Military Veteran To Real Estate Masterminds With David Pere
Participant #1:
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, a meeting with outstanding investors, investors, highperforming 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, everybody to the show. We're joined today by David Pere. We have a real treat. David has a remarkable story. He's the CEO from military to millionaire. He's the co founder of the Real estate War Room Mastermind. He is clearly a heck of a resourceful guy. He's got an amazing story, and I think some real value will be able to deliver to the audience today. David, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah. Thanks for having me on, brother. I appreciate it. Absolutely. So as we always seem to do, we like to get a sense of background. So you joined the Marine Corps, and I think it was August of 2008. Military. Was that something that was in the family? How did you end up following that path? Yeah. No, I don't think it wasn't in the family at all. It was definitely just more of a I lived in Arkansas, and I wanted to get out of Arkansas. I didn't really know what I wanted to go to school for. I didn't really have money to go to school. I didn't like school in high school, so I didn't really want to do that anyway. So then I talked to a recruiter while I was in, and I thought I'd always kind of wanted to do something like firefighter, police officer, whatever recruiters came to my school, I ended up talking to them all and thought, oh, the Marine Corps sounds like a good fit. Let's travel the world. And that's all she wrote. I did it. I was going to do it for four years, then go to school. And with four years, I realized I still don't know what I want to study. I still don't like school, and I like the Marine Corps. I'm going to keep doing this for a little while. So this was a pathway for you to travel a bit and see if you can find your path. As you were doing this, you became a command financial specialist. What does that mean? So that's just, like an additional bill that you can get once you hit a certain rank. And basically it's like a week long course that the military does to teach you all about our benefits and budgets and our thrift savings plan, like 401K and the VA loan and just overall basic stuff. And what happens is you go through this course, and then it becomes kind of a collateral duty that you do, where there's one rep, at least at every unit. And when a new service member says, hey, I want to buy a car, but I don't understand the process. They can come talk to you and not be, I guess, talking more to, like, a fiduciary role than a car salesman. Got it. Okay. So we share something in common. And one of the things I talk about on the podcast all the time is book club and how much we enjoy it. So 2015, as so many people have come on the show and told us, you read Rich dad, poor dad. Yeah. And that was the launching point for you. That was the catalyst. Yeah. I read that book. Ironically, someone handed it to me while they were trying to get me into Amway. And I read the book and was like, Amway is not what I want to do. Real estate is. Thanks, man. And that was kind of all she wrote for me. I did the household. I bought a duplex, lived in one side, ran to the other because it was just good timing. I got handed the book about two months before my lease ended on an apartment, and I was running the numbers and was like, Man, the mortgage on a duplex is almost the same as the payment on this apartment. Why don't I just do that? So I just kind of jumped in. And then after the fact once I moved out and it started paying me to own it, I was like, wow, this is really cool. I can do more of this and all very short window of time there. So for anybody who has not read the book, it's an absolute must. I don't care what stage of investing, what part of the pathway you're down the book. It's just an absolute unbelievable reset in bringing financial literacy to the masses and reminding us of things. That book is filled with things that seem like common sense. But so few of us practice, right. And guest after guest after guest comes on the show and talks about within the amazing impact it's had on their life. So you're in the military for, I guess, six, seven years. At that point, you read Rich dad, poor dad. And while you're in Hawaii, I believe you took down a ten unit apartment building in Missouri. Correct. Correct. And I love this. This was bank financing, seller financing, a home equity line of credit. And you got into it for less than 6% down. Is that right? Yeah. Could you talk the audience through that deal and the structure and how the heck that came together? Yeah. So first off, I wasn't even looking for things that size, right? At this point. I bought one duplex about a year and a half two years prior, and I had bought a vacant, like, five acre lot that backed up to my primary residence so that we had ten acres. And those were the only two transactions that I'd ever done, the primary residence my wife had owned prior to us getting together. And we've just been kind of saving. But as a young service member, you don't save a whole lot of money, right? You don't make a ton of money. We were living on base. So we were losing all of our housing allowance to base housing. And so I'd been saving up for, like, a year and a half, two years. And finally I was like, okay, I think I have enough money for another duplex. I'm going to send out some mailers. And I hand wrote, like, 110 letters on yellow legal pads or whatever saying, hey, I'm Dave, this is my wife. We're looking to buy some properties. Blah, blah, blah. And one lesson learned there was that