Ep003: The Landlord Profitability Playbook

Transcript

Welcome to the Connect Practice Track & Grow podcast. Habits, routines, motivations, and mindsets from some of the most successful real estate professionals among us. Check out the show notes at ConnectPracticeTrackGrow.com. This show is brought to you by the Strategic Resource for Real Estate Professionals, creating and coaching business opportunities and strategies that support and add value to the lives of real estate professionals at the strategicresource.com. And by ROOST Real Estate Co., today’s real estate agent doesn’t follow old rules. She makes new ones. Learn more at careerwithroost.com. Hello fellow real estate professionals. Chris McAllister here. This is a special episode of the Connect Practice Track & Grow podcast for property managers and those who may want to offer property management services to their investor clients in the future.

I wrote a book called The Landlord Profitability Playbook, and this podcast is a discussion I recorded with Kristi Linebaugh of 90minutebooks.com about the eight profitability plays owners need to automate their property management and to get on with their lives. There are a lot of great nuggets of information here, and I hope you enjoy listening. I’m Kristi Linebaugh, and I want to thank you for tuning into this audio recording I made with Chris McAllister about his new book, The Landlord Profitability Playbook. The eight profitability plays you need to automate property management and get on with your life. Chris and I had a great discussion about the system he uses to manage his own portfolio, as well as the portfolios of the clients who work with his real estate brokerage. Here we go.

So, welcome to The Landlord Profitability Playbook. This is the exact system we use at ROOST Real Estate Company with our property management clients to collect more rent, more often attract and retain great tenants, minimize rehab and maintenance costs, and maximize monthly cash flow and profitability. So, you can use the same playbook to identify opportunities in your business that will make the most difference to you. And Chris, I have to tell you, I absolutely love that because having been a landlord, that is number one right there is profitability. So, tell me a little bit about what was really the catalyst of you wanting to create a book that landlords could score themselves on, and why do you think it’s important for them to have this information?

Well, I always subscribe to the theory that the only thing that ever improves is what gets measured. And sometimes it’s not just the numbers that we measure, though, you know, as landlords and real estate investors, we need to do that as well. But I realize that you can also measure your mindset. And if you think about, you know, kind of like how do you think about your thinking, that if you can measure your mindset from, you know, where you are today and where you’d like to be, that’s really the beauty of the scorecard approach. I love that too because I think so many people have no idea to think about their thinking.

They’re just focusing on the problem and not how they’re thinking about it and the solutions. And I think that really probably puts people in a box of finding or asking for help. Well, it does. And, you know, when you spend so much time, I guess it sounds cliche, but when you spend so much time working in the business that we don’t have time to work on the business, when you really make the time to work on the business is where you get a chance to start thinking about your thinking. And I think too, just to make it easier, I love the fact that you talk about automation.

And that really kind of brings us into begin at the beginning with mindset number one, automate your rent collection. Tell me a little bit about that because that sounds fantastic. The aspiration for mindset number one, automate your rent collection is where you’re in a place where you set proper expectations for yourself and your tenants right up front. And you’re able to put systems in place that are so good that from the outside looking in, your properties seem to manage themselves. That’s fantastic. And that’s really the ultimate. That’s the number one goal. But a lot of us don’t start there. Yeah. So, well, so in mindset number one, automate your rent collection in the first column, you may find that you score yourself here.

But the first column or the first row is you’re spending too much time chasing tenants and personally collecting the rent and you hear new excuses every month and you could write a book. And I think about this and this has happened to me, but the excuses would be funny if they weren’t so sad. So I’m just going to share with you a couple of that sort of my perennial favorites. But, you know, and these are documented. These are for real. So we actually have one person say, I can’t pay the rent this month because I’m going to prison. And it turns out they charge rent there too.

Oh my gosh. That’s a good one. Another favorite that our team gave me was I have a rare brain disease that may be forget my rent. Can you make an exception for me this month? Oh my gosh. And then my personal favorite all time winner is my dog ate my rent money. That’s good. That’s rich. That is really rich. And if you’re in stage one, that is really an I’m going to call them stage one here because that’s the way that we’ve you’ve got them at the end of the book there. And I’m thinking that a lot of people are probably in that stage. What is something that they can do to kind of move towards stage two?

Because I know nobody wants to be in stage one for very long. Well, when you’re in the real estate business, you know, you’re ultimately in the tenant relations business, but it can’t be a one sided relationship, right? You’re providing a service. You’re providing a place to live. And they have to do their part by living up to the terms of the lease. So when you’re in stage one, sometimes it’s tough to figure out how to move forward. For a number of different reasons. But, you know, if we move on to stage two, if you found yourself in stage two, Reed, you’ve learned much since you bought your first rental property.

If you could find the space to start over, you know, you could make it all work. I hear this all the time, you know, by your first property, your first couple of properties, you think it’s going to go one way and it ends up going another. And the fact is managing your rental properties can be all consuming. And it’s very hard to step back when you’re caught in a monthly cycle. Absolutely. That’s not a virtuous cycle. And it’s hard, as we said earlier, to step back and look at your processes objectively. So if I were going to say that the one thing that we need to find space for between stage one and stage two is finding the headspace, the bandwidth, to really sit down and think about what’s happening and how to improve it.

The other part of stage two is, you know, it’s not enough to just want to change, although that’s definitely an improvement than, you know, stage one. So it’s not enough to want to change, but it is a step in the right direction, but you have to create the space to change. And I talk about margin all the time, you know, you have to have a little bit of give, you have to have a little play, you have to have a little margin. And the extra bandwidth necessary to, you know, to get outside of the problem, step away and look at it objectively. That’s really what you need to do to, you know, get to the point where you really have automated your rent collection.

As I say, and in stage two, it sounds like really you are starting to hone in on it being a mindset for them to be open to learning from the past and being open to new ways and ideas. Yeah. And when you move on to stage three and automate your rent collection, you know, you strong arm, it reads this way, you strong arm and harass your tenants every month until they pay. You don’t like playing the heavy, but you’ve gotten used to it. I know we’ve met a lot of landlords that, you know, they were at least collecting, which is wonderful, but muscling the month every 30 days is no way to live.

Awful. Stress. Yeah. Yeah, the stress is crazy and this may get the job done, but it always ends up that you’re neglecting other parts of your life and just carrying that stress every single month impacts, you know, your life in a negative way. Even if you don’t see it, you know, obviously because it happened slowly over time. Well, and I think too, because the stress is kind of two fold, isn’t it? You have the stress of trying to strong arm the tenant, but then you also have the stress in your own life of, hey, I need that money not only to pay the mortgage, but I need the excess to go towards other bills or other situations in my life too.

