Podcast Episode 131 Transcript

Episode 131: Simplifying Risk Management And Insurance For Real Estate Investors with Jeremy Goodrich

Folks, this week on the Prereal podcast, we had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Jeremy Goodrich. He is the owner of Shine Insurance Agency. We got into a really neat discussion on the portfolio and optimization of the portfolio. Jeremy's experience runs the full gamut, everything from a first time homebuyer to very complex multifamily and commercial portfolio portfolios. We talk a great deal about the efficacy of individual policies versus master policies, ways to create efficiencies. We're going to actually take them up on an offer to analyze the portfolio. We have found that the best way to create more value for your real estate portfolio is to not go buy another piece of real estate until you've optimized your existing portfolio. And Jeremy's team seems to do a hell of a job doing that. Jeremy Goodrich, don't miss it this week, folks. Are you ready to bring your real estate game to the next level? My name is James Prendamano. I'm the CEO and founder of Prereal. And over the past 25 years, I've closed over a billion dollars in transactional real estate. Each week, I'm meeting with outstanding investors, high performing individuals, and visionaries operating in the real estate space. These are the people that are actually out there in the real estate game right now getting it done. This podcast aims at bringing anyone's game to the next level. This is the Prereal podcast. Welcome everyone, to the Prereal podcast. We're joined this week by Jeremy Goodrich. He's the owner of Shine Insurance Agency. Jeremy has some remarkable content. It runs a pretty wide band of the demographic he's targeting, but his base and his agency covers from the first time home buyer, literally, to complex commercial transactions on the insurance side. Jeremy, thank you so much for taking the time joining us today. James, it's a pleasure. Excited to speak to your audience and just share a little bit about the insurance world, hopefully make it kind of exciting for folks who maybe have seen it as not so much in the past. Yeah. So insurance is one of those necessary deals that I think most of us, to be candid, don't spend enough time getting in the weeds on. And it's unfortunate that usually it takes an event, some sort of occurrence before we start to pay attention to our policies in a meaningful way. But it is something that we absolutely should be looking at closely from Jump Street. Absolutely, yeah. I think if we think about insurance as just a little tiny piece of how we manage risk, I think it starts to make a lot more sense. Like risk is something that we dig into every single day, every decision we make, whether we're picking up a new property or deciding who we want to rent a property out to, we're deciding what the balance of risk is. If we're going to make a big investment, if we're going to make a small investment, all those kinds of things. And insurance is just a tool inside of our risk strategy. Right. It's a way to pass on some of the biggest risks. I think that if we didn't have insurance, this is the positive of it. If we didn't have insurance, none of your listeners would be real estate investors. The only people who would be able to invest in real estate are those who could absorb millions of dollars in loss. If a fire burns down a property or someone slips and falls and is injured and files a lawsuit against you, those would be the only real estate investors out there. And so insurance, in a small way, levels the playing field, and I think that's just one of the positives about the role it plays in your investing journey, no doubt about it. So you own your own agency, and I'm always curious about the journey. How did you end up getting involved in insurance? If we can go back a bit. Absolutely. I was an elementary school teacher for 13 years, so insurance was definitely not on my plate. I grew up a pastor's kid. I was always kind of a teacher, a servant. That's what my parents have been as well. And so the idea of going into something where it's a little more lucrative, finances are a key part of the process was not at the top of my mind. I met my now wife and business partner while I was an elementary school teacher and she ran her dad's agency. She was a third generation insurance agent, making a long story very short. In the end, her dad sold his agency to a big financial conglomerate. She was ready to move on to something else. I had been a teacher for 13 years. That was kind of enough for me. I was ready for another adventure as well. And so we came together in 2013 and started Shine Insurance with the intention of just changing the way people feel about insurance. So it was like, how can I bring a teacher's heart and a teacher's mindset to a world that kind of seems gross and slimy? Can those two things come together? And over the course of the last ten years, I've done the best to bring them together that I can? Your content screams pair concern and there's an authentic feel to it that I enjoyed very much. So you've done a hell of a job to that end. People typically don't go from nine to five and make a leap into owning their own business without there being some influence, mentor, event their why, as they say today. Was there a trigger like that for you? Was there a moment or a book or something that inspired you to say, you know what, I'm going to stop trading time for money, the