handwriting letters is a miserable experience. Like, I pay for mailers. Now, I will never handwrite that many letters again. That was terrible. But I was trying to get a hold of these duplexes. So I sent out a bunch of letters, and one guy called me back and was like, Well, I have a duplex. I don't want to sell it, but I have this ten unit, and I was thinking of selling this ten unit. I'm like, oh, well, tell me more. And it just so happened that he got a hold of me as I was going to be in town over Christmas break. So I was like, okay, well, I'll drive by the property. I got to look in happenstance. I knocked on the door and was like, hey, do you mind if I just poke my head in and see what the apartment looks like? So I saw the inside on one unit that was inhabited and not like, a clean tenant by any means. And then I saw the outside of the building, and we kind of just made our offer off that. And when we did the inspection, so we were under contract for 225. And this is in Missouri. This is in 2017. So prices have gone up a little bit since then. And this is like a Class D crappy building. And so I made the offer for 225. He accepted it. And then we went back and forth after the inspection, and I got about 12,500 knocked off the purchase price. And normally right now, I would prefer to do they either fix it or they reimburse me at closing. So I have the cash to do it. But at the time, just taking it off, the purchase price seemed fine to me because I'm still pretty green beyond the years. But what I did, though, the nice thing I guess that worked out in my favor is the bank didn't realize that we had dropped the purchase price. And so the check the bank showed up for was I forget the exact number, but, like, I don't know $10,000 more than what they needed to. And so what happened was I was going to pay 10% down, and the seller was going to have 10% down or carry 10%. And the bank was going to bring 80%. And the bank showed up with this bigger check. And so the seller still had his 10% down. And the bank was basically like, Well, you can either wait for us to go back and redo all the paperwork, or you can just bring less money into close. I was like, I'll do less money into close. So I ended up bringing it was like 5.8%. So I think I brought, like, 10,900 down on this $212,500 purchase, and the bank brought the rest. And then the seller carried 10%. And that money that I had brought was a HELOC that we had pulled off my wife's primary residence. So it's kind of a weird hodgepodge of things on initial transactions for so many of us. That's what it's about, right? Who's pulling off credit cards? Who's tapping HELOCs who's using seller financing and terms wherever possible. So whatever it takes to get it done now, you're in Hawaii. You have this asset in Missouri, ten units, any experience with management or who's running the building for you at this point? Yes. I had hired a property manager when I bought the Duplex when I moved out of state, and she hadn't screwed me yet. So I thought I'd give her a run. And luckily, she's been really good. She still manages all my stuff. But that was my leap of faith. Then I had no experience with apartments. I really didn't have a whole lot of people around me that had experience with apartments because my network wasn't anything like it is. Now I asked a few of my friends who bought properties, and I was like, do you see any major red flags? None of them saw any major red flags. So I went for it, even though none of them were really experienced enough to tell me there were red flags. It was kind of a weird ride. So we bought it, probably put another ten or 20,000 into, like, touching up the outside with paint, new fascia, new siding or not siding gutters on the fascia and then cleaned up the parking lot a little bit updated things to Led and whatnot. And it just kind of slowly tried to bump rent as we managed it. And it's been four years now. I've refinanced twice on that. The first time I refinanced, I paid off the seller financing and then kept the same, like, short note and mortgage payment. And then the second time I refinanced was this last year when rates dropped and I cut a percentage off the interest rate and pulled $66,000 out. And I had a 16 year note on it, and I bumped it to a 25. And so my payment dropped $50 a month. So I've pulled out, I guess, $80,000 out of that deal now. And my payment is the same as the day I bought it. And, yeah, I basically use it as a springboard to buy some of the stuff. I'm actually listing it to try to see what it will bring on the market this week. I'm thinking about selling it now and rolling it into something a little bit more, a little bit higher class property, just because it's one of those things where the property is great cash flows. It's made me a lot of money. I love it. But it's also the one property where if you tell me like, hey, we got a problem with a tenant, it's going to be that property. So I'm thinking, all right, maybe it's time to move into this little bit nicer class of property and not deal with the Social Security meth type tenant city board. So you've refinanced it twice, though. You've pulled 80 grand out of it. She's still cash flows. She's still cash flows. Yeah. Just because when I bought it, I bought it on a 16 year note, and it worked. And now I moved it to a 25 year note when I pulled out that cash out. So, folks, he pulled $80,000 tax free, by the way, because he's refi cashing out on these deals, and it's still cash flowing. Not bad for your first swing, David. I know it could be a lot worse, right. Do you have any other holdings in Missouri now, or is that the only one? Yeah, that's pretty much