So it’s kind of dual action stress. Yeah. And the other thing that happens when you’re in stage three is what are the parts of your life where you’re neglecting? And sometimes what you end up neglecting is your career, right? Your real job. Yeah. It’s a job where you earn the extra cash to, you know, invest in real estate to begin with. So you start to neglect your job, your chosen profession, your family. And sadly, I see it all the time, your personal health and well-being. You can only muscle the month so many times before it catches up with you. And then at this point, if you’ve really become open and you’re wanting that change and you’re really wanting to do the automation of the rent collection and you want to get to stage four so that you can really get that goal, what would be something that they would need to do to get there?

Well, you know, we talk about in stage four that you have proper expectations for yourself and your tenants and you’ve communicated those to your tenants and that you have systems in place that allow all the monthly activities to happen. So I always tell people that, you know, what we do is not rocket science, but it is an intentional set of processes, steps and habits that, you know, when you execute them or we execute them month after month leads to profitability. And the cool thing about investing in real estate is if you do it right and you figure it out and you get those properties working for you instead of the other way around, what you get is mailbox money.

And there you go. Mailbox money is the most wonderful thing in the world, right? Mailbox money is the goal, getting a check in the mail, net of expenses month after month for the rest of your life. That’s the holy grail. That’s what happens when you automate your rent collection. And mailbox money looks easy and it is easy. You just have to open the envelope, but getting there, you know, getting to the point where you have your systems in place and you’ve communicated your expectations and so forth. That obviously is the trick. That exactly. I was going to say that can be a bigger trick than a lot of people count on or they don’t count on it being such a big obstacle to overcome.

And then as we move to mindset number two, start at day one. I like that because that always there’s a saying that is easier to keep up than it is to catch up. And I really think that this is what this mindset says to me is you go, you need to start at the beginning. Tell me a little bit more about where your mind is in that mindset number two. Well, starting day one, the what we’re looking for here is that you automatically approach every month as a fresh start. You or your team collects the rents. You post the notices. If they don’t pay, you get your evictions filed.

If you have a vacancy, you get in there and get the punch list created and move on. You know, that’s a lot. But it, whether it’s a lot or not a lot. You have to do it every month and hopefully some months when the rent comes in on time, everybody stays. It’s beautiful. You move on. But again, you have to have your systems and processes in place so that when something does not go perfectly and very few months are perfect that you’re prepared to act. So when I look at mindset, go ahead. Sorry. No, you’re good. I was just going to say the goal of mindset number two, that that sounds really great.

But you have to start it. You have to look at it as a fresh start every month. Exactly. And people are unable to do that. And people who find themselves in stage one are less likely to do that because their cash flow is so tight that they have no choice but to, you know, accept partial payments, big plead or whatever. And they have tenants that never get current, but you really can’t afford to evict them. Right. So in stage one, you’re getting some money. It may or may not be enough, but you’re not in a position to move that tenant out because your cash flow won’t allow it.

So in stage one, collecting a partial payment is better than nothing if it’s enough to cover your mortgage and expenses. But obviously, you know, there’s no profit there. There’s no margin. There’s that word again. There’s no room to maneuver. So without profit, of course, there’s no wealth creation. There’s only wheels spinning. If you scored yourself in stage one, you know, you already know that. Yeah. And I was going to say, and that’s easy to fall into really because I know for me personally, I’m, I meet a good person who I think is going to be a great tenant and they don’t quite have all of the, you know, the, all that first month’s extra goodies.

They didn’t realize they needed to come up with them to get started and they say, well, can I just pay you part now and then I’ll just pay you in portions as the months go by. And I only fell into that once and it was horrible. So I know exactly what you’re saying. They did end up getting caught up, but it took a long time. Yeah, that situation seldom, seldom ends well. Exactly. Getting off on the wrong foot to begin with is always tough because you move across mindset number two or what I like to call profitability play number two is in stage two, you feel like Bill Murray and Groundhog Day.

The first week of every month, you know, it’s the same thing, but it’s just not as funny as Bill Murray and you know, there has to be a better way. So usually, you know, in this situation and again, this is about stepping, you know, out of the day to day and working on the business, but usually it’s the exact same tenants who pay on time every month and it’s the exact same tenants who drag it out every month over time. You know, we sometimes come to accept that because we don’t have enough space or margin or time to get out in front of it and it’s sort of like that analogy about the, you know, the frog and the boiling water.

So if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, the frog is going to jump out. But if you have a frog in a pot of room temperature water and you set it on the stove and turn on the heat and let it warm up over time, that frog is going to stay in the pot and just stew. Sadly, if you scored yourself in stage two, you’re going to get the frog in the story. Yeah, exactly. And what could they do to jump out of there to get their frog legs going and jump out of the pot and move towards stage number three?

Well, you know, in stage three, you know, you do the best you can with the time you have, you know, you could do better, but you don’t quite have the resources you need to simplify the job. So again, it’s about creating enough space to one, realize there’s a better way and two, figure out what those first couple of steps are to get to the better way. But the situation in stage three, this is where a lot of our clients are when they come to us for help, right? They’re doing the best they can. They are surviving, but they’re sick of just surviving. They want to simplify the job.

They want to get on with their lives. And you know, in stage three, these folks are stable, but they’re at the point where mentally, whether because they’re beaten down or whatever you want to call it, but they’re ready to welcome some help. And the best help they could get is to have a team of people who really enjoy property management and do this for a living and, you know, treat their properties as if they were their own. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? I was just saying, that’s the thing, isn’t it? They want, they got into it for money, not just to get by. Yeah.

Yeah. And the sad thing is they’re not making money and it’s hurting their lives, right? Yeah. Real estate is incredible. It can actually give you a bigger, better future, right? But it can also turn on you. And that’s what we see in this mindset really in all of the mindsets. But people in stage three find the personal cost is just too high to continue the way they’ve been going. And again, they are ready to try a different way. And when they come to us, they’re ready to ask for some help and get some help. And that’s when they’re finally able to get to stage four.

And let’s go over that again to the stage four you approach every month as a fresh start. You’re team collects your rent, post notices, files your evictions and creates punch lists. How awesome is that? Yeah, I love that, right? So, and this is exactly how we approach going to work for a new client. Honestly, it’s how we approach every client every month, but when we get a new client, you know, things aren’t usually perfect. And, you know, there’s a lot of people who don’t pay on time and there’s a lot of communication that goes on. There’s a lot of standards that are communicated. And then we find that people start to leave and, you know, we have vacancies and things to do, but you have to go through this process.