famous Kiyosaki book, and make that leap? Or was this just an organic process with the missus? I think I've always had an entrepreneurial mindset. I'm, like so many of your listeners, started when I was 13, mowing people's lawns and made a bunch of I mean, it felt like a bunch of money when I was 13. I remember buying my girlfriend when I was like 15 years old, like a gold necklace at some store that doesn't exist anymore, like, almost like a Walmart type place. And I just thought it was the coolest thing, right? Like, I made this money on my own. I was able to scale that lawn care business, and in fact, I really never stopped in the lawn care world until I was 36 years old. While I was a teacher, I would drive up to school with my truck and my trailer and all my commercial mowers and teach all day and then get done with school and go out and mow for the rest of the day. So I've been in the entrepreneurial world for a long period of time, but really, the impetus was, one, my wife's father's agency being sold and the opportunity to jump into this world, and two, I was pretty tired of living off of credit cards and simply not being able to cover even my own costs, let alone invest or grow for the future. I made $27,000 a year for 13 years. At some point, it's just like, I can't function that way. And so those things all came together to take the leap. Now I would say I'm still working. I'm still working towards not having a nine to five anymore. I work for myself. I think there's a great way of thinking about this where when you start a business, in some ways, you're self employed, which is a little bit better than a W-2 job, because you're in charge of your own time. You're in charge of when you do it, and there's no one kind of bossing you around, but you're still spending a ton of time. From that point, you want to grow into truly owning a business where you're no longer self employed, but that business is putting off essentially passive income, or at least partially passive income to you. And that's where the real magic happens. And after ten years, I'm really getting to that place where I'm like, okay, I'm not self employed anymore. I have a team of eight. I have passive income coming off of this business that I can now invest in real estate. I'm a passive investor in multiple real estate deals. And so I think that's the goal is to move up to that place. And that's taken almost ten years for me, because we've just taken it really slow. Well, it is extremely difficult to do, and many of us never reach that point where we even recognize that we shouldn't be working in the business. We should be working on the business. Absolutely. It is very easy. I was a victim of it for 10-12 years. Head down, wouldn't be outworked, and I didn't recognize that I was doing it literally backwards, right? I was in this field because I wanted to have control over my time and I wanted to have more control over my life. But it was quite the opposite. It was far more demanding than a nine to five ever could be in every way imaginable. And it's funny how it happens, but days turn into weeks and weeks to months and months to years and next thing you know it's a decade later and you're still putting in 85, 90 hours a week. And I mean a legit 90 hours a week and you don't know quite how you got there and you don't know quite how to stop. You've had some measure of success and it feels like this is what you should be doing. Although for me at least, there was something calling, saying, no, this is not where you're supposed to be. And I had to work hard and I continue to work hard every day at it, trying to remove myself from the weeds so that I can operate at a different level and hopefully achieve that place of complete freedom. And real estate is the vehicle for me by which you can do that. I'm not sure if there are other investments that offer you the flexibility that real estate does. We had an interesting guest on the show, Mark Podolski, the land geek. It's a program I now subscribe to and we have a division in the company that is building out this land business. He's doing massive numbers, and I mean legit massive numbers, and he works 2 hours a week legitimately. He has built a passive income system that is predicated on not creating jobs for himself. He has really scaled it in a beautiful way. So good luck in continuing on that journey. I know it's very difficult, but it is important to a lot of us that as we get a little older, we realize that there's a better way to do this. So I'm interested in your first time home buyer program and content. If you could just talk to us a little bit about it. And folks, the the links will be in, as always, below. Check out the YouTube channel. Shine agency has a really great YouTube channel. The the videos, you know, some of the videos have at least the ones I saw, 80, 90,000 views. And you focus on some detail that I have seen agents fail to focus on and provide. If you could talk about where all of that content came from and why you decided to produce it and then we can graduate from there. Yeah, I think it all starts from having been a teacher, right? So when you teach third and fourth grader, something you're trying to do a couple of things. One is you're trying to get the basic foundations underneath the thing that you're engaging in. And two, you're trying to inspire them that the topic is interesting and somehow, to give you an example, when I was teaching math, I taught a businesses class, kind of