Investing for Cash Flow

Mike: Welcome to the FlipNerd.com podcast. This is your host, Mike Hambright, and on this show I will introduce you to the 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 available in the iTunes store or by visiting FlipNerd.com. So without further due, let’s get started.
Hey, it’s Mike Hambright with FlipNerd.com.Welcome back for another exciting VIP interview but I would like to start of today by thanking you, my loyal listeners and followers, for making this a great year. This is actually our 150th show over the air, which is a pretty special number, as I set a bold goal at the beginning of the year to do 150 shows in 2014 and I said that at a time where I’d actually I never even do one show, didn’t ever really know what to expect. So here we are, show 150 of the year.
In addition to allowing me to meet lots of great people, we have really laid the ground for lots of great things to come in 2015. If you are on my mailing list you will be very first to know about whats going on. We have some awesome things coming up, really, in the first quarter of the year, and if not, please visit FlipNerd.com to get on the list.
Today we are joined by Kevin Bupp who is a serial entrepreneur. He is a real estate expert, as well as a fellow real estate podcaster. Kevin is passionate about helping others and has a great story to share with us and has a lot of knowledge. So we could talk about a lot of things today, but what we are going to talk about today is investing for cash flow.
Before we get started though, lets take a moment to recognize our feature sponsors.

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Please note, the views and opinions expressed by the individuals in this program do not necessarily reflect those of FlipNerd.com or any of its partners, advertisers or affiliates. Please consult professionals before making any investment or tax decisions as real estate investing can be risky.

Hey, Kevin, welcome to the show.

Kevin: Hey, Mike, how’s it going?

Mike: Good, good.

Kevin: Thanks for having me.

Mike: Yeah.

Kevin: Congratulations on your 150th episode.

Mike: Thank you. Yes, It’s been fun and actually what’s always fun to me is interviewing other podcasters because we get to share notes. It’s a fairly small world. Everybody wants to know like, “How you do this?” or, “What you do there?” and we had a little bit of that chat before that and but that’s always fun.

Kevin: Yes, absolutely. It’s a fun business to be in, both real estate and podcasting. I am excited to be here. I am not normally on the other side of the table like I am today so I think I’ve only been interviewed two or three times. So, I’m pretty excited to be here with you.

Mike: Yeah, good, good, good. You know what funny is – I say this all the time, I think you will agree with me – is that after you’ve in real estate investing for a while, it can become pretty lonely business if you don’t have some sort of outlet to mastermind or do a podcast or some stuff like this or teach other people what you know. You’re pretty siloed off out there, right?

Kevin: Absolutely. In fact that’s why I enjoy having partners. Lot of people say I hate having a business partner but I have always enjoyed a business partner because it keeps fun, keeps it exciting, if you get along with that person. Podcasting helps as well. It helps me to reach out and get the network and meet a lot of people like yourself and other real estate investors throughout the country. So it’s a lot of fun.

Mike: Yes. Thanks for being here. For those who don’t know you, why you don’t tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and your trials and tribulations and kind off how you got to know where you are.

