Non-Performing Note Strategies and Loan Modifications | Real Estate Notes Show

the same thing the one that I got didn't have quite 400 on it but um yeah it was just south of that yeah list whatever so we're we're going through right now and kind of feeding uh our system going through our portal getting database and moving forward and make an offer um but that tape situation you have to bid minimum 250 right you have to have enough to buy for 250 so um so we're performing so that's what we have going on um in the last week and um right now we're just about uh from my coder point of view from about an hour ago uh he updated the pricing on our our beginner series that we're coming out with is about 20 videos um and then our big calculator we're just kind of fine-tuning some stuff um and some coding issues we were having and fixing them to get them launched um you know anything with you that's any business stuff that's going on with your situation I know we'll dive into a few things here that we posted in the uh the event page yeah no not really just it seems like there's been like an uptick of tapes in the last week so yeah kind of the same thing um working on bids talking to you know some of the investors making sure things are lined up so they can execute on everything and um yeah it's actually gotten a little bit busy you know everybody's always talked about how like the end of the year gets busy and a lot of times it doesn't seem to actually do that but this year I don't know if that's the beginning of that actually happening in December or not we'll have to we'll have to kind of see but I've been itching to buy stuff because it's been a little quiet you know through most of the year it seems like and we've had this kind of mismatch between buyers and sellers where I think this last time and so I don't know if things are going to start to unlock a little bit maybe we'll we'll have to wait and see so yeah we're we're agreeing that the pricing is just far-fetched for I guess for the the sellers out they either they bought wrong or they're just trying to take advantage of the sellers Market um I don't happens a lot too I've seen that before where people can't sell at a decent price because of where they bought and just where they are and they're they're kind of stuck it's not that they really think it will trade at that but it's like well I can't sell this unless I sell it at this high price otherwise I kind of just have to hang on to it yeah working out that happens more often then then I originally realized I've kind of noticed you know it's funny too because you know when we first got into it bidding based on stair method was the the the methodology um and sometimes it's based on the seller's basis whatever they're into the deal for they can get rid of it for um so it's interesting to see that kind of play out uh where prices are getting higher and higher and they tried justifying it and I don't understand fully why um because you know maybe it's something they don't they know that we don't know but yeah I agree which actually one of the questions I saw um kimly posted in uh one of the groups out there um about bidding on an asset that was attached to commercial properties and whatnot and how to kind of go about that process um and she was questioning about upb or B and whatnot and it's interesting conversation to have because I think a lot of people um like to talk about things right we like talking about numbers we like to talk about what what worked and what didn't work and why you pric something the way you did not for the fact of anything else but maybe hopefully to learn you know say listen that makes sense or doesn't make sense or whoa I didn't realize that and i' I've done a lot of that in the past year comparing notes with people to see what maybe I was doing wrong and I've corrected myself on certain things you know yeah was was that Kim Banks faucet yep that was talking about that yeah she had a question about you know what would you bid on a number um and she didn't specify all the information for it so it's hard for me to kind of give you details but um you know bidding on note we I'd like to see more Post in the group you know throwing numbers out there say hey guys what do you think about this deal um I think that that interaction is awesome um you know it's something we would we would you know we would should do too ourselves is post it in the group and see see feedback is it's a good learning experience for ourselves as well as other people because some people have different angles than we do right yeah and I mean my pricing models adjust like continuously it seemed like you know when I started it was interesting I was you know trying to be pretty conservative yep you know the market was loose enough back then you could kind of still get some stuff here and there at the same time though I had some bad assumptions in the model right that's the other thing is you kind of get more data points I really brushed up like I've I've taken out conservativism in some places and I put a lot more in in other places like like my BP assumptions you know somebody tell me early on it's like oh well you know take your 30-day BPO and knock it down by 10% you know to be conservative I'm like okay that makes sense well no it's like some of these I've sold for like 50% of what my BPO yeah was GNA be because you I didn't realize at the time if you end up with the property a lot of times like something's gone wrong yeah you're right and so in other areas I've been I could be more aggressive there was a tape I could have bought a fairly big one last spring and it was like kind of like right at the edge of my go noo it was like right inside of it and I backed off because I felt like it was too close to the edge um but if I knew then what I know now I I would have gone ahead and done it so it's all over the map like in some places I'm a lot more aggressive than most people in pricing and in other places I'm a lot more conservative it all just depends I really looked into that for us and see what where where we lay at that um because ours is still based on returns I think that depending on the ex strategy