that means, your cap rates are shrinking and your margins are becoming slim to non-existent. And that affects the capital that flows into those places.

Or again, they just, you just stop doing value adds, right? You’re no longer repairing or repainting because you just can’t do that. I wonder if this applies to like a short-term rentals, Airbnbs.

Could you Yes.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
But if you, let’s say you’re capped at $1,500 for a standard long-term renter, and it’s a four-bedroom place, and you just decide to rent it out per bedroom instead, and now you’re making $2,200 a month in rent. Is that you exceeding the rental cap?

[Alina Herman]
Because it’s When you reposition the property, I do not think, I do not believe that that’s applied, if you’re able to do that. Like, but the thing is, if you have a person in there that is renting currently, you cannot just say, well, now you guys, like, I guess, I don’t know if you can just tell them, hey, you have to move out because now I’m going to be renovating the place. I think it’s possible that this is the workaround, but again, you don’t want to be every year keeping your tenants out to reposition your place so you can get a higher rent, especially if you have thousands of units.

Does that make sense?

[Antonio Holman]
Yeah. Here’s, listen, here’s the truth that I see, hiding. We got all these regulators and all of these politicians.

They’re going to start trying to dig their hands into co-living. So just, just wait on it. Just wait on it.

It’s going to happen, which is really sad and disgusting if you ask me. So, yeah. Yeah.

[Paul Anderson]
You guys all invest as you see more of that, you see capital fling, like Claude said, from your market in California and going to other states. I’m in Idaho, Gavin Newsom has been the realtor of the year up here for the last eight years. Every time he gets on a hot mic or some legislation, here they come and we just back them up and take them in.

[James A. Brown]
Horrible. That’s funny.

[Alina Herman]
Can you elaborate a little more on what you said? I want to understand it better. So you thinking that they’re going to be trying to regulate co-living spaces?

[Antonio Holman]
It happens all the time. It happens all the time. Why?

I don’t know. Who knows? I mean, there’s so much corruption in the government.

It’s like, how do you know which way to go or who to trust? So my point is, is it wouldn’t surprise me whatsoever if they try to regulate more on co-living to increase some type of tax revenue. That’s what I’m thinking.

I’m assuming.

[Domenic Danino]
These things don’t happen in a vacuum though. I mean, what triggers it is the bad operators. That too.

That triggers the issues, right? And then the complaints, right? It happened with the Airbnb, right?

So you have bad operators that trigger the complaints and trigger the issues. And now it brings to light what that investment strategy may be and what’s the causes. And now they try to put controls over it.

[Antonio Holman]
And that’s the same thing that happened with wholesaling too. Now, Joe, you’re in wholesaling, right? I do a little wholesaling, yeah.

So have all the… Well, I’m not going to say all. So what market are you in right now?

[Jospeh Bodek]
I’m not sure what you mean, what market am I in right now?

[Antonio Holman]
I mean, you’re in New Jersey. Now, are there…

[Jospeh Bodek]
Market. No, I’m outside of Philly. I don’t work the cities.

It’s too much of a problem working in cities. I work the counties.

[Antonio Holman]
I wonder how far the wholesaling quote-unquote licensing reach is going to get in this coming year too, because it’s been steadily increasing over the last few years, which to me, it seems ridiculous.

[Jospeh Bodek]
Pennsylvania already requires.

[Antonio Holman]
If you’re going to be a wholesaler, Pennsylvania requires that you have a license. Like Domenic said, too many bad actors have shined a light on… Yeah, that’s a shame.

Yeah, I can see what that means.

[Domenic Danino]
It’s the easy money that draws in a lot of bad actors, right? Or their perception of easy money, right? And then they start operating outside the bounds and they’re just winging it and they’re doing YouTube University and maybe some gurus out there and so forth, right?

So it just becomes… And then everybody jumps to the next thing, go for crypto, probably silver now, right? I’m going wholesaling, all these strategies.

It’s the hot thing and it just draws attention to it, right? So I personally believe in policing ourselves for us that are in the industry and kind of, right? If we don’t want more regulation, then we need to police ourselves and say, we’ve got to operate in a certain fashion.

True.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
And each other, calling out the people who are out here doing stuff that is unethical.

[Paul Anderson]
This is usually a reaction to bad operators or a bunch of bad operators that all of a sudden it brings light to what’s going on and here comes regulation and oversight.

[Jospeh Bodek]
The realtors out there, guys, aren’t thrilled with us to begin with. So I think every suggestion you made is great. We’ve got to police ourselves and all that kind of stuff.

But they consider us taking money out of their pockets with what we’re doing. I don’t care what else they think about us, that what we do is illegal, immoral, fattening, whatever they come up with. But to them, at least the realtors that I talk to, we’re taking money out of their pockets.

Not that they could do what we do. Not that they’d want to do what we do. Certainly, they don’t know how to do what we do.

I was a realtor. I even helped train realtors. They’re salespeople.

They drive people around in their car and they fill out forms. Some are good at it and most of them aren’t. But when it comes to, you say the word lease option, their eyes start to roll and they start to sweat.

What’s that? So they’re not trained to do what we do. My personal opinion is it’s not so much that we’re doing illegal, bad things, it’s that we’re taking money from them and they don’t like it.

They don’t have any control over us and they really don’t like that. Having been a realtor and been around these guys to run the local real estate commissions here in Pennsylvania, they really don’t like investors like us. For a variety of reasons, but the two to me are that they don’t have control, which I really don’t like.

To their mind, even though they don’t know how to do what we do, they’re losing money. That’s why, in my personal opinion, they come after us.

[James A. Brown]
Wholesalers are go-getters. There’s a lot of agents that aren’t willing to put in the work and learn all this stuff, right? Like you said, lease options.

I teach a continuing education class about rent-to-own. It’s going to open their eyes. I don’t know why every realtor in Colorado doesn’t take that class, like chomping at the bit to add some knowledge and tools to their belt.

[Jospeh Bodek]
Well, their brokers don’t want them to do that. You have to understand. I don’t know if any of all you guys are realtors, but when you’re a realtor, you’ve got a broker and that broker wants some of your money.

He doesn’t want you wandering off somewhere doing some wholesale deal and he ain’t getting any of that money. When I went into this business, I was a realtor at the time. You have to understand, when I worked for my father, I was building houses and developing ground and doing all that stuff.

Then I went to be a realtor after he retired and I went out on my own. Most realtors don’t make a whole lot of money. I wound up luckily going into creative real estate, but I was doing creative real estate deals when I was a realtor.

The last thing I wanted that realtor to know is what I was doing because he would want some of my money. He had nothing to do with what I was doing at all. It wasn’t his paperwork.

I didn’t work out of his office. I didn’t use his phones. He had nothing to do with what I was doing, but if I had told him, he would have wanted the money.

Again, it’s control and they don’t want their realtors learning what we know how to do.

[Alina Herman]
Last year in Illinois, you have to be licensed to be able to do wholesales. I don’t know how you guys do that.

[Jospeh Bodek]
Not in Colorado yet. Same in Pennsylvania. You have to get licensed now.

[Alina Herman]
They figured out how to get their cut.

[Jospeh Bodek]
They want your dues. They want your money. I’ve been there.

I’m telling you. I mean, they’re nice people. I’m not saying they’re bad people or anything, but the guys that are in charge, it’s a commission business.

You don’t want to fight with these people over their commissions. Trust me. You do not want to do that.

The brokers override a certain amount and they want their due. They want you doing what they want you to do, not what you want to do. At least that’s been my experience.

[James A. Brown]
I can see both sides. There’s been a lot of people wholesaling subject to deals, terrible subject to deals, terribly set up. If there’s a little regulation, I can see that helping those owners, sellers that were in a bad position and hopefully avoiding really putting them in a worse situation.

Well, I agree with you.

[Jospeh Bodek]
I think that you do have to have some regulations, absolutely, on what we do. Otherwise, you guys were talking about the people that come in here and screw everything up. I agree with you a hundred percent, but to a point.

As long as the consumer is not being harmed, that’s to me what’s important. As long as you’re not harming the consumer, the buyer, whatever he is. I do think we should have some regulations that would keep these people in line.

I don’t think you have to go out and become a realtor if we don’t do what realtors do. So, why should we become a realtor? That’s my look at it.

Having been a realtor, we’re furthest thing away from a realtor than you can get.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
Yeah, I was just going to say that, James, as well. It’s almost like my tagline at this point. I’m like, I’m Gabrielle Simmons and I buy houses.

I’m not a real estate agent because people assume that if you do real estate or you buy houses that you’re a real estate agent. Like you said, real estate agents don’t do what we do. They don’t understand what we do.

I have never wanted to get licensed, but I do see the importance of it helping just because there are bad characters who do very unethical things. I’ve seen it firsthand where wholesalers are going in and lying to sellers, creating fear, doing deals with sellers who have dementia and just things that aren’t right. Unfortunately, so long as we’re bandits that aren’t regulated, we can do those things.

I guess the benefit to that being enforced a little bit is it does protect the sellers who are being taken advantage of.

[Jospeh Bodek]
I agree with that 100%. I think there should be some sort of overseeing organization if we put one together. Hey, look, the realtors put it together.

They put their own organization together. Why can’t we? It doesn’t make any sense.

We can’t do it. Yeah.

[James A. Brown]
Well, hey, we’ve got a comment in the chat. It says, what’s a really smart way to buy property? I live in Mississippi and the real estate rent slash purchases are slow.

When I ask this question, I’m asking what states and cities are the best places to buy and why?

[Alina Herman]
Cash. First question I would ask, how many properties is it trying to, it says, Gerald trying to buy? Is it just one?

