Sean Terry Quitting After 20 Years?

Steve Trang: Everybody, thank you for joining us for today's episode of real estate disruptors. So we got Sean Terry with Flip with Flip to Freedom. If you don't know Sean, I don't know what to tell you. He's another big guy inside the Phoenix market wholesaling nationwide. And today, Sean's talking about about all the times that he's wanted to quit.

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That way we can all grow together. You ready?

Sean Terry: I'm ready. Alright. First off, I I just gotta give a plug to Steve, for what you've done in the community, for your shows that you've done. And he actually recently, a couple months ago, came out and spoke at our at my mastermind there and talked about sales and what to say, and you answered questions. You overcame objections.

And it was one of the most it was so well orchestrated on how you laid out on actually closing a seller without asking for the sale. Right? To actually instead of actually closing, they just came to the conclusion, like, okay. I just gotta sell to this guy, and he did it. So if you guys never have actually, seen what he does when it comes from the sales disruptor side, I highly recommend it.

It's absolutely amazing. If you're struggling to get contracts, this is something you must have. So I just wanna give you a shameless plug on that because it's that it's that good. So it's awesome.

Steve: Thank you. Thank you so much. We recorded, you know, part of it, and we actually uploaded it into our community. And there's this one part, that I was like, who's that screaming and laughing so loud? It was like, oh, is

Sean: that me? It was you. I'm I'm loud. I know. It's like, you're just you're a household, man.

Our household's loud. We got two crazy dogs. It's nuts. Well, it

Steve: was the part about if you remember, they're like, well, how do you deal with Open Door? Do you guys do you remember what I said about Open Door?

Sean: Yeah. Right? Wait. Wait. How'd you do it again?

I was

Steve: like, oh, Open Door. You're considering working them? And all those class actions lawsuits, those don't concern you whatsoever.

Sean: I I love the one with Zillow. Yeah. He goes, well, my Zillow property says it's worth x. And you go, when was the last time Zillow was in your house? Right?

And I could just see their face on the other side of the phone going, ah, good question. Yeah. No.

Steve: Zillow is not coming into your house.

Sean: Yeah. I know Zillow's not.

Steve: So we talked about, this is title show, is Sean and Terry really quitting? Now there's been multiple instances where quitting has been a serious consideration. Yes. So let's start with the first major one.

Sean: Yeah. So, yeah, so so just a reference is that, you know, when you're an entrepreneur, and we're talking about being an entrepreneur, there are times when you will come up against the wall when you have no idea what to do. Right? You're stuck. And so I'm gonna and we're gonna talk about a couple different times, and the most recent one actually was, back in 2019, a story you absolutely have to hear, and and we'll talk about that here in a second.

But, so the first one was, your first deal. So some people right now watching and they're brand new, they've never got a deal, and they're they watched a couple interviews, and they see the potential of what could happen, in this business. So I bought a course at 33 years old. I was living month to month at a time, and the course was $500. It I I had used my wife's first premier credit card of February and my first premier credit card starter cards at $2.50.

And I bought this course.

Steve: You guys are maxing out your credit cards.

Sean: Yeah. We're maxing out to buy this course. And it's interesting because I was working as as in pool and landscape business, and it was a Saturday afternoon. I was driving to an appointment, a pool and landscape appointment, and I heard this guy on the radio talk about how you could, you know, flip houses with no cash or credit or anything like that. And I was like, what a scam.

You can't do that. There's no way. And these guys are making 5,000, 10,000, $15,000 checks. I'm like, that's a joke. So I actually turned the channel.

I was like, who who's gonna listen to that? But now I know it's like you know, I had that intuition that that thing inside, it's God kinda tugging you to flip the channel. So I flipped the channel back, and I continued to listen to what he said. And, he talked about this concept of wholesaling where you get a property under contract for a price and you find a buyer for a higher price, and you can make the spread. And I was like, you know, I never heard that before.

So I had an epiphany of that new idea, you know, and that new idea of what you could do. So, I got excited. I convinced my wife to give her you know, give me her $250 credit card, maxed out my credit card, $500, bought the course, couldn't wait to get it. I got the course, and it came in two big, like, black boxes. Right?

So I opened up the boxes, and there are all these VHS tapes. So do you know what VHS is? Yes.

Steve: I I know.

Sean: Yeah. So some of them, like, all the millennials on there, like, what the heck are VHS? Right? So I had VHS and had a little binder, and I took the VHS out. I put in my VHS, and I sat there, and I'm, like, at the edge of my chair, and I'm ready to take notes.

And it comes on in black and white. Right? And this is in 2003. Right? So this is twenty years ago.

Steve: Yeah.

Sean: So 2003, it comes on in black and white. And this guy has a big old cowboy hat on. He's talking in his southern drawl, and he has these, like, he has these, like, like, that cowboy. He has, like, those chop bottoms. Yeah.

Chaps on. And he's in front of this board, and he's talking about you can knock on preforeclosure doors, and you can have him sell your house. And and, like Eddie Speed. You know Eddie Speed. Right?

He has that southern draw. Right? So, so, anyways, I'm like, what? And I started looking. He recorded these shows back in '19.

It was, like, 1992, '93. You know? And he did it with this, like, VHS tape that some his, like, buddy held. And he and these apparently, these course was sitting in his garage. So that's all I had.

Right? We didn't have we didn't have Zillow at the time. We didn't have any comps. We didn't have, you know, we didn't have GPS. So

Steve: Skip tracing. Skip tracing. So what

Sean: he did is he said buy a list of preforeclosures, you know, drive around and knock on their doors. That's the whole premise of the course. And preforeclosures, our properties are about to go in foreclosure. And I was like, okay. So that was the whole course.

So I found a list, and from NetValue Central, if you remember them. Right? Found a list. And I, and I got the list, and I and I I like I said, you didn't have GPS. You didn't have a car with GPS.

So what do you do? So I went to, MapQuest. Mhmm. Remember MapQuest? I remember MapQuest.

Went to MapQuest, and I printed out the address, and then I printed out the address to the next house and the address to the next house. And I basically lined them all together so I could drive from one house, and I was following this. And I drove I hit about and at the time, I was still doing pools and landscaping. So around my job, I was knocking on these preforeclosure doors. The first house I went to, I and and it now think about this.

You're you're and and and here's the thing. Anytime you do something new, you wanna have validation from other people. So if you and I are friends, you go, hey. I got this great idea. I'm gonna flip some houses.

So I went to my father-in-law, and he said, he and I told him all excited, you know, animated. I was like, oh my gosh. I'm gonna make millions. I'm gonna get rich. My

Steve: life. Yeah.

Sean: It's gonna change my life. You get this property under contract, and you sell it for a higher price. You can make a ton of money. And, I'm all excited. He goes, you can't sell a house you don't own.

Who told you you could sell a house you don't own? You can't do that. That's illegal. Right? So I'm like, oh, crap.

Right? I I didn't know that. Right? And he goes, but listen. Talk to my realtor friend.

He's been doing it for thirty years. He's an awesome guy, friend of the family. He's oh, talk to him. So I called the realtor friend, and, and I asked him. I said, hey.

I got this the thing and the the the contract and wholesaling and this. And, he said, yeah. You actually can do it, but you'll never find a deal because all those are taken by professionals. Right? They have professional teams and big businesses, and they go after, you know, these these these houses, and you'll never ever find a deal.

So that was my out of the gate, you know, of these guys. So you know how it's like you have a balloon, and you're all, like, blown up, like, I'm gonna get and then all of a sudden, you just kinda deflate.

Steve: Well, you have, like, typically, you have people that are cheering you on. Yeah. You already have people who are like, you know, maybe it's not a good idea. Maybe you shouldn't try this this balloon, like you said.

Sean: Yeah. It just collapsed, and I'm like, oh, so I already, I was on you know, I was partially deflated, and now I'm going out knocking on these preforeclosure doors. So the first door I go to, you know, I I I kinda park down the street, and I'm kinda casing the place. And, you know, I I, it's it's February '33, so it's kinda hot out. So I, you know, I kinda go buy the house, and I have my little clipboard.

I have the idea of what I'm gonna say. You know? And now, guys, I'm I'm 33. I have a daughter. I'm married.

I'm a prior US marine. Right? So, you know, so you think I got this big, tough marine guy that's gonna go up to the house. Hey. Hey.

Hey. How are you doing? You wanna sell your house? It wasn't like that. So I go up to the house, and they had this gigantic truck that wasn't parked in the driveway.

It was parked, like, across the front of, like In the grass. In the grass. Right? So I kinda walk around the truck, and he had the screen door open, I mean, the screen door, and then the door was open, and I knock on in. The screen door kinda shakes like that.

And, and and I'm sitting there kinda stand back with my clipboard. I'm like, alright. You know? Ready to ready to do my pitch. First house ever.

And this dude about you know, I'm I'm six foot one. You're pretty tall too. This guy was about six foot seven, six foot eight, and he had he had skin he was, like, had skin head shaved, and he had this, like, you know, tank top on while his hair's sticking out. You know, he had gruffy shave, and he was kinda sweating. He looked pissed.

And he comes up. He comes behind, and this shadow comes behind the screen. And I'm like, oh, crap. And he opens the door, and he goes, what do you want? And I'm like, and and literally, I I've never felt more stupid because nothing came out of my mouth.

I was like, and I was, like, tripping over my tongue. I didn't know what to say. And, and I literally turned around and high tailed it like a dog, you know, with his tail between his legs back to my car, his bed walk back to my car. I sat in my car, and I'm sitting there, and I'm thinking, you know, part of part of doing something, you know, and what makes you quit, and this is what happens in, like, you know, in in boot camp and also, like, what they do with seal team and stuff. They tell you all the things in the future that you have to go through to get to the end result.

Right? So they go, listen. Tomorrow, we gotta run eight miles, then we're gonna go do this, and then we're gonna go do that, and then we're gonna do this. So it tires you out in your brain of all the things you have to do. So I sat there in the car.

It's May 2003, you know, living month to month, you know, doing the stupid pool and landscape thing. I go knock on my first door. And, and I'm like and I'm thinking, how many doors do I have to knock on? How many people do I have to talk to? How many, you know, how many, you know, how many how many drive around?

And I'm at my first house. Right? And I just remember and I sat there, and I was like, I can't do this. Yeah. You know, I can't do it.

So, you know, if you're brand new and you're you might have a fan fan base where people are, you know, encouraging you or you might not or you might be just doing this yourself, You know? You're gonna be at a point in time where I sat there, and I literally I was like, I can't do this. And I I I didn't think I had the ability. I didn't think I had what it took. I didn't think I had the the wherewithal to to kinda do this real estate thing.

And I I sat there, and I quit right there before I even got started. Yeah. Now I've been in the teaching space since 2010. I think you have too pretty close. Shortly thereafter.

Maybe '18. Yeah. Yeah. A a long time. Right?

So you've been you've been a long time. I've been a long time. And I see more people that get excited about a concept and an idea, and they attempt to do a first couple things. Maybe they do a Google AdWords campaign or they talk to us or they do something. And then all of a sudden, they hit an obstacle.

Right? Or something's, doesn't just fall into place for them, and then they go, oh, I'm gonna quit Mhmm. And throw their whole entire business out the window.

Steve: Business, their dreams. Their experience,

Sean: their lifestyle, everything out the window. And, and and and done. And I sat there in that experience, and I'm thinking of all the stuff, all the things that I have to go through, all the push ups and all the all the junk. And I'm like, I can't do this. I don't have what it takes.

I you know, maybe they're right. Maybe I can't do this. Maybe and, so I decided to quit. And I was like, you know, I'm I'll just go back to the pool thing, and I'll just, you know, couldn't do that. And so that was the first time I decided to quit.

And what got me over the edge, was I, we had cassette tapes. Right? And I had my car, and I had, like, a little Nissan Murano. And I I put in the and I had the cassette tape plan. So when I turned on the car, after I was kinda sitting there contemplating quitting, right at that time, I was listening to Think and Grow Rich.

So first off, you gotta inundate your mind with positive success and devour all of his shows, all the information you can. And what that will do is it will prime your mind for when things happen like this. You'll have the ability and the armor to go through it. So I listened to that. And at just at the right point in time, this is another god thing, right point in time is that, there was Winston Churchill, and and Napoleon Hill was telling a story about Winston Churchill.

Winston Churchill has the famous saying of never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever quit.

Steve: Mhmm.

Sean: And he emphasizes ever, ever, ever quit. And he was telling that story in such a way that made such an impact that right then and there, I made a resolution of myself that I don't care how many doors I have to knock on. I don't care if I have to wake up early and I have to go to bed late. I don't care if I have to work weekends. I don't care how many no's I get.