what we've been talking about, about where each kid created their own business. The fun part was it didn't have to be real. It could be anything they wanted. So some kids sold planets, some kids sold waterfalls, people sold all these different kinds of things, right? And then we would exchange things and there was a whole process underneath it. And so I'm always trying to combine those two things, the foundations underneath something and the excitement and interest in it. And so when I knew I wanted to try and help some first time home buyers and this was from an insurance perspective at first. I read a book by Jay Bear, who is a great marketing author, has lots of good books. One of his first books is called Utility. And he said to have success in business, you've got to really refine who your ideal client is and then just try and do good stuff for them. It doesn't have to have anything to do with your product. Just put yourself in the center of their journey in any way that you can. So I was like, okay, my ideal client is a first time home buyer. How can I help? And I was like, well, how can I teach them the process of buying a home? Of course. And so I interviewed Realtors, I interviewed lenders, I interviewed title company owners and inspectors and appraisers and everybody in between. And my intention was, okay, how can I teach people, in a really simple way, the process of buying a home? This isn't to replace a Realtor or a lender. This is to facilitate, under the bottom of those, some foundation. So when they get to their Realtor, they've got their pre approved for their mortgage, they've got their credit as good as they can get it, right? I knew I was helping Realtors in some ways in this. And so I created a bunch of videos, one being the 20 minutes just how to buy a home from start to finish. And they just kind of took off. So I think that video has over a million views and the other ones have a lot as well. And I was fortunate because that was started in 2015, so there were a lot fewer YouTubers when I started posting those things. But the intention was simply, how do I explain things as simply and clearly as possible while providing enough information to actually help someone in their journey? So I think a piece that people forget and agents I could speak to for obvious reasons, specifically, we take for granted what we know. And it's always surprising to me, even today, when you speak to people who have gone through a process and have successfully closed on a home, and they may own a home for two, three, five years, how little they know about the process and the inner workings of the process. Things that we do on a daily basis in the real estate world, folks just don't know it. They're going through a very foreign experience. And your content, I think, offers some comfort and really boils it down for them because people just don't know the process the way we do. Yeah. And I think that one thing you can do, all of your listeners when they're thinking about creating content is what's the question you just got asked earlier today? If one person is asking you a question, that means 100 people are also wondering about that question. And so by creating content that answers it, you do two things. One is you answer questions that you know people actually have. And two, you can point back to that content when someone says, hey, I've got that same question. For example, I get asked the question as an insurance. I'm an insurance adviser, right? Does my insurance cover a rental car? I get that question three times a week. So I created a video, does my insurance cover a rental car? Right? And when I respond to someone an email and say, hey here. And I've got a template that I sent to them with basically the foundational answers. And if you want to know more about it, here's a video that you can watch. Right? So now you've added to your service providing as you're going through the process and then your clients are going to say, wow, this person has thought this ahead. And if you're fortunate enough to get some views on that video, then they go to that video and they're like, wow, this person that I am working with also has a large audience on YouTube. That's harder to do now than it has been in the past. But I think it's really just all about answering questions that people have and providing that foundation because that's what creates the comfort. You said comfort, which I love, that you said that feels so important to me that I could provide that to someone and it's really just answering those questions. So this feels like it came about in a very organic way for you. Was there a marketing genius behind this and the proper tagging and production and descriptions and the meta-data and all of the things that you have to pay attention to today? Or is this all kind of self taught? It's 100% self taught. I mean, you talk about those 80 hours, weeks. I don't work as many of them as I did in the past. But when I was first posting these videos, the first podcast episode I ever put out, you could appreciate this. I edited the audio myself and I still have a photo of what that audio looked like at the end because it took me about 10 hours to cut out all the AWS and things of that nature, right? And so at the beginning, I was doing it all myself. And now I have a podcast editor who helps me to take care of that YouTube. I still do pretty much all on my own. It really is just kind of like, okay, what do I think people need right now? All