Then right where you’re at is the best place. If you’re trying to buy thousands, then you need to look into markets.

[Claude Diamond]
Best way to buy a property, depending on what stage of your investment career, is cash, of course. It gives you the most negotiating power. If you have the cash or you have an investor you’re working with and you’re good at finding and negotiating deals, you have the greatest gravitas when you can negotiate a cash deal with somebody.

If you’re just getting started, you’re a neophyte and you’re looking for true leverage, what we’ve been talking about, the lease with option or something like that is a great strategy. The thing about it is when you have your funds, what should come first, the chicken or the egg, the property or the investor to sell it to? I’ve always found that if I found a good deal, I could sell it to somebody else if I didn’t want to get involved in the repairs and the marketing and everything else like that.

And kind of what we were talking before, I have no employees. I’ve been there, I’ve done the employees, the team, the office. I work out of my homes now.

I just give good phone. When I talk to people, I try to cut to the chase and skip the, hi, how are you, just reaching out, the la-di-da, kumbaya stuff. And I hire very good subcontractors.

I have a great attorney. I have a great real estate broker who I work with exclusively in different markets. So I have people I know and trust.

I don’t mind paying them because they help me to avoid complications, litigation. They help me to make more money. So hire good people.

And so what if they make money? Make sure your deals are big enough. You can afford to pay experts.

[Jospeh Bodek]
One of the things, Claude, that I tell him to answer his question about where he should buy the place, I always tell people you should start right where you are and just keep going out in concentric circles until you find what you want. Just make your market wider. Start where you are.

While I’m living in Mississippi, I’m going to go look in Texas. Why? You know what I mean?

Start in Mississippi and just keep getting bigger areas.

[Claude Diamond]
There are so many gurus who give bad advice to people who are neophytes, starting investors. Oh, you’ve got to go to this place or that place. I agree with you 100%, Joe.

The best place to start if you’re a new investor, you’re not sophisticated, you’re learning. We’ve all learned. We all have whip marks on our backs from the mistakes we’ve made.

Just start in your backyard. You know the valuations. You know the people.

You know where to look. You know where the growth is. Just common sense.

Start in your backyard.

[James A. Brown]
Gerald says some of the tenants are wanting to buy and they can’t go to the bank or don’t want to. That’s two different things. Is it a good idea to become the bank?

If I do, what a great way to do this. Any comments on that?

[Jospeh Bodek]
Are you talking pro or con against becoming the bank?

[Alina Herman]
The question is here not becoming the bank in the sense of giving lending money, but becoming a seller finance. I think this specific question came in from Gerald that has already 15 properties in Mississippi. I’m guessing the slow means that his rentals are slow.

It’s slower to rent out. I’m trying to clarify his question here so we can answer more specifically to what his situation is. Yeah, don’t do DIY.

[Domenic Danino]
Get a coach. That’s what I say. If you’ve never done it, you’ve got to do it the right way.

Stay in compliance. Get a team around you that knows how to do it. If that’s going to be your focus.

If you’re going to do one-offs, two-offs, maybe not. But if your focus is to dispose of your 15 properties in that fashion, you need somebody that can teach you how to do it the right way.

[James A. Brown]
Reach out to any of us that know lease options. We can point you in the right direction.

[Jospeh Bodek]
I didn’t want to own the homes. If you don’t own the homes, you don’t have the problems. When you’re in a sandwich lease option in the middle, to me, I always had a lot of options.

If something went wrong, I’d walk away. I just have to pay them what I would own for the year, whatever the case may be, and walk away and I’m done. I don’t have banks chasing me.

I don’t have officials chasing me. I can deal with the homeowner. I can renegotiate.

I can do whatever I have to do. But I like being in the middle rather than being the homeowner and being the bank because you still have all the problems with homeownership. Plus the fact I’m old now, so I’m not looking for equity built.

I’ll be dead before I get any equity built. When I was younger, yes, it may be okay. But at my age, the last thing I want is to have all these homes and leave a mess for a lot of people.

[Claude Diamond]
Claude, what do you got? I just, whoever, who said become the bank? That was genius.

Who was that? You, Mr. Brown? Yeah, that was the question.

Becoming the bank is probably the greatest avenue to success because we all know real estate can initially be feast and famine. One month you’re rich, a couple of months you’re struggling for the next deal and so forth. Developing your own finance.

I have a file here just to show you guys so you know it’s not guru BS. I take in tens of thousands of dollars every month, almost six figures every month just by financing. Some people pay me 100, some pay me 250, some pay me thousands per month.

I finance my deals. I sell my contracts. I finance products that I sell.

My coaching program. I will finance anything and people pay me on time and they never underestimate a small amount of money coming in on a long-term consistent basis because a lot of people who get into real estate are, it’s, you know, they’re doing these, you know, on paper we, oh, I’m a millionaire on paper, but you’re sweating paying the mortgage payment or the cable bill, right? I mean, truth be told.

So if you can find ways to have multiple streams of passive income like financing, that’s a key to success. I’m sorry if I go too long. I apologize, but I get passionate about this because that’s what got me to having a pretty good life in this business by not just wait.

I remember one more quick story. We got, my wife and I, new baby, I’m in law school. We’ve got like 12 properties that we fixed up, repaired and everything like that and I just did a deal on Monday.

I got a huge $10,000 check and on Friday I said, hey honey, let’s go out and celebrate. Let’s, you know, get a babysitter and she said, with what? And I said, I just gave you 10 grand on Monday.

She said that was to pay for the other three months you didn’t make any money. Okay. So is it okay to tell the truth today or should I?

[James A. Brown]
That’s what this is about.

[Claude Diamond]
Yeah. So whoever said become your own bank, that’s genius. Yeah, you triggered me.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
I’ll add to that the properties that I’ve purchased on Seller Financing where they become the bank, they, in a couple situations, they wanted the big lump sum of cash that they would have otherwise got had they sold it outright instead of becoming the bank. So they, you can then go to a bank and borrow against that note, right? Like if that’s what you’re looking for is more cash, go borrow against the note that you’re holding for your tenant who becomes the buyer of the property from you and now you have that lump sum.

[Claude Diamond]
Yeah. You could use that note as leverage in a negotiation on another deal, you know. Sometimes you don’t want to hold a note because it might be weak or you’re concerned about the payments.

Use that note as a currency in another transaction. You’re out of the note and you got the property instead. It works both ways, right?

[Antonio Holman]
This industry is too good. Too good, man.

[James A. Brown]
Too good. I love this. Creative creativity.

That’s the word. Take a break to learn about one of our partners. Yeah.

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[James A. Brown]
There we go. For Gerald, our last commenter, you can go into usreiresearch.com and poke around and see what’s going on in other markets. So let’s get back to our next article or topic, is the smartest tax escape hatch stayed open.

So luckily, 1031 exchanges survived another attempt at eliminating them. And bonus depreciation was reinstated. So, man, how would things look for you guys if those went away permanently?

How would you adjust?

[Alina Herman]
Honestly, I think that tax strategies start from the entity formation because larger funds and the smart investors don’t necessarily just do the regular LLCs. For example, using some well-structured, self-directed IRAs and or other entities would just completely eliminate for need to 1031 exchange. It’s more like a patch after the fact that you have already got into something and now you have a high capital gains or enormous depreciation you took over the years and you just need to move on.

So that probably wouldn’t change anything for me specifically because we have different structures. But just to mention that also depreciation, you know, you can either have 1031 exchange if you have depreciated and had asset that you held up for a long time and then you want to roll it back in or then have a write off, essentially take everything off and write it off if you’re doing like a fix and flip strategies like what we do from time to time. So there are two things that are not related to each other.

I just want to kind of like separate them a little bit for whoever is listening. It’s 1031 exchange and then the depreciation and then taking in your write offs. Those would be two separate things for two different strategies.

So I kind of just clarify if anybody’s listening.

[Paul Anderson]
Well, I know how much the night of the fourth when they signed the tax bill, everybody was blowing up my phone talking about bonus depreciation again. So we did see in our local market, we saw a lot of spur in capital investments, be it real estate, hard asset equipment, things of that nature. And one thing that we don’t talk about in there now is now that opportunity zones are now permanent.

And so I think that’s also another side of the coin on the flip side of the 1031, how the opportunity zones are going to impact capital injections into underperforming markets.

[James A. Brown]
Claude, you raised your hand.

[Paul Anderson]
You’re on mute, Claude.

[Claude Diamond]
I say that about 18 times a day to my clients and now I’m doing it right. Unmute yourself. Unmute yourself.

For me, we track expenses. I’m lucky. I work with my wife, my best friend, and she’s great at the meticulous stuff.

I’m good at the sales and the fun stuff, creating the deals and everything. She’s great. So we track the expenses really good.

And she prepares everything. We have a phenomenal accountant out of Colorado who’s on top of the law, on top of the deductions and all the other things. So get good advice.

Work with somebody who does accounting, state and federal tax research as a full-time career is my opinion on that. We lease our cars because I can write off so much of the lease. We pay quarterly taxes, state and federal.

Live in the right state, by the way. One of the biggest Can I talk about my mistakes in life?

[James A. Brown]
Yeah, that’s the most valuable.

[Claude Diamond]
I’m incorporated. I have an S Corp and all that in Delaware. I pay my taxes in Colorado, but my kids went to school in Wyoming.

Guess where I should have set up residence? They have no state income tax there. There’s smart things you can do where you live.

The world is so small today. You can live in one place and do business in another, but you want to be in a place where you pay the least taxes and you have the best people advising you.

[James A. Brown]
Anybody else on that topic or should we jump to the next one?