I don't care what pain I have to go through. I am gonna do this, and I'm gonna do it until I get my first deal. And I did that. And I I didn't look at every door I knock and take everything personally. I looked at a group of doors.

Right? So I, like I'll say, I'm gonna knock on a 100 doors, and I'm gonna see kinda what happens after that. So I just went out, and I just started knocking on it. It's probably around a 100 doors, and I finally found a guy that was willing to sell. It wasn't easy.

I didn't even have a contract to sign. I had to go to Staples to go get a contract. I didn't have comps. I didn't have app apps or anything like that. I had to call this realtor friend and say, what do you think it's worth?

And I got the property under contract, and I sold it. And, I am that that's another whole story in itself, but I, made $11,008 in May 2003. That was my first check. And I can tell you, don't sleep until you get your first check. Don't stop until you get your first check.

Don't hesitate. Don't just put your head down and focus on getting that first check because that is validation. And, you know, we're doing the vlog in there, and we're talking to your team, and then we're talking and you know, because I was a marine, and I had, you know, people around me that said, hey. Making any money yet? You're doing it yet?

Is it happening yet? And I'm grinding every single day knocking on doors. So when you get that first check, it's validation. It's almost like a shut up check. So I'm just like, shut up.

You know? It's like, I did it, and it's and it and it turns it's a proof of concept, and it's it's it's something that is your first stepping stone to the rest of your life.

Steve: It gives you conviction.

Sean: It gives you conviction.

Steve: Right. Once one area is, like, I think I can do this. One is I know I can do this.

Sean: Yeah. You know you can do it. You've done it. You've proven it works. Now you've just gotta rinse and repeat.

So you might be in a situation right now and you're watching this and you haven't got your first check yet. I want you to make a commitment to yourself. I wanna look you look yourself in the mirror and say, I am not going to quit, and I'm gonna do whatever it takes legally, ethically, morally until I get my first check. If you make that type of resolution, then an obstacle we all have obstacles. Oh, yeah.

You have obstacles. One thing we learned in the marine corps is obstacle is something to be to be overcome. It's not something to stop you. So obstacles could be money issues. Obstacles could could be, you know, could be lead issues.

It could be hiring issues. It could be all sorts of things. Right? So obstacles, you know, are are just something to be overcome. And in the marine corps, they say you either go over the obstacle, you dig under the obstacle, you go around the obstacle, or you just blow through it.

Right? Stick grenades on it and blow it up. So if you look at obstacles like that as something that you have to overcome, then it is just part of the journey. It creates your story. Because if if if you just woke up and you watched real estate disruptors and Steve here, and you said, I'm gonna sign up for this course and, you know, you ran a couple ads and talked to a couple people and talked to some for sale by owners, and you got a deal and you sold it and you made $50.

And, oh, this is the easiest thing ever. Right? That's not a story. There's what that what that's no story. You have to go through the struggle and put yourself up against the wall where you don't think you can do it, and then you do it.

You know what that does for your confidence? It's it's it's absolutely, absolutely amazing to go on and move on to the next.

Steve: And I think there's a few different things here. Right? So first, like, Sean and Terry. Right? Like, you're you're super well known, but you have moments of weakness, moments of doubt.

Yeah. Right? So, like, we all go through it. The second thing you're talking about, the marine corps, like, they don't just tell you go do this. You have people around you telling you, by the way, we're gonna go do this, and it's gonna suck.

Yeah. Here's where it's gonna suck. Yeah. Here's where it's gonna be painful. You're gonna wanna quit here.

They'll tell you all of this.

Sean: Yeah.

Steve: And then you go through it. It's like, oh, well, Sean did tell me Yeah. It was gonna suck right here.

Sean: Yeah.

Steve: Right? And that you'll if you if you power through this, you'll be okay. Yep. And the reason we're we're talking about this is that a lot of people are seeing Instagram or

Sean: Oh, yeah.

Steve: Facebook ads or YouTube ads. Like, oh, this is gonna be so easy. You can get whatever exotic sports car you want, all the watches you want, travel the world. Right? Like, they're promising all these things.

We're saying here, those things are achievable, but there's gonna be a lot of suck along the way.

Sean: Yeah. There's that whole journey to get from point a to point b that they're leaving out of the Instagram post.

Steve: Mhmm.

Sean: You know what I mean? It's like they're showing the end result or even a proportion of the end result, but they're leaving out that time that they're alone. It's 05:00 in the morning, and they're getting up and they're tired, and they, you know, they're they're they don't know what to do today because they're you know, what's the next step? And they don't have business, and they don't have revenue coming in. They don't have a team, and it's just you, yourself, and you creating income.

Right? You don't have a guaranteed check coming in. You're not getting you're done with your nine to five. And now you're you have to create money by getting a property under contract and and finding that buyer and doing it. And that's a scary thing.

You know? It's a scary thing to do, but it's also liberating to know. Because if you once you figure this out, right, and you know how to do it, you literally can, you know, make money at will. Meaning, even even no matter what happens in the world, right, you would know what a motivated seller is. You could talk to a motivated seller.

You could get a property under contract, and you could sell it for a higher price. Right. Right? And you could close a deal because you have a skill that is is a money producing skill, you know, even if all this goes away, right, which is, you know, which is which is a powerful thing. A job is something to where now you're relying on somebody else to give you a a paycheck, you know, every two weeks.

Right? And they have the control and the power over you. And more than the cars and the boats and the toys and the lifestyle, I mean, the all the stuff is the freedom to control you what you do is probably the most in most thing you wanna strive for. That that that is, for me, is the biggest thing. You got you got kids too.

You know?

Steve: Something that they can't take away.

Sean: Yeah. Something they can't take away.

Steve: No matter what happens, they can't take that away. Yeah.

Sean: You can't take it away. You can't take away that one skill and be able to to be able to do that.

Steve: So that was the first time you almost quit. That was the first time.

Sean: Yeah. I know. There there was I had that resolution. I got my first deal, and then I went to you know, then I put my head down, and and I went to work. And and, so that was 2003.

2004, came along, and, and I basically, you know, I I I learned how to market. Right? And I'll tell a quick story because, there's a guy here local, and I call him the godfather of real estate. I won't I won't say his name or anything like that, but he's, he's a guy kinda guy kinda like a little mentor when I first started. I'd I'd call him up.

His name's Ron. If he's watching, he knows he knows who he is. But, I called him up, and, and I remember I thought it was such big stuff because I was sending 5,000 postcards a month. Right? I'm like, I'm sending 5,000.

You know how in your mind you know, I went from sending, you know, two or 300 a week to, you know, you know, eight, nine hundred a week to, like, a thousand a week, and I'm like, I'm killing it, man. And a thousand mail

Steve: Big freaking deal.

Sean: Big freaking deal. Right? I thought I thought it was a big freaking deal. Send a you know? So I call, you know, the godfather, Ron, up, and and, he I talked to him, and he goes I said, so, you know, hey.

I I sent 5,000, you know, postcards this month. I mean, what are you doing? Right? You know? Trying to show them up.

Right? And, and he goes, well, I just dropped a 125,000 postcards. And I'm like I I couldn't fathom. I mean, it was the first time I was like, what? Yeah.

And I go I go, who's answering the phone? He was me. They said they're coming to my cell phone. Right? I'm like, what?

So right after that, I was like I was like, okay. I'm sending a 100,000 postcard. Challenge accepted. Challenge accepted. So I'm like and that that was a stretch for me.

That's why, you know, if he offers, like, some sort of training or mastermind or something and you can surround yourself with people that are playing at a bigger level, they stretch your mind to do bigger things. You're like, wow. I never thought about that. Maybe I should try it. And you never would have done that on your own.

I never would have went from 5,000 to a 100,000 in in at one time ever if it wasn't being surrounding myself with someone that's playing at a bigger game. So, I went out and, I dropped a 100,000 units. I had a girl named Denise who was answering the phone. Phone melted, with people coming in, you know, with calls and stuff. But we that's the first month in my entire career that we did over a $100,000 for the month.

Yeah. And that's when I correlated marketing with revenue, that the correlation between marketing and revenue is that close

Steve: Oh, yeah.

Sean: That, you know, your marketing and understanding that marketing, the leads you get is a direct relation to your direct relation to your income Mhmm. In your revenue. So that that really took off. So, so, basically, the during that time, we were, mailing preforeclosures because that was kinda my my niche in 2003, 2004. And then what we did is we, we bought properties subject to the existing loan in preforeclosures.

So the sellers in preforeclosure, we pay them 3 to $5,000 to move. We would, reinstate the loan for 10 to $15,000. They would move out of the house. We'd take over the property. We cleaned it up, and then we'd lease option the property, to, to other buyers.

Right? So I built a portfolio of a 120 properties in 2000 later 2004, actually, in, in all of 2004 and early two thousand five. So we had a 120 properties, and I I was hustling. I was working, you know, I was working you know, it was me and a partner at the time, and I was working, literally seven days a week hustling. And because the leads were coming in.

We're meeting sellers. They wanted to, you know, get rid of their houses, and we're just structuring these deals, all these seller finance deals. And we had we had lease optioned. We structured the lease options in a way where they were, a strike price. Right?

Lease with option to purchase. Mhmm. So it's a lease, so we had cash flow. And the purchase option, the purchase contract that was done with it was a strike price, say, $2.50 and or appraisal, whichever is higher. Right?

So now what what happened in 2005 is very similar what happened in 2022 or to actually 2021 where the market went parabolic Yeah.

Steve: Because The bonkers.

Sean: The Federal Reserve poured so much money in into the, into the market. So the market in 2005 went crazy. You know? And what happened? We had low inventory.

We had, we had multiple offers on houses. Home builders would open up. They had lotteries on houses. They had, you know, houses were getting bid up. Part of the part of the time on there, they would do escalation clauses on the offer.

So you get an offer and would escalate to a certain price. And all that happened exactly the same in 2005 or 2005, exactly like it did in 2021. Isn't that funny? I remember they're asked to do an escalation class. I was like, oh my gosh.

That's back. Crazy. Home builders are doing lotteries. I'm like, oh my gosh. That's back.

Crazy. So so, we built this big portfolio, sold them all in, May 2005 to November 2005 Oh. To a group out of California that literally bought all of our properties, and they bought them in basically tranches of, like, 50 houses at a time. And I I made so much money in such a short period of time because they were buying at a 120% of value. You know what I mean?

And we're buying below market and selling at a 120% of value, and they're buying these package deals. We had tenants in them. They had lease options with appraisal, whatever's higher. So they're buying these tranches of properties. And, so we literally sold them all, but but but just a handful, a couple of them, and, made millions and millions of dollars in a short period of time.

So I'm sitting on this money. I'm like you know? And I I I didn't know about quantitative easing. I didn't know about quantitative tightening. I didn't know about how to look at, you know, permits being pulled from home builders as a leading indicator for the real estate market.

Mhmm. I didn't know about home starts as a leading indicator for the real estate market. I didn't know to look at inventory, what that looks like, mortgage applications. I didn't look at at the affordability index. I didn't look at all these indicators that we have today and we had back then to determine where we are in the market to be risk on or to be risk off.

Right? So me, you know, marine, you know, you just do real estate. Right? I was risk on, you know, at all at all times. So my daughter's, my daughter at the time danced, and there was a dance dad that was there.

I won't say his names, or anything like that, but, really good guy. We we became friends, and he's like, we gotta do land. We got I mean, he was they're buying land, and they're entitling it, and they're turning around and selling it. He's like, we gotta buy land. Mhmm.

I'm like, okay. Yeah. Of course. Right? So is is I I took the energy that we took from, like, getting a 120 houses

Steve: That you made a lot of money on.

Sean: Yeah. Made a lot of money on, and I was still sitting on millions of dollars in the bank. And then I put all that energy into land acquisition, started a company, land acquisition, and entitlement. So we're gonna land, buy land, bring it through the zoning process, entitle it, and sell it to builders. Right?

So we started buying lots to the tune of you know, I bought, you know, 20 acres up by the Glendale Arena up here right by this by the stadium and the fight and another 10 acres over by, right behind Midwestern University. And then we bought these other parcels to about $30,000,000 worth of land as home starts are going down, as building permits are going down, as inventories increasing. We're buying buying these lands and we're in bland, and they're putting them through the entitlement process, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for civil engineers to meeting with the vice mayor to doing so I switched from wholesaling to now I was meeting with these big attorneys and doing all this type of stuff. So then we've then I I find myself that the market now now it's now it's 2,006 and 2,007.

Steve: Mhmm.

