Show Summary
To be successful as a real estate investor, it’s important that you always look for that ‘edge’, that new way to operate. Auction.com, once primarly focused on helping banks and institutional players liquidate REO’s and other properties, has become a massive player and clearing house for buyers and sellers of real estate at every level…right down to the individual investor, buyer and seller. Buying and selling houses on Auction.com has personally helped me, and in this interview, we discuss how Auction.com can help you buy and sell properties with Rick Sharga, Executive Vice President.
Highlights of this show
- Introduction to industry visionary, Rick Sharga, Executive VP at Auction.com. Rick shares with us his views on the ever changing real estate industry, opportunities for investors, and his prediction on what we can expect in the real estate industry over the next few years. Rick also discusses how Auction.com is changing with the times, innovating to take advantage of new opportunities, and serving buyers and sellers in more ways than ever.
Resources and Links from this show:
Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode
FlipNerd Show Transcript:
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.
This is Mike Hambright, thank you for joining us today for another episode of FlipNerd.com’s VIP real estate investing show. Today we’re honored to have Rick Sharga as a guest. Rick is an executive vice president with Auction.com, the online auction platform that has sold over $26 billion in real estate. We’re going to hear a lot more about that, and I know they’re growing rapidly. Before we dive in today, I’d like to take a moment to recognize our featured sponsors.
Advertisement: RealtyMogul.com is an online market place for real estate investing, connecting borrowers and capital from accredited and institutional investors. Get a rehab loan fast and close in as little as 10 days. Rates start as low as 9%.
We’d also like to thank National Real Estate Insurance Group, the nation’s leading provider of insurance to the residential real estate investor market. From individual properties to large scale investors, National Real Estate Insurance Group is ready to serve you.
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.
ecommend you check them out. Whether you’re looking to buy or sell properties. And now, back to the show.
Well Rick, welcome to the FlipNerd.com interview show
Rick: Nice to be here Mike.
Mike: Thanks for joining us today.
Rick: My pleasure.
Mike: So a lot of folks… I’ll let you do the bulk of your introduction… We’d like to learn about you and of course Auction.com as well. I’d like to say first that I’m actually a customer of Auction.com. I’ve sold several houses through Auction.com. In fact, I have one on the auction site live. And so I’ll say even for me as a veteran real estate investor that has a mailing list of thousands of investors, we’ve seen benefit for some of our houses to sell them through Auction.com to bring real estate investors or, you know, they don’t necessarily need to be an investor, just a buyer that we didn’t have on our list and couldn’t find that person through our platform. So I think it’s a fantastic tool. I know you guys have had some great success. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, Rick?
Rick: Sure, thanks Mike. And thank you for your business, we appreciate it.
Mike: Absolutely.
Rick: I broke my… I cut my teeth in the real estate business with a company called RealtyTrac. I was initially the vice president of marketing for the company and started publishing a monthly report on foreclosure activity back in 2005 before the foreclosure tsunami hit. And when the numbers got a little bit crazy, we were the only people out there with a years’ worth of data that could be referenced by the press. So I spent about ten years at RealtyTrac and for better or worse, more or less became the voice of the foreclosure market which probably something I don’t really want on my tombstone later. But it was an interesting place to be. Sort of at the eye of the hurricane for those ten years. And I really learned an awful lot about the real estate market, particularly the distressed side.
One of the things that we wanted to accomplish at RealtyTrac but weren’t able to quite get to was the creation of an online marketplace. Where people could come and find properties they were interested in, and ultimately be able to buy and sell them. And I think RealtyTrac has done a great job both during the time I was there and since of providing just copious amounts of useful information and analytical tools. But never really crossed that threshold of being able to let people buy and sell.
That was one of the big attractions, for me, coming to Auction.com. Is the sort of fulfillment of that longtime dream of being able to take part in an online real estate marketplace.
In between I had a two year stop over at another really good company called Carrington Holding Company. Carrington owns and operates about 16 businesses ranging from a hedge fund that invests in mortgage notes all the way through a real estate brokerage, mortgage origination business, mortgage servicing, property preservation. So it was sort of my MBA in the real estate mortgage market for two years while I really learned the business there.
And then in July I jumped on board here at Auction.com. And it really was sort of an interesting intersection point for me because the first 20 years of my career I really spent doing technology marketing. So Auction.com is in the process of sort of converting from an old line auction company to a sort of new wave technology company that happens to do online auctions. And it’s a really kind of interesting place to be.