[Jospeh Bodek]
Well, I’ll tell you, Claude. My father used to tell me all the time, surround yourself with people that know what the hell they’re doing and get the hell out of the way. If you surround yourself with people that you trust and know what they’re doing, don’t try to second guess them.

They know what they’re doing. Just get out of their way, which is what I try to do.

[Claude Diamond]
He’s pretty expensive, but he saves me 10 times more than what I pay him. That’s just good value. I agree.

Same. I have a financial advisor. Same thing.

He’s made me over the last 25 years a lot of money in good investments. I don’t have the time to research stocks and mutual funds and stuff. Hire the smartest people.

If they don’t work out, fire them and find somebody else. The thing about it is, what do we do best in business? We find deals.

We negotiate deals. We get contracts. The people in this room know how to make money, okay?

Can we all agree there’s just too many distractions in the world today? Why not do the one thing we do best and hire other people who do what they do best?

[Alina Herman]
I want to close on it and then just make a little distinction between your account in CPA and tech strategists. The tech strategists are usually the people that are not CPA or they understand what CPAs do, but they are not doing your taxes or tax returns or books. They are the ones that are deciding how you’re going to position your entities and how you’re going to essentially run your overall umbrella.

Typical CPAs do not understand the tax strategy. That’s usually a family offices that are able to afford the tax strategist. Then there’s something that you as the investor need to be aware of.

There is ROBS. There is self-directed IRS. There’s a lot of entities in the way that you can structure it the way that the wealthiest of this country do.

As a small investor, you can replicate that. And just a word of caution, no, not all CPAs. Most CPAs do not understand tax strategies.

Just so the listener understands that they need to look for tech strategies first and foremost.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
I just want to share something I learned recently from someone who’s been in it a long time and was educating me. We were talking about 1031s and he was telling me that I could do… I sold a property and was attempting to do a 1031, wasn’t able to identify another property fast enough.

And he’s like, well, why didn’t you just 1031 into a royalty or do a royalty trust? And I’m still learning all about that. But essentially, it’s where you can 1031 into royalties in oil and gas.

And it’s a little more volatile. There’s a potential to lose some of what you put in there, but there’s also potential to gain. But then you’re deferring your taxes and there really isn’t that time limit on it now.

So you can, if it takes you a year, if it takes you two, it can be held in this royalty trust. And then you can pull it out at another date and reinvest it into property of like kind because these oil and gas royalties are considered of like kind, even if you’re selling a single family home or a small multi-family.

[Alina Herman]
When was that last time? Because I thought the Trump administration has taken that away in the only left like exchanges from what I remember. Maybe they have reverted that back in and allowing this again, because I remember that was kind of my disappointment that they have taken away exchange for something that is not of the same asset class.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
That’s been the, as was explained to me, that’s been the common misconception is what’s considered like kind. That oil and gas actually is considered real property, just like real estate is. The types that aren’t be like stocks and bonds, that is not considered or putting it into an REIT, that is not of like kind.

[Alina Herman]
Got it. Okay. That’s a good distinction.

Thank you. That’s awesome. Yep.

[James A. Brown]
Another option, you can do a reverse 1031, where you identify your next property, lock it up and then sell your first one. It costs about five times as much, but still could be worth it. So you don’t have a clock ticking that could run out.

So.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
If you’re paying five times as much, is it not worth it to just pay the taxes then?

[Paul Anderson]
You can do 721 exchanges where you exchange into commercial real estate health and REITs too.

[James A. Brown]
Yeah. Yeah. 721s are good too.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
Commercial. What’d you say? I’m sorry.

[Paul Anderson]
Commercial REITs, real estate investment trust.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
Okay.

[Paul Anderson]
Yeah.

[James A. Brown]
Which is a good, like if somebody’s going into retirement, you know, and they want their money working, they just don’t want to deal with all the headaches.

[Paul Anderson]
Well, it’s great if you have a lot of heirs and rather than trying to divide up the value of residential real estate, you can give them shares instead of a 721 exchange. So you can, it’s a little bit more fair and balanced. So you deal with people who have, you know, five, six kids and they’re like, how do we divide this up?

And they end up doing a 721 and giving each one of them an equal amount of shares. Yeah.

[Antonio Holman]
Where are you getting this kind of information from? Nowhere but here. I’m saying you’re not getting this kind of information anywhere, but a show like this.

So I love it. Diverse panel. Yeah.

Yeah. Distill it down.

[James A. Brown]
Nope. So our next topic, California admitted the math finally won. California changed how wildfire risk is priced for insurance.

Coverage got easier to find, but a lot more expensive.

[Paul Anderson]
So for you guys, is insurance now something you underwrite first instead of just last, like, Oh, afterthought insurance has killed a lot of deals over the last couple of years in coastal States, Florida, Carolinas, California, you know, who’s is caught.

[Antonio Holman]
Are you in, are you in California?

[Claude Diamond]
Let me check. No, I’m in Colorado. Oh, that’s right.

Sometimes, you know, we change so often that sometimes I wake up and I go to the wrong, I walk into a wall cause I can’t find the bathroom. Yeah. What was your question, Antonio?

I’m sorry.

[Antonio Holman]
I was just wondering if, if you or anybody else was in California.

[Claude Diamond]
I live in part, I live part of the year in San Diego. I love Southern California.

[Antonio Holman]
Are you not investing?

[Claude Diamond]
You know, I, I was, I used to be much heavier as an investor. I owned a lot of residential properties, condos, townhomes, single family homes. And I kind of saw the writing on the wall.

We liquidated a lot of real estate there before the pandemic. And I’m grateful for it. You know, there’s two good days in real estate, the day you buy and the day you sell.

Sometimes, sometimes it’s good to, you know, just get out of it and go to a different location. I I’ve been looking heavily into other states in North Carolina, Colorado. I have a lot of clients.

Somebody mentioned Idaho before. A lot of clients love Idaho. Stuff like that.

You know, we all, those of us who live in, in California and Southern Cal, we have a love-hate thing going. We hate the government, but we love the weather. We love the fish tacos and In-N-Out burger.

And we can go to the beach. We can go skiing. We can go to the desert.

You know, it’s just, you know, it’s so crazy when you go to a pump and you, and you pay $5 a gallon and it, you know, for gas there and stuff like that. How do you think gas, you know, not to raise a question, how do you think gas is going to affect real estate? You think people are moving to places where it’s more affordable?

Sure.

[James A. Brown]
Yeah. Especially if they drive Uber or something for a living. It could make or break them.

Right. Yeah. Good point.

Or, or the trucking industry like Gabrielle’s. And so let’s keep things moving guys. The next topic, the office market finally snapped.

Office space investments defaults rose, lenders stopped waiting, and pricing finally reset. Do you guys see this as the bottom for office space or is it just the beginning?

[Antonio Holman]
Man, it’s gotta be, it’s gotta be. I did so many stories of people selling at massive discounts. I don’t know how much worse.

It’s gotta be the bottom. It’s gotta be. I mean, I would think, I don’t know.

[Alina Herman]
I don’t know. I think this is just the beginning because we are, our technology isn’t as perfect for the remote workplace. So there are still companies asking people to go back.

But I think with virtual reality and with better tech and people realizing that the possibility that they can actually introduce the same environment and somebody can be sitting in the office like this and I can be seeing virtual people walking in and out and we can really replicate the real world and it’s coming. Then I think the office is just going to be something like a record player. It’s people, new generation wouldn’t even understand what that is.

[Antonio Holman]
So yeah, she referenced what eXp has been doing for years.

[Alina Herman]
That’s exactly. The only thing is that they’re virtual people like an avatars. What I am seeing and envisioning it is this virtual reality.

It is as if people walk in and I see them as it would be in there and they see me that they can still see my facial expressions because our communication is only 7% words. Everything else is tonality, the body language and you are losing that if you are just doing this even on the Zoom call. So I think the technology as it’s coming in in the next couple of years is just going to bring in the very, it’s going to that bottom of office space will find the basement.

[Antonio Holman]
So okay, so here’s the question I have. You guys are a lot smarter than me. So if you have all these office buildings all over the country and they’re absolutely vacant and a lot of people are doing remote work from home, which means there’s no need to be in the office.

So if you have these buildings that have been sitting empty for years, St. Louis was one of the cities where I’m originally from. They sold a building for so cheap, it was unbelievable. They lost tons of money on it.

So if they bought that building, what are you going to do with it? Because I keep hearing conversions are an absolute nightmare and sometimes just impossible. So I mean, what can you really do with a giant office building that nobody’s really using?

I mean, is it even worth trying to convert that thing?

[Alina Herman]
Local regulations. I think when a local authority is going to start losing tax revenue and they would just be taking over those properties that are having enormous maintenance and they will try to find a way to get rid of them, then we’re going to see pressure on local authorities to allow conversions. Again, even to residential, if there is a need or maybe some other social gathering places, but it’s just inevitable.

[Antonio Holman]
So it’s probably going to take, like you were saying, a governmental intervention. That’s the only way it’s going to.

[Alina Herman]
They need to feel pressure and the pressure in the sense of they’re either not collecting taxes or they have to repossess those properties because the office building forfeit on the taxes. So I do not see office space recovering, even with the fact how some companies have a push back for work from office. I think it’s just temporary until technology catches up and the new way of tech will allow us to literally replicate our in-person work environment.

[Antonio Holman]
Interesting thought.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
And in connecting with some high net worth individuals, I’ve learned that this is actually appealing to some of them to purchase these because it’s at the bottom. They can get in at a low price and then just take advantage of the depreciation. And if they believe that at some point they can resell these buildings in the future, then it’s worth it for some of them to just get in, utilize it for saving money on taxes and hold on to it.

