SPEAKER_00: 0:30

My name is John Ma. We're in the real estate investment niche. I've got a brand called Blue Trust House Buyers. And what we do is we buy older homes from people who just want to sell as is. What we do on the back end is we'll renovate them, flip them, and that's how we monetize. We could say that we serve like these homeowners, which is true on the business to consumer side. But in reality, in this industry, it's such a saturated industry. And to be honest, it's a, I realize it's a commoditized business, meaning myself, I'm a real estate investor, and there's another real estate investor just everywhere, right? Like they're everywhere. And what I offer probably isn't that much different from anyone else. A lot of businesses are like that. And say lender, not to knock on lenders, like how different is one lender from another lender and from one agent from another, right? You have a gradient of crappier agents to better agents, but in terms of that upper echelon of better agents, they're up, they all offer the same services, right? So that's what I mean by it's a commoditized business. So one thing that I really try to focus on is building, either building community or helping other businesses that align with what we're doing. Like for instance, me going direct to seller is we spend marketing dollars to find these opportunities. When in reality, I think the better value add or the better thing to spend my time on is meeting other agents, because I can talk to, let's say, five different sellers on a given day. Let's assume I talk to one agent, an agent's doing the same thing, right? He's talking to five other sellers. What if I just talk to five agents instead? So almost like building a giant pyramid scheme, right? But in a good way. So one thing I really want to focus on is establishing relationships with various agents, other real estate wholesalers, which are essentially they're on the streets looking for deals for investors, right? So building some sort of community and educating and offering value to these people, right? Because a lot of agents, a lot of wholesalers, they're not everyone, but a lot of them are in the beginning of their journey. They're trying to figure it out as well. And if you can help enable them and accelerate their growth path, you know, whenever they find opportunity, they not always, but they'll probably think of you once in a while. And that's how you can get these deals flowing. And you make it into a team game rather than all right, I'm just gonna spend money on marketing and find these opportunities myself. It just goes a much longer way.

SPEAKER_01: 2:59

That's amazing. However, I would like to know, take me back to the beginning. Like, how did you get started in all of this?

SPEAKER_00: 3:04

Man, I always look back on life and you could always pinpoint or you can come up with like a journey or a story of, hey, I had this passion and this and that, and that's how I got started. But in reality, I think a lot of things, a lot of times we miss the the perspective of it just happened in your life, right? If you didn't meet a certain person, maybe you would have never come across a certain thing that that that started everything off, right? Uh whether it's like a career or some sort of hobby. Right. So I'd say a lot of it is luck, right? And I know we hate to say, especially entrepreneurs, they hate to say success, it's on the backbone of luck, but in reality, like a lot of things are just completely based on chances and luck, right? But here's the thing though, the more opportunities you take, the higher the more opportun what's a good way of saying this. Rather than saying success is a byproduct of luck, like the more you do it, the luckier you get, right? Say you roll a dice and you're hope or like a like two dice and you're hoping to hit like double six or something, right? Or double ones. The chances of you hitting that on roll one roll, you know, it's fairly low. And I wouldn't bet on your all of your money on it. But I can tell you, if you just roll that over and over throughout the day, you're gonna hit that double one pretty often. So that's what I mean by a lot of things are a byproduct of chance and luck. And I guess to get back on your original question, what was it? How to get into real estate investing. Man, like I stumbled into it. I was working a government-related job, and honestly, I recognize that that's like a great opportunity. Not everyone had that opportunity coming out of college, having a pretty decent job and everything. So that's what I mean by it was uh there's a lot of luck element behind it because I know a lot of people work pretty hard at their nine to five day job. Say they worked at Walmart, and when you're working at Walmart, not only do you get you don't get paid that much, but also like you you gotta be on top of things, right? It's customer service all the time. Like it's a harder job. So I would say there's an element of luck to that. Because I had a government-related job, there's a lot of downtime between like different projects and stuff like that. And that allowed me to just research things online. Like I was a huge internet nerd. I like to look up internet forms and get into different topic groups and learn about things, right? And I was at that point where I just want to look into, hey, how do I build wealth? Right? How do I build wealth? How do I increase my income and all that? And I came across sites like Bigger Pockets, which is a really common community or form that a lot of people come across and get into real estate or use that as a resource to meet other agents or wholesalers or other investors, right? From there, it just became a journey, just buying my first house and kind of house hacking it. House hacking is this term where you buy a house, you finance it, obviously, and you have like multiple rooms and you just rent them out to your buddies or to whoever. And I was in my mid-20s, so it was easy to do that. Just have my buddies live with me. It was really easy to do. It was a no-brainer. I like having roommates, like I would have done that anyways. That's what got everything rolling. And then one thing goes to another and you get into flips, right? And then you learn about okay, how are people doing flips? How are they buying these, buying these projects with cash, right? Like that was like a huge question mark in my head. So I started going to meetups. I started meeting other people who were doing house flips and that type of stuff. And I can tell you some of the earlier meetups I went to was that was Causa. Rob Chavez runs a really good group. He calls it Grid Now. But that was one of the earlier ones. There was another one called Alpha. I'm not sure if it's still around. I met some people that were willing to let me follow them around on their projects. And I think just that personal one-on-one introduction, or I call it a mentorship, even though they weren't there to say, okay, first you do this, then you do that, right? But it was more so building a personal relationship. And it was like like proof, right? It was proof that, okay, this is a normal person that kind of did this, and I can probably do that same thing, right? You step foot into someone's project and it becomes real in your head. It's like these internet gurus, they talk about this kind of like a law of attraction type thing, right? They're like, oh yeah, I just go into an expensive dealership and sit in the car and it becomes real, right? It sounds hokey. If you've never been in like that thing and you step foot in it, now your imagination starts churning in a different way, right? You start coming up with new ideas, you start thinking, how do I get to this? And that kind of had a similar effect when these people were willing to let me come along into their projects and see, okay, this is a real project this person's doing. And here's how they did it. They went off and got a hard money loan, they got their contractors lined up and put the pieces together. So that's what got me started and in all that.

