Real Estate Super Woman – Patti Robertson

Mike: Welcome to the FlipNerd.com podcast. This is your host Mike Hambright and on this show I will introduce you to VIPs in the real estate investing industry as well as other interesting entrepreneurs, whose stories and experiences can help you take your business to the next level. We have three new shows each week, which are available in the iTunes store, or by visiting FlipNerd.com. So without further ado, let’s get started. Hey, this is Mike Hambright with the FlipNerd VIP Show. Thanks for joining us again today. Today I have with me a very special guest. She’s a good friend of mine. She’s a superwoman, Patti Robertson. Owns lot of other businesses. I mean, it’s incredible. I won’t even read the list here, we’ll get into it in a second. But she owns a number of different businesses, is a true serial entrepreneur, and we look forward to learning about all of her stories and how she does it all, I don’t quite understand. But before we get started, let’s take a moment to recognize our featured sponsors.

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Mike: Hey Patti, glad to have you on the show.

Patti: Hey Mike. I’m glad to be here.

Mike: Thanks for joining, so this might be a two-hour episode to talk about all the stuff that you do.

Patti: Yeah.

Mike: I know you’re obviously a fellow HomeVestors franchisee, just like we are, and that’s how, that’s the main way I know you, but obviously, you own some Great Clips and some Jackson-Hewitt Tax Services.

Patti: Right.

Mike: You’re involved with a RIA Club, you own rental properties, you have a property management business, too right?

Patti: Right.

Mike: Yeah, and probably some other things. You’re a mother, and a wife, and…

Patti: Correct.

Mike: Yeah.

Patti: Yeah. The plate is full.

Mike: Yeah, I hear you. So why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about all the things you, without giving too much detail, just all the different things that you have going on, and yeah.

Patti: Okay. Yeah, so I’m Patti Robertson. I’m in the Hampton Roads market, and my husband and I consider ourselves sort of “franchise junkies”. We like that business model. I came from corporate America, and when he was very young, high school age, he started interviewing people in this marina. He’s a big boater. And asked them what they did for a living, and everybody who had big boats was self-employed.

Mike: Yeah.

Patti: So, when my company offered, it was Jackson-Hewitt, offered an employee purchase program, they allowed employees to buy franchises, we jumped on board and I worked for the corporate office, and he ran our local franchise, we were 25 years old, newly married, we had everything to gain, nothing to lose, had one baby at the time, and that’s how we got started.

Mike: Okay.

Patti: So we took out huge amounts of notes, drove old cars, and went to $0.10 shrimp night, that was a big night out. And that was the first one.

Mike: Okay.

Patti: Then that company got bought out by a huge franchise conglomerate, and my job went away, they moved out of state, and we had a little nest-egg, they bought us out of our stock options, so we used that to start the Great Clips. So we had “His and Hers” for a long time.

Mike: So they bought, they actually bought out your franchise, your location, you’re saying?

Patti: No, no no. They bought out the corporate office, the franchise store was bought out, so they bought the employees out of our stock options.

Mike: I see, ok.

Patti: So we had a 6-month old baby at the time, and I had to figure out what to do. You know, I didn’t really like the tax business from a day-
to-day operation. I loved working for the corporate office, but with a 6-
month old, I couldn’t really go back to corporate America and get a start from the bottom at 60-70 hours a week, so we met with a franchise consultant and ended up with Great Clips, so we had “His and Hers”, and then built up to about 5 or 6 stores.

Mike: Say that again, what is that? What is “His and Hers”?

Patti: “His and Hers” franchises. So my husband ran the tax business, and I ran the Great Clips, and we were happy that way for a long time.

Mike: Yeah.

Patti: And then we saw the writing on the wall. You know, industries change. I went to a big conference, multi-unit franchise conference, with people who own multiple brands, and met some Blockbuster franchisees, and the Blockbuster story is a great story, but it was right about the time in the early 2000’s when the internet was eating away at their business.

Mike: Yeah.