And, you know, I always tell our new clients that, you know, the first two or three months, they could be a little bit tough, right? Because not everybody’s going to be able to, you know, meet the standards and we’re going to be fair, but our responsibility is to you, the owner. And it’s our job to help you make a return on this investment and things could get a little bit tougher, you know, before they get better over the first, you know, two, three, four, five months. But the fact is rent is doing the first usually in our lease is it’s late on the fifth. If somebody doesn’t pay by the fifth, we post three day notices on the properties of anybody who didn’t pay the rent by the fifth on the morning of the sixth.

If they don’t communicate, if they choose not to pay, if they don’t talk to us in collaboration with the owner, we will file those evictions and move forward. Now, a lot of times when you file an eviction, sometimes people will come up with the extra money, including the court costs and come current, which is fabulous. And oftentimes probably a third of the time, they’ll go ahead and leave and maybe another third of the time they’ll show up in court. But that’s the job. That’s what we have to do to get control of your properties and return you to profitability. The other piece is, you know, once that poor performing tenant is out, then we’ve got to set the stage for how do we get that property turned and get a new tenant in there.

And the first step to that is, you know, getting into the property, getting the locks changed, getting a punch list made and getting bids. But that, those things, that’s what happens on day one when we go to work for a new client. And that’s literally what happens every month for all of our clients. But obviously it gets easier as the month goes on. That’s fantastic. But also what a load of stress off of their mind when they’re able to get into stage four to know that all of that is being carried on without them having to be the motor behind the car. Right. That’s our job.

I love it. And so we move on to mindset number three, rehab to the neighborhood standard. The really the goal of that. Tell me a little bit about stage four goal of that. Well, I gotta tell you, you know, rehab and repair costs are probably other than not being able to collect the rent on time or collect all the rent on time. I think rehab and repairs is the area that makes landlords, real estate investors absolutely nuts because I know it makes me nuts. And, you know, we call mindset three rehab to the neighborhood standard. And the reason that we say that is, well, first of all, before we talk about that, let me just give you what the goal is.

What is the aspiration for maintenance and repairs? And that is, is that you or your employees or your property managers, every time you have a project every time you have to turn a property between tenants, you get at least two bids or two different contractors. So at least you have something to compare one to the other and at the end of the day, get a better result. But the other thing is, and this is where we’ve had some success is we asked all of our contractor partners and we will get two to three bids from different partners for every project, but we asked them to separate their labor quotes from their material quotes.

And the reason we do that is, you know, material quotes pretty much are what they are. It’s the labor part of a project where there’s always some difference between, you know, two or more bids. So that’s sort of like the secret sauce that, you know, gets you to stage four. But when you start off in this mindset, rehab to the neighborhood standard, you know, there are some landlords out there and we know them, you know, you do as little as you can, as little as you can get away with when it comes to repairs and maintenance. And there’s no reason to do anymore because, you know, your tenants aren’t going to appreciate what you do.

And this is a sorry place to be, right? It’s an unhappy place to be. You’ve lost all hope. But rehabbing to the neighborhood standard, that just means that you’re going to go just far enough to be competitive in the neighborhood, in the market, but you’re not going to go so far on repairs and rehabs and remodeling that you waste money on upgrades that you’re never going to get a return on. Excuse me. And I will tell you, and I was guilty of this, honestly, for years before I like to think I got smart. But, you know, sometimes we will go too far in rehabbing a house and we think that, you know, if we give somebody something that’s sort of above and beyond that they’re going to appreciate and take care of it, maybe pay more rent, you know, whatever.

And it never, ever happens. So, you know, every property needs to have a solid roof, you know, has good plumbing, good electricity. It has to be safe. It has to be watertight, et cetera. But that doesn’t mean, you know, every neighborhood warrants a jacuzzi tub or, you know, even a dishwasher for that matter. And an apartment complex, maybe not even, you know, washer and dryer hookups. So, when you start to put money into things that are represented, representative of the other houses in the neighborhood, 99.9% of the time, it’s a waste of money. And the other thing I find is when people score themselves in stage one, it’s usually somebody who did go too far and got burned and, you know, they’re just sort of sick of the entire business.

You know, they wasted their money on things that didn’t give them return and now they’ve got to cut cost of the bone to make up for it and it just turns into a downward spiral. So, sometimes we think we’re being, you know, a better human being, you know, a superior landlord by trying to offer maybe what we sometimes think is a better value, but it almost never works. And that’s why, you know, I call the mindset rehab to the neighborhood standard. And definitely we want to get out of stage one. What can we do to move to stage two at this point? Well, you know, stage two, I write, you really don’t know how much things cost or how do we evaluate a bid.

You’re at the mercy of every contractor you call and you hate this part of the real estate investing business. And again, this is where landlords are constantly frustrated. But what I’ve found is sometimes we have unreasonable expectations for what things cost, right? Right. House and, you know, it needs a paint job or whatever. And I make a snap decision judgment that, well, this is $1,000. That doesn’t mean that any contractor I call is going to do that job for $1,000, right? Sometimes you have to have appropriate standards and expectations for yourself because just because we want something doesn’t mean we’re going to get it. You know, if you’re hiring out the work, which most of us do and really almost all of our landlord clients do, you got to get a couple of bids and you’ve got to look at them critically and get a good idea for what things cost.

I always tell people whatever your first one is for the cost of repair, you know, budget another 25% because you’re less likely to, you know, get stressed down the road. So if I walk into a property and, wow, this should be $1,000, I’m still going to go back and budget, you know, $1,250, $1,500 because I don’t want to go through that grief of, you know, thinking I overpaid because I put myself in a mindset that something was, you know, X amount of money in the reality is it’s not. And then you’re upset before you even get started. That’s right. I need to make us upset.

We don’t need to make ourselves upset before we start. Exactly. So when you move on to stage three, you know, and like I said, sell them, but we do have a few of our clients who do their own work or have their own contractor or whatever. But a lot of times the people who come to us are doing their own work when they bring their properties to us. And one of the reasons, and you see this in stage three, is you feel the only way to avoid getting ripped off is to do the work yourself. And you end up having a great relationship with the cashiers at Home Depot but you seldom get to see your wife and kids.