everything now. I just moved back to Missouri a few months ago, and I got out of the military. I'm in the reserves now, and I guess I didn't get out of the military, but I'm off active duty now, and I got just over 100 doors here in Missouri. So we've got a 40 unit hotel, a 23 unit apartment, 15 unit apartment. That ten unit and then a couple, anything from one to four units, sporadically spaced around town as well. So you've got a hotel? Is it like traditional hospitality, or is it short stay or what do you have? Yes. No, it's a traditional hospitality, but it's not like anything super high end. It's a little like Lodge. It has a pool and hot tub, and it's got 40 doors or 40 units. But it's not like, I guess it's a two star hotel. So I think that's how they it's weird because when people hear two star hotel, they think, like, reviews. And that's not the case. It's two star hotel, meaning it is managed overnight. It does have a pool, hot tub and a breakfast, but it doesn't have restaurants or meeting places or whatever. Right. So it's a typical small town, like, Think Holiday Inn on the side of a small town. And it's basically a guy that I had sent a letter to to buy a single family house, and he was like, I'll sell it. But I'm thinking, I want to retire like, you buy everything and we were like, maybe what is everything and everything turned out to be the hotel, a 15 unit apartment, a 23 unit apartment and a single family house. And this is in a town of, like, 3200 people. The power of mailings and letters cannot be overstated. How many listings and deals that we have sourced and guests have told us about that they have sourced simply by writing letters is remarkable. So can you talk to us a little bit about that? I'm fascinated that you jumped into hospitality. Can you talk a little bit more about that deal? Yeah. When you hear the word hospitality, right? You think it brings, like, pleasant thoughts to mind. But I think that's because most people are on the other side of hospitality. On this side of hospitality, I don't know that any of us would jump back into a hotel again without a much better plan. So this was a hotel that had been basically run into the ground. It went bankrupt, like, two years ago. This guy bought it, and he was trying to transition it to long term care, like retirement home type stuff. And in this town, it's the only actual hotel. And it's the only actual hotel within, like, 20 miles. And the town was like, screw you. We need places for people to stay. So no. And then he basically was like, Well, I don't want to deal with this as a hotel then, so never mind. I don't want it. And so he was getting ready to retire and move his money elsewhere. Basically, his son does short term rental stuff in a different market. So he's just going to move his money in with his son. So we decided to take over it at the time we bought it eleven doors operational. Poor management. The one guy who was awesome went with the seller when he left. So we lost him, which we didn't know about. So we have seven employees. We've probably hired and fired eight or nine since we took over in April to get those seven, including moving managers around. So one of the guys I partnered with on this owned a hotel or a motel, technically, in about 45 minutes south. And we basically took his manager, plucked him and moved him up here, gave him a room to stay in for free. So it's been a headache. I mean, it's a whole different game. Right? And the weird thing with it is we bought it. We were in, like, the summer months, which are much better, much more. We didn't even realize that this was a seasonal hotel. So we put all this money into renovating everything and building the website because it didn't have a website, getting it on all the bookings spots. And then we get everything ready. And we're like, slow season. So now we're just kind of scraping by. And then once March hits, it'll, pick back up. But it's been good. It'll be a profitable deal. Honestly, it'll probably cash flow more than anything else we own. It just takes a lot more effort. You can't just, like, set it and forget it right there's all kinds of weird intricacies, like, hey, you need to ask for reviews. And do we want to sell condoms in the gift shop? And it's a whole different beast. It's a whole different ballgame. It's a whole different marketing endeavor. The underwriting is completely different. The seasonality is completely different. That's why I was curious, but they can be wildly profitable at the same time. Is there a draw, like, a significant draw for you in town? That farming. I think that's the seasonality of it. Right. So our main customers during the summer are, like farmhands and construction crews that come into town. And then right now, it's basically just family members. So there's not, like, a massive draw so much is that within a 2025 minutes drive there's 2025 miles drive. There's not really anywhere else to stay. So we're, like, positioned halfway between Springfield, Missouri, and Lake of the Ozarks. And then pretty much there's a ton of places to Lake of the Ozarks, a ton of places to stay at Springfield. But if you're in any of those small towns or you want to go kayaking or canoeing on the Rivers or anything, you kind of got to go to one of those two places or us. And so I think we're uniquely positioned to just kind of take I think we'll be able to be in a position where we're very busy consistently. We just need to get the word out. That, like, hey, we took over this hotel and it's in new hands. So we're actually, once it gets to, like, February, March, we're going to take people basically just hire some people for $10 an