Patti: And they were, you know, trying to come up with some strategy for what were they going to do.

Mike: Yeah.

Patti: And so we saw the similarities with the income tax and decided we needed to come up with a new plan we needed to ultimately replace that revenue. We didn’t start out you know, as young people, deciding we wanted to have all these businesses.

Mike: Right.

Patti: But, you have to prepare when a market changes, you have to shift.

Mike: Right, right.

Patti: So, we decided we needed a long-term replacement of the Jackson-
Hewitt revenue, and met with another, with a franchises consultant again and that’s how we ended up with HomeVestors.

Mike: Okay, okay.

Patti: So, and that’s kind of how it started. It was an accident, sort of.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s how life usually works, right?

Patti: Yeah.

Mike: It’s not like you could’ve, at least for me and for most folks, it’s not like you could, if you look back, you say “this worked out exactly as how I planned”. It just happens, right?

Patti: Right, right.

Mike: So with Jackson-Hewitt, it’s interesting you mention Blockbuster cos they’re based in my hometown.

Patti: Oh, yeah.

Mike: So I had, and just from where I worked, in my corporate world, there were a lot of folks that left where I was at, and went there.

Patti: Really?

Mike: Which was, from one sinking ship to another, maybe from Radio Shack to Blockbuster.

Patti: Right.

Mike: But, at any rate, so has that actually happened, with the Jackson-
Hewitts? I mean, obviously there’s a lot more options, being online and has that impacted the business quite a bit over the years?

Patti: Oh, yeah, significantly. You know, the retail taxes, just the business model is diminishing, and IRS numbers are out for the first part of the season, and individuals are filing their own returns a lot more than using paid preparers. Especially in the lower end of the market.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. Well, plus the tax codes gotten so much easier.

Patti: Right, yeah, yeah. People are not afraid of, IRS is still putting people in jail, but people are not afraid of them like they used to be.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Patti: Yeah.

Mike: And so, and then talk a little bit about the Great Clips, how you continue to grow that, I know you just, before we started the show today, you said that you just added a few more locations.

Patti: Yeah, we just bought 3 more, we’re up to 11. Another franchisee in my market shifted into a different business, and so I bought her stores. We have 11 of those, and we are getting ready to build a brand-new one tomorrow. In the Norfolk market. So that’s an awesome, awesome brand for people that want to divers-. They’re one of the best franchise companies out there.

Mike: Yeah. That’s great. And so, at this point, we’re you’re looking at business opportunities, are you trying to stick to all the businesses you have now, are you, from HomeVestor’s speak, I bet you’re probably a high
“blue”?

Patti: No, I’m high “red” and “yellow”.

Mike: Okay, I’m high “blue”, so…

Patti: Yeah.

Mike: I have a tendency to do stuff like you’re doing, and get myself, bite off more than I can chew.

Patti: Yeah.

Mike: Get myself into a whole bunch of things, but do you look at growing…you’re obviously still a young woman, and you guys have a lot of runway left, are you looking to grow inside of those business you have now, or…?

Patti: Well, our goal is to scale down, actually. We will likely keep the Great Clips forever. We’ll keep building a rental portfolio, what we’re doing with our HomeVestors franchise is building a rental portfolio, so.

Mike: Right.

Patti: So, we want to get to the point that what we have is our rental portfolio, and our Great Clips, and that’s what we will retire on.

Mike: Okay, okay. And let’s talk a little about, yours is kind of an interesting strategy. You’re using the HomeVestors business to accumulate rental properties, to help offset and shelter some of the tax burden, I suspect, right?

Patti: Right, and I just love the rental model. You know, I didn’t know when we joined HomeVestors, we thought we were, we were looking for a business to replace cash. Cash income.

Mike: Right.

Patti: And then quickly we learned that really the way you build wealth in real estate is owning it, and having it free and clear.

Mike: Right, right.

Patti: So, we are diligently working on adding rentals.

Mike: Yeah, yeah, it’s…

Patti: We’re still flipping and wholesaling, but that’s not the goal.