There you go. You’re significant other in kids. So, you know, personally, I don’t have the time, talent, or the inclination to physically maintain my own rental properties. Now, I, what I do is across my portfolio, I budget between 25 to 35% of every gross rent dollar I expect to collect to cover future lost rent and repairs. Now, 25 to 35%, that can be a lot of money, right? But my goal is a $1,000 rental to set aside $200 to $350 a month per unit for repairs and maintenance. You know, every tenant eventually leaves, right? And that property is going to have to be cleaned up and eventually rehabbed.

And, you know, it’s easy to fall into, to get complacent when you string together a few good months in a row and then suddenly, you know, a couple of people move out, maybe you have a, maybe a more extensive rehab that you have to get through and maybe instead of losing a month or two months rent, you lose three or four. And, you know, it hadn’t been painted for three or four years. I mean, you can use up to $250 to $300 on a $1,000 rental really quick. So, you know, trying to find the discipline to set that cash aside, you know, sometimes in the form of reserves or just because at some point you’re going to spend it, that’s really the way to go forward, right?

You know, if I have a good month, I keep the money in the checking account because one way or another I’m going to need it. And sadly, it’s usually sooner rather than later. You know, when I was a kid, you know, I used to play Monopoly and my whole thing was I always took my cash and hid it under the Monopoly board. Because nobody knew how much money I had and I couldn’t see it either. And, but that, I tried to carry that trick with me by, you know, if I have a great month, great. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to get any of it.

It doesn’t mean that I’m going to turn around and use all that cash to buy another property. It just means that I can sleep nights knowing that I have enough reserves in place to be okay when the inevitably a tenant greater otherwise moves out. I heard a great quote and I think it was from Steve Harvey. He said, when you have money, the only thing that does is it turns emergencies into inconveniences. That’s true. I thought that was so true. Dan at Circles of Influence, a strategic coach has a similar saying. He says, you know, if you have a problem and you have enough money to fix the problem, you really don’t have a problem at all.

Exactly. And then you get to stage four and that’s really the best part. You collect and evaluate at least two bids for every rehab project you undertake. You separate labor quotes from materials. That is a big one. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody separate the labor quotes from the materials. Tell me just a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, we’ve been asking our contractors to do that for years. Because it’s hard to argue what materials cost when there’s a home depot on every street corner. Right? If you really want to go see how much the materials cost you can. So it’s really hard to hide that.

You know, I don’t like to have to go to a owner and try to explain where I think the fudge factor is with this quote. Right? Sometimes it’s, you know, it may be a great quote. It may not be a great quote, but you can’t tell. You don’t know what the thought process was. You don’t know how much they expected to spend on materials. You don’t even know if they did a solid, you know, shopping list, right? For materials. So it’s labor. That’s the variable. Labor is the sticking point. So asking them to break down their estimates into two parts has, you know, it’s just a little simple secret that I’m happy to pass on to anybody listening or reading this book.

And again, I want our owners to see at least two honest estimates for each project. And, you know, our property managers, you know, they’ll go out and they’ll get two quotes. And sometimes, you know, the quotes we get are just guys, right? Independent contractors that, you know, work on houses, they’re not formal corporations. They’re not big companies or anything like that. And sometimes we’ll get handwritten scribbles, right? Right. For an estimate. So what I asked our property managers to do is, you know, take those handwritten scribbles, talk to the contractors, decipher them, get the two bids sorted out, and then email the client, you know, our landlord, the scribbles, and your worksheets for sorting them out.

Be prepared to discuss the pros and cons with the owner, make your recommendation and move forward. But I want to be always 100% transparent with the owners when it comes to rehab and maintenance bills. You know, we don’t mark them up, right? You know, part of the fee we charge for property management includes keeping your properties ready and rented. And I never want an owner to think that, you know, somebody’s, you know, collecting something on the side or whatever. Transparency in this business is an absolute necessity. I would say that’s probably the biggest fear that I have heard of people turning their properties over to management is that you have to know the person can be trusted because if you’re out of state or you’re traveling and you’re not seeing what’s being repaired and you’re just getting these bills and you don’t know how to decipher them.

I think that’s the big sticking point where the fear can come in. Yeah, and we like to get out in front of that at the start. So that’s perfect. Yes, market purposefully. So tell me about that. The goal of mindset number four. Well, you know, marketing. Vacant property is kind of an art in and of itself. And what I, you know, suggest to, you know, people out there managing their own properties is that they should benchmark their marketing and advertising against the most successful investors they know. And when you do, that’s the first step to making sure that your marketing systems are bull proof. So for a lot of landlords, you know, the marketing strategy isn’t all that sophisticated, right?

They put a sign in the yard, says, got their cell phone on it, right? Magic marker. Yeah, magic marker. And they put an ad on Craigslist. And what happens in that situation, their phone just rings off the hook to the point where the incoming is just flat out unmanageable. So that’s the worst place to be in marketing purposefully, right? Set yourself up that you can’t make your phone stop ringing. And there’s so many messages that you can’t get through them and make callbacks. It’s just horrible. And, you know, back when I started, I did something similar. It’s just when I started, we still had newspapers, right?

So, you know, I used to hate putting an ad in the newspaper when I needed a tenant. The calls to unqualified prospects were just overwhelming. And with technology Craigslist is infinitely worse. And I had to be honest with you, just thinking about that situation. I just get sick to my stomach. Little woozy. Yeah, I get a little woozy. So, you know, so what do you have to do? What does stage two look like? Well, you know, usually people in stage two, one, they know that they just can’t continue with the Craigslist strategy. It’s and they want to attract better applicants. And by better, I mean better qualified applicants, but they just struggle with where to begin.

And what they’re looking for is a system that cuts marketing time and cost. Not that, you know, Craigslist in and of itself is expensive because it’s not. But the expense of taking time away from your real job or your family, because you’ve got all those billions of phone calls coming in or potentially not getting something rented at the first of next month and missing another month of rent. So anyway, did the cost do add up? But my advice to, I’m sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say, and the emotional stress of that is a huge impact too. I remember when I had done the same thing exactly what you said, took my magic marker, put my little sign out front, so proud of myself.

Did such a great job. Did the Craigslist thing. And of course, it was just inundated. Well, of course, you can’t answer every single phone call when it comes in. So I was having to call people back. Well, here I am a woman calling these men who are looking for an apartment. And more than once I got women calling me back and when I would answer, I’d get cussed out because they’d say, why are you calling my man or why are you calling my husband? Why are you calling my boyfriend? And then I’m like, oh my gosh, now I’m in a position. Well, do I tell them?