Mike: Yeah I bet, I bet. So one of the things that I’ve always said creates opportunities for individual investors like myself, is how inefficient the marketplace is for distressed real estate. And so how do you… Obviously there’s an opportunity to make that more efficient, which you guys are benefiting from. Where do you see the kind of investor marketplace for real estate going as we come ahead, as we move ahead? Is it going to become as efficient, is it your intention to make it as efficient as, say, you know, the MLS is for retail properties?
Rick: With all due respect…
Mike: You’re going to drive me out of business, Rick, is what I’m asking.
Rick: No, not at all. Investor, individual investors in particular are some of our best friends. I was hesitating because I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody use the MLS as an example for efficiency before.
Mike: Relatively speaking. Relatively speaking.
Rick: Relatively speaking, yes. No, the real estate ecosystem is one of the messiest ones around. And when you had a chance to dig through the paperwork as I did for ten years at RealtyTrac and a couple years at Carrington, you find out just how dysfunctional, disorganized and inefficient the whole ecosystem is. Very, very paper intense business. Very user unfriendly. You just about need to be a nuclear physicist to figure out how to fill out a mortgage document. So it’s not for the faint of heart.
I think what our platform does is make the transaction part a whole lot smoother. You know this from selling our properties on our site but we handle the marketing. We’re posting properties on websites like Trulia, and Zillow and Homefinder and RealtyTrac and a number of others that attract investors and other buyers.
The transaction process is very painless. It basically, bidders come in and start competing to buy your property. And it’s always a much better position for a seller to be in when you have multiple people interested in buying a particular asset. So it’s very much like an eBay style action that happens to be selling real estate.
And I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to see a lot more real estate transactions done online. I think, you know, 92% of all real estate purchases today start with some sort of online search. And we have a whole generation of home buyers and sellers coming to market right now who are conditioned to buy… Pretty much everything they buy online. But when my mother started telling her grandson that it was okay if she couldn’t find something in the store because Nana would go online and find it, I knew the world had changed.
Mike: Yeah. Well my grandfather got a Facebook account recently, I knew something was… Something had changed like you said. Yeah that’s right.
Rick: That’s right.
Mike: Great. Great. Well I know that Auction.com has changed quite a bit over the years and most recently, is a very heavy player in the trustee sale. Can you talk about some of the innovation that’s happening in terms of, I guess, how you go to market? And then maybe how those things are benefiting both sellers and buyers? You know, real estate investors or I guess otherwise.
Rick: Yeah, traditionally the company was a way to dispose of REO assets that couldn’t otherwise be disposed of. Although back in the day when our founders Jeff Friedman and Rob Friedman got together, a lot of what they sold was land. They were sort of the market maker for hard to sell land. And still wonder why some people bought the parcels they bought. There one guy apparently who wanted to sky dive off a part of a mountain and that’s why he bought a parcel.
Mike: Oh okay.
Rick: But it sort of migrated from that hard to move stuff into distressed assets. And the auction process turned out to be very efficient, very profitable way, if you will. At least generated less losses for the sellers of that institutional real estate. The last couple of years we started to move up the food chain a little bit. You mentioned trustee sales. Trustee sales forever, and you know this as an investor a lot of your listeners probably do as well, those trustee sales have been an insider game. And typically there’s some guy holding a clip board on the court house steps and surrounded by four of his buddies and they’re divvying up who gets to buy which property.
Mike: Right.
Rick: We’ve opened that whole process up. So we’re now doing full ballroom style actions. Sometimes in ballrooms at nearby hotels. Sometimes we set up sort of tents out on the courthouse steps. But they’re completely open auctions now. And what our sellers are finding is that they’re capturing a lot more revenue on the properties that we’re moving through those traditional auctions than they used to sell in the more clandestine trustee sales.
But we’re doing those in 30 counties in California. We’re doing them in about 15 other states. And we recently started doing some pilot programs in non-judicial foreclosure states that typical have sort of been off limits for companies like ours. And the early results are very promising.
We’re also doing some work selling short sales. And we’re working with a major servicer. The way that process works is when they get an offer on a short sale, they take the offer under consideration but require that the property is posted on Auction.com for about three weeks to see if they get a better offer. And about 60% of the time they are getting a better offer. The offer tends to be between 15 and 20% better. So we’re not talking about a few dollars here, it’s pretty significant. So another process that really hasn’t been optimized from a seller’s perspective is that short sale process.