Mike: Yeah, well, and I think for a lot of us that are in this, even if that was the goal, or you thought that was the goal, and actually when you start to realize that, “Wow, I did really well on that” or “I didn’t”…

Patti: Yeah.

Mike: …but I’m never going to make another dime off of that house.”

Patti: Right, right.

Mike: And you start to have, and I’ve talked about this a lot lately, you start to look back over time after you’ve been doing that for a while, and have regret that you didn’t keep more houses as rentals, right?

Patti: Right, right, I think so, too, yeah.

Mike: Yeah.

Patti: And we’re keeping as many as we can.

Mike: Yeah.

Patti: Yeah.

Mike: So, and you also run a property management business, as well.

Patti: We did. Yeah, we were running our own, and you know when you have a lot of rentals it takes staff.

Mike: Right, right.

Patti: You know, I have a lot of other things I have to pay attention to, so I had to hire people to run that business, so it was just a natural progression. I ended up getting my broker’s license, and it was just a natural progression to manage other people’s too. We were just, we were particularly good at property management.

Mike: Right, right. And it just kind of enabled you to scale up and add people to manage your own by managing other folk’s, so…

Patti: Right.

Mike: So, how many properties do you manage all together?

Patti: We’re managing about 155 right now.

Mike: Okay, okay. And are you actively looking to grow that as well?

Patti: Yeah, yeah.

Mike: Not just your own, but for other folks?

Patti: Yeah, we are, yeah. We would like to use the economies of scale to draw a little bit of money out of that.

Mike: Right, right. So, talk a little bit about how do you deal with all this, Patti? How do you, and you have kids, as well, right?

Patti: Yeah, I saw a thing on TV this morning about, I think they called it “low sleepers”? You know, Donald Trump, Martha Stewart, there’s people that don’t need a lot of sleep, I’m one of those, so.

Mike: Oh.

Patti: I really do not require a lot of sleep. People get emails from me in the middle of the night, and think that’s crazy.

Mike: Yeah.

Patti: But, I work a lot, and I like it, but I also have staff. So my, you know, I’ve got people running the Great Clips, we’ve got people running the property management functions, my husband has staff overseeing the Jackson-Hewitts, and basically we run the money. You know, we make sure that everything is funded and the advertising’s going. We spend the money and manage the checkbooks, but other folks are typically managing the operational functions of all the different businesses.

Mike: Yeah, and some of that I guess is enabled by scaling up those businesses as well, right?

Patti: Right.

Mike: If you had one Great Clips, you wouldn’t be able to afford having another layer of management probably, so…

Patti: Exactly right, right.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. So have you found that you’re able to put in place some sort of check-and-balance reporting that you get and can kind of understand what’s going on in your business on a daily basis, or a weekly basis just by using a dashboard, or…kind of some way to keep a pulse on the business without having to go physically visit?

Patti: Yes, well Great Clips and Jackson-Hewitt are both stellar reporters, you know both of those franchise companies or franchisers just deliver us awesome tools for reporting and monitoring. And the real estate is the harder, but real estate is pretty easy. You know, I mean tenants call, when there’s a problem, you get a phone call.

Mike: Right. So on your property management side, how involved are you in that?

Patti: Pretty involved, I mean I go to the office everyday. We do have, you know, I am right now, I would be the person doing the acquisition of new houses. Only because we haven’t been focused on…we’re getting rid of, that’s the next position we’re adding.

Mike: Yeah.

Patti: We have to, we just haven’t done a lot of marketing for that yet. We just had brochures ordered. We’re getting ready to blow that up, so we’ll add someone in that position. But I spend most of my time in real estate, as opposed to the others.

Mike: Yeah, and it’s a hard, you know, I talk about this a lot, it’s a difficult business to scale.

Patti: Yeah.

Mike: And some of it is not lack of reporting, or things like that, it’s just that…you know, when you buy a house or you sell a house, you’re dealing with a different person every time, you’re dealing with different issues every time. It’s not like you’re buying a house a month from the same person and you start to get some sort of rhythm.