[Alina Herman]
I mean, if they have cash flow, otherwise it’s just basically a lot of expenses.

[Antonio Holman]
That’s kind of the Blackstone play too, right? They’re buying new builds and they’re holding on to them for three plus years and then they’re letting them go for a profit. Interesting.

[Domenic Danino]
Land is still worth something, right? Even if the building has no worth, land beneath it, right? I mean, so we’ve talked about a couple of things going through this, right?

Data centers, could you put data centers in these buildings and go up instead of wide, right? You go up and then same thing. Somebody mentioned tax consequences, right?

So if you buy it, deplete it out, basically almost like an oil well, get all the tax benefits of it down to zero and then just the land itself, the building may have to come down and just use the land and redevelop again.

[Antonio Holman]
I could see that. That’s a different type of conversion that would be a lot less hectic to try to pull off. Yeah.

[Alina Herman]
If it’s possible, because not every place you can convert to a data center, it’s just the enormous amount of HVAC and the electricity needs and the pipelines that are going to have to be with multiple data fiber optics from multiple different providers that you have to have. There’s just so much going into building out at the data center than building on anything else. The infrastructure is critical.

You have to have multiple power supply, multiple suppliers of your utilities because the redundancy is at the core of a data center. Also, you do not want to have a data center at any place where it is susceptible to any cataclysms. So when we were placing in the data center, like collaborating on the data center location, there was more places were disqualified than qualified.

So just kind of on that note.

[Antonio Holman]
Fascinating.

[James A. Brown]
Let’s keep things moving. When rate cuts stopped mattering, Fed rate cuts, they don’t necessarily line up with mortgage rates. Dom, as a lender, you know a lot about how this all works together.

It kept refinancing slow because it didn’t drop down to where everybody was hoping that it would go. Inventory’s tight. So there’s a lot of ways we could go with this.

But to kick things off, like how has the rates kind of just stabilizing affected you guys and what are you going to do if the rates stay the same or go up? Or where do you see it going?

[Domenic Danino]
Yeah, there’s always been this misconception that as the Fed cuts rates, it impacts long-term term rates, right? On the long curve, talking about the 10-year treasury. I think right now, the biggest thing we probably anticipate is the spread between the 10-year and mortgage rates to compress.

Average typically is 1.7 or 170 basis points. We’re probably like at 215, 215 basis points right now. So that’s the spread that the risk spread basically from what lenders do to what the 10-year treasury is.

So that needs to compress and probably that’ll help us get a little bit lower. But who knows how this market is going to act, right? Especially no speculation that as we change, a new Federal Reserve chairman comes in and there’s expectation that he wants to push interest rates down, but it could have a reverse impact.

It could have a reverse impact, right? Because that doesn’t control the 10-year treasury or the long bond as they call it. So we could have a reverse situation there and we don’t know what these outcomes could be, right?

What’s happened in the past may not happen again. So yeah, I’d be wary of anticipating and putting in your plan, expecting rates to be a certain way. And I’m referring to on the lower end, right?

If you’re counting on rates, say you’re borrowing on short-term debt or bridge debt at 5% today, or let’s say 6% and you’re counting on your numbers or your underwriting to account for being able to refinance at 5% or 4.5%. A lot of people got trapped in that, right? As of 2020, right? You saw all the agents going, you know, marry the house and date the rate, right?

How did that work out? That’s the dumbest slogan I’ve ever heard, but anyways. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So I’d be cautious with that.

I mean, but as we’re talking about everybody in there, right? There’s different strategies to be able to acquire properties that, you know, there’s already has fixed debt. You know what that number is, right?

When it comes to seller finance, subject to lease options and so forth. So yeah, there’s a way to pivot from that. As it relates to the retail market as a lender on the traditional consumer side, I tell people, if you can afford the payment now, get in now because if rates do drop, then prices will go up.

Right. Don’t wait. Especially people that are entry level buyers and say, hey, they need a down payment assistance program or something to that effect.

It’s like, well, the rates go down, you’re going to have a lot more competition and a lot more investors are going to jump right back in and they’re going to push the prices up and you’re not going to be able to compete. And we may get into another situation where, hey, we’re going to have the overbidding again, so, you know, $10,000, $20,000, $50,000, $100,000 over asking price if we get down to rates, let’s say, in the threes or fours, right? So people entry level, people will never be able to get in.

So this is the best time to get in because they could always refinance if it happens. But if it go up, then you’re already locked in and you know you could afford it.

[James A. Brown]
Nothing’s free. It’s a teeter totter, right? Rates go down, prices go up.

[Alina Herman]
Honestly, if your rate is less than the inflation rate, real inflation rate, not the reported one, I think it’s still a bargain.

[Domenic Danino]
Yeah, we’re talking about two different things, right? If you’re going to live in it versus from an investor perspective, right? So owner-occupants are one thing, investors are another thing.

So your mindset has to think about what are you doing, right? Is this for you, for your use, or is this from an investment perspective?

[James A. Brown]
We saw a lot of apartment syndicators get pinched when they definitely shouldn’t have. They should have known, right? A lot of those are five to seven-year, shorter-term debt.

They’ve got to refi at some point or stick with what they got. But yeah, a lot of them got pinched. They didn’t think it was going to go up and they were forced to refi.

And some of them, the numbers didn’t pencil. So they’re having to fire sale those deals.

[Paul Anderson]
We’ve seen some of the institutional and the private capital extending these notes out because they know otherwise it’s going to end up leading to a default and they don’t want to put that on their sheet. So they’re working more, some of them are working with the investors for resolutions. But to Domenic’s point earlier, that spread is so wide right now because all the lenders are figuring if we see a decline in rates and all of a sudden you start having mass refis, they’re going to have early payoffs.

They’re going to have a lot of runoff on their books. And so they’re trying to capture everything that they can right now in up front revenues. So that’s why you’re seeing points and fees so high right now, where typically they haven’t been as high in the past.

[Claude Diamond]
Does anyone remember 14% interest rates back in the Stone Age?

[Paul Anderson]
18 and 19 too. Yeah. Yeah.

[Claude Diamond]
Joe and I, you know, today, I don’t know after that experience and I think back in the 81 interest rates on residential mortgages were as high as 18% for a while. Yeah.

[Jospeh Bodek]
18, you’re right. Yeah.

[Claude Diamond]
So today when you tell me 6.3% on a residential mortgage, oh, well, you know, that’s the price of doing business. Make sure you have enough spread, you’re making enough money on your property. One of the tips I give to the people watching this is when we had a good month in my business, we would, there’s no such, there’s no, you can’t get a prepayment penalty on a mortgage anymore.

So if you had a good month and you threw a couple extra bucks to the mortgage payment, which would offset the principal, I found that many times a 20 or 25 or 30 year mortgage could be reduced to a 15 year mortgage, thereby artificially reducing the interest rate.

[Paul Anderson]
Well, you’re seeing prepayment penalties come back on non-owner.

[Claude Diamond]
Really? On residential?

[Paul Anderson]
Really? You’ll get a better rate if you lock in for one, two, three year prepay on it.

[Claude Diamond]
Okay.

[Paul Anderson]
And we’re seeing yield maintenance come back on commercial deals, which I haven’t seen since the early 2000s. So the bank. What’s the yield maintenance?

So yield maintenance is, let’s say we finance you on a deal today, James, at six and a half, and the market drops down to five and a half and you want to refi. It’s a form of a prepayment penalty. We’re going to capture the spread at that point.

And we’re going to charge you a percentage of that as a prepayment penalty to exit the note. So it’s a prepayment, it’s another way of saying prepayment penalty, but they call it yield maintenance. And I started seeing those come back about February or March.

And I’m like, wow, I haven’t seen those for a while. And it’s kind of like disco, everything comes back, you wait long enough, it’ll come back. So they’re back.

[Claude Diamond]
I got some platform shoes in the closet somewhere.

[Antonio Holman]
Yeah. Bell bottoms are next.

[Claude Diamond]
Yeah. God bless Donna Summer.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
And I was just going to share, you know, like real estate in general is risky, right? And we all know, like the ups and downs and sometimes things that happen in the market, we can try to prepare for as much as possible. But even myself, like hit a wall at some point, over leveraged too many properties and had to go to my private money lenders and just be like, you know, hey, I can’t make these payments.

And, you know, I was like, well, I don’t know. That’s what it is. Will you work with me before I ever missed a payment, you know, and being able to just have them sit down and understand.

And I explained it like, hey, look, here’s you, you loan me this money because I gave you this projection of what this property would do. And here’s what my portfolio is doing as a whole. It was good.

It’s no longer good. Things changed with Airbnb. Right.

And so I have to pivot now. And that’s affecting my ability to make these payments. But I think that’s a part of real estate as a whole, even for individuals who are buying their family home and taking bad advice to marry the home, but date the rate.

We all have to understand that, like, things change. And sometimes we have to just go back and ask for grace, ask for time, ask for payment plans instead of just walking away and defaulting. You know, that’s that’s almost never the answer.

[Paul Anderson]
But I think you are smart and proactive. And I’ve told people this. When you get in front of it, when you call them and they’re not having to chase you, you’re more likely to get a workout.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
Yeah.

[James A. Brown]
Good point. I’ve been working a bunch of short sales, people facing foreclosure. They don’t have that mindset.

They don’t understand how this works. So they just bury their head in the sand until the very last minute. It’s sad that they end up in these positions.

And I try to help them, but sometimes they can’t be helped, unfortunately. Well, let’s take a break from our next partner.

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[James A. Brown]
Okay, back to the show. Our next topic, Washington quietly changed its housing strategy. Recently, lawmakers started talking more about building supply instead of subsidies on the demand side.