We’re also doing commercial sales. We’re going to probably sell between $3 and $4 billion dollars of commercial properties this year. Some of it overseas. We’ve done three auctions in Germany, we’re getting ready to launch in a couple other countries. What really kind of got me to jump on board here was the opportunity to start moving non-distressed properties. So there are a lot of investors like yourself who will rehab a property, maybe put a tenant in place. And then sell that as a non-distressed unit. And we’ve sold about three or 400 of those types of non- distressed properties. Some from regular consumers. And we’re finding that the auction process works equally well pretty much up and down that food system.
Mike: Yeah. Well you start to sell… First I want to ask you about the trustee sales. So how do you… Who’s your customer there? Is it the banks? Are other trustees coming to you and saying let me outsource this to you? Or how are you getting that business, who are you serving, I guess.
Rick: Well a little bit of both. It is kind of a convoluted process sometimes. The trustee typically is our direct contact. And the trustee will be pushing us properties, approving sales prices, and so forth and so on. Sometimes they work with us directly, sometimes they work with us at the behest of either a servicer or an investor where the trustee is managing the properties on behalf of the trust. But it is a bit of a mixed bag, and I guess all of the above would be customers depending on where we are and which properties we’re talking about.
Mike: Right. Right. And you said you had some excitement about moving into more of the, I guess the owner occupant space. Folks that are using your platform to actually buy houses. And there’s no doubt that people are armed more than ever before with researching properties and neighborhoods on their own before they… Maybe before they contact a Realtor or using information from a Realtor to go do some research.
How do you see… And I know some other folks that claim that they’re actually getting maybe above retail prices for selling houses on auction sites. And that’s, of course, you have appraisal issues to worry about and things of that regard. But in some ways… I did mention how the MLS is efficient, relatively speaking. But in many ways it’s inefficient because I have to go through a person to spend my money. And many times, you know, not to take anything away from all real estate agents. But sometimes they’re not helpful folks. And you’re kind of maybe stuck working with that person if they have some sort of representative agreement. Or you at least feel obligated to because somebody has done some work for you.
But how do you tap into that space in the event… You know, when you consider that folks often want to physically see a property. How do you kind of facilitate that process with them? Because ultimately everybody wants to see the house. Or I’ll say 98% of people want to physically see the house and walk through it before they would actually buy.
Rick: Yeah I mean there are some investors who are comfortable buying property sight unseen. I know speaking for myself, if I were buying a house to move my family into, I would not only check out the house, I would check out the neighborhood, the community and so forth. So you really can’t get away from that aspect. At least not today you can’t. Maybe some time in the future.
But we actually encourage people to go visit the properties. So we don’t try and eliminate that part of the process. We actually help facilitate it. So we will work with, what we call concierge services. So we’ll stage a couple of open houses. We’ll make it possible for people to get over it and inspect a property. And that way it’s a very similar arrangement to what you get working with a realtor locally.
The big difference is the process itself is highly transparent. So I’m sure that you’ve made offers on properties and found out much to your dismay later that somebody bought it for a bit slightly higher than yours, or maybe even slightly lower than yours. Because the realtor decided that was the best offer. Excuse me. This process is much more transparent. I mean if you really want the property, you’re not going to let somebody outbid you by $500 or $1,000 you’re going to make sure you get that property. Or you’ll at least know that the bidder who won went beyond your price threshold.
From a sellers’ perspective, we just had an elderly lady, God bless her, who lost her husband and one of her children and had been unable to move a lakeside property in about three years. We were able to sell her property for above her list price. And it was just because we were able to cast a broader net than what she was able to do locally. And so that is the benefit of being online with these auction. And it’s a combination of that online technology and the auction process that really works.
But to get to your… One of the thresholds we have to cross is to change the behavioral pattern of your average home buyer and seller. And I guess where we start is probably with the traditional for sale by owner market. And as you know between 10 and 20% of all existing home sales historically have been for sale by owner. So these are people that are already motivated to do the process on their own. Generally to save the commission. And what we offer them is we think a better product than what they’ve been able to use before in order to move their property by themselves.
Mike: Okay. I know in my experience, the expense to work with Auction.com has been burden of the buyer. Is that the same instance for in situations where you’re talking about? So, folks that want to eliminate an expense associated with playing a Realtor commission or things like that are able to, you know, effectively do that through you.