Patti: Right.

Mike: It’s just by design.

Patti: It’s a lot of money on the line for a single transaction.

Mike: Yeah.

Patti: Yeah.

Mike: Yeah, a lot of emotions involved sometimes and so it’s difficult some, yeah.

Patti: Yeah.

Mike: And so, talk a little bit about, you kind of talked about how you’re
“franchise junkies”, and obviously you’re big on brands and things like that. Why don’t you talk about, in your experience, how you’ve grown several different businesses now. The importance that you think brands or systems play in that.

Patti: Yeah, and I think each entrepreneur has to have their own expertise and decide where they want to spend their time. I like spending my time growing the business, not creating the business. So basically a franchiser delivers you…a good one, not all of them, but a good one…a good franchiser delivers you a “store-in-a-box”, and you know Great Clips, they drive the truck up and they open the doors, and there’s my store. I just have to put it together.

Mike: Yeah.

Patti: And they, all you have to do is follow the system. I don’t want to create the system. My job is just to make sure there’s new customers going in the store every day, and that’s what I like. But you have to chose a brand or chose an industry based on your skill set.

Mike: So the advice I think that a lot of folks get when they’re trying to start a business or trying to transition out of the corporate world, or things like that, or if you’re my wife talking to me, is about focus. I need to focus, and I found a new friend in you, Patti. In that you have lots of focuses, but talk a little bit about how, for folks that might be listening that are interested in getting started, whether it’s real estate or some other things, obviously our show is predominantly real estate focused but also very entrepreneurial focused, is the importance of the balance between staying focused but also having some diversity. Is that something that tends to come after time? Ok, now we’re going to bolt this on, or…?

Patti: Well, diversity is key. You look at people who are, you’ve seen them, are in one industry and the industry tanks or they have all their eggs in one basket. Another big lesson we learned early on. We lost a lot of money in a ponzi scheme.

Mike: Ah.

Patti: And when that happened, we learned that we really have to diversify. You know, our income and our assets, I think one thing that people do when they’re starting out, is that they get “analysis paralysis”.
You know, they study, study, study, study, study, consult, they join mentoring teams, and they never launch.

Mike: Right.

Patti: You know, they never pull the trigger and open the store or buy the first house.

Mike: Right.

Patti: And the best way to learn something is by doing it, so.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. So talk a little bit about the importance of specifically franchise systems. You talked about it a little bit, but…because we obviously we are growing from the HomeVestor side, I don’t talk a tremendous about HomeVestors on the show, but we’re HomeVestors folks here, obviously so we won’t deny that…but just the importance of franchise systems, the good and bad, but just the fact that there is a system, and you can surround yourself by people that are doing things the way that you aspire to do, or want to do them. Talk a little bit about how that comes into your thinking when you’re looking at new opportunities.

Patti: Yeah, there are good…just like within a business there are strong people and weak people, there are good franchisers and weaker franchisers. The people with the best systems, I think have franchisees who stay around the longest. I think one of the biggest benefits of being in a franchises system is that you get, you know if I have an issue, I can call you, and you don’t have any bone in my market. So you’re going to give me honest advice, you have some desire to help me succeed, and as much as the people in my own market say they want me to succeed, there’s always going to be a built-in amount on competition with people that you network within your own market. I think it’s very valuable to talk to people who are in the same field, and same company, who are all over the country. That’s one of the biggest benefits of being in a franchise company, is the system of franchisees you have all over the place, doing the same thing, building the same brand.

Mike: Right, right, and I think it’s just natural in real estate. And that’s part of what I’m trying to do with this show too, is bring people together, allow people to learn from one another, but generally speaking, a lot of folks don’t talk to one another in real estate investing just because they tend to be very local, so the person that they would talk to is in the market and those folks, everybody sees each other as a competitor, and so they just don’t…in fact, there’s kind of a funny saying that if somebody, if you talk to another real estate investor and they tell you to do something, do the exact opposite, because they may be trying to mislead you, so…

Patti: Right, right.