right, I'm going to put it out there. And since I've been doing it for quite a few years, being able to edit a video is pretty quick. And I probably don't have the best looking videos in the world, but I just try and get it out there and give folks some answers to their questions. Good stuff. And the fact that you've done it organically is remarkable to me. I know what it takes and how much of a challenge that is. So congrats on that success. Thank you. As you've gone through the process now, you have grown into or did you always offer commercial products as well on the insurance side? 100% grown into it. When we started the agency, my wife Mackenzie knew a whole lot about insurance than I did. I pretty much knew nothing. I was an elementary school teacher. I finished the school year. The week after that, I studied for the insurance exam, and that Friday I took it, and the Monday after that, I was offering home and auto insurance to folks for the first time. And so I've really just grown my knowledge from personal insurance into small commercial insurance and then from small commercial insurance into large commercial insurance. And that's all I do now, is work with clients who have 200, 300 units of commercial real estate or larger. I have clients with six, 7000 units. And so it's really just a progression, right? You make yourself a little bit better every single day. You answer a question on one day that you didn't know the answer to yesterday, and then someone asks it of you a few days later, and you know that answer, and you just start to compound knowledge. And I think that anyone who gives advice about entrepreneurship or learning anything, learning how to play the piano, right? You sat down with your piano teacher and they taught you how to read music, and then it was how to feel music, and then it was how to play a larger piece. I think that growing in any knowledge base is simply stacking little bits on top of each other, and it's those basic daily habits. So one of the videos that you have right up at the top of the site talks about, I think it's the seven red flags of a home inspection. Give us you don't have to give us seven, but give us some of the red flags that, as real estate investors, we should be keeping an eye out for on our insurance policies or in the insurance world. So from an insurance perspective, some of the red flags, it starts with roof. If you've got an older roof that's going to create a couple of issues. One is probably an issue for yourself as you're deciding to buy a home. That's going to be a cost to replace that home. From an insurance perspective, your insurance costs are going to be significantly higher. If your roof is more than 15 years old, that's because an insurance company knows there's a high likelihood that a loss is going to happen, that a claim is going to happen. So that would be one of the top things I would put no matter what size the real estate is, is the age of the roof is a big piece. One of the second things is whether something is in a flood zone or not. I think I see folks getting deep into the purchasing process and not seeing that something is in a flood zone until too late. And there's a couple of things about a flood zone. One is that you're much higher likelihood to have a flood. So that's a risk you got to decide whether you're going to take on. But two, flood insurance is fairly expensive, oftentimes more expensive than homeowners insurance as a whole, right? You buy a homeowner's insurance policy for $1,500 a year and then you want to add flood coverage, coverage for the natural rising of water because of a river or a rain or something like that. And it's $2,000 just for that more than for everything else, right? And three, a mortgage lender is almost always going to require that you buy that insurance. And so it could be a cost that gets added in there on the back end that you didn't even realize. And if your debt to income is really close, that could potentially create a problem in that as well. So a roof is number one, flood or flood zone is number two. I would say another high risk that I see a lot is this isn't as much insurance. It's not like a question. I mean it's just foundation stuff. And I think any good real estate agent knows that if you walk into a basement and it's looking shady like the value of that property is deeply dropped. And as a buyer, I think if you walk into a basement and you see troubles or you see that in an inspection, these are high cost issues that aren't going to increase the value of sale for you on the back end. So those are three. You said I didn't need to go all seven. I could keep going if you want. But those are three common examples. So the policies as you had described earlier, are managed risk. That's essentially what you're trying to do here when shopping for these policies. Is there really a profound difference in agency to agency, carrier to carrier? If it's apples to apples, are there wins that you can make between the lines there or is it pretty uniform across the board? It's vastly different, especially when you leave homeowners and start to get into real estate investing, whether that's residential investing, one to four unit properties, or that's commercial five unit or more apartments or office buildings, golf courses, things of that nature. I say there's three tiers of insurance companies. The top tier, tier number one, is the best companies with the best claims experiences, with the lowest price for insurance. You