SPEAKER_01: 7:49

That's beautiful because it like made this huge monster of a dream. Like, like you said, when you go sit into the car at the dealership, the luxury car, it makes it real. That's why uh what is it called? Vision boards are so important. Yeah. And being able to break it down into like baby steps.

unknown: 8:07

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 8:07

Here's how to accomplish it. Now you said that your goal is to provide white glove service to homeowners. What does that look like in practice at Blue Trust?

SPEAKER_00: 8:15

Yeah. One thing I realize when we're talking to a lot of these distressed homeowners is first off, people who aren't familiar with the business or the industry, they always wonder, okay, why the heck would someone sell their house for half the value? You're ripping them off, you're stealing their equity, you're taking advantage of old people, whatever it is. In reality, a lot of people have they have a problem going on, right? It might be a financial problem, or maybe it might just be an emotional problem, or they have some sort of circumstances where they just don't want the house. Like you value the house because you're a younger person, you want to build wealth, but they actually don't really value that house anymore. They've had enough of it. To them, it's a problem. So it's important to recognize that to understand what the problem is you're actually solving. It's because it's not just they want the house sold. They could have contacted a realtor and got more money for it if you list it on the market. I always tell them that actually. But a lot of them don't want to work with the realtor. They don't want to deal with the hassle of getting it listed, having pictures of their house and having people walk through it. I think a lot of people just want it done without, you know, having nosy neighbors, being in their business, that type of stuff. And sometimes maybe their house is a little bit messy. And to them, it maybe it's a little bit embarrassing and they don't want to say it. So, whatever the reason is, they just want someone that can just give them an offer and just make it just a done deal. So part of that white glove service is just understanding what it is you're trying to solve for them, like what the actual problem is, because a lot of times it's a problem that you know they're not saying, right. And just making it a really easy transaction because they came to you because they wanted a quick solution. So because they trusted you in providing that, you don't want to make it more complicated. There's a lot of people out there, a lot of wholesalers operate this way where they'll tell a seller, hey, we'll buy your house for let's say a certain amount, 400,000, right? And then they want to go off and resell it to another cash buyer for 450. And that's fine. But a lot of times they just complicate the transaction. It was supposed to be a very easy transaction, just cash deal, and then we close in 30 days. But now they're going off and bringing a whole bunch of people in for inspection, and then they can't find another buyer for it. So now they're giving excuses to the seller, hey, for this and that reason, hey, we got to drop the price. And this is like a week before closing, right? So you're not really serving them anymore. Although we wholesale deals sometimes, we try to make it as tr we make it as transparent as possible, let them know exactly what's happening. If we're not gonna be the end buyer for it, we'll tell them, hey, we're gonna bring our network of investors, we're gonna take a look, and we might end up sending up selling it to someone else if you know they're okay with it. And usually they don't care. They just want to know the entire they which they just want to know what's happening, just being transparent with the transaction. That's that's what I mean by providing a white glove service to them. And uh same with agents. Say an agent or another wholesaler brings another opportunity to us, and we feel like if we end up being the end buyer, we'll tell them. Hey, if we need uh some sort of inspection period, just two, three days, we'll tell them. Or if we feel like, hey, maybe it's not a good fit, but hey, maybe we'll bring a buyer, we'll tell them. Hey, I think we'll have another buyer for it. At the end of the day, you just gotta keep that transparency there so that people have confidence in you that you can take it to the finish line. And I always equate real estate investing closer to a pawn shop business, to be honest.