So do you think they’ll actually be proactive and help build that supply or will they just continue to think short term and put band-aids on the problem?

[Domenic Danino]
Yeah, that article talked about changing the rules for manufacturer housing, so as an entry level point for housing. I mean, that is a great niche if you’re an expert at that. Manufacturer housing on the retail side, we can lend manufacturer housing.

But if you’re an investor and that’s your niche, whether you’re buying those properties through seller financing or sub-two or acquiring properties on discounted, however they may be, manufacturer housing I think is a great niche to get into moving forward as the cost to own and housing expenses continue to stay up. I think that’s an excellent model or business to get into.

[James A. Brown]
Yeah, the same with co-living, renting out rooms separately in a house and getting some economies of scale there. Colorado, as an example, passed a law, statewide law, making it okay to have, there’s no limit to how many unrelated people in a home. And so that’s helping with the affordability problem by making some laws like that.

So if they follow suit with a manufactured housing, that’s going to help as well. So it’s a good trend.

[Domenic Danino]
It’s already happening. I know out here, Arizona passed a law where you can build two ADUs to a single family property without any restrictions by the city or the state doesn’t allow for cities to restrict you. HOAs are a little bit different, but non-HOA areas, you can.

And then on January 1st, to effect basically any single family zoning, you can build up to four units. So you go multifamily up to four units on anything that’s single family zoned in Phoenix without having to change the zoning.

[James A. Brown]
Yeah. Yeah. They’ve loosened it up here in Colorado as well.

I think there’s still some restrictions. I mean, you still have to have a big enough footprint and be able to get your utilities in there, but yeah, they’re definitely trying to solve the problems. Are we seeing where you guys are doing it though?

Actually building ADUs? Yeah. Yeah.

[Domenic Danino]
Here. And I mean, it’s one of those things, right? So it’s a, if you already own it and you want to build an ADU, how do you finance it, right?

That’s usually the issue, the hangup. How do we finance that? So it’s either through equity.

If you already own it, you live in it as a single family, right? So equity financing, getting a home equity loan. But I mean, if you’re going to buy it, that doesn’t have it, right?

No, you could FHA, FHA conventional, Fannie, Freddie and VA do have a Reno renovation program that allows you to build an ADU as you acquire as well. And then if you want to acquire it off market and as an investor, then I mean, you could finance it through a hard money loan and see how he’s going to, obviously the ARB has to be there and you obviously need to find comps, right? So you’re finding an area that already has some other problems.

So somebody has got to set the market for those values with ADUs, because that’s not a big mix in the market as it relates to resales, right? So, but that, I think that’s coming. You could do it privately, right?

You could do borrow privately, set the market, sell it, and then kind of build out neighborhoods that have ADUs, right? And then that just resets the market. That’s a good point.

[James A. Brown]
I know we’ve, we had somebody come to our investor association meet up talking about building ADUs. And when we were looking at the numbers as an investment, at least the models that they had, where you’re building a garage and a unit above, those were expensive. Like they didn’t pencil as an investment, at least not initially, was more of a good fit for, you know, somebody that really wanted it as like a, you know, granny flat or there’s different names for them where you’re building it and you’re getting some value for your family.

[Domenic Danino]
Yeah. The reason why it doesn’t is because the valuation is in there. You’re not getting dollar for dollar for what you spend, right?

But it still costs you the same dollar per square foot to build it, right? But you’re getting below grade value on it, right? Until the market kind of grows and now you have comps that are sold and that you’re getting, you know, you’re getting the additional square footage at the main house rate.

That’s why it doesn’t work currently in many markets, unless you buy it deeply discounted. You go off market buying deeply discounted. Now you’re building it into your ARV that way.

[James A. Brown]
Yeah. I know my financial advisor, he’s another guy. We’re starting a company and they’ve got three different models and they don’t include a garage.

It’s just a living space and that was kind of where the numbers started to make sense. Yeah.

[Domenic Danino]
And it’s always every strategy doesn’t work well in every market, right? I mean, sure. So yeah.

So just like any other strategy in some markets, especially in high cost markets, it’s making a ton of sense, right? California is doing them. Washington is doing them, right?

I think it just trickle over to us here in Arizona. So uh, yeah, I think those are the things to look out for the next wave.

[Alina Herman]
Address the chess, the, uh, law that, uh, actually the bill that hasn’t even passed into law yet about the mobile home, uh, chassis, uh, something that I think this is more important than, um, first step of us as a country admitting that we are literally very short on a low income housing. And if that, if that bill passes into law, which it hasn’t yet, it will be incredible step into at least starting to relook from the financing and then maybe address that into financing them as a single family home. Because at the moment, uh, what I believe is the biggest obstacle in mobile, uh, in manufactured home communities is essentially obtaining, uh, reasonable financing, which are hard back by HUD, Fannie Mac, Fannie Mae.

And this step, even though it seemed like unrelated, uh, with the chassis not having to be, um, permanently affixed may change this, um, from the financing standpoint, because affordability is not just a number of houses, low income just cannot go in and magically pull out, you know, 50, $60,000 out of their savings. So just if someone wants to address or familiar with the, um, financing for the, um, multifamily manufacturing home communities, I’d love to hear the opinion because that’s what I’ll be looking as my focus in 2026.

[Domenic Danino]
Yeah. So on the financing side for manufactured housing, right? So yeah, you brought up a couple of points.

So it’s you, so you have two, you have what we classify as chattel, right? The old term chattel, where it’s just, it’s just the mobile home, but it doesn’t come with the land. And then there’s the land.

So when it’s a fix or it comes with the land, it’s already a fix and it can’t be moved. Right? So those are two, two different types of financing.

So the one that’s just chassis, right? It, you treat it almost like a car, right? And then the one that’s affixed to land, then that’s financeable as single family, right?

So those rules are in place by, you know, the GSEs or, you know, Fannie Freddie, uh, and HUD on the FHA side. And obviously if there’s influence to change those rules, then that’ll trickle into, into like, you know, traditional financing and single family financing. And obviously on the, on the investor side, hard money and so forth, they have their different rules, but, but to, to address your question, yes.

So those rules will need to change to either have a little bit more flexibility, but there’s a reason why those rules came into effect, right? It’s just basically, Hey, typically mobile homes depreciate unlike single family. And that’s, that’s why those rules are in effect.

That’s what you can’t get 30 years. Well, you can on double wide 30 year financing on FHA, but typically if you’re just going to finance the chattel, like a car depreciates, right? And you don’t get 30 year financing on a car, you get five, seven years, maybe eight years, right?

So on chattel, a mobile home, you can go up to 20, 25 years. If you got really good credit and significant down payment, but on the one, if he comes with land, so always, you know, I always tell people like buy it with land, buy it with land because it has more value because even if the chattel depreciates, the land is still worth something, right? And you, and you can move it and bring in a new one.

[Alina Herman]
I mean, I believe they’re depreciating just as fast, like if they’re permanently affixed to the land or part of the land of, let’s say, what I’m personally looking into conversion and subdividing land into the parcels where that can become possible. They really depreciate in about the same rate as your single family home. It’s a land is appreciated, but the property itself, you know, your mechanicals, everything it’s all deteriorating in about the same rate, I think probably even less now.

So then they close that was built, you know, a hundred years back that is sitting on the land. It’s worth nothing other than what’s the value of the land is because it’s unlivable. So I think that the rules hopefully will change after this bill will pass into law and financial industry will have to, will be forced to look into specific manufactured mobile homes affixed to the land as consider that, you know, hopefully as a single family residence.

[Domenic Danino]
Yeah. I think the quality over time too, right? Cause you can’t finance anything over 1978 under FHA.

But so the quality has gotten better. And I think some of these modifications will help improve that. No, it’s just a natural.

So the expectation of the life expectancy on some of these will probably improve over time. But yeah, to your point. Yes.

So even if it’s the same mobile home, it’s a fixed to the land, but versus the one that’s not a fixed to the land. Yes. They depreciate, they deteriorate at the same rate.

However, from a financing standpoint, HUD made the rule that, Hey, it’s got land in it. We’re willing to take more risk on that one than one that doesn’t have land.

[Paul Anderson]
Well, for some reason that land gets sold from underneath you, then all of a sudden you went on collateral that no longer exists. You know, so that’s, that’s always been the problem, like, cause you can finance in a park as long as the remaining term of the master lease exceeds the term of the mortgage and you have loading rates. But to the affordability standpoint, I would love to see this take off and like to see more of it.

And you kind of look at sometimes the manufacturing process, all these homes are manufactured inside of a climate controlled facility. They’re all on the specs. They’re all two by six construction.

They have to meet hurricane earthquake standards where that may not be relevant to you. But the problem like where we see is everybody’s buying up our mobile home parks and converting them, but nobody wants a mobile home park anywhere near them. And the people who need the affordable living need to be close to a bus line, need to be close to mass transit.

They need to be close to all these other things. So as we work to solve one problem, we just place people that just, I don’t, I love the idea. I just would love to see the mechanics of it, to see how it’s really going to help.

[Alina Herman]
I’m starting seeing local, some of those manufacturers, actually, they no longer have a zoning, at least in my area, because I looked into it, they no longer have a zoning as mobile home parks. They have decommissioned that verbiage in itself. Now, if I were to go for rezoning here, I would be zoning it into manufactured homes zoning, which is, I think, branding mobile home parks into a better category, which is great.

And also I’ve seen some of those communities that from those manufactured homes, they actually look just like single family homes. You cannot tell the difference unless you really know the norm.

[Paul Anderson]
I would love to see it happen because I feel it would really help serve a large portion of the populace who’s locked out of housing right now.