Maybe they don’t know he’s moving, you know? So that was awful too. So definitely, yeah, I can relate. Yeah. But my advice when you’re doing a rental ad on Craigslist or, you know, go to Zillow or apartment.com or wherever that you choose to go is, you know, answer every question in the ad that you can think that somebody’s going to ask. Right? Nice. Yeah, that’s great. Are you going to allow pets? Then say yes or no up front. You know, if you’ll allow a cat that you’re not going to allow a Rottweiler or whatever, say that. If you’re going to expect them to, you know, give you pay stubs, you write so that you can show that they have enough income to pay the rent, say that up front.

You know, it doesn’t mean that every applicant is going to read it before they, you know, apply or call you, but at least it’s a step in the right direction. You know, the goal for marketing market purposefully is to collect as many great applications as you can so that you have something to work with. Right? You have a, you know, two, three, four, whatever it is of, you know, fairly qualified applicants to choose from. And that’s ultimately what we’re trying to get to here. And if you’re wanting to, you go ahead. Yeah, part of that of attracting or collecting, you know, multiple good applications is making sure that the rent you’re asking for the property is appropriate.

So, you know, that’s how you kind of get to stage three or start working towards stage three and beyond this. And stage three and market purposefully says you are unsure of the market rate rent in your neighborhood, but as long as you have cash coming in each month, you feel fine. Well, you’ve got to know what your market rate rent is in the neighborhood, right? If every other house in that area is renting for $800 a month and you’ve arbitrarily decided that you’re going to get $900 a month, well, you know, you may get a deposit, you may get a signed lease, and you may get somebody to stay for a month or two.

But the likelihood of that person honoring the lease to term, if you’re asking, you know, more than the market rate is just slim to none. It just never ever works. Now, of course, on the other side, you know, it’s not good business to ask too little and leave money on the table. But there’s a sweet spot, right? You know, you want to be competitive. You want to have a number that’s market right, right? If it’s $800, maybe, you know, you want to be $750, you know, I always use $795, you know, it’s just arbitrary. But if I think it’s worth $800 and the markets at $800 say $800 to $825 and I can make my numbers at $795, that’s a sweet spot, right?

That’s competitive. And that’s going to generate the greatest number of applications from that aren’t just able to give you enough cash to move in, but are able and willing to honor the terms of the lease, you know, for the entire year. That’s the best place to be. Yeah, so you want to market for that, right? Exactly. You want to market for that. You want, if that starts with the price, you know, what you’re asking for rent, it starts with answering all the questions, you know, telling people that if they’ve been evicted, you know, anytime in the last X number of months or years that, you know, they need not apply, you know, whether you take pets or not, that you’re going to do credit criminal background checks.

Say that in your ad and answer as many questions as you can. Get your standards and writing. Get them out there in the world. Does it solve every, you know, call coming in from or an application from an unqualified person? No, but it is an absolute step in the right direction. And that would really set you up to hit the goal of stage four. You benchmark your marketing and advertising against the most successful investors, you know, your systems are foolproof. And that’s really the best part right there is you’re not trying to recreate the wheel every single month with every single tenant. Yeah, and I always suggest, you know, look online, check out successful property management firm in your market and see what their ads look like.

Assuming they have vacancy to advertise because a lot of times I know for us and I’m sure other property management companies, we can fill our vacancies from our waiting list, right? So we’ve got, you know, usually a handful in a given month of pre-qualified prospects that are just waiting for us to have a vacancy. So that’s the downside of, you know, being able to look to a successful firm for tips because they may have already, they may never have to advertise, right? What you won’t find in a reputable property management company are bait and switch ads, right? You’re not going to see an ad that just says, you know, give us a deposit first last month’s rent move in.

You know, you’re not going to see, you know, available rentals from X dollar and they call and it’s going to be, you know, more than that. You’re going to see ads where they’re putting their expectations right out there in front so the people who apply know if they should be applying or not. You’re going to find offerings out there that are clear and direct. Yeah, the worst is starting from, well, how far are we going? You know, because the starting from price is probably already gone. Well, how far out do we have to go? Yeah, and there’s just crazy ads out there. And I don’t know why investors do it.

I don’t know why property management companies do it. You know, get the right house, have it ready to rent, price it right, tell the world what you’re looking for. And that is marketing purposefully. That’s perfect. And mindset number five, select applicants strategically. And the goal, you have systems in place to screen in applicants most likely to pay their rent on time without running a foul of fair housing laws. So tell me a little bit about selecting applicants strategically. Well, you know, if you’re marketing purposefully and you actually have applications to choose from, that’s how we move right in here to mindset or profitability play five.

And if you start with stage one of the mindset it reads, you rent to any applicant that shows up with cash, your cash flow will not allow you to evict non-performing tenants. So we’ve kind of heard this story before in previous mindsets, but just let me say up front, you know, the best way to retain great tenants is to rent to great applicants and teach them how to be great tenants. That’s right. I know that sounds easier said than done. But not everybody knows, you know, that your expectation is we may think it’s common sense. We may take it for granted. But sometimes you have to tell people that, you know, you can’t disturb the neighbors with loud music.

Sometimes you have to tell people that being a great tenant means that you leave the property in better shape the day you move out than the day you moved in. I know that’s a lot to ask, but we can still, you know, have expectations. And at the end of the day, if we don’t communicate those standards, we’re never ever going to, you know, get that margin that we’ve been talking about so we have room to move and get better. And really that’s the first stage really is in that mindset of you’re just in that, you’re in that process of almost panic really in stage one because you’re wanting the people to be in there.

And I don’t really know, you know, moving towards step to stage two is really heading in the right direction. Tell me a little bit about what we can do to get to stage two. Well, in stage two, your tenants never finish out their lease and they never leave the property ready for the next tenant. And you still feel like even though it’s better than stage one that this should have been a lot easier or it’s supposed to be a lot easier. And I tell people, my advice to anybody listening is qualifying an applicant requires more than just a signed application and cash to move in.

You know, your criteria needs to include proof of ability to pay, history of completing leases, and most importantly leaving previous properties in a good or better condition when they move in. And you do that by, you know, making sure that you have an application that clearly says you’re going to do a credit and criminal background check, telling people that you need, you know, three months worth of pay stubs to show that they make enough money to pay the rent. You’re going to have to make every effort you can to make contact with the previous landlord. Not sometimes you won’t get a response. Sometimes they may not tell the truth, but more often than not they will.