Sean: And I'm sitting on this this land with a couple partners. I had this one property that was, right down the street here, and, we assembled as, it was, 28 acres. And we we basically, did a plat engineer of a 166, you know, rear entry lots on it. That we we sold the Monta Bellano homes. Monta Bellano Homes was a huge builder back back in the day.

And they bought it for, $12,000,000. We were in it for 2 and a half million dollars. Right? So they literally bought it. They are $250,000 they had that was and they had a certain due diligence time frame.

They go nonrefundable of quarter million dollars, and then they were gonna close. I was in Disneyland, and, and I got the the call from Teresa, which was our, from Stewart Title, our title rep, and she said they pulled out. They pulled out because of the market. And that was the first time I really felt an impact of the market, and I was literally about thirty days away from getting, like, another 3 to $4,000,000 payday on this dirt that we acquired and, and and done. That was the chip that fell.

Mhmm. Right? And and and it became really different. From that point, the market literally eroded from there. The bad news came out.

Foreclosures happened. And I spent most of 2,007, negotiating with our lenders on trying to, you know, try to and now the the cool thing is they were all I had one personal guarantee for, $4,000,000. The rest of them were, nonasset. So we gave those properties back to the lenders, including the 400,000 in this deal, 500,000, you know, 700,000 in this deal. We gave the properties back, and I had this one deal with a personal guarantee.

Right? So now I had to negotiate. He let us out of the personal guarantee and, gave him back the property and helped him through the process and whatever. I still know him today. He's a good guy, the lender.

And, and, essentially, I found myself in 2008. Market crashed. I'm not doing wholesaling. I'm getting away from my morning ritual. I'm drinking too much.

I'm overweight. I'm kinda lost on the whole the wholesaling thing, the the core thing that I got away from. I got too big for my britches. I wasn't praying. I wasn't doing the things I needed I know I had to do.

And I remember, you know, it was it was crazy. I don't think I've ever told this story, but, my wife was a realtor at the time, and she saved up probably about $200 at the time, and we were in the process of doing this huge house remodel. Mhmm. Right? Because I was expecting to get this million dollar payday from this land and all this stuff and do this house.

So half of our house was basically off to the to the open. Right? And we ran out of money. So I have my house. So I got my kids.

I have two daughters at this time, my wife. I'm dealing with these guys. I have no business going on. I have no deals going on. I'm I'm literally now we gave these properties back.

I'm literally out of cash, and we have no, literally, no on the side of my house. We have no we have basically plastic to the open. Yeah. And I'm like, holy crap. What do I do?

So my father-in-law gave me a book. It's called the, four spiritual laws prosperity. And, the first law talks about tithing. Now I'm sure probably no one's ever talked about tithing on the show ever, so I'm probably the first guy. But it talked about tithing is giving in the Bible.

It talks about giving a tenth of your income, but I didn't have any income. So I remember I went to my my wife said, hey. You go, you know, go to the store and get something. And I remember I go to the store, and I'm coming out the store, and there's this this man and his wife and his daughter who were sitting out begging for something. And I literally give him my last $20 bill.

And I was like, I gave him my $20 bill. And, and and at that point, I remember I'm sitting there broken. Broken. I've been in real estate. I didn't understand what was happening.

I didn't understand about the market. And I'm sitting there, and I I'm I'm lost, and I'm like, what what am I gonna do? So I from that point, I committed to giving 10% of any dime that comes in my family. That's one that's one thing I did. I started getting up early.

I cut the drinking. I started to get myself back in shape, and I I literally started from scratch as a real estate wholesaler. Mhmm. And I handwrote letters because that's I couldn't afford marketing from my kitchen table 25 a night. Yeah.

I took a yellow pad of paper, and I handwrote letters to the preforeclosure. I got a that little $100 cost me for a preforeclosure list. And I literally handwrote letters. Right? And, at the time listen to this.

Because all the land, I was going through an IRS audit. And I had because we have so many LLCs and so many properties and stuff like that and so many things. I had a stack of bank statements, and they were they were checking every single deposit. Now it's one thing. My my taxes are clean.

Right? So I had everything. The IRS is screwed, but the taxes are clean. Right? So I went through and they, they I was in the middle of this audit.

And because and remember, my house is open, and I'm just trying to do we we ran out of money for the contractor, so I'm stuck. Right? So I'm in the middle of this audit. I've I'm I go meet with this audit lady that's doing this thing, and she says, we've closed the file. You're good.

Right? And about three or four days later, a $96,000 check shows up in the mail. Completely unannounced. Right? I it unexpected because they and she didn't tell me this either.

They, I paid too much taxes. Oh. Actually, the income that was that was reported. Mhmm. So when they audited me, they found out I paid too much, and they sent me a check for $96,000.

Fantastic audit. Yeah. It was a it was like, yeah. You never wanna get audited, number one. Number two, if you do get audited, make sure you're, they give you money, which is rare.

So first off, it's a rarity and that that ever happened, but we had literally the perfect amount of money to finish the rest of our house. We got that completed and done, and it was the the the first sign of brightness. At the end, I saw a little hint of light at the end of the tunnel because things started to kind of I felt like kinda turn around. I I, I I sent some letters. I got a deal, you know, that came in a 4 or $5,000 deal, and I I got another deal.

And and, from that point, and that was that was, 2,000, like, $82,009. I just started building. And at the time, we borrowed money from, you know, family and friends and stuff to do these deals. So I spent the better part of probably three or four years paying them back Mhmm. You know, to make good on on You're able to pay them back?

Yeah. Pay them back. So that was that was good. Never filed bankruptcy. Did anything like that.

That was all good. But I had to literally unwind myself out of this mess that I got myself in because I didn't know what I didn't know. Right? I didn't know. That's why I'm really passionate today of talking about, you know, the market and what's happening.

Just talking about the indicators that I wish I would have known, and then someone you know, indicators that I wish I would have known, and then someone you know, their own intelligence can make their own decision Right. You know, on what they wanna do.

Steve: Into all that, I wanna, do just two different things here. First, talk about the emotions. Right? Like, what would like, you know, how long you were sitting through that? What were the thoughts that were going through it?

Because, look, you not only had a lot of success. Like, it's it's one thing to never experience success. It's another thing to experience massive success and then get back brought down to earth. I Yeah. At least a dozen times in my career, I was like, oh, I finally got it figured out.

Sean: Yeah. Yeah.

Steve: Yeah.

Sean: Right.

Steve: Yeah. Right. You never do. Right? So talk about, like, that crash landing and, like, the the the emotions that you went through.

Sean: I'll talk about the low point. So the low point of that whole thing is my my house is open. My, I remember, I'm I'm overweight. I'm drinking. I'm

Steve: What's overweight for

Sean: you? Overweight, so I'm I'm about I'm about two zero five right now, so that's about two forty, two fifty. So I had a gut on me. My face was all chunky. You know?

Steve: We're gonna have to find some old pictures.

Sean: Yeah. I know. We're gonna find some old pictures. But I just you know, it's like when you drink a lot, you know, you're you're you're just kinda get, you know, kinda drawn and stuff. And, so that was a bad thing.

I wasn't waking up early. I wasn't doing my morning ritual. You know, and I was completely disconnected, sleeping in, just just in a bad state.

Steve: Not wanting to get up.

Sean: Not wanting to get up. I wasn't I was I every time every time I get up in, I have to put out some sort of fire or deal with some sort of problems.

Steve: So There's, like, a little bit of,

Sean: Denial type of just almost like almost like, avoidance.

Steve: Yeah. Avoidance. Like, you resign. Like, if I get up, what am I getting up to?

Sean: Yeah. Yeah. And it was just it was, like, more crap. You know? It was just, like, up again, more crap.

So, the low point was, Labor Day, right, which is coming up Monday. Monday. Yeah. Monday. So Labor Day.

It was Labor Day. 2008. So do you remember what happened in 2008?

Steve: I mean, is that was that right around Lehman Brothers?

Sean: It was right around Lehman Brothers. July 2008 happened in Lehman Brothers. Right? So TARP came out, trillion dollar bailout. Every morning, I'd wake up, but I'd look at the real estate section looking for signs of hope.

Right? Trying to look for some sort of signs or something. And, so what I did was, is I it was Labor Day. I was sleeping in, and I get this knock on the door. Right?

I'm like, ugh. Throw my hat. You know? Have my boxers on. You know?

And, and we didn't have Discord back then. And, and I throw on my hat, and I go to the door and this there's this, like, this thug looking guy there. Right? He has some tattoos on. September, it's hot out, and he goes, I'm here for the car.

And have you ever felt adrenaline, like, come over you where you, like, start shaking? Mhmm. I'm like like so he goes, I'm here for the car. I was like, okay. So I'm literally shaking.

I go grab my keys, and it was a, it was a Range Rover, that I had. And I'm, like, shaking and stuff, and I'm like and and, I I went to go out outside, and my neighbors are mowing the lawn. And my other neighbor, hey, Sean. How's it going? I got a tow truck in front of my house to come get my car.

Right? I'm sitting there shaking like this and then my boxers my hat on. And, and luckily, I I said, here, just give me a second. I called the lender, and I said, hey. Can you can you, you know, give me till, you know, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday to come up with whatever the money was on it, like a couple thousand bucks.

And he said yes. So the guy went away. I was able to raise the money to pay for the stupid car, and that was the low point. And and I can tell you the humiliation of walking out there and all my neighbors in a

Steve: tow truck sitting out there. It's public. Everyone knows.

Sean: Public. And I'm sitting there, and I'm like I'm like you know? And just my wife's going, what's going on? What's going on? Hey.

What what's going on? I'm like, you know, and my kids are like, what, daddy? What's going on? You know? I'm like and, they're in in the adrenaline rush of just this this fear of going through you is completely unexplainable.

And from that point, I've just, like, I gotta change. Yeah. I gotta change. Is

Steve: that the wake up call? Was that the wake up call?

Sean: That was the wake up call. And then that from that, my debt my my father-in-law gave me that book.

Steve: Was, was quitting an option at that point?

Sean: Yeah. I thought about getting a job. You know, going back and just, you know, trying to you know, I I had I didn't have any income. You know? And I I I I knew I did wholesaling, but I didn't have any money for marketing.

So I was like, do I get a job and then go, you know, and to and try to do the this on the side, you know, because I need money coming in, and what do I do? And I think giving that $20 giving that $20, reading that book, giving that $20, and then making that commitment to make the change that, you know, I'm gonna start waking up early. I'm gonna start, you know, kinda working on myself, that it, that the the tide the tide kinda turned in, and that's when, you know, this this audit thing closed. We got to check-in the mail. Yeah.

It just kinda good things started to happen. There's a because I started to think about good thing. I was I was thinking so much about what I lost and what, what happened to me and woe is me. And I was, you know, I was feeling sorry for myself and all this stuff. Victimology.

Yeah. Victim. A 100%. And then I then from that point, I was like, you know what? And my wife, you know, she came in.

She's like, you know, go to work. Stop moping around here and get your ass to work. Go. And I'm like and now when your wife says that, you know, we have someone she because she she believed in me and knew I could do it. I could do it once.

I could do it again. And that's when I handwrote letters, and I just started hustling, hand writing letters, knocking on doors if I had to do whatever I had to do to go get a deal here and a deal there and a deal here and then kinda build it

Steve: from there. Well, then and another huge lesson, right, is that you're really good at sourcing properties. Yeah. You're really good sourcing properties, turning them around for profits. Yeah.

And you took all this energy that you're really good at and you put it over here. Yeah. Right? Which we all do as entrepreneurs.

Sean: Yeah. It was a shiny object. I didn't know what I didn't know. And, and it took me down a bad path. But you know what, though?

You know, I look back now, and and Tony Robbins says something. It says life happens for you and not to you.

Steve: Right.

Sean: Right? And you've heard that before, and I'm sure other people have heard that. But, you know, that is a point where it truly happened for me. You know? And I'm I'm glad that happened because it got me on a path on on how to turn my love.

Otherwise, I probably would've kept drinking. I probably would've kept doing this and doing that. You know? And really not turning myself and my mentality around, and, and and focusing on becoming a better man Right. You know, for my wife or for my kids or for my family and for the community.

And I probably would have never got into the education space. You know what I mean? And and being able to even sit here with you, you know, I wouldn't be here if that if if if the kind of that stuff didn't go through.

Steve: I wouldn't be here if you didn't do it didn't work for you. Right? Because, like, you were the one that inspired a lot of us. And another way, I've always kinda said it was, like, either, you know, universe universe happens to you or you happen to the universe. You get to decide

Sean: Yes.

Steve: Which direction it goes.