Kevin: Sure. I started off in the real estate background when I was 19 years old. I am 35 today, going on 36 here in a few months. But I really didn’t have a direction in my life. I was going to community college. Lot of my friends had gone away to school but I really didn’t know what to do and didn’t want to waste my parents money so I was just taking classes in community college and bartending part time. Just having fun. But no direction in life whatsoever.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to an older fella. He was an actual boyfriend of girl I was dating’s mother and he introduced me to real estate. He invited me to Ron LeGrand of all people, if you’re familiar with Ron LeGrand or not, but I went to a Ron LeGrand bootcamp in Philadelphia. I was 19 and it was a three-day bootcamp in Philadelphia.
I didn’t really have expectations, didn’t know anything about real estate. I really didn’t know anything. I hadn’t even read any real estate investment book. So I was just going in like a complete virgin.
What happened in that three-day classes is, number one, I saw a lot of people that looked like they had a lot of money. That was the first thing, and that was kind of eye opening to me. The second thing I saw was lot of people that didn’t seem much smarter than what I was, making a lot of money and it was intriguing to me. It was intriguing enough to where I was like, “Okay. Well, he invited me here, this has been a great knowledge getter and I am going to see where I am going to take this path.”
So I kind of presented to him, the individual that took me, he was already a real investor. He owned some multi-family and single family homes and I kind of proposed to him that he should take me underneath his wing and I could help him be his little admin person or do his whatever, just be the busy bee that helps him to get his work done, but in exchange he would teach me the business and teach me what he knew and that’s what I did.
Basically for like a year, I literally would go to school in the morning, tend bar at night, but in between those times I would go literally to his house or to his office in his house and hang out with him, go on calls with him, go to realtors’ offices, go see properties, go see rehab projects and just try to learn as much as I could.
At the age of 20 I bought my first property, flipped it, and did that a few different times – I’m from Pennsylvania, that’s where I was doing this at and continued going to school, finished my degree and decided that I really wondered take this business to next level, but I knew I didn’t want to stay in Pennsylvania, knew I needed to get the heck out of there. I needed to go somewhere warm and ended up in Florida.
Moved down to Florida in 2002 and took about six months really to understand the lay of the land, what was what, where the opportunities were and that was kind of right when the market started just really heating up and just kind of rode that roller coaster, like a lot of people did and ended up doing 150 deals total. Most of them were buy and holds. We had about 122 single family homes in my portfolio along with a bunch of other multi-family, working up until the crash happened and the crash killed me. I mean, the crash, I literally ended up giving most of my properties back to the bank minus the multi-family.
The Florida real estate crash wasn’t just a value crash, it was also a rental market crash. I was in areas where a lot of spec homes were being built and these developers, when the market started going down they realized they couldn’t sell them so they started renting brand new homes for basically what we were renting our 20-year-old homes for. So the little bit of cash flow we had from single family homes, although we had a lot, it was gone. It wasn’t there.
Anyway, fast forward to today, I have kind of reinvented myself, decided that I wanted to basically focus on cashflow, truly cashflow positive income properties. My niche as of two and half years ago until today has been mobile home parks. That’s what we are doing today is we’re investing heavily as often as possible in mobile parks.

Mike: Sure. Thanks for sharing your story, Kevin. What advice would you give for people . . . what’s interesting to me and really lot of this came from me interviewing so many people and making new friends along the way is that how powerful the knowledge is that you to learn in bad and good markets and carry that forward and kind of how you morph yourself into something that’s leaner and meaner and more market resistant, more resistant to the ups and downs as you go along the way. What kind of advice would you share to people that are listening that maybe haven’t been through these things?

Kevin: I got caught up in the heat of the moment. There was a point in time where I realized we shouldn’t be buying anymore, the point time you realize that things are just artificial, they can’t keep going the way they were going. So just be conscious of what happening around you and just don’t get caught up in the anxiety or the heat of the moment of, “God, these guys are still doing deals or still buying a ton of properties.”
Just take a step back every once a while and step back and take a 10,000-foot view and really try to understand what’s happening. Listen to a different economist, find out what’s going outside your bubble because that’s what happened to me. We got caught in our . . . I call it my Florida real estate bubble. What was happening here in Florida, I really needed to step back and look, “Okay. What are other people thinking about this market? How are other people feeling in the market we are in?”
If I had done that, I probably could have got out fast enough, because when I realize the market was steering into down, I couldn’t sell stuff fast enough. But if I really would have taken a step back and not thought I knew everything or thought I was a genius, then I probably would have salvaged a little bit of what I had.
Anyways, so just slowdown every once in a while and look around and speak to people that know a little bit more than you. Speak to other experts in the industry that are scattered across the country and find out what their thoughts and perspectives are is what I suggest.

Mike: Yeah, and I think what we’re going to learn from you today is clearly you’ve evolved from being in a more speculative model that’s all really focused on appreciation. It was in the Florida market, right? And now much more on cashflow, which is really what matters the most, right?