Rick: Yeah our services are still free to the seller whether it’s an investor selling the property or an average homeowner.
Mike: Okay. Okay. And how did you… Was there a point in time… I seem to recall not too long ago, you pretty much only worked with large institutional sellers. Some of the Homevestors folks like me that have access to a lot of properties. It’s not individual sellers. Has that changed now? It sounds like it has, but…
Rick: We are open for business, Mike.
Mike: Okay.
Rick: Yeah, you know, the truth of the matter is, the process used to be more difficult than it is in terms of just getting properties into the website and moving them. We also wanted people that were experienced in the real estate transaction itself so that there weren’t the kind of hand holding issues that you might have with somebody trying to go through this for the first time or one of the first times. But as our business has matured, we actually are actively looking for individual investors who are going to buy and sell, you know, a hand full of properties over the course of the year. We think that’s an un-tapped market and something that we can really provide a good service to that will help make them more successful.
Mike: Right. Right. And that’s one of the other things that’s made, I guess, the real estate investing business or industry so inefficient. Is that it… I don’t know that there’s a more fragmented industry. Other than maybe… I have some background in retail, I always compare it to cell phone, I guess the retail market for mobile phones. Because I used to work for a very large retailer that was the largest mobile phone retailer in America, but they only had 6% market share. And the top ten only had 10%. So you have all of the mom and pop kiosks that are selling phones. Any mall in America there’s 40 different kiosks with 40 different owners.
And real estate investors… When I come up with analogies that I like I seem to think that everybody will like them. But I think it’s very similar to the real estate investing industry. Where a lot of investors are, you know, they’re like fire ants. They’re everywhere, there’s mounds of them and they never seem to go away. But that’s some of the opportunity that obviously you have at Auction.com is to help kind of roll some of that up, I assume.
Rick: Well that is part of what we’d like to do. And candidly, again, the same things I said for sale by owner customer apply to an individual investor as a potential customer. Typically you have expenses incurred in marketing. A lot of individual investors who maybe aren’t as experienced as you or some of your folks have trouble figuring out actual market value for a property, how to price it. They have difficulty negotiating, and then the closing can be a real pain the neck too.
And we take the burden of all four of those things off the seller and handle that at no charge. So it really does become a much more seamless, much easier process for those individual investors. And I should also point out for people that aren’t familiar with how auctions work, that you don’t have to worry about selling the property for less than you want because virtually all of our auctions come with a reserve price. And that’s the price that you set as the threshold. If we don’t get a winning bid that goes above that threshold, you’re not obligated to sell the property.
So we’ll approach you, somebody comes in with 95% of your asking price, we’ll approach you and say Mike you consider this because it was the highest bid. But there’s again no obligation to sell it unless you get the price that you were looking for.
Mike: Right. Right. And can you talk a little bit… I could describe it, I’m sure I won’t do it as eloquently as you. But just about the psychology of the auction process. The emotional side of folks getting caught up, whether they’re buying or selling, in how an auction works. Because as you know, in my experience, most of the activity comes down to, let’s say the last ten minutes of the auction. And that’s when emotions flare for the buyer and the seller. Can you talk a little bit about the psychology of that and why for buyers and sellers alike, why auction sites make sense in that regard?
Rick: Well yeah, you know, the running gag is you only you have to watch the last two minutes of any sporting event to figure out…
Mike: That’s true, yeah. That is, unless the Cowboys are playing.
Rick: Then you really have to watch the last two minutes of a Cowboys game to see how they’re going to cough it up. I’m an Eagles fan so I take great joy in that. But that aside, it’s also similar in that the last two minutes usually takes about a half an hour. And you’re right. There is an emotional component to bidding at an auction. Buying a house for your average consumer is also an emotional time. So it kind of multiplies itself.
But if you’ve ever been to a live auction event, there’s an energy that really permeates the room. And people find themselves raising their paddles who didn’t expect to be doing that. And I was recently at a charity auction and I wanted to bid on something that was Disneyland related. And it was very unique and very unusual and I thought my family would really enjoy it. I thought maybe I’ll go to $2,000 for this, maybe to $3,000. It was at $3,000 before I could get my hand in the air. And I think the winning bidder bought it for something like 11. This is something that probably had a retail value of $2,500. But that’s the kind of emotional froth that can happen.