hour, 15 or whatever and hand them a bunch of postcards that say, like, hey, we're new management. This is what we're all about and just slide them into people's doors because this place, when we took it over, we took it over. It was okay. But when I went under two years ago, it was in rough enough shape that when we originally took it over, somebody called in at one point and asked if we would still trade hit of crack for a two night stay. Two hits a crack for a one night stay. Something like that, right? Like we were laughing because the front desk was like, well, this really tells you what kind of people were operating this thing. I wonder why they went under. There's always some interesting things that shake out of the hospitality deals. I had noted to you before we started, and I apologize to the audience. I keep jumping off on mute, and you could see me peeling layers off here. I'm battling the flu, but we're going to get through it. So you literally go from absolutely no experience whatsoever in this business. You read the book and now you've written books, the no BS Guide to Military Life. You've got a mastermind, the War Room real estate mastermind. You've got a course real estate investing for beginners there's consulting. You've got a coaching course, I believe, a six week coaching course. And you've got a hell of a following. How did you make this leap? What's been the inspiration for you? Really? None of that was started with the intent of it being any of that. What happened is about shoot, I guess almost four years ago. Now, three and a half years ago, man, next month will be almost four years ago. I'm going to have to get used to saying that. About four years ago, I was sitting down. So I had this idea for a book, nothing real estate related at all. Something about my deployment when I was in Afghanistan, and I realized, nobody knows who I am. Nobody's going to read my book. There's no way I'm going to be a published author. Like, I failed an English class my senior year. I was like, I'm not a good writer. Nobody knows I exist. And I don't know anything about marketing. And so I was talking to a friend and he was like, Why don't you just start a blog and you'll learn how to write? Maybe some people will follow it and you'll learn some basics of how to get people to find your blog. Okay, cool. And then the question was, what do I write about? Because if I'm going to write this book about being the normal marine in the desert, I can't just write a million articles about, like, so there I was eating an MRE. I'm never going to have enough content. And he was like, Well, you do real estate. Why don't you just document what you're doing in real estate while you're doing it? You just write about what you're learning. And then now you've got content. As you learn. It'll reinforce what you're learning. And it's like, you do it from the military angle. Maybe some people will follow along. Okay, cool. I didn't even come up with the website name. I put out like, ten different website names on Facebook to a bunch of friends. And one of my buddies who is not even in the military, was like, Those are all garbage. Why don't you do something like, Military Millionaire? And we looked for a bunch of domains online that was taken. So we did the from military to millionaire because I was like, I'm not a millionaire yet. I don't want to be an imposter. So we'll do it this way. So it's about my journey. And then, Holy crap, it blew up. I mean, that's really what happened is like, a year and a half, two years down the road, it was like, okay, now there's people asking questions and wanting help. And now I'm writing articles to answer their questions instead of just whatever I want to write about now people are asking me if there's one place that they can go. And if so, like, hey, I'm willing to pay you for it or whatever. And I'm like, well, I don't really want to charge people for any of this anyway, but the reason for the course having a price tag on it is because I did it free at first, right? I did it for completely free, and nobody finished it. And someone told me, put like, $150. They're like, that's affordable. Watch what happens. So I bumped it up to at the time 97. Now it's like 147. I don't know. And it's amazing because people finish it at a much higher rate at $150 than they did at 100 or at zero. Right. So when it was free, nobody finished it. It was 140% of people finished it. And now I'm getting like, 65, 70% of the people who buy the course, finish it. And so it's like, man, I don't necessarily like charging money for a course when you can find some of the information online. But at the same time, it just goes to show if you don't put a little bit of effort or skin in the game, like, you're not actually going to pay attention to it. And then the mastermind kind of just started with like, well, hey, what if we pull some of the more serious people together and we just kind of group them in to do some accountability? And then it ultimately got to a point where I was like, I don't think I'm the author, but if I don't write a book about everything I wish I'd known when I first joined the military, I'm doing everyone else at the service, because now everyone who goes before me or goes after me is going to go through all the same stupid mistakes I made when I have at least enough of a platform to reach some of them and say, hey, I guess I could pick it up. Got it sitting here like, hey, if you read this, then you can avoid at least the mistakes I made. There are tons of other mistakes out there that I haven't made yet. So outside of the book that specifically obviously speaks to military life the following 