Kevin: Well, the funny thing is that I wasn’t really investing in a speculative manner. Everything we were buying we had a really strict model; we never paid more than $0.65/$1.00. In my mind I knew the boomer market was coming. I knew a ton of people were retiring and I knew that everyone wants to live in Florida – Florida, among a couple of other states. People don’t move away from Florida typically. The move to Florida from the colder states.
In my mind, Florida couldn’t lose and the population was continuing to grow here and people were coming by the droves, so I wasn’t necessarily speculating because I thought we had enough of a buffer in how we bought. We were buying cashflow positive single family homes but at the end of the day, the thing that was challenging for us with single family homes was the management infrastructure that it took to efficiently manage them properly. When you really start getting down to it, there wasn’t a lot of real cashflow left over. There just wasn’t.
Either way, what I did learn is when the market did crash and I looked back at what happened to me and my business, the only thing to survive were my multi-family properties and I just wondered to myself, “Why the heck didn’t I get out of my comfort zone and start buying multi-family properties sooner?” because you can diversify your risk amongst multiple different units rather than just one single family home. You get more efficiencies of scale when you have more doors under roof and that’s what we’re doing today. That’s kind of the premise of why we solely focus on multi-family type properties now.

Mike: Okay, okay. At the time, multi-family back then, was it mobile homes back then or was it . . .?

Kevin: No, actually apartments and stuff. Yeah, we had a lot of stuff like a 10-unit, a 12-unit, a 28-unit, had a 42-unit. I think the largest we had, which is still small in terms of larger multi-family investors, it was a 72 or 76-unit townhome community that was in Florida here but everything was in Florida; it was still in the Florida market, so those properties still took a hit, don’t get me wrong. The rental market still crashed but we were able to survive. The type of debt we had on it was still good enough debt to where we could still have a positive cashflow each and every month after debt service and they still supported themselves, which I can’t say the same for the single family homes.

Mike: Yeah, so talk a little bit about the rental crash. I know you said that builders started to rent and things. I’m in Texas here, we didn’t see that. I think, if anything, we saw rents go up because all of the sudden, really, supply and demand, there were people moving out of homes they owned and into rental properties, so the supply of availability went down and rent rates started to go up. It’s kind of stabilized over the past year or two, I’d say, but we’re still seeing an increase in rent.
What was the dynamic there of why rents started to go down?

Kevin: The spec builders were building homes for people that weren’t really here. They were building homes for flippers that were just flipping contracts left and right. It was brand-new construction but there weren’t enough bodies here to fill those. So when the bodies that truly did populate those communities, when they had the opportunity to either renew a lease on a property that we had that was 15 or 20 years old or a brand-new home that’s shiny, brand-new for the same price or sometimes less . . . I saw some spec homes that were three-bedroom, two-bath, two-car garage homes that in today’s market would probably rent for $1,500, I saw builders renting these things for $750 and $800, about the same price as what we were renting older, smaller, no garage type homes for.
You can’t compete at that point in time. It’s impossible. A lot of those builders went bankrupt anyway but they were still trying to hold on. Just by a thin string, they were trying to hold on as much as they could to pay their debts and sooner or later the inevitable happened. They imploded as well but with that strategy that they utilized, they completely crashed our rental market in the markets that we were in.
Actually, we had some homes up in the Tampa Bay market but a lot of the stuff we had was south of Tampa, about an hour south, and then all the way down to Fort Meyers, which is on the west coast of Florida. Lots of retirement markets, just lots of markets where, like I said, there weren’t bodies there to fill in the brand-new homes that were being built so it was a challenge for us, to say the least. Yeah, hey, you live and you learn, right?

Mike: Yeah, so from a cashflow perspective, talk a little bit about why, before we get into mobile home stuff, about why the apartment buildings held up a little bit better. What are some of the reasons as to why?