SPEAKER_01: 11:48

Stuff like thrift stores and pawn shops exist.

SPEAKER_00: 11:50

Yeah, I really equate it to a pawn shop business. I think a lot of people trying to get into the business, they often they overcomplicate what a transaction might look like because there's all sorts of courses out there and you know, all sorts of coaches selling programs and they're trying to sell you some sort of service. And there's just a lot of content float floating around and it can be confusing for a lot of people. But at the end of the day, it's pretty simple. It means it's a pawn shop business. Just talk to people, and if that opportunity doesn't work, then it just doesn't work. There's nothing, there's no magic script you can say to convince anyone to sell if they're selling. Yeah. There's a lot of opportunities where it's a maybe, right? You can tell, okay, they're gonna sell to a cash buyer investor, but maybe not with you and maybe not yet. And those are like the maybe category, right? Those are the ones you can nurture for a period of time and or maybe forever until they sell. But there's gonna be a segment of people that's just it's gonna be a no and it's always gonna be a no, and it's really not worth talking to them. There's gonna be some people that are just a low-hanging fruit, it's a slam dunk, it's a yes just right off the bat, right? Because they're phenomenal if you find them. But most of them are just gonna be in that middle zone, right? They're just a maybe. And there's no magic line you can really say to get them to sell, but just nurturing and building trust.

SPEAKER_01: 13:08

You have a background as an in the Navy, correct?

SPEAKER_00: 13:10

I've worked for a Navy contractor. Okay. Yeah, I used to work in the Newport News that we we built ships for aircraft carriers. Yeah, I I refueled the Roosevelt and the Lincoln.

SPEAKER_01: 13:20

Very cool. Do you feel like they had a certain like level of service that they ran you guys through?

SPEAKER_00: 13:26

A service?

SPEAKER_01: 13:27

Or just like values?

SPEAKER_00: 13:28

Yeah, I I think so. And it's not something I realized at the time, right? Because it was my first job out of college. We're just trying to figure it out and figure out where you fit. Like you're trying to figure out where you fit in the world, but also like in the organization. Because when you work for a larger enterprise, it's like you start on day one and then you're not too sure what you're doing, and people give you assignments here and there. You're not really sure if like you're doing enough. But yeah, there were some, what do they call them? Like mission statements. Like, I don't remember exactly what they were. I think one of them was like just build good ships or do good work, something like that, because it was important work. Like we're refueling like these aircraft carriers, and you have a I don't know how I don't know how many, but there's a lot of service members that work on those aircraft carriers. And not a whole lot of people see one in person, but once you see one in person, you're just like, oh my God, this is a floating city. It's insane. Yeah, you realize, okay, this is you can't make any mistakes on it. And if you have any questions or uncertain about something, you gotta bring it up and make sure nothing slips through the cracks. I think I do take that with me outside of since working for the Navy and taking that into my own business and also into your personal life as well, right? Because for instance, uh, say you have an arrangement with someone and you guys plan to meet somewhere, even if it's just for fun, right? It's so you're gonna be there at this time, if you not show up or tell them last minute, oh, I'm not gonna make it, it messes everything up, right? Even though it's not like these stakes aren't super high, it's still not a good look. And in reality, you know, business is the same way, right? Because all a meeting is like a meeting of the minds between two people. I told them, hey, I'm gonna meet you at your house at this time, and they're expecting me at this time if I show up late or just cancel on them last minute. It's like dependent on you. And there's times where sellers, like, yeah, that's common, that's fine. I think a lot of times you just gotta realize, okay, regardless if they're serious or not, and they probably have stuff going on, that's fine. Sometimes you just have to meet them with meet them at where they're at. And that's part of providing that that service.

SPEAKER_01: 15:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 15:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 15:39

Yeah, that's interesting. How many people are on your team?