45,000 on Instagram, 30 on Facebook, 18,000 on YouTube, 31,000 TikTok I mean, you've got a hell of a base here. Is the majority of your followers. Are they military? It's kind of a hodgepodge, right? A lot of them. Yes, military. But a lot of them are also just real estate because I talk all things military finance. But then I really focused on real estate because that's where 80 90% of my net worth is. I've kind of just developed, I guess both pockets of that with time. You're kind of humming here on the secondary parts of what comes with the investing. And you're doing all of the other things we talked about. Where do you see the market? Heading. I'm curious to speak to investors from around the country and get an idea of if they're seeing what I'm seeing and where you think this ship is headed. So with that, David, what do you see in the next one to three years? Yeah. Here's where I pull out my Crystal ball. And if I'm wrong, we all forget this ever got set. And if I'm right, three years from now, I'm going to be on an infomercial saying the guy who predicted correctly, such a double edged sword. Right. Because there are two main things going through my head. One is, oh, my goodness. This is so hot. And everybody's decided real estate is the answer. So fundamentally, now that the entire world knows about real estate, it's got to be at the peak. We've got to be at the top end of the market. It's too crazy. People know everything. Like, everybody everywhere is talking about real estate. It's going to come down. It's got to happen, right? Like, there's definitely that emotional side of the market. But then when I look at things analytically, it's like, well, inflation is historically pretty good for real estate values. Right? They seem to hold. Okay. Inventory is ridiculously low everywhere, especially here. Like, I'm listing a house on the market, gone in two days in a market where normal. So we listed a two one not like your ideal big family home, right. Like, just a little rental, two bedroom, one bath that could be a good starter home or a rental property. And we listed this thing at full market value and had almost full price cash, no contingency offer within three days. Going on the market in a market where normal days on market is like, 45 to 80. Right. This is not historically a super crazy buyer's market or seller's market. So it's like, I can't really argue with that. It's very hard to say. Well, the market is doomed when the inventory that's the problem here is you can't find enough houses and that's supply and demand. That's like the biggest driver of any economic cycle. Right. So that's kind of my camp right now. It's like, okay, well, interest rates need to go back up. If interest rates don't go back up. I think the economy is eventually going to just then that's going to be a reason that we see a crash here because the Fed doesn't have any other levers to pull other than printing more money, which is bad. But as far as boots on the ground, I feel like my market is extremely healthy right now. As far as market sentiment, I feel the same way. It's just the overlooking, emotional side of me that's, like everybody else is thinking the same thing I am. So it's probably time to start. So basically what I'm doing right to answer what people actually care about is I'm selling the underperforming assets and that's kind of my hedge. Right. So I'm selling the ten unit that makes good money does. Okay. But it's a headache. And I'm selling the single family that barely cash flows, and I have some equity in it. But I'm keeping all the things that cash flow. Well, that aren't a headache that are decent properties at decent locations. And I'm buying everything I can with long term fixed rate debt, as long as I'm getting it for 60, $70 on the dollar off market for current value. So I'm still paying. I'm paying today what I would have been paying three, four years ago on the MLS. So I know. Okay. Even if we do see a correction, it's not going to be that it's not going to hit me that hard. And I'm making sure cash flows well. And as long as I can get those two things, I don't know what the future holds, but I'm going to keep buying stuff as long as I can get a good discount. So if the market there has got tremendous absorption rates and there's always supply and demand of the standard kind of key metrics for any market and subject, where are you finding deals that are 60% to 70% discount to market? This is where I should hold up a letter, but they're all with my system right now getting run through the system. Two main forms, right? One is direct mail, right. So I use ballpoint. Marketing is kind of my go to as far as direct mail. They do the handwritten machine written, but they look handwritten letters had a lot of success with that. And then on the other side, we just started yesterday with two cold callers that we hired. One is in Egypt, and one is in Albania, and they're both affordable and Holy smoke so far today. Apparently one of them has gotten six leads, which right, if I can get six leads at $5 an hour. Okay, let's go. Right. That'd be the cheapest marketing source I've ever had. So I don't know, I'm trying to get my hopes up about how good that could be. And we're just going to town with pulling lists of people who have pain points. Right? They have a lien on their property or the city said you have a code violation or whatever. Yeah. The power ISAsAS and the VAS and all this kind of next iteration of real estate outsourcing. We have had tremendous success with them. So I think that what you're finding with your Isas or your cold callers. You're going to find this is the norm. And you're going to end