say, well, that's what I want, tier one. Well, that's what everyone wants. Tier One insurance companies say no a lot. They're very picky. So for a lot of commercial real estate investors, tier one is not an option. So then we go to tier two. Tier two insurance companies, slightly worse insurance coverage, you start to get some exclusions that are kind of scary in claims, slightly higher price and slightly worse claims experience. Those companies are going to say yes more often. Right. And then there's tier three companies, which is like excess and surplus. These are companies who specialize in the harder to ensure risks. So if you have an apartment complex that was built in the 1970s, that's 10 miles away from the coast, you've got a high risk property. Tier One companies are going to run away from that risk all day long. Maybe you could get it into a tier two company. If you can show your risk management strategy, if you've got brand new roofs on it, if you've got all updated electrical and plumbing and everything else, there's a possibility you get in there. But most likely that property is going to be in a tier three space. So it's the job of the insurance advisor to know the differences, to know the backdoor ways to get into a tier two company, when maybe it should be in a tier three or a tier one company, when maybe it should be in a tier two, and to have access to all those companies. Every different agency has access to different companies. If you're going to a state farm or an all state or something like that, they have access to one insurance company. Right. If you're going to an independent insurance agency, they have access to as many companies as they've been able to go out and get access to. So there's some independent agencies out there that only have access to one company. There's independent agencies out there that have access to three or four. Our agency has access to about 100. Right. Wow. And so how is the difference there going to affect the competition inside the agency, affects their capacity? Right. And so that is just a small answer to are there truly differences? Absolutely. And so it's access to companies, it's ability to be able to get in to the right places and then it's the ability to turn around. So my job as an independent insurance agent is to have a client come to me and say, I need to insure a ten-storey office building in Downtown, Indianapolis, Indiana. And I'll say, okay, I need a whole bunch of information from you. So I can turn around and sell this to insurance companies. And then I turn around and I sell it to a group of insurance companies. And then when they start coming back to me, I say, well, that's a really nice price, but this company over here has given me a 10% less price, so can you come back at that or not? And this company says, yeah, I can come back at 10% lower. Okay, great. I go back to that company. So if you have a good independent insurance agent, they're the one creating the competition. And the mistake I see a lot of people do is go out to multiple independent insurance agents. Now there's multiple people trying to pin companies against each other and now it's just a mess. And those companies and the last thing I'll say I know this is a long answer the last thing I'll say is those companies, when they start seeing submissions coming in from multiple different agents, it says to the companies that the client is not a committed client and they're just looking for the lowest price. And you're actually going to get less bargaining power with a company if they're seeing a submission come in from multiple agents. So as a client, you have to be careful. You don't want to go out to a bunch of agencies because it can actually backfire on you. So I want to expand on that a little bit because I think it's something that is overlooked, it's not properly understood, and it's critically important for whatever reason, insurance, I guess it's because it's the piece that comes toward the conclusion of the transaction. So you sell them. See, I've seldom seen and I've seen quite a bit of transactional real estate in my day. People really aggressively shopping through their preferred agent, their policies, the way they would a mortgage, right? So if you can imagine it's no different folks, then if you go to Citibank for a loan, you're going to get it from Citibank. If you go to bank of America, you're going to get it from bank of America. If you go to ABC Mortgage Broker, in all likelihood they have access to a number of different lenders and they can go literally pit those lenders against each other and fight for the best deal for you. And the same option is available to you in the insurance world. And it sounds like from what Jeremy is saying, and certainly from, again, having closed a number of transactions, that there are a suite of services. There are multiple ways to skin a cat. There are a lot of really wicked creative ways that you can get maximum coverage at a really affordable or reasonable rate. And by going to the right agent that has an agency with access to multiple carriers, not one, you have the ability to really open up to a full suite, a full complement of options. Is that. Summing it up properly. Absolutely. But in the bottom line is you don't necessarily need to worry about any of that, right. In the end, that all is what's happening behind the curtain. And hopefully if you have an advisor who's clear in the way they describe things, who has things set up properly for