SPEAKER_00: 15:42

So Blue Trust is my personal brand. I work with a partner. We have another brand called Investor Collective, where we're working on this, it's a joint venture together.

SPEAKER_01: 15:51

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 15:52

So it's just us, us two, and then a few virtual assistants. The virtual assistants, they're out of South America and the Philippines. And we we try to treat them as just like any other team member, regardless if they're physically located here or if they're located elsewhere and working remotely. I think when it comes to I know you didn't ask this, but you know, in terms of the question.

SPEAKER_01: 16:12

Yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00: 16:12

In terms of working with virtual assistants, I know a lot of people treat them as uh like a disposable asset, right? It's like, all right, let me just get a VA to do this. And if it doesn't work out, just go find another one. In reality, a lot of VAs, they treat it as their career, they take it pretty seriously, right? Because say you're only paying them three, four, or five dollars an hour doesn't seem like much, but you know, where they're from, that's actually a real living. It's a real living. It's it's insane to think about how ridiculous the cost of things are here in the US, and you don't realize like that scale of where that goes in in in another country. In fact, in most countries, actually, a couple dollars an hour is that's a livable wage. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 16:57

Yeah. What are some of the biggest challenges that homeowners face in the DMV area and how does your process solve them?

SPEAKER_00: 17:04

I think this is where like the service element comes in, right? I think a lot of people try to build processes to do certain things. Like try to build a, I call it like a McDonald's model, right? Like you can build a McDonald's model and you plug people in, they just follow the instructions, and you the result is like a deliverable or hamburger or whatever. I think for this is something that it it will always require like that human element, that human touch. Like you can probably automate a few things using AI tools we have nowadays. And I think that helps for like mass marketing and maybe organizing information, but in terms of actually interfacing with a customer, you're always going to require that that human touch. So the original question was how percent of the people in this area, homeowners face. Okay. So in terms of homeowners that have a distressed property, a fixer upper, I would always say it's like it's an emotional issue that they're having, right? They feel like their home is old, it needs a lot of work, and they've had enough of it, right? Everyone has their story growing up. Maybe it was a happy home, maybe it wasn't a happy home, maybe it was a happy home, and now you're in a new phase of life, and it's time for a new chapter. And they just want an easy sale. And like I mentioned before, you always wonder, okay, why does someone sell the house for half the value or 70% of the value? It's they just want that convenience. And part of it is just understanding exactly what it is that you know they're going through and the real problem that you're solving, right? Because anyone can give an offer, anyone can sell a house for them. That's not like that valuable. Like I said, it's a commoditized business. We're competing with other investors, we're competing with real estate agents, we're competing with big box buyers. What we're offering is not that special. It comes down to that human touch and really understanding them and building that trust. And building that trust to allow to allow you to provide that deliverable. Cause like any, like I said, anyone can provide that deliverable, just a cash off or taking it to the finish line and closing. But it's building that emotional connection and trust is what it comes down to.

SPEAKER_01: 19:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 19:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 19:13

Very important.

SPEAKER_00: 19:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 19:15

Looking ahead, what's your long-term vision for Blue Trust and the legacy you hope to build in Fairfax and beyond?