Mike: But, yeah, yeah that’s interesting. So, why don’t you tell us a little bit about the RIA Club that you’re involved with as well?

Patti: Yeah. We have a great club here in Virginia. Most of the RIA Clubs are for-profit clubs, and I think that around the country at least 50 percent of the clubs are for-profit clubs, and those are run a lot differently than not-for-profit clubs. I would encourage new folks that are starting out, found out if your club is for-profit, or not-for-profit, because the goals of the clubs are different. Ours happens to be a non-
profit club, it’s called the Tidewater Real Estate Investor’s Group. It’s the oldest club in Virginia. Been around for about 40 years. And I took it over, I actually just…I’m delegating Mike, I just passed the hat to a new president. I was president of the club for the last 4 years, and we doubled the size. We went from 130 members to 250 members.

Mike: Okay, that’s fantastic.

Patti: Yeah. And very active. We have about 100 people show up at a meeting, and it’s all non-profit. Everybody is a volunteer, it’s just a great club.

Mike: So talk a little bit about that, because I believe that RIA clubs are the backbone of the real estate investment community. I’m a huge proponent. We, for those that haven’t, that have only seen our show or listened to our show and haven’t actually been to FlipNerd.com, you’ll see that one of I think four tabs across the top is an RIA Club finder, because I believe it’s a big part of getting started and maintaining your role in this industry.

Patti: Right.

Mike: But, I always ask people when I interview them, when I interview RIA Club presidents or other folks that are involved, is what’s the right balance between education and selling? And in all honesty, you probably know this, even clubs that are for-profit, it’s hard to make that a profitable business in and of itself.

Patti: Yeah.

Mike: I mean, it’s…so…

Patti: That’s why…what’s difficult in the for-profit clubs, it’s almost always about selling, because they are for-profit. Whereas the non-
profit clubs just have to carry their expenses. So, I think it’s a much better balance of education in a non-profit club.

Mike: Okay, okay.

Patti: I know in our club, we had paid speakers come in twice a year. You know, the rest of the time, it’s local education or networking.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. Ok. And so talk a little bit about your club specifically, a little bit more. Some of the education. Tell us more about what’s typical of you have volunteers that are what? Sponsors, board members of the club that are primarily doing the education, providing the education?

Patti: Well, now we find experts in the community so we’ll have, we might have a panel of experts we have some of the same folks that you had. You’ve had some of our Mid-Atlantic IRA…

Mike: Yep.

Patti: …has been a speaker. National Speakers’ Jeffery Taylor is in our backyard. Mr.Landlord.com. He’d be another great guy for FlipNerd.

Mike: Yeah, I’m trying to get him. You need to plant a seed.

Patti: Yeah, I will, I’ll give you a cellphone number. And local, we just had my closing attorney L.T. Caplan just did a session this month on basic contracts, purchase contracts, and assignment contracts. He gave out a free contract to everybody in the room, and people could bring clauses. You know, we try to make it interesting and have a balance of material for beginning folks, but also for experienced folks, and we find that when you’re running a club you have to address both audiences, and you depending on the topic, we get a different audience at the group.

Mike: Sure, sure. Yeah. It’s really content-driven. You know, you can see the quality of the experience based on the quality of the content, right?

Patti: Right, yeah, yeah.

Mike: Awesome. And then, Patti, obviously we know you’re a wife, but you’re a mother as well, right?

Patti: Yeah, I’ve got two boys, yeah.

Mike: Do they know you, or?

Patti: They do. They’re teenagers, though. They’re older than yours. So 15 and 17.

Mike: So they don’t want to know you.

Patti: They don’t really want to be around me anymore, yeah, yeah.

Mike: Well, my son’s only six and I think he’s quickly getting there, so yeah. At least around me. He wants to be around, he’s a “momma’s boy”, so.

Patti: That’ll change.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. So what do you think is going on with the real estate market these days? Where do you see things going over the next couple of years?