you, they're going to come back and say, well, I made all these companies battle here's the best option, right. So you're not going to have to get mired in 23 different options and what the best thing is. Whatever. And I think that's true with mortgage brokers a lot too, as they're going to bring back to you. Look, I went out to a bunch of people, here's the best option from my perspective they're serving as advisers rather than a commodity or something like that where you just go to them and you get the only option that they have. Now with your agency, can you speak a little bit about the claims process? Because I think that is certainly it's top of mind for me. Insurance is insurance and it's there until there's an event and then you want to be able to lean on someone that's going to be there for you. So when a claim arises, if policies are placed through your firm, are you guys available during that process or is it deal with the carrier? Yeah, that's a great question. So here's how the players lay out. So when you have an insurance claim, the insurance company is the one that's going to pay the checks, right? The insurance agency, which is what I own, is not going to pay the checks. My role is to be your adviser and so I'm absolutely involved in the process, but mostly when I need to. So what happens in a claim is I connect the policy owner, the client with the insurance company adjuster. And what I say to my client is, hey, this person better take great care of you. They better be really clear in their process and they better make sure that this comes out on the back end, how you expect it to come out. If in that process you have any questions or you need my advocacy, this is when you need to bring me into the mix. If they're doing their job, you don't need me in the middle because ultimately that's just too many people and more communication you don't need. But if they're not, then this is when you need to come to me and get me pulled into the mix. And that's different than a lot of if you again coming back to that State Farm example, the person who sold you the insurance at State Farm has zero connection with a claim. They're not going to be able to help you. They're not going to be able to give you any advice. They're not even necessarily going to be able to see the claim in their systems or anything like that. And that's true in a lot of places with some independent insurance agents aren't going to get involved either. So that's a question you probably want to ask the one you just asked me, what happens in a claim scenario? And can I count on you to be my advocate through that process? Okay, so outside of the general policies, do you guys get into umbrellas and some of the more complicated coverages as well? Yeah, so the term umbrella gets misconstrued a lot. So generally in the insurance world, when we say the term umbrella, we're talking about excess liability coverage. Now, liability coverage is really simple to understand. It's when bad things happen to other people because of you, your home, or your business. So I've got a claim going on right now where someone slipped a tenant in an apartment complex, slipped and fell on their way out to the car. They had a broken arm. They decided to hire a personal injury attorney. We're navigating that process. The the liability coverage on that person's policy is what is covering them for that situation. An umbrella is excess liability. So usually we have about a million dollars of liability coverage. That million dollars is definitely going to cover that person's broken arm, no matter how bad the lawsuit. Well, I shouldn't say no matter how very likely to cover that, no matter how bad it is, but could it go above and beyond a million dollars? Yeah, it could. And certainly if you have a lot of assets that you're worried about higher numbers, then you want more liability coverage than a million dollars. And that's where an umbrella comes in place. You can get an extra million. So now you have two. You could get a $10 million umbrella. Now you have $11 million in a loss scenario where something bad happened to someone else because of you. In the commercial real estate world, sometimes people say umbrella when they're talking about an insurance policy that covers their entire portfolio, as opposed to one policy for this location, another policy for this location, another policy for this location. In the insurance world, we would call that a master policy or a portfolio policy. This is bringing multiple locations together, sometimes even with separate LLCs for every single location, bringing them together on one master policy so that it's oftentimes cheaper. It's easier to add a property or remove a property. There's lots of advantages to master policies. So I don't know if you're referring to a master policy or an umbrella, but I hear those terms kind of interchanged and mixed up a little bit. So I was referring to umbrella and excess liability, but you just raised a great question. So as an investor, if you have LLCs that are set up for each transaction that you're involved in or in each long term hold, and each individual property has its own policy, and you then want to cover Visa, vis through an umbrella or I didn't even realize that it was a consideration that instead of having individual policies on each property, you can have one master policy that covers the different LLCs. Yeah, absolutely. So a rule of thumb is the LLCs need to have at least 50% similar ownership across the