So, you know, you’ve got to do your due diligence when you’re qualifying an applicant. And again, you know, we put all that information usually on every single ad that we run, you know, for a vacancy and all of that information is collected in the application, whether they fill it out in person at one of our offices or they fill it out online. So again, establish and communicate your standards for what it means to be a great tenant. That’s really what you need to do to start moving towards stage three and four. And tell me a little bit about the stage three, too, now that they’ve kind of started moving in that direction and becoming more aware of things.

Well, in stage three, you know, your properties are vacant, maybe a little bit longer than you’d like, but you’ve already learned the hard way that you have to wait for the right tenant. That is really a quantum leap, right, from stage one. Yeah, absolutely. When you write to anybody who shows up with cash, right, you know, you may not be strategically screening people in, but you’re definitely in a better place. So, you know, the argument against, you know, becoming complacent in stage three is that this approach leaves money on the table. But again, it’s a way better place to be than stage one or two.

And again, your goal is to be able to cast the widest net possible to capture the greatest number of qualified applicants that you can. And then, like we said earlier, when you move into stage four, that you’ve got your systems in place to screen in applicants that are most likely to pay their rent on time without running a file of fair housing laws. Let me elaborate that on a bit. You know, I like to say our marketing selection processes are designed. I use the term screen dash in those applicants likely to pay the rent. This isn’t about screening out or exclusion. It’s about inclusion. But again, it’s about these are standards.

These are, this is what you will need to have to be a qualified applicant. But the moment you approach, you know, selecting tenants from a attitude of screening out for exclusion, the exact opposite of what we do. That’s when, you know, you run the risk of, you know, violating local, state, federal, fair housing laws and guidelines. And, you know, a lot of times, you know, we’ve met landlords who’ve had problems with, you know, complaints through truly. But they didn’t ultimately do anything wrong, but their words they used or I guess the approach they took was somebody’s ears parked up and wanted to dig deeper to see if there was a problem.

Screening in is important because you want to cast a net. You want to bring in as many qualified applicants as we can. You just want to be careful that you don’t take the opposite tact by screening out because that gets you on the road to trouble. That’s such a great way to look at it too. Completely different nuance. And that moves us to profitability play or mindset number six. Track your numbers. The ultimate goal is you receive an income statement with detail by property each month and you measure the profitability of each property against your plan. But that’s not where we start out. We start off in stage one.

So tell me a little bit about that. Well, stage one is, you know, you collect your rent is often paid in cash and your income and expense reports are incomplete. You know, maybe a good credit risk, but you can’t prove it. You know, if you collect cash, it’s easy to spend that cash, right? It’s easy to put it in your wallet and forget about it. And it’s also a possibility that if you collect cash that you’re not going to record that, you know, in your income and expense records and your things are going to be incomplete. And that’s really a problem aside from potentially a tax time.

I guess if you’re audited, but it’s really a problem if you want to go to the bank because you want to expand your portfolio, right? But you want to go get another rental property and your numbers for the properties you have aren’t accurate or aren’t good because you haven’t recorded all of your rent. So again, it kind of goes back to track your numbers. Nothing improved if it’s not measured. And that includes your financial performance as a landlord. Now, you know, the scorecard that we get every month is that financial statement, right? So it’s going to be a profit and loss statement. Sometimes it’s in the form of a cash flow statement.

But that’s your scorecard, right? How you did, you know, compared to the previous month or the same time the previous year, that’s how we keep score. And your ability to track your performance over time year over year is critical to making your investments run like a business that can support you over time. So again, you know, if you do collect cash, be sure you have a system in place for documenting the receipt of every dollar. I will tell you, you know, all the hundreds of properties that we manage, we don’t take any cash. Now, again, it’s different because we’re doing it for other people. We’re not doing it for properties that we own.

But we don’t take cash. Every dollar that comes in either comes in electronically or via a money order or a check. And that money gets documented, recorded and deposited that day. Well, and that’s the thing too, is if you are scoring yourself in stage one, you think you’re doing yourself a favor in the long run by or in the short term because you think that you’ll pay less taxes. But in the long run, absolutely you’re doing yourself a disservice to stay in stage two because you’re going to have a lot more flexibility and freedom to be able to grow your investment properties if you are tracking the numbers.

And that would be really moving to stage two. Let’s talk a little bit about stage two if they score themselves there. What does that look like? So you have the information you need to file your tax returns, which is great, right? Move up from stage one, but you really have no idea what your return on investment is or how you are truly doing financially. So, you know, the reports that you generate or your team generates need to allow you to track your performance, including your return on investment or ROI over time. And being able to file accurate tax returns is critical. But filling out a tax return isn’t a dynamic financial reporting system.

And you really do want that. If not today, you will when it comes time to look at expanding your portfolio. So you’ve got to track your numbers and, you know, your property manager, if you choose to go that route, you should be able to give you exactly the kind of reports you need. And if you’re going to do it yourself, there’s several software products on the market that you could choose that, you know, will help you do that as well. And that’s really something. Oh, yeah, exactly what I was going to say. Yeah, to move to stage three, what would you suggest? On stage three, you’re confident your books and records are in order. That’s huge.

And that you’re receiving all the benefits due you a tax time. So that’s the other thing, you know, one thing to file your taxes and, you know, avoid an audit. But the tax benefits of investing in real estate are really incredible. It’s beyond the scope of this book or this conversation. But I can tell you that, you know, you can take a lot of deductions, you know, depreciation expenses, a huge one. But being able to prove you qualify for every deduction that you take during an audit is a beautiful thing. And I always approach my taxes with my accountant as if I’m going to be audited.

And fortunately, my accountant takes the same approach, but I went back up for everything. I’m going to take every single deduction that I am illegally allowed to take, but I’m going to make sure that my financial records support and prove every one of those deductions. Yeah, you don’t want to be like the accountant that I was interviewing to work with who says, how close to illegal do you want to be? I said, bye. I hear those stories all the time. I don’t know. I’ve been audited and everything came out okay because, you know, we had followed books and records, but it is not a pleasant experience. And I can only imagine what it would have been like if I didn’t have my ducks in a row.

Absolutely. And really the goal for profitability play number six is you receive an income statement with details, and by property each month you measure the profitability of each property against your plan. And that’s really the ultimate of mindset number six. Yeah, and comparing your performance to last year is an important metric. You know, I used to work in retail for years. And you know, the one thing we looked at constantly in operations was how am I doing compared to last year? What are my comparable store sales? I said, I still look at that to this day. You know, even if it doesn’t go up every year because the market changed or what have you, I still need to have that reference point. I still need to have that benchmark.