Sean: Yes. And and that and that's a powerful statement. And until something you can actually pin it on, you know, because you're thinking the universe is so big, but you you go back and look at an event that happens in your life and you go, you know, thank you for that event. And you're thankful for it and you're grateful for that event and you grow from that event instead of looking back at that event as going, that was the worst time of my life, and I was you know what I mean? I'm grateful for that time that that actually happened because it made me who I am today if that didn't go through.

Right. You know? So that that was a a a a critical you know? And it almost I almost had to quit by default. You know?

And if it wasn't for my wife coming in and going, get to work. You know? I, you know, I probably would have taken the easy path or trying to go get a job and trying to do this on the side. Finally, I just buckled down. And and here's the thing.

You can handwrite letters from your kitchen table. You know what I mean? You can and you can get people to call you. They'll call you, and you can get a deal. You can negotiate.

You can get a property under contract, and that can create revenue because there's always buyers for properties. Mhmm. I don't care what happens in the market. There's always buyers no matter what.

Steve: Absolutely. So that's the second time.

Sean: Second time.

Steve: Their third time?

Sean: There is a there there is there there's a there there's a third time. And the third time is interesting because, from that point, I I'm good at creating, but you like, you're really good at really understanding your numbers and your KPIs and your tracking and stuff like that. I was really never good at that. I wanted to be good at that, and I knew I had to be good at that, but I wasn't really myself good at I had to do the tracking myself. So I read the book Traction, and I think that was a really business turning point for me because I I had a small little I had a buddy of mine who owned a, a, like, an investment company, like, remember the name of investment company, but on he was on one side of the office.

On the other side with all these little executive suites, they were empty. And I said, okay. Well, let me rent one of your executive suites for $200. So I paid him $200 cash for this little executive suite. Yeah.

Then I I had to hire. Right? And I hired Chelsea, which is my wife's niece, and so I had to pay another $200 for her office. Mhmm. So now the $400 a month, for two of the offices.

Then I had an I hired someone else. So I I get to the point where I'm paying, like, $1,500 a month, and I have these little executive suite offices. And I have a, an acquisition guy and a dispo guy and Denise answering the phone and Chelsea kinda doing some stuff. And I walk in the office on a Monday, and I go, so how are we doing? Right?

And they go, oh, good. Yeah. Yeah. I got a, you know, I got a, you know, a potential closing this week. I got a couple people I'm talking to, and I I only got appointment later this afternoon, and we're doing great.

Right? And I go back in my office, and I go, okay. We're doing great. And I'd, you know, go on a couple appointments myself, and and that was my business for years.

Steve: It worked.

Sean: For years. For years. Years. I mean, I'm I'm like years. And I'm at the time, I'm recording my my initial stages of the podcast Right.

During this whole thing. Even when I sent the 100,000 mailers and we did a $100 in a month, it was that time. No structure. None. I didn't know my KPIs.

I didn't learn my average deal size. I didn't know our cost per lead. I just threw stuff at the wall, and I hoped there was revenue at the end of the month. Yeah. For years, I I I I I I ran Google ad I did Google AdWords before even Google AdWords.

Anybody knew in the real estate space about Google AdWords and, and, and, did that for years and years. And and, you know, I put everything in one account. Right? And I wrote you know, hopefully, there's money left at the end, great. If it wasn't, you know what I mean?

So two really, very impactful books is Traction. Right? Traction, great book. Talks about scorecards and your KPIs. It talks about hiring, you know, the right people for the right seats.

It talks about your, you know, your your meetings to create the traction and stuff like that. So that was a critical thing that really made a difference because we started holding Monday morning meetings. We started tracking the deals that were closed and how many are are leads per deal and revenue and all that type of stuff. So we started really getting a grasp. I could look at a scorecard and go, wow.

Here's my business. Right? And now I could look at where it was weak and where it was strong and start putting emphasis on how to make things a little bit better and working with the team and where to train them on sales. Right? You know?

If if their leads per deal is high, we gotta teach them on sales and how to close. If our cost per lead's high, we gotta work on getting a channel that's a lower cost per lead. So, so really give me a, a, a grasp on the business then. The other book was profit first, which I'm sure you read. Right?

Yeah. So profit first, two books I highly recommend. Profit first shows you how to structure your bank accounts. Right? So you have an income account.

You have operating account. You have a tax account. You have a what's the other one? A profit account.

Steve: Right?

Sean: So you have four different accounts, and and you basically the the money comes in and you and you disperse them on a percentage basis. Right? Yeah. So it's funny because I go to the bank and they go, what's CREI's, you know, percent, whatever. Right?

And they're like, oh, it's just you know, it's I still name the accounts exactly like he says. You know?

Steve: We've done the same. They're like, what the hell are these things?

Sean: Yeah. What are these accounts? Who are these percentage numbers and stuff like that? So, you know, but I've learned that profit first, a great thing. And it's great when it comes to QuickBooks and accounting.

It makes a lot easier to do everything you're doing. So all my companies are set up that way. So, anyway, so, we're we're doing this, and we're growing, and we're, we're local. Right? So we're doing deals in Phoenix.

Now in Phoenix, we were dropping a 100,000 mailers. I had a cold calling team. We're running pay per click advertising. We even did billboards at one point. We did this omnichannel marketing where, we were we try to surround the seller with everything.

Right? So, so we got to the point where our average cost per lead was about $5.50. Our average deal size was about 18,000. Right? And our cost per deal, you know, 5 and I think our leads per deal was in the, like, 20 range.

So how much is that? It's like $10,000 for cost per deal, plus commissions, plus office, plus overhead. So this is 2,019. Not not not long ago. Right?

No. Not long ago. And we would typically run at a probably, a 30 to 40% margin, right, which is pretty good for a business. Right?

Steve: It's 40% amazing. 30% is still rock solid.

Sean: Yeah. Now I got my my neighbor owns a couple businesses. He owns a bar, and he owns a a granite fabrication company. He runs he runs one at, like, an 18 to 20% margin, and he runs it super, super tight. He runs the other one at a 15% margin.

Right?

Steve: I mean, like, restaurants, I think, are, like, if you're running at 6%, you're doing pretty good

Sean: in restaurants. Good. Yeah. Because you have food cost and so and his his is a bar, so it's more alcohol driven. Right.

He used to own a restaurant. It was at 6%. So he did the bar, and now he's at, you know, 15 to 20. But he did him over $1,000,000 and brought home, you know, 150,000. Right.

Steve: You know

Sean: what I mean? So what's great about this business is you can have higher profit margins, but only if your cost per lead is in line, your leads per deal is in line, and your average deal size is in line. Those three KPIs are literally the lifeblood of your business. If you don't know them, you must know them. They're they're literally that is your lifeblood.

So

Steve: It's like knowing your blood pressure if it's out of whack. Yeah. If you don't know your blood pressure is out of whack, you can Yeah.

Sean: But the thing is if you know what's wrong, if you're sitting at, like, you know, one fifty over 100, you know what I mean, you're you're dead. You know what I mean? Yeah. And if you're sitting at a cost per lead at 500 and you're sitting an average deal size at 18 and that leads per deal at 25, you're dead.

Steve: Yeah.

Sean: Right? So we I I came to the point, and it was 2,000, and we were doing a lot of business. So we were doing a lot of revenue. But when we looked at the every single month, the profit margin just came to where there are a couple months we're negative Mhmm. Or a couple months, we may basically, absolutely just break even.

Right? And I'm like, okay. This can't happen. Right? There's something something's gonna happen.

Steve: This is not a real business.

Sean: This is not it's not working. And and have you ever been to a point where what tweak can I make?

Steve: Oh, yeah.

Sean: You know what I mean? It's like, what what can I tweak the leads per deal? And I had, you know, you know, Rafael. Mhmm. Right?

Rafael, he was probably in here in a podcast. Right? He was my top sales guy. Right? And it worked for me.

Mhmm. He did over $1,000,000 a year in revenue for the company. But still average deal size was $18, and his leads per deal was still 25, which was good. Mhmm. Right?

And, you know, so we had other reps who are maybe at 27, 28. We'd work with them on sales training and what to say and how to close. You know? But still, it wasn't enough. I mean, we literally had to cut our cost per lead down to, you know, a $100, and we had to have our average deal size go to 30,000, and we had to have our leads per deal go under 20.

Now we have a business. Right? So I I sat there, and I'm like, you know, what do I do? Mhmm. I didn't I I and listen.

I've been I've been in 2019, I was, you know, doing it for a long time. Yeah. Right? I I see we've done thousands of deals, made a lot of money doing the business, and I slowly saw the business coming down to a point where it was at as a like, the, you know, sirens were going off, like, you know, what the heck? So I had to do something.

I had to do something drastic, like, seriously drastic. And and I I I I literally racked my brain for about three or four months in, third quarter, right, 2019. Right? And I'm I'm sitting there crunching the numbers, cutting everything I could cut back, all the useless junk in the business to try to to try to drive profitability. And if you've ever been in business and you and you're looking at numbers and stuff like that, you're going, you know, and and you but you there's no I felt like there's no place to squeeze.

I'm I can I'm trying to make my guys to get bigger spreads. Go get bigger spreads, but you have competition. Yeah. Everything's been maximized. Everything's been maximized.

So what do you do?

Steve: Well, I know the answer.

Sean: So Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. You go nationwide.

Sean: You become Steve. Right? Yeah. It's like, what do you do? What do you do?

And I literally came to the point of you know, maybe maybe I maybe I maybe I've just run my course. You know, maybe maybe I just you know? And I wanna give a shout out to Nick Perry for one thing, and I know he's been on the show. And because he and he was an actual student that actually then I became the student of his. And, and I reached out to him, and I said, tell me about this nationwide thing.

Right? And this was after me, like, three months of agonizing on what we could do and how we could change things and trying to work with my team on what we can maximize. And I finally got on the phone with Nick. So I appreciate it, Nick. You know?

Thank you so much. And, and, I asked him. I said, hey. What you know, tell me about your business. And and he'd kinda started explaining what they did and the cost per lead and the leads per deal and the average deal size.

And I'm like, really? And everything's over the phone and, like, you know, and just like, how did it done? It just didn't make sense. And so it was a real barrier, and it took me about a month to really wrap my head around that whole process, you know, of what to do and how to do it. So at that time, now we're in, you know, basically, September 2019.

I said, you know what? You know, I'm just gonna we didn't have any process, any procedures, any anything. Really hasn't told my team. Right? My team's all local.

They're going on appointments. I have a whole sales team, and they're going on, you know, 15 appointments a week. And it's just a it's a machine that we're doing, and we're bringing in contracts and doing deals, but we're not making that. Right? We're we're we're done.

So, and, like, and, like, how can I, you know, teach? But I didn't feel congruent by by what I was teaching. Mhmm. So I'm like, there's a disconnect there, and I it was tough. It was like I had a big disconnect.

So I'm like, what do I do? Do I just you know? I mean, I I own a bunch of oh, actually, we bought an apartment at the 2019. So I didn't I didn't have I had about 500 units apartments. Financial is okay, and I could do whatever.

So I'm like, maybe I'll just do another business. Right? Maybe I'll go buy a restaurant, and I'll do a bar. You know? I have to worry about any of this stuff.

Forget that. I'll be I'll be done. You know? And I may do something else. I started looking at some other businesses, something I could buy or do something like that.

And, but I love real estate.

Steve: You know what

Sean: I mean? And I love teaching real estate, and I had followers and people all these years and stuff. And I'm like, you know, again, my wife's like, get to work. And I'm just like, you know what? And I buckled down, and I talked to Nick, and he kinda broke down their business model over you know, I think we had a Zoom call for about, you know, maybe an hour.

I kinda broke it down, and I was like, okay. I got it. So I did a PPC campaign national. I hit I targeted every single state. I hit The United States.

Steve: All 50?

Sean: All 50. I hit The United States. When I went targeting on Google, nothing's excluded. Hit The United States. USA.

USA. And I put it on. I I I basically created a website national. We switched our CRM to FreedomSoft. Rob Swanson taught me to to go to FreedomSoft.

So I went to FreedomSoft, and, we went national. And we we started getting leads in from Pennsylvania and these small little hold down towns in Ohio and and, like, Macon, Georgia and all these, like and my team now is like, what what what what the heck's all what's this? You know? So, literally, everybody so I did that for, like, September, October. Leads came in.

Everybody quit except three people. Wow. Right? And so I'm now it's now December November, December, right before Christmas. My whole team quits.

Everyone's got they all like, they just start dropping like flies. They can't do it because we're we're floundering to try to figure out this business model. Sure. And we're contracting, but then canceling. And then we're contracting more than canceling.