Patti: Oh, it’s getting tough. It’s getting tough to buy a houses, although the resell market is strong. And we’re in a military market, so we don’t see the effect that the rest, we didn’t see the “downturn” as much as the rest of the country. But houses are selling. There’s a lot fewer houses on the market for sale.

Mike: Yep.

Patti: From a landlord’s standpoint, it’s getting harder for me to find them. I’m finding, finally, rents are squeezing down a little bit, and since I’ve been a landlord this is the first time I’ve seen that happen.

Mike: You’re seeing rents go down?

Patti: Yeah.

Mike: Wow.

Patti: And we do a lot of Section 8.

Mike: Okay.

Patti: You know, the government funding, budgets have been cut. Not all of our cities, but some of our cities, we’re feeling a little squeeze at the lower end of the market.

Mike: That’s interesting. We haven’t quite seen that here, but I think that’s obviously very market-specific. So, you know one thing that I think is interesting is a lot of the benefit that we get out of being organized and running any sort of volume is, you can start to get a little bit
[officiant]. What’s interesting about this market is I think real estate investing is kind of an inefficient marketplace. And that’s kind of why…there’s not really an MLS for investor deals, per say, unless you work the MLS, but does it feel to you with technology and things, I always feel like the real estate industry has been a laggard to adopt new technology, but does it feel to you that it’s starting to get more efficient?

Patti: Well, I don’t know. We have a lot of competition in the wholesale market with investors in this market, and they’re pretty tech-
savvy. You know, they are strong competitors from and internet standpoint, but yeah there aren’t any comprehensive tools. You know Home Depot’s starting to come out with some, and people are trying but there really are no comprehensive tools for real estate investors nationwide. Other than the auction sites.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah, what’s interesting is the people that have the ability to create those tools, usually will just exploit those opportunities themselves.

Patti: Right, right.

Mike: There’s more money to be made because of big-ticket items and finding a way to use those tools to buy more houses themselves than to, say, pay me
$39 a month and you can have access to it.

Patti: Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Mike: Awesome, and so are you seeing…how vulnerable are you where you’re at there to changes in the…just being so focused on the military, serving housing for military. How vulnerable are you in market, there’s markets like that all across the country, that if they decide to move a base or something like that.

Patti: It would be a huge, if they decided to move a base, it would be a huge blow to our market.

Mike: Yeah.

Patti: It does, it petrifies the market.

Mike: Yeah, and what do you think about, because that’s happened in some markets. In Texas, I don’t have properties there, but they’ve made a lot of changes with Ft. Hood, which is a massive base. And so what would you say to investors that are military base markets to kind of protect yourself, or kind of how to think about those issues if they come up or if they could come up?

Patti: That’s a really good question. You know, very few of my tenants are military tenants. You know, we chose to focus more on well…about 25 percent of my tenants are Section 8. A significantly greater number than our military tenants. So, maybe shifting your market and going either a little higher? And we have NATO here, we do a little bit of renting with NATO. You know, I don’t know that there is a way to infiltrate, or really to protect yourself against that loss.

Mike: yeah, yeah. I guess unless you have properties outside your market.

Patti: Right.

Mike: I think if you’re kind of like me, we really prefer to keep our rentals close to where we live. Even though we don’t manage ours, and we probably never will, but it’s nice to know that they are here. I don’t know, we had an out-of-state property one time, and it was just a nightmare to deal with.

Patti: Yeah, that scares me too.

Mike: Yeah.

Patti: And you know, our numbers are great in this market. You know, I can buy low, I can rent high, so there’s no reason for me to go to another market.

Mike: Right, right. So, one of the things I want to talk to you about, Patti, is being a woman serial entrepreneur. Why don’t you tell us more about that? And I will say, I had another guest on recently, the show hasn’t come out yet. The guest is a real estate attorney that I know very well, and she talked a lot about how there aren’t a lot of women in real estate investing, and she actually formed a real estate investing club for women, that has a couple of hundred members, so…

Patti: Yeah, we have those here, too.