LLC. So if you've got drastically different ownership structures between one LLC and another, then a Master policy probably doesn't work for you. But especially if you're I see a lot of scenarios where you're a single owner LLC and you're purchasing one to four unit dwellings, right, and you've got a schedule of them. Maybe you're in a town, it's a college town, you're doing student housing and you're just buying all these houses up, right. All these LLCs are under essentially the same owner, or at least certainly 50% the same owner. And now we can just schedule those on one policy and it makes it a lot simpler. One potential negative to doing it that way is how it splits out the cost for your accounting and so that can create a problem. Now I'm getting a bill for $50,000 once a year for my 50 different properties, but I've got to pay out of a different bank account because that's how I've set up my accounting. So sometimes people don't do Master policies simply because it doesn't work for how they want to do their accounting. But absolutely, you can put it together. So does the Master policy, though, give let's face it, we're based here in New York. It's a highly litigious society. Does it give the less let me be careful here. Does it give attorneys a bigger target, where if I had, for example, a four family, a four family, a ten family, and a six family, each is in its own LLC, all under my ownership. But separate LLCs, same ownership structure. Everyone is in kind of a silo, which is part of what we're taught, right? Keep it separate and distinct. There's a policy for the value plus or minus with your excess on each individual piece. Now we lump it all together. Perhaps there's not an asset there that's worth over 2 million as an individual, but together it's 15 million. Are we giving attorneys a bigger target or is that not the way it works? Is the liability still stripped down to the individual asset where this potential event occurred? Well, I think the hard answer would have to be answered by an attorney ultimately to say if they think there's any when an attorney is going to file a lawsuit, they're going to sue anyone and everyone. So if they see any connection between entities, they're probably going to try and bring those entities in. Could you argue that an insurance policy that brings them together could potentially create that? I suppose, but I mean, just the fact that the person exists is going to potentially bring them together in the same way. The purpose of the siloing of the LLCs is to separate those things out. So in all the conversations that I have had with attorneys, while obviously not giving legal advice myself, the insurance policy being together does not create any issues with Veils, does not create any issues with Silos, doesn't create a problem there. But could there be an argument from an attorney, well, all these are on the same insurance policy. I suppose there could, but how's that argument different than, well, all of these are owned by the same owner, and that's there whether you have your insurance together or not. Of course, I'm not trying to be argumentative. I'm learning here, and I hope the audience is learning. Right. This is really valuable for us. The thought process of the rebuttal would be, well, we set up separate LLCs intentionally. Many of us use Delaware LLCs. It's very difficult to make that link of ownership because you're protected. Right. You have the benefit of anonymity in these LLCs without an extraordinary act. It would require end fraud for you to penetrate that val and to be able to peel the curtain back and see who the owners are behind those LLCs. So we set them up that way intentionally. So when an attorney does a search, it's one, two, three, Main Street. I usually name them the address. Right. So there's no tie, there's no connection. Okay, we're just going to go pursue one two, Three, Main Street so they don't have that access to those other LLCs. I would love to talk to you about this offline because I had never contemplated Master policies, and I wonder what the advantages are. And the savings possibilities are above individual properties with individual policies and in excess above it having just a Master that deals with them in the aggregate and covers them individually. Yeah, happy to chat, of course. And I think the pros and cons are certainly kind of one of those things you have to figure out as a business owner. I think from that legal Silo perspective. Just one last example. We add mortgage lenders as an additional insured on a policy all the time. No one expects that a mortgage lender is going to get sued in a scenario where someone gets slips and falls. And so I think the insurance relationships are just drastically different than legal relationships. But again, it would be good to have a back and forth with an attorney and take this to another level to kind of see their thoughts. And if you're super concerned about it, then there's an easy answer. Don't have a Master policy, just keep everything separate. And that answers your question? Sure. For my fellow agents out there, are their policies available? Maybe their professional liability policies? For example, this is a real scenario. One of the agents was hosting an open house. It was three doors down. Someone was walking on that block and they tripped and they broke their arm or their elbow. Whatever it was, and they sued us because we were hosting an open house three doors down, had nothing to do with that