up with the situation that you're going to have to solve for is, how do you manage all of these great leads, right? We've had tremendous success with it. And it's crazy how in any market, regardless of the metrics, there are always deals to be had. If you just know where to look, it's something that people I think lose sight of so quickly, they feel the market is hot already. I missed the boat on this one. No, man. There's deals out there. There's gold. I just got to know where to look. Absolutely. Yeah, I agree. And that's exactly what it comes down to. It's the mentality and it's just knowing what to play with. Right. So direct mail has worked very well for us, but I also know that in this market, not a whole lot of people are doing texting or cold calling, so I'm going to kind of pivot into that as well, just because when I start hearing, oh, I keep getting these letters and I think, all right, well, let me try something else and see what happens. Yeah, absolutely. So as the market remains strong down by you, I'm curious who's buying all of the housing stock? Are you guys seeing a big influx from center city and from the big cities? People pushing out who's the base by you? Well, a lot of my buyers are still investors. I don't think we've seen a huge uptick from bigger cities so much as our base seems to be the blue collar who couldn't get approved for a mortgage. And now that interest rates are lower and they've gotten some stimulus or whatever. If they were smart, they can afford a down payment and they can afford to get into housing right now with the way the rates are.
Participant #1:
I guess what I should say is that we aren't far enough into it to see that there's a trend as far as new buyers, but there's definitely been some growth from out of city, out of state. It's not big enough that you can just be like, oh, yeah. There are people coming from New York. We've had an influx of jobs here, and so they're coming from places, but it's not like any one spot. We're not like Austin, where the entire world is moving to Austin, from San Diego, La and whatever Silicon Valley. So influx of jobs, any specific segment just kind of weird stuff. Right. So we got an Amazon warehouse. We got a Costco, we've got some Springfield has a decent amount of manufacturing. So we got a three M plant and a Budweiser has a plant here, and Bass Pro is headquartered here. O'reilly is headquartered here, but it's mainly more the manufacturing side and like the warehouse side that'll do it, man, as the big cities decentralize, and they no longer remain the epicenter for jobs. And a big reason for that is the decentralization of everything, including the warehousing and the manufacturing. We were screaming about this a couple of years ago, get out of the overly regulated, multi families up by us, at least because legislative threats are top of every analysis. Now, legislative threats are just brutal for us and shift to MZone because we feel that there still is a humongous amount of upside left in that market. Are you guys seeing any regulatory threats by you? No, not really. The one thing, like the Airbnb side. They're not strict. They have some rules that don't really make sense here. And they're not driven by, like hotels, like they are in a lot of big economies, so much as driven by, like, some as far as I can tell, some old neighbor was complaining to city hall loud enough that they were like, These are annoying. Let's just kind of limit them. That's probably about it. Springfield is fairly easy to deal with the little town where our hotel is. We're actually waiting to hear back on an offer. If we get an offer approved, we're going to buy another 27 unit apartment in that town that actually shares a fence line with the one we currently own. If we buy that, we're going to own 106 doors in a town that has 3200 people. So, like, 3% of the population will be our rentals. Cool. Yeah. So it's interesting. And so in that market, it's like, as far as regulatory, it's like we have the police Chiefs number, the mayor's number and the city development number. So it's kind of more of like people call us and say, hey, it's weird. It's totally different dynamic. But in Springfield, they're still pretty easy going. Obviously, there's rules, but they're few and far between. Right. We're an interesting state as far as constitutional carry and pretty easy going on a lot of life, which is nice. Yeah. I think another overlooked part of the transition here or the decentralization, which again, we've been screaming about for a decade. We saw the first wave of the decentralization, right. We saw the coronavirus hit. People broke their habits 60 some odd days to replace a habit, another 60 some odd days to put a new habit in. And people said, hey, we could do this. We're going to trade in our nine to five and opt for a different life. That was people proactively that for the most part, those were people that were a little bit more financially set that had the flexibility to make those decisions and take a little bit of that risk. I think what you're going to see next is the companies that have had enough and have kind of wised up and have gotten to a point where the regulatory madness and the litigious society that we're in up here, you're going to find these big corporations start to push back from the table the numbers right now, believe it or not. And so few people look at this side of it because it's scary. 8% of workers, office workers are back in five days a week in Manhattan. 