We didn't know how to sell it. We didn't have see, we get here we get deals here. I had a I had a buyers list of fifty, sixty thousand people. We'd send an email out, text us out. We'd sell in second.

Right? We'd do just like that. It'd be like a machine. We clock where we had. Eileen Brown, which is my title rep here, closed all of our deals and stuff, and we had a machine that was going It was optimized.

It was completely optimized, but except the cost per lead start increasing. You know? So that that was so the procedural side of what we did was optimized to the t. So we changed, and it's a complete different procedure nationally than locally. Yeah.

So now I put this whole different procedure. Everyone's like, I can quit except three girls. Three girls. Right? And, and they stayed with me.

I said, you guys stay with me. Stick with me, please. We're we're gonna we're gonna crush it. Just trust me. And they stuck with me, and and we got through November.

We got through December. I hired a sales guy that came in at the December, started in January. We signed 40 contracts out of the gate between myself and him in January 2020.

Steve: That's more than one a day. Yeah.

Sean: Yeah. 40 contracts.

Steve: Yeah. Good.

Sean: I was just slinging them. And it was amazing because these leads are coming in. They're all motivated. We're I was getting deals in Detroit. The people are practically giving it to us.

We take it. Detroit. Right? Right? So we're slight we're signing these contracts.

We closed one. We canceled 39. Closed one. You know how much our revenue is for January 2020?

Steve: $8,900.

Sean: And the little Hoedunk town in Indiana, we found a by he was a gym owner who happened to who's like, I'll take it. You know? Yeah. We made $3,900 in January 2020. Yeah.

Now I'm sure people watching us going, what? Right? But I had three people, and I had, well, four. I had this this one other sales guy that that, that probably went through your training and, you know, and crushed it. But it was tough.

We're struggling. Then February, we did a little bit better. We sold, like, two or three or four more, and then we got some more contracts. And then guess what happened in March 2020?

Steve: Global virus.

Sean: Yeah. The yeah. Exactly. So had that happened and, at the time that the week the country shut down, I was in the process of interviewing my now COO. His name's Josh.

Awesome guy. Right? And he's used to making 400,000 a year. And he's used to running big sales teams all over the phone. Mhmm.

I've been kind of, you know, talking to him and kind of before this whole pin you know, thing came along. And, and so what happened was, I, I was the the the country, and he goes, well, what do you wanna do? Do you wanna hire me or not? Because I got some other you know, I got some I'm like, you got other opportunities, though, this country shut down. So I and, again, blind faith.

I'm like, I hired him the week the country shut down. I taught him over Zoom, and I have my team. We had Zoom calls with huddles every day, and we went to work. And all the people that quit all called me back Mhmm. Because they wanted their jobs back.

Right. Because they didn't their jobs got screwed. Right? And they're doing layoffs, and then we're crushing and now hiring. Mhmm.

And we, from there, started building. And, you know, we went out and started doing deals and started doing two a month and three a month and five a month and 10 a month and 12 a month and started growing it from there. And we've really honed in our processes and our procedures and, and what we were gonna do. So there there was that point in, in that December, you know, in that, you know, November, December when you know, before I kinda talked to Nick of, do I really wanna do this? Do I really wanna kinda really dive in and take on this new challenge and this new business model and this new nationwide thing and this new wholesale thing and this new it's completely new.

Oh, because I'm you I'm I'm good like you are in person. I wanna meet you in person. I'm gonna I wanna look at the house, and we're gonna see your family. We're gonna close. So, so that that that was my quitting point in in, you know, where I contemplated in, you know you know, in the car the first time, you know, and it took me about maybe, you know, couple two, three hours to get out of it.

And then I contemplated in 2008, that was a long contemplation to, you know, the am I gonna quit? You know, here was, you know, am I gonna quit, was, you know, probably about maybe an hour. And I'm like, okay. No. I'm not gonna quit.

We ain't talking about it. Nuts. I'm then you get you get a you get pissed, and he was like, I'm gonna just crush it. Right? I'm gonna go after it.

Right? And attack, on a mission. So, I went after it and, and and just start and we we started hiring people, started going. Then 2021 happened. And what happened in 2021 at the latter part of December 2021?

There was the writing on the wall. Mhmm. Housing starts started decline. Right? It started to I mean, literally started to come off.

Housing permits started to come off. And during this time, because of what happened in 2008, things happened for you and not to you, what happened in 2008, I really educated myself on what asset classes did well during the crash and, what how could I know a crash is gonna happen again. Right? So in 2000, '21, latter part of 2021, I saw kind of the writing on the wall. I knew something was up.

The real estate market was frothy. The, the houses were, you know, parabolic. Stock market was parabolic. You know, I was like, what you know? And I saw starting to see these indicators.

Inventory started to increase. You know, so we had these signs of these things that are happening. So that's when we really looked hard at, of understanding what happened in 2008 to cash buyers, 2007 in cash buyers. Cash buyers exited the market for a better part of 2007 and 2008. Mhmm.

And the people that were buying were bottom feeders looking for, like, ridiculous deals. I mean, I remember doing deals in 2008 in Phoenix, Arizona, houses that were $2.20. I was contracting for 10 to 15,000 and selling for 30,000 that were 200,000, right, in in in in Maryvale. Right? Yeah.

I remember I contracted a house. Today, there's probably worth 400 Mhmm. For $8,000. I think I sold it for 30 or something like that. Yeah.

That made that that's what happened. So, so I saw the writing on the wall with all the indicators and what was happening, and I'm like, we've gotta learn. I told my team. I said, we're gonna list every property on the MLS. This is kinda, like, you know, kinda before anyone was doing it.

And I'm like, we're gonna sell every one of our properties to retail buyers. Mhmm. I said, wait. So we figured out that model. A lot of help with that.

Shout out to Corey Boatwright. He put what's called the RBP program together and kinda showed me how and actually walked me through a transaction. And then to you know, literally, we started listing all properties on the MLS, selling to retail buyers, and getting paid through the RBP process and being 100% transparent to the seller on exactly what we're doing and what our value add is Mhmm. In the transaction. Right.

And then we did that, and we trained our whole team. Tell the seller we're here to make a profit. Tell the seller we're gonna list the property. Tell the seller you're gonna see a profit on the HUD. Tell the seller that, listen.

We're gonna handle all the repairs if needed. You don't have to take care of we'll take we're like a concierge service. We'll take care of everything. You don't have to deal with anything, and you're gonna get this price. Right?

So we are completely transparent. Some people said no. Some people said yes. We still signed a bunch of contracts. And, and then in 2022, you know, I do one on one coaching.

I kinda moved away from that, but my phone was blowing up for people that did the fix and flip model Mhmm. Or did the, you know, the the contract buy and wholetail model were calling me because they were literally their business was dead. Right? Because they they couldn't they couldn't do it anymore because, you know, their cash buyers weren't buying. They couldn't just stick a crappy house on the market anymore, you know, and sell it at top price and and be able to sell and be able to do it like an open door model.

Right? That's why open door lost $1,900,000,000. You know? That's why, you know, Zillow shut down their home buying section, lost a $180,000,000,000. You know?

So you know, so, and and Offerpad stock went down, you know, 92%. You know? So, is the reason of that decline that happened in 2020 because of these indicators we pivoted. So now today, we do we sell everything on the MLS, and we sell 90% of our deals, 99% of our deals to retail buyers. Yeah.

Right? And, you know, we have our team. I've got five sales rep. We have a COO. We have a, you know, a couple of dispo team members, and I have an office, you know, over on the, West Side right there.

And and, and my team pretty much runs the entire operation. I do a once a week meeting for about ninety minutes or level 10 meeting there and go through all of our KPIs and numbers and dashboards. And, you know, and they have great months. You know? They have sucky months just like just like, you know, sales.

Steve: Every sales team.

Sean: You know, every sales team. But we're running at a 45% profit margin, which is which is great. And our cost per lead is under a 100. It's about $85. Our leads per deal is under it's, like, between 20 I have one sales rep that's a leads per deal at 7.75 leads per deal.

Wow. Right? I got another sales rep at 12 leads per deal. I got another one that's, like, 25. We're working on her.

But our average the average deal size is around 20 leads per deal. So at $85 cost per lead, leads per deal 20. Right? Average deal size is over $31,000. Right?

So you put those numbers together, it spells about a 45% profit margin Yeah. Which is which is which is money in this business. Now we have one one of the guys in our mastermind. His name is Jacob out of Atlanta. He has his entire sales team out of Egypt.

Dispo team, Egypt. And he pays them a 1% commission and pays them, I don't know, $5 an hour, right, out of Egypt. Yeah. And they crush. Right?

And at the mastermind you spoke at, right, he was there. He's, he he's, he was one he's the guy right in front. Loved your stuff. But he told me at the mastermind you spoke at that, he just broke a million dollars Wow. You know, in business, and he's running at a 74% profit margin.

Disgusting. Disgusting. Yeah. Disgusting. I mean, guys, hello.

Right? Hello. What business do you know on the planet? One, that you can run at 45%. Right?

Number two, you can run at 74% margin. I got it. That means you do a million dollars, you bring 740. So he'll you know? I mean, he's doing he's doing good.

Steve: I don't know any legal businesses there, Sonny.

Sean: Yeah. So, I mean, we're in a great business. We're in a great business. And and, I believe right now, we're in a great market for what we do because there's more distressed sellers coming into the market. And what we do is a is is a we we help for our our mission is helping sellers out of their real estate problems.

We get the vagrants that live in the house. We get the, you know, the tenants that aren't paying, that aren't responding. We get the the property that's vacant, but it's an out of state owner, and they don't wanna fix the property. We get, you know, the foreclosure situations. The deal we got on right now, we're closed on.

It's like that. You know? So we get all these we get these, these inherited properties where you have, you know, the siblings. We have title problem, probably, probates. We have to figure out title problems.

So we take all the all the all the difficult deals, and we turn those into revenue. And I remember my team is like, oh, we got another deal. Blah blah blah. You know? It's like, that's where we make money.

Steve: Yeah.

Sean: Right? What how can you how can you I mean, how can you make $60,000 on a deal, right, and just, oh, the seller wants to sell a bull market. You sign it. It's vacant. You put it on the market.

You sell it. You make $60. Mhmm. There's no now those happen. Right?

They'll come along, but where's the value add? You know? Not a

Steve: lot of value add.

Sean: There's not a lot of value add.

Steve: No. No. Very, very few. So I wanna before we go into what's going on with the market Right. And the future of our industry, because I think those are two things I definitely wanna talk about.

I wanna take a just a quick detour because you have your Flip to Freedom events. Yeah. Right. I've attended your Flip to Freedom events. And then we've talked about before, like, I just blatantly just stole your website and all your AdWords.

Right? Running my own PPC campaign Yeah. A long, long time ago because before you were It works. Right? Before you were talking about it, I was like, I gotta figure this out.

I was like, oh, there's a guy in town that does this. I'm a just copy his website. Right. Right? Works.

It works. So I remember I was at an event one of your flip to freedom events, and you're like, yeah. So on my event days, I turn off my PPC campaigns

Sean: Mhmm.

Steve: Because you had a bloody day with your PPC. Yeah. Can we talk about that real quick? Can you talk about adversity?

Sean: That's funny.

Steve: Things you things you don't

Sean: You remember that.

Steve: Things you don't anticipate, but we get punched in the gut all day, right, all the time. Wanna talk about that real quick because I

Sean: Well, it's interesting. We we do these, big flip to freedom events. Last one we did was, I think, was 2019. We have, you know, three or 400 people that come, to the events. And and people do a lot bigger events, but we have we have I mean, you know, so I'd have go on AdWords, and I'd show people the campaigns, and I'd show people the websites, and show people how to do it and what the campaigns look like and the structure and, you know, give some of the keywords and stuff and pretty much give everything away.

Because, you know, one thing I have learned is is if you have an abundance mentality, you know, there is no scarcity. Right? So, you know but then what happened was everyone will go click on our ads, you know, and our cost per lead will go up, like, dramatically, and our lead you know, stuff like that. So but now I pause the campaign, before and just tell them, say, guys, do me a favor. Just do me a favor.

Just go look at other people. Find Steve Tran. You know, you can find him and just click on all his stuff. You know? Do you

Steve: remember how much it was that cost you that one particular day?

Sean: Yeah. I I can't remember the number, but, I mean, I think we're spending, I don't know, $2 a day, and I think, I think we I think we spent the $2,000 or $3,000 a day Mhmm. Doing it, and I think they're all, you know, just just, you know, just fun leads here. I mean

Steve: So it wasn't too bad. It was only a couple grand couple grand.

Sean: Yeah. So that bad.

Steve: We, I saw you posting some stuff, earlier this week about Zillow, right, and how they do 1% financing.