And what’s been fascinating for me to see is how much of that emotion has been brought online. Now for bigger properties, commercial events, we’ll actually have people monitoring the auctions live and reaching out to bidders saying are you done? Do you have one more bid in you? Because this guy just came in at $1,000 more do you really want the property? Sort of like what you’d see on a floor at a ballroom auction.
We don’t necessarily have that going on at the retail level, if you will. But you can watch those auctions yourself. And as you see somebody bidding beyond you, there is that compulsion to hit the bid button one more time. Just see if you can’t be the winner. So there is that sense of gratification and that energy that you don’t get when you call a realtor and ask them to put in another bid as a counter offer to what the home seller gave you and then wait a week to find out what happened.
Mike: Right. There’s some immediate gratification. Yeah. I know that for every house I’ve sold through Auction.com, and I buy and sell houses all the time. Sometime they’re sold without me even being there. I mean, I say sold under contract, which is I guess what we’re talking about with the auction as well. But activity happens and I don’t really think about it.
But every time I’ve had a site… A house on Auction.com for sale, I literally make an event out of the last 15 minutes. It’s like hey everybody come in and let’s watch my screen and let’s see what happens. And it’s entertaining as well, and it’s exciting because you know, like you say you get down… And I guess what you do is it a systematic approach every time? That when somebody bids, more time is added? Is it the same amount of time or…
Rick: Once you get down to the closing itself, if somebody comes in with a higher bid we automatically extend the amount of time that’s available for a counter offer. And that obviously works pretty much to the benefit of the seller.
Mike: Yeah and sometimes that happens in the last second or two. So kind of watching that countdown to see if it will get extended. Which I know that that means that somebody just bid more.
Rick: You also have to understand the psychology of the bidder. Nobody wants to be the first bidder, everybody wants to be the last bidder. So you do have some bidders who would try and game the system by waiting until literally the last second with their bid. And that’s really one of the reasons we have that extension because you don’t want somebody sneaking in at the last second and stealing a property away from someone who really wanted it. And by the way Mike, they’re willing to bid more. So good for the seller.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. That’s fantastic. Well where are you and Auction.com going from here? Actually could you explain a little bit, we didn’t talk about this up front. A little bit about your role at Auction.com and kind of tell us, you know, in terms of your responsibility. How you’re evolving the company?
Rick: Well I really came to sort of be a spokesman on behalf of the Auction.com brand. So doing these sorts of interviews that you and I are doing today. Over the last 12 years I’ve become something of an industry spokesman on housing and mortgage related issues. And so I leverage the contacts I have in the industry in the media to go out and to continue talking about those topics, but now doing it on behalf of Auction.com. And so there’s two things I’m really focusing on right now. One is just sort of getting out and continuing to talk about the housing and mortgage industries. And building the reputation of Auction.com as a reputable company in those markets. And the other is really going out and sort of evangelizing the auction process as a viable way of moving real estate for people that are interested.
Mike: Okay. Okay. And do you want to talk a little bit about the… Just the climate of the real estate industry and where you think things are going over, I guess, let’s say… Since we’re coming on the end of the year here why don’t we talk a little bit about 2014 and then maybe a little bit beyond of where you think things are going. From kind of a macro environment, even above and beyond Auction.com.
Rick: Well I think a lot of the momentum that we’ve seen over the last couple of years has been investor driven. And the unique aspect of this particular wave of investor activity has been that it’s come from institutional investors. Most investment activity historically has been from people like yourself. And the Homevestors folks who have gone out and bought a hand full of properties in a year and done something with them. We didn’t see a Black Stone or a Colin Capital or an American Homes for rent coming out and buying thousands of properties all at once. Going into a market being very price insensitive and really driving home price appreciation.
Fortunately, as they’ve moved in and out of markets, we’ve seen the prices hold. So they weren’t really artificial inflation in the case of these purchases. What they really did was just accelerate the recovery in those markets. And gobble up a lot of the vacant inventory.
Having said that, I think we’re going to start to see that buying activity slow down a little bit next year. And I also think we’re going to see very limited availability mortgage credit. We have new rules coming into place from the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau that are going to make it more difficult for marginal borrowers to qualify for loans. We’ve seen the government entities talk about lower loan limits, which is going to prove problematic in some of the higher price markets.
And candidly, I don’t think the economy is going to be strong enough to generate a lot of good paying full time jobs. Certainly we’re seeing unemployment rates come down, but I think that’s actually a false number that we’re seeing. We’re seeing a lot of part time jobs, a lot of low paying jobs. A lot of people just voting themselves off the isle and not looking any more.