So am I improving the last year is a basic metric for me. Now, when you take that past performance and you forecast into the future, then what you’ve done is you’ve made a plan, right? If the last few years, you know, I’ve made, I don’t know, $5,000 profit on a property or three years ago was $4,800. Last year was $4,900. This year is $5,000. You know, rents are going up. Everything’s going in the right direction. I may create a plan where, you know, if I’m going to have an opportunity to raise the rent and I don’t take my property taxes or insurance and so forth, are going to go up, I may create a plan for myself where my challenge is, okay, maybe I’m going to make $5,100 next year instead of $500.

Can I write a play out to support that? And then can I execute to that plan, right? So we keep score by looking backwards, right, and seeing how we’ve done to the past. And then we make a plan based on what’s it possible to do in the future, and that helps make sure that, you know, we don’t leave money on the table. So tracking your performance both to last year and your plan is the optimum way forward, especially in a hot market, right, where the rents continue to go up. So, you know, to me, that’s tracking your numbers. You’re not 100% tracking your numbers. You’re not going to make it to stage four unless you’re able to track them both to last year.

And I think, too, that’s probably what a lot of people fall into the trap of just not even looking. I got my rents move on and not realizing that there’s areas that they could tweak here and there to be able to continue to grow their profit every year. Exactly. And we consult with our clients, you know, on an annual basis, sometimes more often, and, you know, try to help them, you know, forecast it into the future what they can expect. And that really brings us to, and this is an exciting one I know for me as far as being a landlord, profitability play number seven, build a self-managing team. So the goal, the end goal is to have a team of professionals at your disposal looking after your properties as if they own them and you’re free from day-to-day tasks. But we don’t start there. We start out at stage one.

So let’s talk about starting at stage one. Well, stage one is you’ve basically given up, and if you had the chance, you’d sell everything if you thought you could pay off your mortgages. Right. Absolutely. That’s stage one. And my comment on that is, you know, it’s not impossible to run a real estate empire or business as a solo operator. But it is impossible to do it successfully for the long haul and not negatively impact other areas of your life. So if your reason for investing in real estate is to diversify your portfolio because you’re generating excess money in your real job, well, you absolutely should have a team to help you at the beginning.

Because if your real job is going that well, the last thing you want to do is jeopardize that income. You know, you can’t be, you just can’t afford to be distracted from what you do for a living. And I always come back to, you know, I want our clients, our landlord clients to do what they do best and get help from people, us who do what we do best, right? So, you know, if you’re a dentist and, you know, you’ve got a thriving practice and, you know, you’ve got excess cash every month to save or invest and you want to diversify your portfolio, do us all a favor, be the absolute best dentist you could be and find yourself the absolute best property manager you can find.

Because they can’t work on teeth and chances are you’re not going to be nearly as good at managing your properties. And I’ll tell you, and there’s nothing that makes you want to sell all of your properties more than showing up at a house that the tenant has left without telling you, turned off the electricity and you have to clean out a freezer that the meat has rotted in and it’s full of blood. You will definitely want to sell all of your properties if you’re having to do that, which I did. And that is why I had that feeling. Yeah, you know, that’s just not how most of us want to spend their times.

But thank God there’s people out there that want to do that. Exactly. And you can find them. That’s the best thing. Exactly. You make this shirt, it doesn’t happen. Yeah. That’s the best part. Yeah. So that’s stage one and stage two, you know, you misjudge the amount of personal time and effort investing and residential property requires and your quality of life is slipping. And again, you know, I see this all the time. But honestly, the most rewarding thing about our job is when we see the relief and in some cases just your joy in the eyes of one of our investor clients that gets their life back.

Absolutely. So as we move on to stage three and the profitability plays seven, you know, stage three is you muscle through each month and try to keep a brave face. You hope that appreciation will make it all worthwhile, but you have your doubts, you know. So, you know, here we’re back to muscling through the month, right, just to get to break even. The bills and the mortgages are paid, but there’s no positive cash flow to build a cushion or gain that margin much, much less to use to build wealth over time. And, you know, sometimes people get to this point in stage three where they just don’t see it getting better, you know, then break even.

And the only thing they can hope for is that the property appreciates in value and they can sell it. And, you know, profit from a future sale. You know, there’s nothing wrong with appreciation and profiting from a sale in the future if that’s what your plan was. I want my clients to make money every month, you know, that their ROI comes from monthly rent, less expenses, first. And that appreciation bonus on a future sale is just that. It’s a bonus, right? And that’s the way we approach that. We’re going to make our money every month. Mailbox money, right? That’s right. We make more money in the future because we sell at a nightside price versus what we paid for it, that’s just gravy.

Brosting, absolutely. That’s the best. And then you’re really at that point of your goal of step four, stage four, that you have a team of professionals, get your disposal, looking after your properties, and if they own them themselves and you are free from day to day tasks. And that’s the most important part is that for me anyway, they manage it like they own it themselves. And I’m free of having to mess with anything. Well, you know, I know this sounds self-serving because I’m a real estate broker and I run a property management company and a sales company. But it is absolutely true that professional management is the best investment a landlord can make to ensure long-term profitability.

I really believe that your property manager relationship needs to be so good that you never think of it as a cost, but you think of it as an ongoing investment in building wealth for the future. So I can’t stress this enough, right? Find a licensed team of brokers and agents who specialize in management and do it full-time. One of the things that you have to be careful of is there are, you know, a handful of agents and brokers out there that do property management, but they only do a few and they do it on the side. And that’s not necessarily the optimum situation. I would really urge you to find a property management company that specializes in property management and does it full-time.

And better yet, find that team that absolutely loves what they do and is passionate about the work they do for their landlords. And I love that too because team, I think, is the operative word there. Team, not just one person who’s doing it on the side is a hobby. And that brings us to mindset number eight. Keep your why in mind. The ultimate goal is an annuity. You can count on in the good times and the bad. Real estate is essential to your diversified portfolio. And that’s really the number one right there of the big goal of just looking at it as an investment that’s going to constantly pay you.

But we don’t start there. We start at stage one. So if you’re scoring yourself at stage one, what does that look like? Well, a lot of people get into real estate investing because they saw something on a late night infomercial, right? They jumped in to investing with both feet because it seemed like a great way to get rich quick. And I kind of did that too when I bought my first property 20 years ago. It wasn’t a late night infomercial, but I read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad. I read that and it sure did sound easy, so I jumped in. How hard could it be?