Kevin: The management infrastructure to manage single family homes is very expensive to do it right, especially when you’ve got homes that are scattered across multiple counties. Our apartments cost a lot less to run and therefore, we weren’t as affected by our overall expenses with those units. I wouldn’t say they did great during the crash, but they survived.
Don’t think that we were making fat checks each and every month on those things because there was a certain point where there were a couple units that we were about to give back because there were a couple months when we had to write checks out of our own bank accounts to make up the negative debt service. So they barely survived, to answer your question.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. For those that don’t invest in multi-family now, maybe go through some of the details as to why they’re easier to manage. There’s some obvious ones that they’re all under one roof, just with more scale, but talk a little bit about some of the just general reasons why multi-family versus single family.

Kevin: Yeah, well, that’s it. You just mentioned one is that you’ve got all the doors underneath most of the time one roof or 20-30 units under one roof and you might have a complex that’s 300 units that you’ve got more than one roof. You’ve got buying power when you’re buying supplies and when you’re buying all the same stuff for one type of property. When you’ve got different types of homes, you’ve got different types of supplies that are needed.
Maintenance, if you’ve got a couple different apartment buildings that are close together or let’s just say you have one, you can have one maintenance guy making one trip to that property to do repairs. Whereas if you have 30 single family homes that are scattered across a couple different counties, number one, the time that it takes for that maintenance person to get from house to house is very inefficient, and then the cost of gas and travel time, things of that nature, the inefficiencies add up very quickly when you simply talk about the maintenance aspect of it. That’s a big part of it actually, really.
The other thing that you get with multi-family, and this is from my personal experience, is so we had our own management infrastructure with our single family homes and that was only because we never actually could find a good local management company that did as good of a job as what we thought we could do. With apartment complexes it’s a little different. You end up dealing with a different caliber of property manager when you have a larger multi-family property. I mean, these are true professional management companies. This is all all they do; this is their business.
You truly have the ability to buy an asset that can be professionally managed by a third party company and they’re going to do probably a better job than what you’re going to do running it. Whereas it’s kind of a flip-flop when it comes to single family homes, I always had a challenge. I’m not saying that there’s not good single family property management company that’s out there, but I always had a challenge with finding ones that would aggressively market our property for rent, not nickel and dime us on repairs, and that could run as efficiently as what we could ourselves.
What I’m getting at with that is you don’t necessarily need as big of a management infrastructure in place to have multi-family properties if you’re buying the right types of properties, the right size, in a market to where there’s professional property managers available.

Mike: Okay, okay, that’s good. Thanks for sharing that. So, Kevin, how did you find your way into mobile home park investing?

Kevin: Well, I kind of look back and 2011, I got out of real estate in 2008 when the market crashed. I literally got out of real estate. I kept some of the properties that still made sense. I have some of the single family homes that were left over and a few of the multi-families. We did sell off a few of the multi-families after the fact, but it took three years, really, just to reflect. I did start a few other businesses that were completely separate from real estate.
I wanted to see what was going to happen because I was stuck, again, in my Florida bubble. I was looking around me and seeing blood everywhere and just not knowing what was going to happen next. I thought the world was going to end, really, because a lot of people were speaking that way and it’s tough when you’re stuck inside that bubble.
Anyway, so 2011 I realized I wanted to jump back in and I saw a lot of guys doing really well and I started looking at what worked for me and what didn’t. Multi-family worked. Single family really didn’t and I started looking at the apartment market and the local markets that I wanted invest, at least I thought I wanted to invest in, which were the markets surrounding me.
The apartment market was very hot. There’s a lot of institutional money here locally where I’m at and they’re compressing cap rates. I wasn’t finding great deals. I wasn’t finding deals that had enough of a buffer zone that would make me feel comfortable buying them and the prices were just continuing to go up, cap rates go down so I was like, “Well, okay, number one, I need to start looking outside of my market that I was comfortable in,” which was the Florida market, so I started looking at other major metros and the same thing was happening.
I looked at mobile home parks. I had always heard that they’re cash cows and so I started digging a little deeper. I started realizing that there were some additional intriguing values that mobile home parks have that multi-family apartments didn’t and one is they’ve got a massive barrier to entry in that no new parks are being built in the US. They’re only going away so you don’t necessarily have to buy something and worry about a competitor opening up a new mobile home park down the road and undercutting you or having more amenities or whatever it may be. That just doesn’t happen.
The second thing is a lot of the owners of mobile home parks are still the original mom and pops that developed these things 25, 30 years ago and they’re at the age now to where a lot of them are owned free and clear. A lot of them, their health is deteriorating, they need to get rid of them, and there’s the opportunity for owner-financing. It’s pretty common to help them avoid their capital gains and mitigate their exposure to the IRS.