[Alina Herman]
Yeah, that would be my, that’s, I’m super excited that next year I’ve been already looking into this and then seeing if that’s something with the regulations coming in and with the, you know, ease of maybe trying to rezone it and finding the place that’s what I would like to refocus, you know, away from my fix and flips and into that.

[Paul Anderson]
So is this draft legislation or is this a bill that’s already made it out of committee and headed to the house?

[Domenic Danino]
Yes. Yes. It’s got sponsorship in the Senate and in Congress as well.

Oh, good.

[Alina Herman]
Yeah. So some good things are coming, but it’s only first baby step. It’s just so much more has to happen, but it will be forced to happen if that were to pass and go into the law.

[James A. Brown]
Let’s go to our next topic, guys. The commission collapse that never came after all the drama around compensation for realtors, anybody who’s listening in, commissions basically stayed the same. I’ve got a bunch of thoughts.

Maybe I’ll just jump in. So I think the reason they didn’t change is that it’s a very established industry. And the reason they didn’t change is that realtors have always provided value and, you know, it just had settled in.

Also, this is kind of a little foreign because I’m a licensed realtor and there was a lot of media and attorneys claiming all these things, basically saying that the compensation was like locked up. It’s always been negotiable. And they kind of made it seem like realtors were trying to take advantage of people.

But like I say, it was always negotiable, always has been. Another thing that, you know, everybody, all the realtors are like, oh, no, what’s going to happen here? Well, commercial real estate, it’s always been separated.

So their compensation is part of the offer, the contract to buy. But residential realtors weren’t used to that. It was kind of preset by the sellers.

We’re getting down in the weeds here. I’m not explaining it well. But anyway, residential realtors thought the sky was falling.

But when it came down to it, nothing changed.

[Antonio Holman]
This story was probably, it was one of the biggest stories of the year. And it was so hilarious because it was a roller coaster from beginning to end. As soon as the Missouri ruling happened, everybody started pointing fingers at each other.

Everybody was pointing fingers, mainly at the realtors. And all the people were starting to sell their homes themselves. And they were like, I don’t want to give my money to you.

And this is unfair. And oh, man, the drama was probably the highest with this story over everything else. Yeah, it was crazy.

[James A. Brown]
Yeah. Guess who won in this case?

[Antonio Holman]
Attorneys. Yes, always. They always win.

[Paul Anderson]
What was their commission percentage, James?

[Antonio Holman]
Oh my goodness.

[James A. Brown]
Yeah, that’s crazy. And we’ll probably see the backlash because that was like, that was one side of like buyers versus sellers. Now it’s probably going to flip and there’s going to be a bunch of money made on the other side.

So anybody have some comments on that? I think I’m the only one that’s a licensed realtor right now. A lot of talk about nothing.

[Antonio Holman]
Yeah. Yeah. Joe left that world behind him.

Yes, sir.

[James A. Brown]
As an investor, we’re always like, oh, should we get licensed or not? One of my lease option mentors said, hey, you need to get licensed so I can facilitate lease option deals, especially the way that we do them. It’s been hugely beneficial for me to be licensed.

No, I’m not wholesaling. And so I can’t, like Gabrielle was saying, she can say, hey, I’m not a licensed realtor because most people don’t like or trust realtors. So it’s good to kind of use that as a talking point really.

But I find that for me, the benefit of being licensed has been beneficial, especially getting going to, I learned a lot about the industry by going through all the licensing and and learning the business from that side of it too.

[Antonio Holman]
So anyway. So that commission number was that I just found 33.3%. That’s absurd. I don’t know.

That’s irony. Yeah, totally.

[James A. Brown]
Don, were you going to say something?

[Domenic Danino]
Yeah, that’s a question since the beginning of time. Whenever you got involved in real estate as an investor or any method, to be or not to be licensed. Is it better or is it not better?

I’ve kind of changed my own personal view on it. I used to think, oh, it’s not even worth it or it’s a headache or what do I want to mess with that? And that can be true.

Depending on what your strategy is. Right. I really believe that.

Obviously, if you do a multifamily, who cares? What do you need to be? You don’t need to do all that.

Right. But if you work in the single family space, I think it adds credibility. Right.

If you’re going to work with agents. Right. Who’s your avatar in that sense?

Right. For what we do. Right.

We work with agents. So it adds credibility. The fact that you’re licensed.

Right. So if somebody doesn’t deal, if they’re only dealing with sellers, traditional sellers or off market sellers or distressed sellers, then maybe not necessarily. But you could be passing up opportunities where somebody is trying to sell.

You can’t buy it or the deal doesn’t fit your box. But the fact that you have a license, could you just do it as a listing? Right.

So vertical integration within your model. So you have to think of that.

[Antonio Holman]
Listen, that’s the thing I was going to say. The hack is just to have your best friend be a real estate agent. That’s it.

Solves it all. Not to.

[James A. Brown]
Yeah. It can be like Domenic and I both teach classes for realtors about the rental and strategy. And so I think, I know for me being also an agent, not some, you know, out of left field wholesaler, creative financing guy, you know, like they, they know that I’m held to the same standards and understand how the business works.

[Domenic Danino]
It opens the doors for you. Right. Because of what you’re doing and who your avatar is.

Right. Opens the door, gives you credibility. You’re part of the, you’re part of the crowd or them.

Right. They view you as that versus an outsider per se. Right.

And then sometimes you just have to educate people. Right. It’s like, Hey, if this opens the door for me and I can be in the room to educate them on it, so they’re not afraid and not scared and don’t want to point the fingers.

And as Joe mentioned, you know, they don’t want to treat us as, Hey, we’re different or we’re stealing from them or it’s their money or their commission, whatever that may be. Right. So there’s, there’s some of that that we need to do.

[James A. Brown]
Well, let’s go to the next topic. America quietly changed where it was moving. The Sunbelt markets cooled off while more affordable markets like the Midwest got attention again.

Cashflow and predictability started beating appreciation height. Are you guys seeing that shift where you invest or where you live?

[Alina Herman]
Well, I’m in Midwest, so I have to say the difference between our market and then all the, you know, coastal areas was always that we didn’t never had the volatility even during COVID times or, or even in 2008 the crash after the great reset, we never had a huge ups and downs and been always kind of like wondering how’s the property can appreciate like three times, like, well, 20% is great here. We’ve seen a migration of people from like the cities to the suburbs from between different areas. But we’ve never seen big ups and downs like the coastal area.

So I think Midwest, you know, for any investor in general, it was before and it is now, is that we always more stable cashflow asset and we’re not as much of an appreciation strategy here. But again, this is not something new. That’s always been like this.

The coastal areas always were up and down. This is just another way of the same thing that happened in the past.

[Antonio Holman]
Yeah. That’s, that’s exactly what I was thinking. It seems like most investors are focused typically on the middle of the country because of the stability.

It’s not, it’s not volatile. Like you said, yeah.

[Paul Anderson]
In cash flows, it just doesn’t appreciate it.

[Antonio Holman]
Right.

[James A. Brown]
You build wealth through appreciation, but you can’t count on it. But that is another, you know, timeless arguments or, you know, debated cashflow or appreciation or both. Where do you go?

And a lot of it depends on where you are in your investing journey and your risk tolerance. There’s a lot of factors that go into that. Yep.

Claude, got some comments on that?

[Paul Anderson]
Well, we used to be, we were a hot investment market for two decades and then COVID hit, we had mass migration here and our housing prices since 2015 have almost tripled. And incomes have not. So now we’ve seen many of our investors, to the least point, they’re heading to the Midwest.

So I do, I do more business in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, in the last five years than I had 20 years prior. And people are, acquisition costs are low, cash flows solid. You just don’t see the robust appreciation you see in other parts of the country.

[Claude Diamond]
I say, always look for the undiscovered country. Look for the, where the new opportunities are going to present themselves, where the new growth is. Where are people moving to?

Where are people retiring to? You know, I’m in a little ski mountain town here and it exploded when the pandemic hit. It just, it was a quiet, sleepy little town with little $45,000 condos.

And now they’re million dollar condos here and multi-million dollar homes building. So, you know, look for that. Where is the next opportunity?

Where’s the next best place? And just on the previous discussion, I had a new 18 year old client, real go-getter kid, an immigrant, by the way. And he said, Claude, should I get a real estate license?

I want to learn as much as I can about real estate. Guess, take a guess what I told him. Anybody?

I said, get it. And this kid is doing fantastic. He’s so entrepreneurial.

He’s so hungry. He owns a car wash now. He owns, he’s done, he learned everything about real estate, you know, right from the real estate office.

And he learned about the law and different strategies and things like that. And maybe instead of spending a lot of money from a lot of seminars, motivational seminars, he was out there in the real world. So, you know, just my take on the real estate agent part.

I think for some people, it’s the perfect avenue.

[James A. Brown]
Well, hey, let’s keep things moving. Go to our next topic. Recession proof was a lie.

More than one healthcare company apparently sold properties that they owned to REITs, Real Estate Investing Trust, basically big funds, and then did lease backs. And then they ended up going under, which left these REITs with no tenants. So, I think a lot of investors, including these big REITs maybe, just assumed, hey, healthcare is booming.

There’s so much money in it. They’d be safe investments, but apparently not. It got me thinking too about the process of underwriting these healthcare businesses.

We’ve underwritten multifamily deals. That’s a whole different thing than a healthcare company. And then it got me thinking too, back when I was doing marketing, graphic design, I had a client that actually his business was going in and evaluating healthcare companies if they were planning on selling mainly, but he could also represent a buyer and help evaluate that business that they’re buying it and getting involved in the property itself.

So, would you guys assume that those REITs brought in an expert like that or just winged it and assumed that they were a safe tenant? Any thoughts?