SPEAKER_00: 19:21

Yeah. The vision here that we're executing is building a network of agents and other people trying to get into real estate investing and showing them like what it takes, right? Because like I said, there's so many coaches and influencers and different sales systems out there, and they're all trying to get more customers, sell you their service, sell you their data, whatever it is. And the ones that are good pump out so much content that you just end up you're just taking so much content. You got a direct mail vendor trying to tell you, yeah, direct mail is the best way. You got a Facebook marketing ad agency trying to tell you, yeah, you got to do it this way. And there's just so much information out there. And we want to build up this community and show them, okay, these vendors, these tools out there, they're great to use if you choose that path. But at the end of the day, you've got to look at what actually makes this business work. Is like I said, it's pretty simple. It's just a pawn shop business, right? Just talk to more sellers. And no matter how you generate these leads, whether it's through Facebook or Google Pay per click or whether it's old school direct mail or cold calling door knocking, all these methods, like they all work. Like they all generate leads. It's helping people see that bigger picture rather than being so myoptic on, you know, one coach's or one vendor's content and thinking, all right, this is the only way. And just seeing the bigger pictures to allow them to choose, okay, which marketing method might work for me, right? Maybe it's none of them. Maybe it's just going out and networking with people because that works also. And there's investors out there that just straight up look for deals on the MLS, right? People will tell you that doesn't work. There's no deals on the MLS. There are. You just need to sift through the noise, just like you would if you, you know, you're generating leads through Google Ads or through Facebook or through direct mail. You still have to sift through a lot of noise, right? Some marketing channels might have less noise than others, and you just have to recognize that some of the lower cost lead generation methods, like you know, cold calling, you're gonna sift through a lot of noise. But, you know, that's part of uh that's part of this bigger picture, right? We're building community, we want to build awareness and provide more educational content on doing this the most effective way. And I'm always willing to share like my failures because a lot of coaches and coaching programs will tell you about how great they are and they'll tell you about the wins, but it's like all these stock traders, right? They'll they'll only tell you about the wins. You don't see the losses and realize they're actually a net negative. You shouldn't even be listening to this guy right here. I always tell people I'm willing to share the losses, all the challenges. There's so many flips where I just lost money on. The funny thing about house flippers is people never talk about how much money they lost on some of the projects because it's embarrassing. You got into it to make money, not to be in the hole. But the reality is a lot of flippers have lost money on deals and they just sweep it under the rug and don't really talk about it. But I'm going to share them because I think it's important because I think it's important to study failure just as much as you study success. Because here's like the like the bias thing when it comes to studying success. There's so many self-help content out there. And I think part of the issue is a lot of it sounds really good. And a lot of it, it's like this paints a rosy picture around everything. I call it like a the Kim Kardashian spirituality, right? It's everything is just love and light. When reality, yeah, it is, but you also got to look at the real world because without the civilization, without all this advancement we've had, all humans are is like we're not that different from animals. And without these rules, it's like you come down to basics of just killing and like dominating another person for their protein and and nutrients. I mean, I hope we don't ever come down to that, but that's the nature of people. Yeah. So you just gotta look at the world as it is. There's the good and there's the bad, and you gotta study the ugly side just as much as the positive side.

SPEAKER_01: 23:23

Do you have a space that you share, the ugly and the positive? You're talking about your group.

SPEAKER_00: 23:28

Yes. Our brand that we're building is the investor collective. And we have a Facebook group that I've I've helped my friend Josh run. It's called a DMV Dealmakers have helped him run that past several years. And before we were talking, I mentioned that we did like these video episodes.

SPEAKER_01: 23:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 23:43

Actually, so I realized so that happened during COVID. That's what it was. We used to run meetups where we had events in various spaces. We brought investors in. The whole purpose was for networking, for people to share deals and that type of stuff. And when COVID happened, everything shut down. So we decided let's do a few video episodes. We invite a few guests and we had some pretty cool guests on there. But it it was a lot of work and we put a pause to that. But that's something I like to restart again. And I'm looking for guests to bring on that have a really good story. But uh, but yeah, I would say Instagram is probably the best one. I not only share these skits that we're building, but also just raw content as well, where I just pick up the camera and start talking about stuff. I think it's important to have both the skits and the comedic stuff that's fun to watch. But I think uh it's good to have a mix, right? Show a little bit of your business, a little bit of who you actually are, and a little bit of some words and ideas that you might have going on up here, right?

SPEAKER_01: 24:40

Yeah, that's smart. So as we're wrapping this up, is there anything specific that you would like to touch on that maybe I haven't asked you about?

SPEAKER_00: 24:48

Shoot. I don't know how much time I have to think about to come up with that answer. Yeah, I think we we touched on a lot. I think my final takeaway is the talking about the real world. There's the good stuff that a lot of influencers like to share, positive messages. I just want people to know you can be inspired by some of the success people have built. But when you're watching stuff on social media, you have to recognize that it is a highlight reel. Like the whole thing is meant to be a highlight reel to show you how cool someone's lifestyle is or how I mean, sometimes they exaggerate this, but how big their business might be. And you just have to realize this is literally a highlight reel. And people who produce social media, they treat it like a business. It's a business of it's almost like I have my own TV show on channel five Fox or whatever. It's a produced piece of content. It's a produced, almost like an online avatar. I think that's how a lot of people treat it. Like they treat their social media brand as almost like an avatar of myself. It's not the 100%, but it's like the maybe just a piece of it. It's kind of like the cooler looking piece because they're not showing you everything else, right? Everyone in the morning goes to the bathroom, sits on the toilet, but no one's showing that, right? There's so much to there's so much more behind the scenes. It's important that people recognize the difference, right? It's entertaining and can be inspiring to watch people online, but just understand that there's always the other side of it. Like an example is recently in the news. I don't know if you're heard Ty Lopez. He's a business coach.