How hard could it be? But I’ve learned the hard way. Getting rich is never easy and it’s seldom quick. There you go. There are no shortcuts. Investing in real estate is no different, you know, but real estate investors, we have time on our side. And again, it’s about building wealth over time. And the beauty of it is, or the grace is, or the margin is that even if we make a less than perfect buy, right, on a property, if we purchase property, maybe we paid a little bit too much, maybe it wasn’t quite the perfect property. But usually over time, you know, even investments that you made before that you wouldn’t make today ultimately work out.

Exactly. And that’s one of the beauties of investing in real estate because time is on your side. A lot of people thought that, you know, buying rental properties would supplement, you know, their income today. Right? People would do having a rental property that, you know, or a collection of properties that would pay off every month so quickly, you know, maybe they’d stop doing their real job or, you know, really see additional extra income. So a lot of times in stage two, that was the expectation. And I know this is disappointing, you know, for you to hear if you scored yourself in stage two. But unless you own your rental property free and clear, it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to enjoy any real mailbox money.

Right? At the end of the day, the bank gets paid first. And, you know, I just think sometimes people aren’t honest with themselves about the math and probably ongoing expenses and maintenance and so forth that’s involved. And what can they do if they are sitting in stage two right now and they want to move to stage three? Well, this is a tough leap, right, from one and two to three. But in stage three, you know, we have investors that we talked to and, you know, you heard that about people were just making a killing in real estate. And, you know, you didn’t want to miss out, right?

You know, it’s sort of FOMO, right? Fear of missing out. And some people in stage three, you know, they may not have done it for the best of reasons or hopes, but at least in stage three, their primary income is keeping them afloat, right? Not in any danger of losing their property. You know, maybe they’re even able to take care of their job or whatever, you know, but at the end of the day, they got in because everybody else was doing it and it just didn’t work out. So, obviously, somebody in stage three is better off than in stage one and two, right? So, it does indicate that you’ve got some monthly financial security.

But I don’t think anybody wants to have their investments put any part of their financial future at risk. And in stage three, there’s an element of complacency and you can end up dipping into your primary source of income to subsidize, you know, this investment that was supposed to make you rich. And of course, staying afloat is about as exciting as break and evening or spending your weekend cleaning up after a tenant that disappears in the night. Exactly. So, again, stage three, we’re treading water, got in for the wrong reasons maybe or didn’t turn out the way we planned, but stage three isn’t the end of the world.

You’re moving on up to stage four, the ultimate goal. Well, you know, that’s always been my thing was I want a collection of properties in order to do this. Most of them over time are going to be paid off, you know, there will not be mortgages on them. It’s a buy and hold strategy that I want an annuity, right? I want a collection of properties that are going to pay me a base amount of income in good times and bad and have enough margin in the income mix that when something goes wrong, there’s cash in there to fix it. That’s really it. I love the idea of an annuity I can count on forever.

You know, my portfolio at this point is going to get me there. And, you know, the investors we work with the same thing is going to happen to them. And, you know, my why in mind, well, my why in mind has always been mailbox money. It’s always been about mailbox money. And it’s about having, you know, reasonable attainable expectations, you know, for how much that mailbox money is going to be and, you know, how long it’s going to take to get to the point where my portfolio throws that cash off. But I speak from experience. It is possible. It takes a little time. You have to do a lot of things right every single month.

But you can do it. But you’re going to be much happier if you find somebody to help you do it and you build that team around you so that you can go on with your life. And that’s the best part too is because you’ve really kind of taken the fear out of the investment at that point because my business partner and I totally agree would always say, you know, I want to be a business partner. You know, I want to be able to touch my investment. I want to know that I can go over where my money is and touch it. It’s real. And now to know that you can touch your money.

It’s real and to know that it’s being taken care of. I think that’s the ultimate freedom as well. I want mailbox money without having to lift a finger. That’s the holy grail. There you go. Even better. And what are some final thoughts you’d like for the reader to have? What would you like for them to take from this scorecard and how they’ve scored themselves and some final thoughts for them? Well, if you’re an experienced real estate investor, I hope this book kind of reignites your excitement for creating wealth over time. Right. If you’re new to the game, I hope this book and this audio gives you some food for thought about the downsides, right?

How real estate investing can negatively impact other areas of your life if you let it. You know, sometimes I forget how complicated this business can be because, you know, we’re fortunate to have property managers in our company that make it look so easy. But again, it comes back to that they make it look easy because they are doing what they do best. Exactly. So, doing what they do best allows you and I, meaning myself, with my portfolio and our clients, you know, to do what we do best both personally and professionally. So anybody who listens to this or reads this book, I wish you the ability to move confidently forward on your path to financial independence and a full and happy life.

That’s fantastic. And what should they do next? You know, here’s the easiest way I know of to automate property management and get on with your life, right? So now that you’ve learned the eight profitability plays you need to run your real estate business, you know, with a more of a hands-off approach, your only decision is to continue on the path you’re on or to look for a better way. So we have a company called ROOST Real Estate Company and we actively manage properties for clients in Ohio, Florida and Nashville, Tennessee. And this company, my company, can be your better way forward. So the first step is, you know, book a 30-minute consultation with one of our local property managers.

And the second step is I would really ask you to be prepared to share your goals, your opportunities and your frustrations. Really think through what’s happening in your business right now and try to be as specific as you can be about what’s going well and what’s not going so well. And then the third step is, you know, work with us or another qualified company and create an action plan so that you can automate your property management activities. You know, and again, real estate investors often think that, you know, professional management has an expense. And maybe they can’t afford the expense or they don’t want to afford that expense.

But again, I will tell you whether it’s us or another qualified company out there, it’s the best investment in you building wealth over time that you can make. So if you decide that you’d like to reach out to us, just send an email to PM, that’s short for property management, PM at ROOSTRealEstateCo.com. PM at ROOSTRealEstateCo.com and we’ll take it from there. And thank you so much, Chris, for taking the time to sit with me and talk about this and really kind of helping me get a grip on this too of the scorecard. I’ve really appreciated our conversation and I look forward to talking to you again in the future.

I appreciate it too. Thank you so much. And there we have it. Thanks for listening in. If you want to continue the conversation, go to www.ConnectPracticeTrackGrow.com. That’s ConnectPracticeTrackGrow.com where we have additional information about the podcast, archived episodes, and an option you can select to be a guest on the show. We’d love to hear from you. So that’s it. We’ll be back next time with another episode of the Connect, Practice, Track, and Grow podcast.