Sean: Yep. And I have

Steve: not done my research on this.

Sean: Mhmm.

Steve: What is the Zillow 1% financing deal?

Sean: Okay. So and Zillow came out several months ago. I think it was, like, in June or July where they're where they're they're coming out with this 1% loan. Right? And it's interesting because now Rocket Mortgage and several other lenders offer this 1% loan.

And I think they they released it quietly, and now it started to get on, like, names like CNBC reported on it and someone else reported on it. But you'll start seeing that, in my opinion, become more mainstream where you'll see these different type of loan options. Because I just read this morning that, home affordability Mhmm. Right now, is it is it the worst it's ever been in forty years? Really?

Forty years. So for home affordability is the worst it's ever been in forty years. So I'm I was, you know, 13 years old. You know, forty years ago is 13. Yeah.

Right? Now I'm not saying the the housing was the same price forty years ago, but the affordability was as bad as in forty years.

Steve: What you would

Sean: pay

Steve: Yeah. Per month on your mortgage versus how much you make.

Sean: Right. Exactly.

Steve: This ratio is completely off whack.

Sean: Oh, completely off whack. So if you look at, the Fed comes out with a home affordability chart, and and it's it's interesting because it's bright orange if it's bad. And in 2007, that number, the the affordability index,

Steve: they

Sean: got down to 70, which is which is low. A higher is above a 100. Like, a 110 is incredibly affordable. 70 or below is really bad. So we're right now, I think, at, like, 65, right, affordability, which is considered a worse than forty years.

Like, it's terrible. So what impacts affordability is interest rates, of course, in home prices. So we're still have elevated home prices, and we have elevated now interest rates. And the Fed, they just came back out in Jackson Hole, said they're still gonna be aggressive on their their 2% target. So could they raise?

Could they pause again? If you look at the Fed watcher tool that gives, like, a prediction of what the Fed's gonna do here coming up in twenty four, twenty twenty three days, that they're basically stating it's about, you know, $60.40 type of thing. They don't know. The market doesn't know if they're going to raise or not raise. But, I I think they're on this path of continue to raise because they want to, crash the market.

They want affordability to come out. Even Fed Powell said, we're going to make housing affordable. Right? So how do you make housing affordable? If you're if you have to raise interest rates

Steve: Bring the prices down.

Sean: The prices have to come down. So something will crack, and I think and, obviously, I am not I don't I'm not a, you know, but, or a futurist, but I think we're gonna have a black swan event. It's gonna come up here probably in the next, you know, next six to six to eight months, some sort of black swan, something. We have an election year, and we all know about we don't even get into politics and all that stuff. We got an election year that's happening.

I think there's a black swan that's gonna happen here in the next probably six months or so that's going to rock the markets. Now we look at bank closures. Right? In 2008, there's 348,000,000,000 of, bank foreclosures, right, that that happened. Here, we've had three to the tune of $548,000,000,000.

Right? So we're already more on three banks, and those banks now are basically signaling red. Like, ding ding ding ding ding ding. We're red Mhmm. Because they have to increase their, their their, I think, their limits of of of basically, like, you know, their limits of cash they have on hand to cover, their risk profiles.

You know what I mean? So if you have something like that, you know, these banks, these small banks aren't gonna survive. And I think they're trying to do a consolidation in the banks and get rid of the small banks, right, and then just gravitate toward Wells Fargo, Chase, and and the big ones.

Steve: Make the banks are make the banks are too big to feel bigger.

Sean: Yeah. Make the banks are too big to feel bigger. I mean, they're the ones that they bailed out with a tarp back in 2008. Right? Yeah.

So so there's there's that going on, and then there's now this, you know, talks of this new Ares thing, variant that's coming out that could essentially they're talking about a new, jab that's coming out that they're gonna mandate for everybody. Yeah. So there is some sort of black swan event that's gonna happen. It's either in the financial sector or in the health sector, that's gonna impact. Now the interesting thing is in the timeline that you look at, the inverted yield curve is when the two year yield is higher than the ten year yield.

Meaning, if you invest in something typically long term, you should expect a higher yield. Good. But the two year yield is inverted now, meaning you'll make more money on a short term than you will a long term. So in that case, when it inverts, it predicts it's a predictor of recessions. So if you look at that happened in August 2022.

So it typically takes about anywhere from fifteen to eighteen months Mhmm. For it to hit the labor market. Right? So people ask, there's low inventory. What about the inventory?

We have this inventory. Blah blah blah blah blah this inventory. Right? You know, I post on there and it goes, oh, the housing market's fine. You know, there's no inventory.

Right? It's coming. Inventory is coming. And they and they wonder where is the inventory gonna come? Well, where did the inventory come in 2007?

Steve: Foreclosures.

Sean: Where yeah. Foreclosures. Right? But why does why did the property foreclose?

Steve: Well, people lost their jobs.

Sean: People lost their jobs. And people lost their jobs through unemployment. Right? So if you look at the timeline of what's happening, August and you if you fast forward fifteen to eighteen months, right, and it's August to August, August right now, so that's twelve months. So we get three more months before we're gonna start to see an uptick in unemployment or another three you know, another you know, there are five months after that.

So we're seeing end of this year to be first quarter, 2024 where we're gonna start to see an uptick in this unemployment. Now when you have unemployment, people go, no one's gonna sell their houses because they have low rates. Why would they sell their house?

Steve: They can't make their payments.

Sean: Unemployment. Now you look at credit card debt, hit over a trillion dollars. Right? You hit savings rates of Americans, hit the lowest it's been, you know, pre pandemic levels of the savings level. So you look at those two things, it's it's divergent, you know, by like this of debt here, down here, you lose a job.

I don't care if you have a 2.8% mortgage. If you lose your job and you can't pay the repo market, right, looking at cars being repoed. Right? It's like it's like shocking what's happening right now in the repo market. So you look at all these indicators, and you're saying something's coming.

Something's coming. Now if you're a real estate wholesaler, you're good. Right. You're you're you're good. You're it's it's like we're in the best time as a real estate wholesaler.

Right? So if you're doing fix and flip, just be cautious. Make sure you buy low and you sell low. Right? If you're doing buy and hold, I don't know if I do the BRRR method right now.

Right? I think I'd offset on the BRRR method. Would I do subject tos? Subject tos could be good with equity, but just know there might be a, a rent decrease. There will be rents that will come down.

And if you stress test it and you do get a 2.3% and you have a stress test on it at, like, a 20% on your rents, then buy it. Right. Right? Then buy it. I'm still looking at at at, you know, self storage that with seller financing that we can stress test, you know, with the rents on the property and and make sure it works.

So I'm not saying not buy. I'm not saying suspend what you're doing. What I'm saying is is just, you know, look at it and what does a stress test mean? Stress test means, you know, put it under a 20% rent reduction and see what that looks like. Put it under a 30% equity position and see what that looks like.

And if you do that and this thing still pencils You're good. Buy it.

Steve: Yeah. It's just like we see a lot with, a lot of people right now freaking out about Airbnbs. Yeah. Well, it says you only have one strategy. Yeah.

It was Airbnb.

Sean: Airbnb. Right. Right.

Steve: If it didn't work in any other strategies, was it the right purchase?

Sean: Right.

Steve: Yeah. Exactly. You didn't stress test.

Sean: You didn't stress test it. You didn't stress test it what it could be. Now if it pencils as a normal monthly rental at, you know, as a year long rental or a six month rental with a 20% stress test and you can Airbnb it, well, now you have your downside covered Mhmm. And you have your upside there. Right.

And and and you're and you're all good. So, that's why I'm I'm kinda looking at any asset purchase right now. I've kinda been on the sidelines, for probably a couple years now

Steve: where

Sean: I, you know, I see all the you know, on social. And I I I honestly, me too, I get kinda FOMO. You know, friends of mine that I know are buying this apartment and doing this thing and raising this and doing that and doing this. And, so I do get FOMO, and I'm like, oh, man. Maybe I should do this and that.

And then I'm like, you know, what is Warren Buffett doing? You know Warren Buffett's doing?

Steve: I don't know what he's doing.

Sean: Warren Buffett is sitting on the largest cash position he has ever had. You know? Now how does Warren Buffett invest? Warren Buffett invests by waiting till there's blood in the streets, like he did in 2008. Mhmm.

Right? He he he made a loan to Goldman Sachs that was literally a a 100% guaranteed back by the government, a guaranteed a I think a six or 7% return on it right there, and his loan was guaranteed by the government, and he make a guaranteed 6%, and he made up up upside if they did well. Can't lose. And he and he gave him, I don't know, how many billions of dollars.

Steve: Could not lose.

Sean: Yeah. Could not lose. Right? So those opportunities will come. And, you know, and, you know, and I know Ray Dalio says you know you know, they say, oh, cash is is trash.

Right? You know, but it's not. You know? You listen to some other people, cash is king. Mhmm.

You know? Right?

Steve: Well and I think, you know, you're talking right now. You you look around and experience a little bit of FOMO. You know? Like, you and I were in real estate. You started a little earlier, but you and I went through 2007, Lehman Brothers and TARP and all these other things.

And I looked around. When I surveyed the landscape looking around, I was like, oh, everyone that's doing a lot of flips got crushed. Yeah. Right? So you look as a Bought the Bolano homes?

Gone. Right.

Sean: This is a home builder. That is Chicago. Huge. Yeah. They built thousands of houses in Phoenix.

Bye bye. Yeah. Small home builders, spec home builders.

Steve: All these builders. Gone. Gone. So we look around. It's like, yeah.

It sucks. Like, when we look at other people doing these things because it for the last few years, I've looked around, like, Airbnb is like, man. Like, people are killing Airbnbs. Yeah. Maybe I should do it.

It's like, no. Because the when when the winds change, that's not quite the same.

Sean: Yeah. So I I I I agree, and I I I think that, you know, I think everybody you know? And and and the one thing social media has really put a I think social media is bad. I think you I think we need to use social media to, promote our education and stuff like that. But to let social media use you because you don't really feel good.

I don't care who you are, even me, even you, you know, the success you've had and what you created and things like that. You know, you know, unless you're Grant Cardone, you know, you know, then you don't feel bad looking on social media because you're, you know, you pretty much conquered everybody else on the planet. Right? But, you know, but me, I look on there, and I'm like, boy, man. I'm a you know, I I gotta get my game up.

I gotta do this, and I should be doing that. And I suck, and I gotta do this. And, you know, and you still have that. And I'm like, I I just gotta, you know, get get off it. And, you know, I I see my 20 year old daughter and stuff like that, and it's doing the same thing to her.

And I'm like, just listen. Use it for what it is. Don't let it use you. Mhmm. And don't feel bad and try to top other people.

Run your own race. Yeah. You know? I mean, it's like, you just gotta run your own race. God has given you your certain gifts and dreams and thing.

You know, not to yes. You can if if you wanna post it, you can post it, but just run your own race.

Steve: Yeah. Play your game. It's hard. It's hard to play your game.

Sean: Yeah. It is. Just keep your head down and do the things you're gonna do. You know?

Steve: So you and I, we love wholesaling.

Sean: Mhmm.

Steve: Right? Given us a lot. Mhmm. What's gonna happen to wholesaling, you think, in the next five to ten years?

Sean: Yes. So I've been thinking a lot about that because I'm always you know, my career, has been in wholesaling, building a business, and then, teaching. Right? Wholesale. So, you know, in looking at the of what's going on in the regulation side of the market, is interesting.

Meaning, we have to play, cleaner, than we ever had before. And we were kind of living in the wild, wild West.

Steve: But we were in unknown territory for the longest time.

Sean: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like like like the this wild, you know, wild wild west back in you know? We were we we're in a small little niche that nobody really knew about.

We didn't really disrupt the real estate industry. I mean, the the the realtor industry because it wasn't a lot of us. Mhmm. Now there is a lot of us because of you and I. Right?

And other people out there now that, you know, influencers are talking about, you know, this niche. So now, you know, there's laws that have come out in in certain things in, like, Oklahoma and Illinois and Philadelphia and Georgia and stuff like that. So you're just gonna be a little bit careful in what you do. Now could that law propagate to federal? Possibly.

Could it go state by state where each state by state just starts, you know, releasing things? Yes. But, you know, it it it will be a harder game to play, a game that still can be played, but you will have to close on your deal. You'll have to be the buyer. You'll have to close on your deal, and you'll have to be able to get it done.

Now interesting, the Novations slash RBP model, where you're, getting paid off the HUD on a recorded, essentially, a lien release. Mhmm. That, I haven't seen anything about. So that could be a, like, a surviving methodology that could happen. If, you know, if anyone's not doing it, I'd highly recommend looking into doing, that type of model.