property, nothing to do with why they were there, no connection whatsoever. But nevertheless, because they looked up and they saw a sign, we're now named in a lawsuit. And of course, no damages came as a result. But there are damages. It cost us 67 grand to have to hire the attorney to go and defend it. Are there policies for that type of stuff? For the agents? Yes. I think it's important to differentiate two things. You said you talked about professional liability, sometimes called errors and omissions coverage, something that all realtors should have, right? And that is coverage for bad advice or considered bad advice that you give to someone. So you say you should buy a house, turns out to be a money pit, they sue you over it, or something like that. The example you just described was a physical injury to someone who is accusing you of being the reason for that physical injury. And that would be general liability coverage, what we were talking about before. So as a realtor, it's a really good idea to have an insurance policy that encompasses a few things. I would say Arizona Missions is the most common example, and realtors often think that's the only thing they have to have because I don't have any property, things of that nature. Right. And that's a fine perspective to come from. But you should also probably have general liability coverage. I would argue your general liability policy in that scenario would have defended you up to that $6,000 until it got thrown out. So that would be a great example of why a realtor should have a general liability policy and then hired a non owned auto. Coverage would be the other. You're driving your vehicle around all the time for your business. If you're in an accident, even if you don't have anyone else in the car, like a client or anything like that, and it is deemed to have been during your use of that car for your business. It's possible, I don't think it's super probable, but it's possible that your personal auto insurance denies the claim and says, well, you are using that car for your business. So some hired and non owned auto coverage would address that issue. And then the last thing would be some business personal property coverage. This is just coverage for your stuff, your computer, some items. If you do have an office, whatever, your desk and chairs and things of that nature. Generally, there's a very limited amount of those things that need coverage. But that would be a quick litany of the types of things a real estate real estate agent might consider for insurance. The eno is an absolute. But are there exposures out there for general liability or property coverage or hired and non owned auto? Yeah, absolutely. So again, as things are rocking and rolling. The insurance tends to come toward the end of the transaction, so oftentimes it's on cruise control. And when the market shift, as they have now, we have found it's a good time to double back and revisit all areas of the portfolio, see where things can be optimized. If we wanted to have a chat with you, I guess the first question would be, what states do you practice in? Yeah, so we have a national commercial real estate program. We practice in all states in the United States, so happy to help. Our program is built for folks with 100 doors or more. So fairly large portfolios is what we're working with. In the state of Indiana, we do smaller stuff, so if you happen to be listening from Indiana, we can help you out with a variety of size properties, including your home and auto or smaller dwellings. But across the country, our commercial real estate program is really for folks with 100 doors or more. Now, if it's like a retail based portfolio, we own a number of shopping centers, not necessarily multifamily, but from a value perspective, the value under management is significant. Does that qualify or is this specifically geared toward multifamily? That totally qualifies. So we do retail, office, industrial, self storage and apartments. So, yeah, I use the term doors. And when you get to a commercial real estate portfolio, sometimes that doors relationship or units relationship isn't quite the same. We're happy to look at that and dig in. And Jeremy, what's the best way for folks to reach you? If they wanted to take their portfolio, as we are going to candidly do, and have it looked at and see if we can centralize and create some efficiencies here, what's the best way to find you and to reach you? Absolutely shineinsurance.com is the easiest way and we have an online portal there that you can submit information or you could reach out to me. I'm all over the socials. I hang out a lot on LinkedIn and spaces like that. And then again, feel free to check out our YouTube channel. As you said, there's a lot of info there and hopefully it provides a lot of value to your listeners. Well, this was very valuable for me. I can say for sure. We're going to double back and take a look. This is a good time to try and optimize. The greatest way we have found to increase value in your portfolio is not to go buy another deal. It's the creative efficiencies in the deals that you currently own. So we're going to definitely pursue this. I can't thank you enough for the time, Jeremy, today. This was really informative. Yeah. James, happy to help and obviously happy to chat with you or any of your listeners about how to limit the cost and at the same time make sure you've got the right coverage. Jeremy Goodrich, everyone, as always, please stay safe.