Mike: That’s great. So just talk a little bit about kind of for any women that are listening that are interested in real estate investing, in what, right or wrong, tends to be a a male-dominated kind of industry or business, kind of how they maybe can crack into that, and not be intimidated by a bunch of scary guys.

Patti: Yeah. It is a little strange. You know, the first time I went to a HomeVestors convention it was odd. You think of, people think of real estate as being a female-dominated world, and in the agent world it really is. Most real estate agents are female, but in the real estate investing realm, most people are men. It’s a little bit bizarre.

Mike: It is weird.

Patti: Yeah. And you know, there’s no reason, women do an excellent job. You know, and I think they, going on a job site, you know, the construction site, the guys are happy to please us. You know, I don’t see it as really a male or female issue. It’s…anybody can do it.

Mike: Right. So what do you think holds some women back, is it the fact that it’s a bit of a hussle business, and you may not…you know, we tend to be in a business where, if an opportunity comes up, no matter what day of the week or time of the day, we have to go, we have to kind of get on it. Do you think it has something to do with the inability to kind of totally plan what your day looks like, or? I don’t know, I’m grasping at straws here, Patti.

Patti: I don’t know, yeah, I don’t know. I think women tend to go…most people go where the herd is, and in most women are in the traditional real estate realm of being agents, and I think that’s probably the reason. It’s just they’re not breaking out of the shell.

Mike: Yeah, that’s interesting, yeah. Well, so Patti, anything else you want to share with us about, what are you going to do from here? You’ve got a full plate…

Patti: Yeah, we are aggressively looking for rental financing now. I really liked the podcast you had this week on, the one on lenders, so we’re looking for medium- to long-term financing for rentals, so that we can build that portfolio. Once you have a bunch of rentals, that becomes the harder part, is funding them. And we’re focused, very focused on paying off debt. So we’ve got the debt schedule on the wall, and we’re checking it off. Because building business creates a lot of debt.

Mike: Oh absolutely. I haven’t had them on yet, but have to talked to B2R?

Patti: Yes, yes. And, you know, the local banks will do the same thing for cheaper. So we just did a big 18-property refinance with a bank called StellarOne in our market.

Mike: Okay.

Patti: It was, if anybody’s looking for a back to do “refi’s”, they were great to work with. You have to have owned the properties a year, but they did it for one point, we got a 5-year note, amortized over 20 years at 4.5 percent.

Mike: Oh, wow.

Patti: For one point.

Mike: That’s fantastic.

Patti: Yeah.

Mike: Yeah, that’s great. And they only lend in your market there?

Patti: No, they’ll lend anyplace. Called StellarOne. Yeah.

Mike: Anywhere in the country?

Patti: I believe so, yeah.

Mike: Wow. Okay. I’ll have to get that connection from you, so…

Patti: Yeah, yeah.

Mike: Awesome, awesome. Well, Patti, I appreciate you being on today.

Patti: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me. I love the show.

Mike: Yeah, and I appreciate that you’re a fan. You keep giving me feedback, and I was like “well, why don’t you come on the show?”

Patti: Yeah, I love the show. I’ve been promoting the show, it’s a great show.

Mike: Thank you, thank you.

Patti: Everybody should watch it.

Mike: Yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t really have anything to sell. We’re just kind of introducing people,and it gives me a chance to play hooky from my real job, or jobs a little bit.

Patti: The vendors you’ve had on, or most of the vendors you’ve had on have been my vendors too, and they’re great, they’re great folks, and its good to get the word out on them.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for being on. I’m sure that we will be talking again soon.

Patti: Thanks so much, have a great week.

Mike: Appreciate your time.

Patti: Alright, bye bye.

Mike: Alright, bye bye. Thanks for joining us on today’s FlipNerd.com podcast. To listen to more of our shows and hear from incredible guests, please access all of our podcasts in the iTunes store. You can also watch the video versions of our shows by visiting us at FlipNerd.com