So that all said, I’m a little bearish on the market for housing next year. I believe we’ll probably close this year with about 5.1 million units sold. In a healthy market we would probably be around 6 million units. I think 2014 will probably look a lot like 2014 in terms of sales volume. I think we’ll probably be right around 5, 5.1 million units again.
And I think home price appreciation is going to slow down. I think… I don’t see us going negative next year but I think a more traditional three to maybe four or five percent increase in home prices is going to be what we’re looking at next year as opposed to the double digit growth we’ve seen the last couple of years. So I think it’s going to be a challenging environment. But I think because we’re not going to see a lot of the traditional consumer owner occupants coming back to the market, there will still be ample opportunities for individual investors to buy properties. A little bit less competition, perhaps, than we’ve seen in the last couple of years from the big guys.
And I also think for investors who are looking to rent properties, we’re going to continue to see home ownership rates decline next year. Which suggests that there’s going to be a market opportunity for people to move who are looking to buy and hold. So not an awful year next year, not like what we saw during the trough a couple of years ago. But I think the boom is going to take a time out next year while we kind of work through some of the issues that I already talked about.
Mike: Okay. Okay. And how about beyond next year? I guess we can say in this industry long term might be two years out but… But kind of two years and beyond I mean where do you think things are going? I mean I think most people believe that interest rates are not going to stay this low for… They can’t stay this low for much longer without starting to see some inflation. And where do you think things are going to go beyond 2014?
Rick: Well I do think the Fed’s going to probably start tapering a little bit on the quantitative easing it’s been doing. That all by itself will knock interest rates up a little bit. If the government actually does start to back out of some of the loans that it’s doing in the housing market, that will bring back private capital, but at higher rates. All of that pings affordability, which is one of the other reasons I’m not really optimistic about home prices over the next year.
I think 2016, a couple of interesting things happen. I think one is you probably do see credit start to loosen up a little bit. I skipped 2015 entirely, didn’t I?
Mike: That’s okay.
Rick: I think between 2015 and 2016 you start to see credit loosen up a bit. I think you start to see the economy recover to a point where you start to see more buying activity among owner occupants. And interestingly, also at that point by 2016 I think foreclosure levels are finally back to normal. So you have far fewer home owners upside down on their loans. You’ll have virtually the whole pipeline of distressed inventory flushed out. You’ll see credit loosing up a little bit. You’ll start to see inventory numbers come up. So I think what you’ll see is a more normal, healthy market. But you’re not going to see some of the volatility that we’ve experienced going up and down over the last few years.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Which a lot of that’s been driven by government intervention.
Rick: Oh yeah.
Mike: It’s really a shame that some of the laws that are coming into place now continually put pressure on individual folks that want to provide seller financing and things like that. I mean that seems like that could be a great solution that’s not on the taxpayer backs. But that continues to get harder for folks that want to play that role.
Rick: The government is trying to protect the consumer. And unfortunately in a lot of cases the government will protect the consumer from being able to get a loan. And so well meaning legislation, well-meaning regulations attempting to protect people from unscrupulous lending. Either by individuals or institutions, excuse me. But in a lot of cases, the unattended consequences, it’s just going to be really difficult for people to get loans that they should be able to get.
Mike: Right. Right. Great. Well anything you’d like to add, Rick, about Auction.com or about the services you can provide for folks that might we watching the show?
Rick: Well yeah, I know that, Mike, you’ve been using us to sell properties and again I appreciate your kind words on that regard and continued business. I encourage other people to take a test drive of the website. Go register, sign up for emails that are free by the way. That if we get properties you might be interested in, you’ll get notifications. It’s a good place for people to buy if they’re not as networked and have feet on the street like you do. And you might be surprised at some of the opportunities that you get outside of your own local neighborhood. But check it out. I think the excitement is real. I think we’re…
Our long term objective is to change the way people buy and sell real estate. And I think you and your peers in the individual investor community are the next group that’s going to embrace this and we’re really looking forward to having you all on board.
Mike: Great. Great. Well we’ll add links to Auction.com although it’s pretty easy, go to Auction.com. But we’ll add links to learn more about Auction.com below the video here. And Rick we thank you so much for joining us today, appreciate your time.
Rick: Thanks for having me.
Mike: Okay. Take care.
Rick: You too.
Mike: 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.