But, the bottom line is is that, you know, either a, you close on it. Right? And you're the buyer, you close on it. Mhmm. And then you just stick it on the MLS and sell it.

There's nothing wrong with that. You can do that all day long, twice on Sunday, you know, within the certain, you know, marketing laws in Georgia and, you know, and stuff like that. But, but if you're the buyer and you're gonna offer some in cash and you can close on it, it's your deal and stuff like that. You don't have to, you know, you don't have to market a property you don't own. You don't have to, you know, stuff like that.

Then, you know, you'll you'll be fine. So so what are what are two ways that could, that you can continue to operate or prepare for? One is either, a, be well capitalized, or, b, two, have a lender that can that can you can work with the close and resell, right, and have a lender in your pocket that could that could start doing those deals, or two, be able to really understand the Novation RBP model where you can, start doing those. Those two things, I think you become essentially resilient even if Novations and RPP goes away Mhmm. At some point, than doing just the buy and sell type of thing.

There's no reason why you just can't buy it or sell it. You know?

Steve: Yeah. What

Sean: do you think about that?

Steve: So you look at so the number one lobbying firm. Right? For the longest time, I haven't checked recently. The number one lobbying firm, the NRA, National Rifle Association. Right?

Second Amendment. All about the second amendment. Right? That's number one. Number two is the National Association of Realtors.

Right. Right? That's the second largest lobbying arm in the country. Right? And I'm a licensed realtor.

So every year, they just take out $35 out of my dues, goes right into the lobby. Wow. And there's a million plus realtors. Wow. That's $35,000,000 every single year going to the coffers of the National Association of Realtors.

Sean: Yep. Right. And just start paying off politicians to get their ways on

Steve: certain They're very well funded. Right? And so what you're talking about with Oklahoma, I'm not sure exactly what drove it in Oklahoma. Illinois, you gotta be licensed. Philadelphia was driven by one of the most successful realtors in in Philadelphia.

Shocker.

Sean: Yeah. Right? Exactly.

Steve: And so there's this thing that's happening. And I when I started this podcast over five years ago, I started the first 10 episodes. It was wholesale realtor, wholesale realtor. Right? Because I believe that there's no reason why wholesalers should dislike realtors and realtors should dislike

Sean: wholesale. Yeah.

Steve: There's no

Sean: reason for it. Yeah.

Steve: But it exists. Right?

Sean: Yeah.

Steve: And so I believe that in five years, if you haven't figured out how to close on every single deal, you're gonna be in trouble.

Sean: Mhmm.

Steve: Right? And you don't need five years. You can figure this out in five months. You can figure this out in two months. Yeah.

Right? Go get funding. Yeah. Go create a relationship with a with someone that who's got money.

Sean: Right.

Steve: Right? We already know how to find motivated homeowners. It's not that hard to find people with money.

Sean: Right. So Well, the interesting thing is think about this, though. Think of the opportunity. Yeah. I mean but think about think about the opportunity.

So what if you were a forward thinker and you built those relationships today and something does come on down the line, you know you know, literally, all the wholesalers would be gone, and there'd be a handful of standing that would get all the deals because that market's not going away. Right. Distressed properties is not going away. Yeah. And you still can do your Google AdWords, but your cost bleed's not 85.

It's $18 or 18¢. You know what I mean? It's like and now your profit margins and now instead of a leads per deal of 31, I mean, average deal size. So you're you're having an average deal size of $50.60 grand because you're buying on it, closing on it, getting the best deal, and selling it. Yeah.

You might have a capital cost in there, but still

Steve: There'd be less competition. Less competition. Right. So really and this is the thing that I've always said with regulation. Like, if it happens, who wins?

Not the homeowner. Right? Yeah. Because they're gonna get offered less because there's less competition.

Sean: There's less competition.

Steve: And we have to buy it deeper for the for the numbers to work.

Sean: Right.

Steve: Homeowner's not the one who's gonna win.

Sean: Yeah. Because they still have to sell. Right. They still need to sell. Yeah.

Right? It's not that they wanna sell. You know what I mean? I'll just go listen. They they're in a situation.

They have an impending event, and they have to sell. Right.

Steve: And so with regulation in the place, there's less competition. Our cost per deal goes up, capitalization costs. So it's coming out of someone's pocket.

Sean: Right. Right.

Steve: And it's the homeowner.

Sean: Yeah. Yeah. So, the big short Mhmm. Michael Burry. You see what he just did?

Steve: He shorted the S and P.

Sean: Yeah. He he took,

Steve: like, 85% or he

Sean: took some 2% of his portfolio. Now he did it with derivatives. He did it with, he bought puts and calls. Now, you know, puts and calls, you know, you can put less down and control more. Mhmm.

So it could have been the way he structured a little bit different. But, that being said, it's still $1,600,000,000 position, essentially, either controlling, betting the market's gone is going down. Right? I mean, that that's a big position. He probably he got clobbered yesterday, because the market went up five points.

He probably just took a massive hit, but he doesn't care. Right? So so here's here's my here's my question to you. Is he in Big Short, basically had this big monster play Mhmm. And he had a conviction that the housing market was gonna crash.

Right? And his play was to do he bought, you know, insurance swaps on bulk dead work. So Bill Ackman. You know who Bill Ackman is? He was a fund guy

Steve: Yeah. Yeah.

Sean: Stuff like that. So he had a big play, in February 2009, and he essentially bought puts on the S and P 500, to the tune of $26,000,000 and turned it into 1.6 Yeah. 2,600,000,000.0. Crushed it. Right?

Because he knew he knew something. He heard that this this thing that was coming out that was gonna crash the market, and it did. So here's my question to you. You know, that that being said, we we know something's coming. What's the big play?

Steve: What's the big play?

Sean: I ask I ask everybody.

Steve: What's the big play right now?

Sean: The big play. What's the big play? What's what is your big play? What's your Bill Ackman? What's your what's your Michael Burry play?

Oh,

Steve: I mean, the the problem with options is they still cost money. Yeah. Right? There might be leverage, but you still have to put a significant amount in that ex the the option reduces time. It's not a permanent option.

Sean: Yeah. Like an ice cube.

Steve: Yeah. So I know something's gonna happen, but I don't know when it's gonna happen. Right. That's the problem. Yep.

Right? If we could time it, it'd be great. Right. I'm fully confident the market's gonna go down. The the the stock market's gonna go down.

Real estate, I don't know. It just doesn't make sense. If you talk to me like, all of us in 2020. Right? In 2020, when COVID happened, right, I called the toilet paper crisis of twenty twenty.

Right? Yep. When that happened, I was ecstatic. Right? Because I was like, okay.

I survived 2009. I know what this looks like. I've got money ready to go.

Sean: Yeah. Well, let's go.

Steve: I've got relationships. I got money in the bank. Right? I know how to source properties. Let's freaking go.

Uh-huh. And then that crash?

Sean: Yeah. It went it went straight up.

Steve: It went straight up.

Sean: Yeah. Because all the foreclosures, they just kicked the can down the road.

Steve: Right? Yeah. All the four all the forbearances in this month.

Sean: I I thought the exact same thing.

Steve: So if I were to bid it all then, I would have gotten crushed.

Sean: Well, actually, you probably would have done well because the market did go up twenty twenty twenty one to later 2022.

Steve: Where I was gonna start acquiring assets from my portfolio.

Sean: Yeah. Yeah. You would have had to buy and then sell within a year to two years.

Steve: Yeah. Right. So I'm I'm looking because I was looking forward to, like, 30% price corrections Yeah. To buy and keep. Right?

Sean: Yeah. Just buy and hold. Stick in there.

Steve: Yeah. So right now, I mean, I know the stock market's gonna go down. I know there's gonna be a lot of pain because you can't keep raising the Fed rate like this and have no pain. It just doesn't make sense.

Sean: Yeah. It's that's what I'm saying. It's it's, you know, per historically

Steve: Yeah.

Sean: It's, you know, job market is fifteen to eighteen months before you start seeing, you know, basically a loss in jobs.

Steve: But, like, every report says, like, okay. We're expecting this much job loss. Oh, we did not lose that many jobs. Okay. This month.

For sure, we're gonna have this came out this morning. Yeah.

Sean: It did go down, but the market went up. Yeah. See, the bad news in the market go the stock market goes up, but there was negative today. Yeah. But but but not a lot.

Little. You know what I mean? Even GDP went down today.

Steve: Yeah. So something's gotta give. The problem is with options and shorts and this and that is there's a window. Right. And I don't know when it's gonna happen.

I just know what's going to happen. So I guess if the the big play if there was gonna be a big play, is to put, you know, 10% of your cash shorting the market, but you can't short sell the market because you still have to it's it's a long term play. Right? Or it's a it expires. You can't do a long term short.

Sean: Yeah. So Michael Burry, basically, he bought puts on the, the queues, QQQs, which is Nasdaq and the spy, which is, the s p five hundred. But he did what's called leaps. Right? So leaps are long term equity positions.

Right? So so a leap is something as a year out. Right? So the time decay doesn't happen. It happens over a year time frame.

So if nothing happens in a year He's

Steve: in trouble.

Sean: He can do it. But he also can sell options against his position and collect premium if it doesn't happen. So there's a lot of cool things you can do with options. And I like trading. Trading's fun.

And I deal with just risk capital, whatever. And,

Steve: but longest I can short is a year.

Sean: Oh, no. You can do long. You can I yeah? I can buy a put option on the SPY right now, like, two or three years

Steve: years out. Okay.

Sean: Right? And just hold on to it and just, you know, go through the fluctuations.

Steve: Yeah. I would say eighteen months. I would say if I was gonna do eighteen months, it'd be the Yeah. If I was gonna go hard, it'd be putting money in that. We're gonna we're gonna go we're gonna crash.

Sean: Yeah. But would you put 92% of your portfolio?

Steve: No. I would never put 92% in any

Sean: I love real estate. Yeah. He did that. He did that in Michael Burry did it in in 2000 prior 2008. Would you put 26,000,000,000 like like Bill Ackman did right right before, like, the COVID crash?

So you it's gotta be convicted a convicted position, and it can't be a, tester position. Right? So and I'm not talking real about the stock market. I'm talking about more about real estate, but with with you know, I I've been thinking a lot about the big play because there is going to be a big play that's happening. Otherwise, Warren Buffett Warren Buffett wouldn't be sitting on his largest cash position ever

Steve: Mhmm.

Sean: In history. Why would he be doing that?

Steve: He could just be waiting for a correction to come in.

Sean: Right. I know. So he's waiting Mhmm. For the black swan. He's waiting for something to potentially happen.

So I think we have to be patient, and it's hard to be patient when you flip on social media.

Steve: Especially when you're driving

Sean: from value. This and buying that and doing this.

Steve: That's something to talk about. Hey. It's Monday, and I'm still doing nothing.

Sean: Yeah. I'm still doing nothing. Right? You know? And, you know, and, you know, it's it's crazy, but it's, you know, so but here here's the thing I look at.

If I'm wrong, that's okay. Then I just buy then. Right. You know what I mean? If I'm wrong and I load up on a bunch of property and real estate and go do, you know, you know, some, you know, some, pull out some debt on some class c apartment complexes, capital for and also and I'm wrong, I'm killed.

You know what I mean? So and all the investors with me are killed. I've been there, done that. I was wrong on land in 2008, and I went all in on land, right, at the wrong time right at 2008. So, I look at it now where I'm like, it's okay to be patient, but look at what the big play what is the big play that could be?

And I do think and it has increased 2022% year over year. Foreclosures, you know, and I I that's where I got started in foreclosures. I believe that could be a big play. A big play meaning where, you know, for for guys that are, you know, doing houses and they're used to house and stuff, that they still will have two to 3% mortgages. And if you get them before they hit the market and become inventory on the market, you can do a get a loan for two to 3%.

You can give them 3 or 4,005 thousand leave. You can, you know, reinstate their loan for whatever, you know, $10.15, $20,000. And now you have a house that you can do, and you can turn around and lease option it Mhmm. You know, for a long term, and you can get cash flow. Now the here's the thing is that you get you you can do that where you get you get you get money.

Literally, you can you can do it for breakeven because if you lease with an option to purchase, you can get down payment upfront. You can offset some of your cost upfront. It doesn't take a lot of capital to build a large portfolio. I did it.

Steve: You did it. Yeah.

Sean: I did it. I did it when you don't have, you know, have a huge because you're circulating, and then you could sell property, and you get a chunk, and you can take that, and you can literally build a $12,030,000,000 dollar portfolio, of properties. And and here's the thing is that I I look back historically of when the pivot happened in the real estate market where inventory decreased. Right? And if you look back when the market kinda comes back, you know when that time is?