[Antonio Holman]
I would assume they winged it to some extent, because once you get to such a level, you just start assuming things. That’s human nature. That’s my assumption.

[James A. Brown]
Kind of do our due diligence in this business.

[Paul Anderson]
I think healthcare as a whole is such an interesting industry and there’s so much volatility in it. But it’s never going away and the need is always growing. So, it’s figuring out how you can fit in and what’s a good strategy.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
I think looking at the operator is important too, not just revenues. If we make purchases or are willing to give out loans strictly based on revenues or more largely based on revenues and not looking at the operator and their background and their ability to pivot, then we’re kind of setting those opportunities up for failure too.

[Antonio Holman]
Yeah, that’s a great point. Great point.

[James A. Brown]
Let’s go to our fun news item. The great lock-in of 2025, trend of the year. So, we’re talking about years of uncertainty and inflation and basically exhaustion from the hustle culture.

A lot of people have just kind of started shifting towards comfort and staying put as it relates to real estate. So, rather than moving for adventure reasons, they’re moving for what they call cocooning or just staying in their homes and not moving around.

[Antonio Holman]
I had no idea about any of this and I found it. I was like, apparently this was huge. I probably caught a little bit of it, but maybe I’m just one of those out-of-control people who are not trying to take a break for anything.

And the thought of people spending money just to go somewhere and be away from everything, media, phone, mobile, so they can just sleep with nothing. I mean, to each their own, I guess. Yeah.

[Paul Anderson]
Digital detoxing is becoming a thing.

[Antonio Holman]
Yeah, yeah. That’s pretty much what it was. I mean, maybe it’s a matter of a lack of self-control and you have to force yourself to have self-control.

Maybe that’s it. I don’t know.

[James A. Brown]
Antonio and I haven’t let grass grow under our feet recently.

[Antonio Holman]
I know. Look, it’s December 27th, so that’s the proof right there. We’re doing a live stream right here, two days after Christmas.

Hey, life don’t stop, as they say.

[James A. Brown]
Any comments from the rest of you?

[Antonio Holman]
Yeah. Can any of you see yourselves buying a hotel room just to sleep?

[Gabrielle Simmons]
I’ve actually started to, I didn’t know this was like a thing, but yeah, I’ve started to take some of this on just for my own sanity because I’m very much, I very much have embodied the hustle culture and go 24-7 and work from the time I open my eyes, so I go to sleep at night. And just probably in the last year, I’ve taken time to cocoon, if you will, either at home or I’ve had a couple little getaways where I will not turn my phone off. I still end up working, but I just make it a point to work a little bit less than I would have otherwise.

And I do think that it helps kind of recalibrate my mind so that I’m not so high strung in everything constantly. It helps kind of just bring me down a little bit, and then I’m able to analyze things better than I would have otherwise.

[Antonio Holman]
You know what? I got a quick question. Let’s see if anybody here is similar to me.

I am not a fan of taking breaks. I like to work, work, work, work, and work, and when I take a break, I’m done. Okay, good.

I’m not alone. People are like, you need to take a break, and it’s like, no, because if I take a break, I won’t get anything else done. So, Claude, is that you?

[Claude Diamond]
Is that you, Claude? I love my work. I could have retired a long time ago.

I’m very grateful to this business. It’s been nothing but wonderful to me. And my logic has always been never take vacations.

I hate vacations. They lose your luggage. The weather is bad.

You know, so my wife and I have always said, let’s not take vacations. Let’s live them. Let’s live in places where other people take vacations, and our businesses, the wonderful thing about this business is if you’re really, you know, if you’ve got a niche, you know how to market yourself, you’re very good at sales and negotiation, you can live wherever you want.

The technology has given us the opportunity for the most wonderful lifestyle in the world. So, you know, I think, isn’t it great to live in a place where you work in the morning, then you can go out and take a hike or go skiing or go to the beach or play some golf or do something? You know, life is short.

We all have friends and family who died way too young. You know, I say, you know, yes, we all have to hustle. We all have the hustle, but let’s work smart, right?

How come I always ask, how come some people can make so much money and other people always struggle? What is it about? What is it about this business?

Why is that some people can do better than others? We all have 24 hours. We’re all relatively in the same IQ factor, right?

So what is it that the people in this group have that other people don’t have? And I think there’s a, you know, that what’s that expression work-life balance thing, right?

[Antonio Holman]
Yeah.

[Claude Diamond]
You know, can you, you know, are you working so that you put a value on your time, knowledge and energy, or are you just doing a lot of busy work that doesn’t give you any gratification financially?

[Antonio Holman]
If you need work-life balance, you’re not necessarily enjoying what you’re doing. That’s what I think.

[Speaker 11]
Yeah.

[Antonio Holman]
So just, you have to create a life that you enjoy, you know? Yeah.

[Claude Diamond]
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The thing, I love this business. I can’t retire. It’s too much fun.

I meet wonderful people. It’s challenging. It’s rewarding.

I mean, solving the problems of housing and things like that while being able to put food on the table and pay your bills. It’s the greatest business in the world. Can we all agree on that?

[Alina Herman]
Yeah.

[Claude Diamond]
It really is. And I think, do you need, do you, you know, do you, I discovered one thing about myself and I’ll shut up. I used to think I was an introvert, you know, that shy guy and never raised his hand.

And then I had a great mentor and I thought then maybe I’m now an extrovert. And I discovered this year that I became an ambivert. I do, I love to talk to people and start conversations and negotiate deals.

But I also like a quiet moment with a good book and go into the corner and, you know, that nice, get a nice blanket and read a book and have a good cup of coffee, you know? So that balance, you know, when New York’s coming out, I’m saying, you know, too much. Any ambiverts?

That’s my new word of the year. Any ambiverts in the room?

[Antonio Holman]
I’m pretty sure that’s me. Yeah. Cause I’ve spent the majority of my life not wanting to be bothered, but it’s like, once your mindset shifts and your goals start to shift, everything else just changes.

Cause it’s like, if you have these goals, if you’re this way, you’re not going to make it to the goals. So you have to change.

[Claude Diamond]
Yeah. James, does the squeaky wheel get the grease?

[Antonio Holman]
James, you’re on mute, buddy. Your mic’s not connected. There you go.

[Alina Herman]
I actually was laughing about the hotel. I did have taken one time, just use my points to go in a hotel room, just kind of like collect myself and use that time to pause and to think. I thought myself crazy, but I’m like, what else am I going to use points?

I already live in a beautiful location. I travel all the time. I was like, how could I do that?

And that’s what my use of the points was. And I did kind of giggled a little bit. I was like, yeah, I thought of that myself.

I guess we’re just caught in the wind of everyone else doing it.

[James A. Brown]
All right. Can you hear me now? Yes.

My AirPods died and it muted me. Well, let’s jump into our last news topic from nickwignall.com, five alternative New Year’s resolutions. The article presented five alternatives to traditional New Year’s resolutions designed to reduce guilt and increase long-term follow-through.

These approaches included choosing a word of the year, running short-term New Year’s experiments, committing to anti-resolutions, selecting a person of the year to invest in relationally and adopting a highly ambitious 10X resolution. So anybody have any resolutions that you’re committing to?

[Antonio Holman]
No, no. I never do this. And I always think about maybe, no, that thought happens in two seconds and it’s gone.

Anybody else do that?

[Alina Herman]
No, I think what happens with the New Year, I actually did the webinar on that time because it was my background is an NLP trainer and mindset psychology coaching. I think that the reason why people set up the resolutions, which are mostly like a wishlist and then not going after it is because what they want is indirect contradictions to their values. There’s a value conflict within and they really do not know that.

Very common value conflict, this example would be people want to create more wealth and abundance, more income. However, their top values are like family connection and then they have a deep, very deep fear of rejection as well as they are averse to money or they have a wrong belief in what money truly is. And that would create literally a dead gridlock on any New Year resolution.

And then it was like, well, yeah, I wanted to do this or the health. The health is one of the most common resolution goals is to create a better body or have more energy. And then they set a goal of, let’s say, pounds, how many pounds you’re going to lose.

All those things are just not going to be done past one or two, three weeks because the actual deeper reason why you do something is what matters. And I always ask people, have you asked why do you want to do this? Because that’s where the fire is.

And if you ask yourself for anything that you wanted in the past and maybe you haven’t achieved it or you haven’t had that fire burning long enough, is keep asking why. If you want to go and lose weight, why? Well, I want to have better health, why?

And in seven layer deep, if you had that strategy, that would be the main suggestions I would give.

[Paul Anderson]
Dr. Pompa Nice. What’s your purpose?

[Alina Herman]
Dr. Grieco We should come down to your purpose.

[Claude Diamond]
Dr. Pompa My resolution is to never have resolutions, basically. People set these once-a-year goals, health, lose weight, and everything that Alina just said. One of the things I do every day, I have a to-do list.

I write down every day what I want. You can develop good habits. I exercise every day.

I run, I swim, I sauna every day. I try to speak to at least five new prospects or follow-ups every day. Daily consistency is better than just doing this once-a-year silliness.

Okay, you have to have a consistent routine and behavior, and you can accomplish wonderful goals. And just old school, I write things down every day in a journal and things like that. And I there’s something.

Does anyone else write their things to do on a piece of paper like I do? Isn’t there a certain wonderful satisfaction when you cross those things off? Don’t you love that?

And you say at the end of the day, hey, I had a good day. Look at all the things I got done. And you can also be a little critical of yourself.

Look, I didn’t get anything done that I wrote down. And then maybe carry it over to the next day.

[Antonio Holman]
Constant reminder. It’s always better to write things physically, write things down, because that’s physiological connection to your brain that technology doesn’t give us.