Mike: They have more of an installment sale to you, is that what [inaudible 00:20:45]?

Kevin: Absolutely. Absolutely. Then there’s also additional opportunity because you find those people that have owned it for such a long time, you’ll find that they became friends with the people in the park, they haven’t raised rents for a number of years or they’re just not managing it efficiently. They’ve got empty units there that need rehab, they’re just sitting there vacant that are just revenue waiting to happen. So just positive things that I didn’t see happening in the apartment sector.
Plus, as you and I both know, affordable housing is an ever-growing demand and mobile home parks kind of fit a unique niche in that field in that when you start looking at housing that is in the $500 a month price range, what you get in an apartment in most major markets is war zone, scary, drugs, violence. It’s not a nice apartment building. So that person has the option to either live in a really rough apartment building that’s scary and do you really want to raise your kids around that, or they have the ability to live in a mobile home that they’ve got their own little parking pad, they can put Christmas lights out around it, their kid has a little bit of a yard to play in.
It kind of fits a unique void in the affordable housing market and gives lower income families the ability to have home ownership or you have something that they can truly call their own. That’s the exciting part that I like.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. Talk about, kind of separate mobile home investing, individual units per se, versus kind of buying the park.

Kevin: Okay. Well, buying the park, there’s a couple different models of buying the park. There’s models to where you just own the dirt, where you just rent lots back to the tenants who own the homes themselves. Then there’s a hybrid of the two where you own the dirt but you also own some of the units, whether you accumulate them because people died and you end up keeping the trailer in the park because their heirs didn’t want it or whatever it may be. Then you’ve got other models where you actually own all the units, so it’s almost is like an apartment building because you own all the rental units.
In comparison to that, you’d said, mobile home investing itself, there’s a lot of guys out there that I know just buy the mobile homes and either have them on their own parcel of land or they actually rent a pad from a park owner like myself and collect a spread on what they can either rent or sell that home for on a monthly installment basis.

Mike: So what do you guys do? Do you guys actually rent the properties or are you just renting the pads?

Kevin: No, no, no. Well, that’s it, we have a mix of the two. We have a park that we just bought. It’s a recent acquisition up in Atlanta, actually the beginning of this year, where we actually own the property and we own all the units. All the units came with it. It was a bank sale. It was a kind of unique situation.
The previous owner, it was an old mobile home park seven years ago with old, run-down, crappy units and that owner took a lot of new debt out and went and bought a whole bunch of newer, used homes and brought them in and over-leveraged himself. Then basically the property went into foreclosure. So that property came with a whole bunch of newer trailers and now we’re selling them back to the tenants on more of a rent-to-own type basis.

Mike: I see.

Kevin: Yeah, and then we have other parks where the majority of the pads are actually . . . we own the pads and the tenants actually own the trailers themselves so they just pay us lot rental. Our only requirement is to keep up the infrastructure of the park, keep up the water, the sewer lines, the street, the lights and things like that, but we don’t maintain their trailers, it’s up to them. So they just pay us basically for the dirt rental.

Mike: Okay, okay. If you wanted to invest in parks, like you said, they’re not building them any more, how do you find those deals?