Have you ever looked at the chart?

Steve: I've looked at the chart.

Sean: And then kinda overlay it Mhmm. With quantitative easing or quantitative type. So you overlay the real estate market with quantitative easing. You overlay the stock market with quantitative easing. Well, quantitative easing is when the Fed comes in and pumps money in the market.

Right? And if you pump money in the market, all asset classes rise. Gold, stocks, currencies, everything.

Steve: There's just too much money

Sean: out there. Is there yep. You pump money in the market. So right now, they're quantitative tightening. If you look at the Fed balance sheet, they're basically they're they're basically trimming Mhmm.

You know, their balance sheet right there.

Steve: Sucking the cash out of

Sean: the market. Sucking the cash out of the market. So we're you're we're seeing stocks that are kinda hovering right there, but I mean, not stocks, but you see, real estate kinda hovering right there, but it's gonna have to correct it's gonna have to get in line, at some point, and it could happen when these, you know, foreclosures happen. But I think there's a big opportunity. What if you built 50 houses, 100 houses of doing that same thing where you could do it with limited capital and build a huge portfolio at the time when the Fed pivots, they start the quantitative easing essentially the bottom.

Mhmm. If you look at, housing starts and and and housing permits pulled, guess when that number started to tick up? Quantitative easing. Right? So think about if that's the bottom and that's our signal, because you have to wait a signal before you get in, You wait for the signal, and who knows when that could be?

It could circle. You know, they'll quantitative ease when there's blood in the streets. Right? And they'll go, oh my gosh. We gotta come in.

We gotta save everybody in quantitative ease. So when they do that, then we can turn around, and I think and start, buying some really smoking deals and build a portfolio and then ride that. And here's the thing. Most people that are probably watching this, maybe or maybe not, but, got involved in real estate after post crash. Alright.

Right? Oh, yeah. Most of the people I've talked to I I did a I did a I I was in a room, and and I think there's a couple 100 people there, and I asked a question. How many people got real estate post crash, like, after 2008? Ninety nine percent of them.

There was one guy in the entire room of, like, 200 people Yeah. Who raised his hand. I mean so the the thing to learn from it is is is that in my opinion, my humble opinion, I'm not a procrastinator or whatever. But, do your own research. Look at when the Fed pivots quantitative ease.

Look at what happens to the marketplace. Look at what happens to inventory. Look what happens to all those technical indicators that we can look at and see what happens to that. And if imagine if you bought ten, fifteen, twenty, hundred houses then. Mhmm.

Right? You can ride it up as the inventory decreases, prices increases, quantitative easing, they do lower interest rates. You either, a, can refinance them out at lower rates, still cash away. But you do have low debt on it because you took over the loan, or or you can sell them into strength and you buy into weakness. Right?

You buy when everybody's fearful and you sell when everybody's, you know, at the height of the market. Yeah. So, you know, in 2021, that's when you sell. Right? Mhmm.

Because everyone's euphoric, and they wanna sell. So, and here's the other interesting fact. If you look historically of properties being sold, if the 2,005, properties being sold on the market, there were 7,000,000. 2021, guess what the number was? 7,000,000.

Mhmm. Right? Same. Right? So that's the p highest 7,000,000.

Right? Average is about 6,000,000. Guess what the lowest? So 2,008. How many houses do you think sold in 2008?

If seven is the high, averages yeah. Close. Really close. Good. 4,140,000.

4,140,000 houses sold and the worst housing crash that you and I know.

Steve: Right.

Sean: So you know what that tells us? Us as wholesalers, we have people, especially for selling to retail buyers, we can sell. Guess what guess what's the difference between 4,000,000, 6,000,000, and 7,000,000? What that difference is? Cash buyers.

Steve: Yeah. Well, you know and I was a realtor this time.

Sean: Yeah.

Steve: Right? And so I would show houses, and there'd be lines out the door for the houses. And people would be like, why are there so many people looking to buy this house? This is a housing crash. Yeah.

Why are so many people looking to buy us? Like, well, if you have a good house priced right, it sells.

Sean: Right. That's that's what I'm saying. So 4,140,000 houses sold at the worst housing crash in US history. And that means us as real estate wholesalers, if we understand how to sell retail and we can get our deals at wholesale, sell them at retail, there is a ton of market this market share that we can sell into. And all you gotta do is couple 100 a year Mhmm.

At $30,000, you're talking 6,000,000. Yeah. That's a pretty good living at 45% margin. Yeah. That's good.

Steve: Oh, it's great. It's incredible. Yeah. And I think, like, you know, for those of you guys that are watching this, Mike, like, what are these guys talking about? I was like, this is what when you get burned, right, like, you look around because we had a lot of time I had a lot of time to survey the landscape.

Right? Like Yeah. All these people getting divorced. Right? Because when money's good, everyone's happy.

Yep. Money's not good, all the marriages are getting tested.

Sean: Yep. It is. Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. So I got survey landscape to see, like, you know, what the wealthy look like. Here's how the wealthy operate. Here's how the smart operators look, and then you got everyone else who's reactive.

Sean: Right.

Steve: We got to see that too.

Sean: Yeah. So you wanna be proactive, and you wanna look and ask yourself the question, what is the big play? And then formulate the big play. You know what I mean? The other thing I think the big play is I what two asset classes that crushed it during the two thousand eight crash was student housing and mini stores.

I own 760 student housing units. You know know what I mean? That's why I've kinda built that portfolio. And I really see a huge opportunity in storage. The interesting thing about storage is, multifamily is about 70 to 80 institutional.

Right? So it's about 20% small mom and pop. Right? When it comes to mini storage, it's about 70% mom and pop Mhmm. And about 40% institutional.

So I think there's a huge opportunity in storage. The other interesting thing about storage, you can have the ability to do a forced appreciation on it quicker Mhmm. Because rents come up every month versus come up every six to twenty six to twelve months. So they're in the face lifts you can do on it. So you can buy a class c in a class a neighborhood, be able to force appreciation on it quick and either just hang on to it or you could, you know and rates are coming in and buying.

So if you build a portfolio of those, I think that's a big deal.

Steve: Yeah. I think the other one too, now that we're talking about it, is I think multifamily. I think, if you can get if you can raise enough capital

Sean: Mhmm.

Steve: I think it would not be unreasonable to see a 40% correction in in multifamily. Yeah. Right? So I think that you can position yourself. We know, one of my best friends is family friends with, in Emera's name right now.

They have a theater down in Downtown Phoenix. Anyway, they bought this entire complex right off 72nd And Shea. Right? That's Scottsdale Road. Right?

So the Northeast Corner, they bought the entire complex for $300, right, in the eighties.

Sean: Oh, that's what I was saying. Like, what?

Steve: Yeah. Like, in the eighties. Yep. That's worth quite a bit more.

Sean: Oh, yeah. Huge. Yeah. Crazy money.

Steve: Right. The entire Northeast Corner, like Holy cow. We're talking, like, the this the the supermarket, like, all the stores, all the entire retail thing, the entire corner. Right? $100.

Sean: So Well, I mean, it's like I I, Bob Parsons Mhmm. Bought the complex that I'm in. Mhmm. Right? And, the builder built it for 30,000,000.

It was valued at $4,050,000,000 in 2005. And they have a zip center in there. They have bodega, the pizza place. They have, biscuits, which is a breakfast joint

Steve: in there.

Sean: They have coffee shops and other stuff like that. So so it's a pretty big center. And, so he bought it at the auction cash for $8,000,000. Now it's worth about a 100,000,000. Easy.

You know what I mean? So it's like, those, I think, become the big plays. I think that the things we really gotta do is be friendly with capital. Mhmm. So I've I've been building relationships with capital.

Right? You know, and and and and, hoarding capital. You know? And, basically, building relationships with capital. Because when those opportunities come, you know, there's gonna be incredible opportunities to be able to do something that would normally take years to do.

You can you know, years and years and years and years to do to acquire and and and enforce, appreciate, and get that value that can do in, you know, you know, like, twelve to eighteen months. You know what I mean? Like, to be fast, super fast.

Steve: There's something that I learned from a mentor. Right? Like, if you have deals, right, you should be able to sell them. You should have. You'll sell them.

Right? If you have money, deals will find you. Yeah. Deals will find you if you have money.

Sean: Right. Yeah. And the thing is if you know marketing and what we do as a real estate wholesaler, you can find the deals. Right? You can direct mail them.

Right? You can PPC them. You can cold call them. Their deals the deals are out there. And and as the market continues to erode, smart people that have asset classes like those, they see the writing on the wall.

They're not stupid. No. Right? So they're going, maybe it's the time I'm 80 years old. I own this storage unit now.

You know, it's, it's a 100,000 square foot. And maybe maybe I should just exit. And they don't wanna put their capital $10.31 into another building. Mhmm. Right?

So they'd rather sell or carry at a good rate, stress test the heck out of it. Right? And if the numbers still pencil, then then you can pull the trigger.

Steve: Absolutely. You

Sean: know? And I I look at it like that. And I think if we look at stuff like that, then we still we still not inhibiting the opportunity, but we're also capitalizing on, I think, the opportunity of the narrative in the market right now.

Steve: Yeah. Got it. So we're coming up, past an hour and a half. So Oh, wow. Actually, I think we're coming up

Sean: a bit. You talk too much.

Steve: I'm sorry. My apologies. My apologies. So I wanna wrap up. I want you to think about something you wanna leave all the listeners with.

Guys, if you got value today, I mean, this is such an honor for myself to to be able to sit down with Sean. If you have value today, please subscribe. Don't keep us a secret. The more people the more you subscribe, the more people will actually see this. And then we do have our, sales leadership event coming up in just a few weeks.

So if you guys if you guys are interested in learning how to get your salespeople to work as hard as you, the business owner, text leaders to 33777. Nice. What last thoughts would you like to leave all the listeners with?

Sean: I think probably, you know, as a real estate as an entrepreneur itself, you know, you are the visionary and also the implementer at the same time. Mhmm. So you have kind of them both. So being a visionary, you have to be crystal clear on where you're gonna go. Because if you are not crystal clear on the direction you're gonna go and you can't convey it, then you can't, attract people to wanna get in your boat.

Do you see what I'm saying? Now what happens is you also have to be an implementer to a a degree where you're gonna have to get in. You're gonna have to row yourself. At times, you're gonna have to get in a row. But there will be rough waters.

Right? You're gonna come into dark clouds. You're gonna have rough waters, and that's when you have to have faith. Right? You have to have faith that you are doing the right thing, you're moving forward, and you are grounded, and you have belief in yourself, in your ability, in God, whatever you wanna believe in.

And if you have that faith and you continue forward and you are relentless about never giving up, then success becomes inevitable. Right? I had three opportunities and probably more over my career to give up. Right? And if I would have give given up on the first one, I would never be here today.

If I would have given up on this, you know, the the second time, I would have never been here today. You know know what I mean? And even if I probably given up on my third time, I would have never been here today. So it's an honor for me to be here, to watch your shows and what you produce and the content you produce. And if if you're in if you realize you're gonna be in the storm and you have that faith in your your your strong in your vision and your goal and what you wanna accomplish, then, you know, you'll handle the storm, and you'll do it in a way where you might have an exterior, you know, or, yeah, almost like an exterior type of circumstances and turmoil, and it might be dark in clouds, but inside, you're gonna be poised.

Inside, you're gonna be calm. You're gonna be you're gonna be grateful. You're gonna be happy. Even through the tough times, if you can operate in that manner, it's a great thing. Yep.

You know what I mean? And, and and having that element of faith of knowing that things happen for you and not to you, and, it is a kind universe. It is kind. And, then you will end up on the other side, and everything is will turn out okay. Might suck for a little bit.

It'll be okay.

Steve: It will be okay. Right? It always looks like

Sean: get all worked up and tension and, oh, and they can't sleep. I don't know. They stress. You know what I mean? Take a deep breath.

Have some faith. I mean, it's gonna be okay. You know? For me, I give it to God. Give it to God.

Put it in his hands. And you know what? He's never let me down.

Steve: Yeah. Absolutely. Someone want if someone wants to get a hold of you, what's the best way to do that?

Sean: You can just hit me at flip, the number two. Actually, just go to Instagram. Look up Sean Terry, flip to freedom. Just message me. Awesome.

Cool.

Steve: Thank you so much. It's been an absolute honor.

Sean: Great job. He's the best interviewer. Great. Best looking guy.

Steve: We won't go that far. I like the first part.

Sean: Steve train. Jump on the Steve train. We real estate disrupt us.