SPEAKER_01: 26:17

And what's going on with that? There are so many people ripping him up right now.

SPEAKER_00: 26:21

Yeah. He's been like, I guess he was one of the original social media business coaches out there that got started on YouTube in the mid-2010s. And I believe he was raising money to buy like these failing businesses like Radio Shack Pier One, Bodybuilding.com, stuff like that. And I think he promised like a certain percentage of returns to those investors. And I think things probably went a little bit sideways, right? Like they weren't producing those returns. So they, in order to pay those investors back, they went off and got more investors and collected their money to pay off the original investors. And that's when you when you're why they call it a Ponzi scheme?

SPEAKER_01: 27:00

Yeah. I didn't understand it.

SPEAKER_00: 27:01

Yeah, so that's where things got sticky, right? That's what I mean by there's things on social media. He's making his YouTube, YouTube com content, his Instagram content about how great he is at business. And I'm sure he he is, but you know, people have their failures. This is one of them.

SPEAKER_01: 27:17

And when you don't, and maybe when you're not as transparent about that, other people are quick to blast you when they see those failures. If you're only sharing your highlight reels, because I was surprised when I started seeing that because I did see some of the polished videos he was producing. I was like, oh, he's back. And then soon after I just saw eight to twelve different content creators that I follow talking about their run-in with him in some negative way. I thought that was interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 27:45

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, point of this is the point being you can watch their content, but just realize that's like the TV show of them that they created. It's kind of it's the highlight reel, the cool lifestyle, the mansion parties, and you're not seeing the other side of it.

SPEAKER_01: 28:01

The ugly.

SPEAKER_00: 28:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 28:03

You give yourself grace, right?

SPEAKER_00: 28:04

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 28:06

Yeah, unless you're comparing. Is there anything else you'd like to touch on? I think that was so important for you to double down on.

SPEAKER_00: 28:14

Yeah, I think that's my final takeaway. But if there's any agents out there that are, if they have fixer-up or deals or looking to get more into flips, I'm always happy to connect and show them some of the things that we do, some of the flips I have and some of the pitfalls I've gone through. And at the same time, like I partner with people as well, right? If they bring a deal, happy to partner with them. Or if they want to do the deal, I'll figure out how I can do it with them as some sort of joint venture. Or those wholesalers out there trying to move a deal. I'm always happy to work with them. And I'm always happy to show people how to generate these leads and find these opportunities as well. Cause a lot of agents, they got into the business to increase their income and build more wealth. But oftentimes they get stuck on that hamster wheel of constantly just doing sales, which is fine because you're making a lot of money at it, but you need to have a short-term investment and longer-term investment as well. And sometimes they're just too busy to take it to the next step and maybe do their own flips or work with specific clients because a lot of agents out there, they're constantly serving first-time home buyers. And the issue with that is it's almost like a one-time customer, right? Yeah. If you work with investors, you're getting multiple buys with that customer. That's what a business should be, right? Yeah. When you start a Walmart, you got repeat customers coming to Walmart. You're a real estate agent. It makes more sense if you have these repeat buyers and sellers, right? So I always tell agents, hey, I think the smarter thing is always working with investors such as myself or other investors out there. And I always tell agents, you just be careful with some investors. They always have some long study period or they'll have these kind of really loose contracts where it just a lot of weasel clauses where they can just get out of the contract. Whenever we do a contract, we make it as solid as possible. Oftentimes we don't have any study periods or bring cash. And a lot of times we'll do them side and scene because I'm pretty familiar with a lot of the inventory out there, especially if it's in DC. In my opinion, they're all they're all uh pretty cookie cutter. They're all pretty cookie cutter projects. Just barely looking at it, I can tell roughly what it's going to cost on my end. Can get a I can give a cash offer relatively quick without any inspection periods or contingencies. So that's awesome. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 30:30

That's good. When you've been around the block a little while, so you can be able to do that, right?

SPEAKER_00: 30:34

Yeah. A couple years, several years. There's people who've been doing it for decades and decades, but we're all on that journey. And yeah, I try to learn as much as I can from people that are experienced and still pass down that information to others that are still earlier in the journey.

SPEAKER_01: 30:47

So that's amazing. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. It was such a delight to hear about your story and all the great things you're doing in the future for homeowners, agents, and investors.

SPEAKER_00: 30:58

100%. Thanks for having me.