[James A. Brown]
I actually brought one of those clickers. You know, when you go to an event and they’re clicking the button for when people come through, I bought two of those that I could set on my desk. So if I make a cold call, I hit it.

And then at the end of the day, I write it in an actual paper calendar.

[Speaker 11]
Yeah.

[James A. Brown]
Smart. Yeah. That came from Russ Ligon.

He’s got a cool book called Be Followable. And he’s like, turn it into a game. Otherwise, like there’s just some power into gamifying things like that that are painful.

[Paul Anderson]
Todd has systems and structure. And I think it’s Tony Robbins said you will rise or fall to your systems and your structure. Yes.

Motivation is fleeting. It comes and goes. So that’s why New Year’s resolutions.

By Valentine’s Day, everybody quits going to the gym. They start drinking and eating chocolates again.

[Antonio Holman]
That’s right.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
I don’t do the resolutions. But last year was the first year that I started off by saying, OK, I have a phrase. And you mentioned like the article was recommending having like a word of the year last year or this last year, 2025.

My phrase was how you do one thing is how you do all things. And so I don’t quite know what my phrase is going to be for 2026, but just making that a phrase that could stick in my head, I would recite constantly helped me be more productive and not delay things because I had a tendency like, oh, I’ll do it later or tomorrow or whatever. And I’m still relatively highly efficient in most things that I do.

But I was delaying things more than I would like to. And so utilizing that phrase, how you do one thing is how you do all things, really helped me just get more on it.

[Claude Diamond]
Love it. I got to go, guys. I’m sorry.

All right, Claude. How can people connect with you? Your audience is so beautiful and intelligent.

I don’t need to promote any. They just have to Google Claude Diamond if they like or my phone number is 619-206-5960 if they want any of my books or anything. Thank you so much.

Interesting conversation. I really appreciate it. And I wish nothing but health and prosperity in 2026 to everyone in the room and everyone watching.

Thank you.

[Antonio Holman]
All right.

[Claude Diamond]
Thank you, guys.

[James A. Brown]
Cool. All right. Well, that covers the news portion of the show.

I’d like to thank our sponsors, United States Real Estate Investor Advertising, Universe Media Publishing at universemediapublishing.com. And of course, thanks to our guests, Paul Anderson, Joe Bodick, Claude Diamond, Alina Herman, Domenic Danino, and Gabrielle Simmons. And of course, Antonio Holman, our founder and producer.

Why don’t you guys, people who know how you can connect, we’ll start with Paul.

[Paul Anderson]
If you want to reach out to me, I just recommend going to verticalfundingcapital.com. I’m also known as Boise Lender on all the social media platforms. So I’m always available for consultation calls and love to work on creative deal flow.

So I want to thank Antonio. Thank you, James. Thank you.

It was great to do this again. And next year, let’s plan to do it again. Let’s talk about what’s going on in socialized New York with their rent control.

[Antonio Holman]
There we go. Yeah, for sure. All right, Joe.

[Jospeh Bodek]
I want to thank you guys for having me. Thank you, Antonio. Appreciate your invite.

You can reach me, guys, at realestatementoringusa.com. Real easy to remember, realestatementoringusa.com. Or if you want to call me at 484-297-2152.

Real easy to find me. Or you could Google me. You probably find me that way too.

But once again, it was nice meeting all you people and look forward to doing it again.

[Antonio Holman]
Joe, I’m waiting for you to rock us on out with the outro with those guitars you got back there. So next year, get ready. I’ll have it down for you next year.

[Jospeh Bodek]
Yeah.

[James A. Brown]
Perfect. It’ll be awesome. Let’s see, Alina.

[Alina Herman]
Oh, my gosh. This was actually really good. I love the news articles.

It’s been most interesting to discuss. You guys always have the most amazing crew coming in and almost amazing guests. Thank you so much for putting in the work and perseverance and to putting it together.

I know how much willpower and passion and discipline it takes to put this together. And again, if anybody wants to reach out to me, I’m on LinkedIn. And if you search Alina Herman, you should find me in there.

You can also contact me at Alina at IDXM.com. If anyone interested or have any questions about personal development, business growth, strategies or tech IT. So it was my pleasure.

Thank you so much again.

[James A. Brown]
Awesome. Domenic.

[Domenic Danino]
All right. Well, thank you guys for having me on as a pleasure and nice to meet everybody. And if somebody wants to get a hold of me, if you’re an agent or lender or aspiring homeowner, or you’ve been turned down by the bank, you don’t qualify for traditional financing, I can be reached at any of the socials as MrRedToneHomes.

I’m on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X as MrRedToneHomes. And yeah, I’d be more than happy to help you if you’re in a situation where you can’t qualify for traditional financing. Cool, cool.

[James A. Brown]
Gabrielle.

[Gabrielle Simmons]
Yes, you can find me by going to our website, dealmakersco.com. My phone number is on there. Feel free to reach out, call or text.

You can also find me on Instagram, InvestorLadyG or a Google search or Facebook, Gabrielle Simmons.

[James A. Brown]
Fantastic. All right. Antonio, any last?

[Antonio Holman]
Yeah. Yeah. I got one last thing, which, yeah, we’re flying by the seat of our pants.

So as I said before, I don’t have any resolutions, but the more we kind of thought about it and talked about it, I was like, oh, I do have something, but I want to hear in roughly one sentence, what is the main business focus that each of you have that you’ve been thinking about to do for 2026? Gabrielle, what do you got?

[Gabrielle Simmons]
I’d say personally, just for myself, goal is to acquire my first commercial property. And I’ve been attempting, I’ve been under contract. Well, one, I was under contract and then one, I didn’t get to that point yet, just negotiating with the seller.

But I feel like I’m getting close to finally acquiring my first commercial property. And then for our company, for real estate dealmakers, goal is to close at least 200 transactions within our deal desk.

[Antonio Holman]
That’s good. That’s good. Alina, what’s your main focus business goal for next year?

[Alina Herman]
There probably be two different ones. One is start doing events, hosting events and doing training as far as personal development and helping business owners to create a correct mindset and grow their business from the technology and as well as standpoint and their personal mindset. And the second one would be is to look for a great acquisition of land and to make it into manufactured home community.

I think that this is a passion of mine to create affordable low housing, that’s beautiful places to live for people. And I think that would be a great route. Hopefully the laws will be a wind in the sail.

[Antonio Holman]
Yeah, yeah, really. Joe, what’s your main focus for business next year?

[Jospeh Bodek]
Well, as you know, Antonio, I like teaching. So my whole goal for next year is to bring in at least 100 new students for lease options. And that’ll make me very happy.

[Antonio Holman]
That’ll be good. That’s yeah, that’s good. I like that.

Paul, what do you got? What’s your main focus for next year?

[Paul Anderson]
I think I’m starting to come full circle with this after been being around this for close to 40 years now. I’m in talks to move out of daily operations and take more of an oversight and development role with a couple different companies and manage residential construction lending. So I’m getting out of the day to day and this still allows me the freedom to do all my commercial and other stuff.

But I’m really enjoying going into markets and working with small and midsize builders who are trying to compete against these large national companies and get them capitalized and try to help create. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as affordable housing anymore, but more affordable options for the consumers and keep those little guys in business.

[Antonio Holman]
Yeah, that’s good. That’s different. You’re about to step into a whole different world.

Wow. That’s fascinating. Domenic, what do you got?

What’s your focus for next year?

[Domenic Danino]
It’s the same goes go deeper, not wider.

[Antonio Holman]
Yeah.

[Domenic Danino]
Right. And so my hyper focus is just reaching a broader audience for our program. So probably going to do some paid ads.

[Antonio Holman]
Paid ads to deepen what you’re already doing.

[Domenic Danino]
Yeah.

[Antonio Holman]
Yeah.

There you go. Love it. James, what about you, sir?

[James A. Brown]
I’m going to hyper focus on being an investor focused agent. And I don’t know. Let’s let’s tease a little bit.

Antonio and I are putting together a bunch of cool stuff, probably a new podcast coming along with some partners of mine in the co-living space. And then we’re going to build out a network of investor focused agents so investors can find agents in different markets. So we’re creating a huge network through the United States real estate investor platform.

So cats out of the bag.

[Antonio Holman]
We have a lot of things that we’ve both been kind of working on and brainstorming on that are starting to intertwine intelligently, which is super cool because this year should be the year. I don’t see anything stopping at this point where I can actually launch Real Expert Talks or we can have people like you find expert people on the platform to help other people get personal one on one insights from you directly on video calls. So that’ll be amazing.

So eventually I’ll have to talk to you each and get you in the fold on that. My main focus of what I’d like to do for the platform is I’d like to really increase the research data that we can provide for people like you, because if you don’t have the proper data, it’s still a lot of guessing. A lot of people talking to this person, that person.

But if you have the hard data and the numbers from previous years, previous months, previous decades, that helps so much more in the future to make smart decisions. So that’s one of the smartest things that I think we can do is increase real data and give it to investors to help them move farther. So that’s my focus there.

[James A. Brown]
Fantastic. Cool. Let’s close it out.

If anybody wants to connect with me, you can go to Linktree forward slash partner with James Brown. And if you want any help, reach out to me. You can also go to JamesBrownRealEstate.com slash coaching. Let’s see. Follow and subscribe to This Month in Real Estate Investing at thismonthinrealestateinvesting.com or your favorite podcast app. And if you run across any interesting news events or have suggestions for expert guests like we had today, feel free to share by emailing Antonio at UnitedStatesRealEstateInvestor.com.

And remember, when one door closes, another door opens to financial freedom. See you next year.