8%. Right. Yeah. Now when the big companies are responding to some surveys and we're reading these surveys and they're saying things like we haven't quite decided on when or what the future looks like. And we'll revisit things in Q two of next year that's companies speak for. We're not coming back. Right. And they're going to start to look for those elements that can be contested, like Force Major and their lease. And they're going to start breaking leases out and they're going to shrink and they're going to relocate and they're going to be then pulling the workers with them. Right. So the first set was people could do it, leaving. I believe this next run is going to be the companies that are now saying, you know what? Let's trade in that Fifth Avenue office. It's 300,000 sqft that we pay a million dollars a year. Fine, because we're not green compliant, and we pay $5 million a year in taxes on let's go replace that with five offices that are 20,000 sq. Ft. Let's get lean and mean in five of the emerging markets across the country and decentralize at a fraction of what the cost base is today. So I think that those smaller towns and these secondary markets and even the tertiary markets, there is still a lot of upside, because I think that, again, simple supply and demand that we talked about earlier. You're going to see those metrics start to flip, and more and more and more people are going to start locating to these secondary markets. Oh, yeah. And then if they can figure out they crack the code on the remote working thing, right. And they figure out like, oh, I have a buddy. Him and his wife are both high end, like accountant CPAs for a company. And they were making and I'm going to make all these numbers up because I don't remember. Let's say they were making $120,000 a year in San Diego. So I'm bringing in 240 a year together. They relocated to Florida about a year ago, and their company was like, yeah, hey, we're totally cool with you guys. We're looking to Florida, but you're going to take a $15,000 a year pay cut, right. Because whatever and cost of living. So the company saves $15,000 a year or 30 because they were paying both of them for them to move. But in Florida, where they moved to that 105 goes a lot farther than 120 did. And so they're still better off. So it's like if a company can figure out that piece, right. The Geo Arbitrage piece. Now you got people who are working remote like they have been for the last two years. I feel like it's just corporate trying to figure out, like, a how do we tell them you're not going to make as much money, but it's going to be a lot better for you and B, because it will as long as they move somewhere. That makes sense. And B, it's almost like the Marine Corps side of things where it's like we've let them work from home for so long. But we can't just but what if we have to call them back into the office? We don't want to let them go everywhere just yet. And they just need to get past that fear and once they cut that cord and let 80% of these people work remote and be successful and they can realize that, man, we can cut our expenses so much. Yes, I think you're absolutely right. Why would they be stupid to work from a $300,000 or 300 square foot, thousand square foot place if they can work from, like, ten or 20,000 square foot place and have people all over the country and pay less for it? Yeah, significantly less on the cost of real estate side. But then again, the regulatory. It's tough up here, man. It's tough to keep things moving anymore. There's just so many challenges, much of the legislation, much of the changes are well intended, but we've long since passed that point where it's just become too heavy. It's just become untenable. And you're going to continue to see this mass exodus, I believe, until things stabilize and they start shifting because I don't think it's that big of a sell. David, to Joe or Susie. Hey, we're going to knock your pay down by 20%, but you get to go live in Jacksonville, and the cost of living is significantly better there. And we're going to pay for you to move and you only have to be in the office twice a week. I think the population is ready for that. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Especially the younger population who wants to travel anyway, right? Yes. Without a doubt. So do you have any straight commercial in your portfolio? Like retail? I had a little bit of retail for a little while. We did it as a lease option, and we ended up ultimately not going through with it. But that was less because of it being the asset that it was and more just because of some things that had not been performed accurately. So we got into it and realized this isn't exactly what we thought we were getting into. I wouldn't be opposed. There's a couple of buildings in downtown in my market that I've been trying to buy for a long time, and it's just sellers are not always as easy to work with as you'd like. So been going back and forth. There's one gentleman I've probably been to his office six or seven times, and we just haven't found a price point that works for both of us, but I would love to buy his building. So trying to buy some more and that's like a commercial retail front with an upstairs loft. So I would basically use the loft as my office and then rent the bottom out. In this case, hopefully like an ice cream parlor that's coming in. Right. Well, listen, I really appreciate you taking the time today, Dave. What's the best way for people to find you? Just Google Military millionaire. We're finally getting to a point where you'll be able to find all my platforms there. We're Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok. You name it where I'll I really appreciate it. David, pray everybody. David, thank you so much for the time. Everybody out there as always stay safe.