Kevin: There’s a couple different ways. Obviously there’s websites like LoopNet. I’m sure everyone’s familiar with LoopNet, which is the largest commercial listing service. Then there’s a niche website called mobilehomeparkstore.com. That’s probably the largest listing site for mobile home parks. But what you’ll find is most of the stuff that’s listed on there are overpriced.
There’s an issue with it as to why it came available to the public, because most commercial transactions, whether it be mobile home parks or apartment buildings or shopping centers, they happen off-market. No one ever even knows they come for sale. It’s closed transactions.
We have found deals on LoopNet or mobilehomeparkstore, but they’re few and far between. What we do is we go directly to the owners. We have a guy, he’s a partner of ours and he builds a database on a daily basis for us. He literally spends eight hours a day scanning the markets we want to be in, literally, physically scanning on Google Earth Pro and building a database out of every mobile home park that’s in that individual market.
Then we do a background check, we track down cellphone numbers, home mailing addresses, things like that. We cold call them. We cold call every day and we do followup direct mail campaigns and we work with brokers as well. That’s how you find really good commercial deals is either going direct or building relationships with brokers that have those relationships already with the property owners. That’s how you find the best deals.

Mike: Okay, okay. For those listening that are interested in mobile home parks and things like that, why don’t you talk a little bit about your kind of exit strategy.
Let me tell you my experience with rental properties. There was a point where I used to buy rental properties and a big part of my thinking was I thought about the eventual harvest, like where I want them to be. I wanted more of a B-class property. Then I started to see how well C-class properties cash flowed but I was worried about the eventual harvest. Am I going to have to sell it at a discount to a guy like me when it’s time to sell? I was worried about that.
Then I got to a point to where I’m like, “Why would I ever sell this thing? It cashflows so well, I’m never going to sell it,” and if I really wanted to, of course now I could just sell or finance it. But what’s your strategy for exiting that eventually, or maybe there is no exit plan?

Kevin: Yeah, well, that’s it. It depends on how we own the properties. A couple of the properties that we own are just literally owned by myself and another partner, so we have no equity partners involved or anything like that, and a lot of the debt that’s owned, if there is any, it’s private debt and it’s good longterm amortization, it’s good secured debt.
Like the property I just mentioned in Atlanta, we’ll probably keep that one. That thing has got new infrastructure, the units are pretty new. I’ll keep that thing for a long time. It’s in a great market. It’s in the path to progress. It’s a good market now and it’s only getting better.
I can’t foresee any reason why I would ever sell that. The only reason why I ever would is if I had an unsolicited offer that came to me that was just too good to be true and I had another opportunity lined up that I could 1031 the money into. That’s about it. Other than that, I really would probably have no interest in selling that.
A few other properties we own with Equity Partners, and they’re the kind of properties that are in the turnaround, transition phase, so it really depends on at what point in time we maximize the value of the park then also, at that point in time, what the capital markets look like. That really will determine whether or not we have to sell or that we can refinance and keep in the deal.
Because a lot of the debt that we have on it is short term, like five or seven year type term commercial debt, and it really depends on what our investors want to do at that point in time because our equity investors, they don’t necessarily have a say in what we do, but at a certain point they need to get their money back out of it. In order for us to get their money back, we either need to sell or refi. If we can’t refi into some debt that makes sense in five or seven years, then we’ll sell. That will determine what happens with some of our properties.
My goal, my personal goal, is to build longterm cashflow for myself and my family. So we buy properties both inside a fund and we also buy them outside of a fund. The ones I buy outside of a fund are ones that I plan on portfolioing for myself to keep for the longterm and don’t really have an interest in selling it at any point in the near future that I can foresee.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. So, Kevin, tell everybody about your podcast, the Real Estate Investing for Cashflow podcast.

Kevin: Okay. Yeah. I’ve been doing it now for going on a year, which is crazy. We just released episode number 50 and I started the podcast because there weren’t many other podcasts out there that brought on commercial experts that both owned and operated multi-family properties and commercial type of real estate properties. I wanted to put that offering out there for people that whether they’re already in commercial real estate investing or whether they’re looking to make a transition, because a lot of guys are in a transitional phase where they’d love to do some multi-family or a commercial property and they’re currently buying single family.
It’s hard to track down educational information on commercial real estate investing. It’s just really difficult to do. There’s just a ton of stuff out there for single family investing, fixing or flipping or wholesaling but I noticed that there wasn’t really anything out there for commercial investing. I really wanted to bring some experts on the show that would share their story about how they got into the business, what they did that’s unique to their business in terms of owning and operating their commercial properties, so that’s what we do.
We bring on guests probably about 80% of the shows and the other 20% are yours truly talking about different topics that are important in the commercial real estate investing field. It’s been a lot of fun. We release it once a week. It’s every Monday and it’s been a blast.

Mike: If people want to learn, where do they go? If they want to learn more about you, I know you have a couple websites. Where do they go to learn more about you and the podcast?

Kevin: The best way to learn about me is just going to kevinbupp.com. You can actually access the podcasts from there. You can obviously find it on iTunes and Stitcher, but kevinbupp.com is the go-to site for everything that I’m involved in and all of the different opportunities that I’m currently working on. So one stop shop, nice and easy.

Mike: Great, great. We’ll have links to your site and the podcast down below the video here. So, Kevin, before we kind of shut things down here, as we’re going into the new year here, any advice to people based on your experiences and how they should be thinking about moving forward with investing? One thing that we didn’t really talk much about that is a little bit interesting is it feels like, and maybe not in Florida where you’re at, but it feels like we’re back in about 2006 or 2007 right now, right?

Kevin: It absolutely feels like that in Florida. In fact, I was having this conversation yesterday with . . . in fact, I have it probably at least once a week and that’s why I say just always take a step back and get that 10,000-foot view and get outside of your local bubble and find out what’s happening in the other markets. We actually don’t buy much in Florida right now. In fact, I haven’t even prospected in Florida for the past, probably six months.
Most of the properties we’re looking at now are in North Carolina and the triad region up there. We’ve got a property that we’re working on in Virginia right now. So markets that are a little more stable, they don’t see the fluctuation that we see here in Florida markets or other popular warm weather markets.
Just get educated. Find out what truly is happening. Obviously you’ve got to come to some kind of conclusion on whether or not what’s happening, is it real? Are we at the top? Are we at the bottom? Are we in another bubble? Get educated, speak to people who are smarter than you and surround yourself with that are smarter than you and have been through this before. That would be my words of wisdom for guys that are in the business now or who are just getting into the business.

Mike: Yeah, thank you for sharing that. Yeah, it’s been interesting to me. We’ve accumulated a rental portfolio, not a huge one but a pretty good one, and it cashflows really well. I feel blessed going into this market because when I started in 2008, it was really not that long ago. We bought hundreds of houses, had some great years for sure, but when things started to, I guess after you’ve been through a cycle, if you’re in a position where you have cash flow or you have multiple streams of revenue, you start to appreciate the fact that you can slow down a little bit.
A lot of people that are wholesalers and that’s all they do and they don’t have rental properties or other sources of income, they can’t stop buying ever because then they’re dead.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s a job.

Mike: Yeah.

Kevin: They’ve created themselves a job. You can make a lot of money doing that but I never understood that model either to where that’s all you do. I know it’s getting tougher now. I know there’s not as much inventory in the market and their marketing budgets are way higher now than what they used to be, so the margins are a lot thinner. I’m not interested in creating myself a job. I want something, like the parks we have now, I literally haven’t seen . . . it’s been probably two months now since I’ve been to any of them and I do talk to the managers on a regular basis but we get money deposited in our account each and every week and it’s a beautiful thing so that’s what I like.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Awesome, awesome. Well, Kevin, hey, thanks for joining us. Definitely appreciate your time.

Kevin: Thanks for having me, Mike. It’s been a lot of fun.

Mike: Absolutely. Take care, my friend. Please stay in touch.

Kevin: You too.

Mike: All right. Take care.

Kevin: Bye-bye.

Mike: Bye.
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