we look at and we look at the worst case scenario because I can plan all I want for the borrow to reperform doesn't mean they're going to and you're great point the fact that if it does Gario you're not walk into a freshly painted you know house so just you know you have to do some repair and well one of the things we changed recently was our repair estimate for properties where we had a straight flat number we really didn't have a good guideline of what to figure out we changed it based on the year built right so if the house is built re recent we don't have to expect to have 10 $15,000 of repair most of the time but if the house is built 1950 I can't estimate 75 $110,000 you need to go higher and you know what we found was most people well what if it's a small house well I never built a kitchen back for a grand you just don't do that right appliances aren't less because the cow is smaller so it's a struggle for us when we we estimate these kind of things um but yeah are a crap shoot I I I I try to stay away from anything where I know I'm going to have to do rehab work that the few times I've done it they were just kind of special situations where it made sense but um you know because you get into depending on where you are you have contractor risk as well right yeah like it's risky enough you're going in the deal you don't know what rehab you're going to have to do then you find out and the people you hire to do it may or may not perform so it's like to me like an extra level of risk on that I don't like unless it was a place for like had a crew and I had people I trusted and knew that would be Yeah a different animal but we we've over the years gotten those locations right both of us have our locations that we just we trust the people in the process that we have no problem saying listen if they're not going to pay I'm going to take this thing back and I can easily get this thing you know rented or cfd or turned over to a situation to sell it as is and you have the buyer Market um one of the things that was also brought up was um was regarding you know on servicing notes some of the terminology I know uh Steven bur mentioned this um a while uh just over the last week or so you know there's a term they had it was foreclosure bankrupcy fee dispers dispersion and you know it's hard to tell what that exactly means but typically you know from from our experience when there's a dispersment of bankruptcy fee there was something to do with the courts and there was a fee paid to the courts not typically the attorney have you seen foreclosure bankruptcy fee on any of your stuff and what has it been for you no this was from the servicers so was this maybe um you know I know some of like the what I call like the full service servicers like SN you know sometimes like if they're doing the the workout you know for their terms like they take some percentage of the proceeds I don't know if it was something maybe like that or if it was actually like a court fee that the serer advanced it's hard to say yeah I don't really have those with with Allied in Madison that I use so I'm not exactly what that would be you know what I wanted to say is that every servicer like you're cluing into labels things a little bit different right it's not always the same terminology so it's hard to um guess what it means but I'm going to presume there was some kind of fee attached to the Banky more than likely the court maybe there was a um publication thing but use that's different right something to do with the it's usually not the attorney fee it's usually more the legality of the court fees that's to brought into there and um I haven't seen that term before so it depend what servers there is so Stephen if you're watching feel free to jump in and put that in there um so this is something I wasn't too knowledge about um but I want want to bring it up to you and see what your experience was is Frank had asked a question um and it was regarding cfds have you ever done a trial cfd where they're not paying and you you want to see trial mod but then turn them over to a full cfd yeah if if if I understand correctly that's something I kind of do all the time right so if I have a non-performing cfd and the borrowers there and they want to stay you know I try to put some agreement in place and usually it's got the format of you're asking for some good faith down payment from the borrower so they have some skin in the game and then some number of trial payments six to 12 usually um and then if they follow through on all that then I agree to basically reset the loan yep where they current um sometimes it can be as simple as just agreeing to change the the next due date or you could modify it um what I really like to do if I can is just say okay if you go through this whole plan we'll tear up the cfd and we'll create a new mortgage assuming that they qualify to make a DOD Frank compliant one but yeah you always want to have some trial period in there I wouldn't go straight from a non-performing loan to agreeing to do a mod because those trials fail all the time um I've got one guy that's performing now it's like we're on like the third go of it yeah and that's because i' I'd rather I'd rather give him a few chances and try to get that to work because if it works it's so great versus going through all the legal process and then yeah then maybe having Aro and then figuring out if you need to rehab the kitchen and all that other fun stuff but yeah trial payment plans or or or something I definitely use quite a bit and I'm sure like you do there's a ton of different methodologies of doing this thing right you can forbear some stuff you can do forgiveness of debt you can do structure where it's like double payments for two years there's all different methologies there's not one way to do it is there you know without getting to your secr saw stuff is there what what have you done and not sure we do to figure out how much that payment should be in how much should charge that person yeah I actually did a podcast on this a little while ago I'll later on when I get into it I can maybe try to link to it um where actually I mean I go into the secret sauce on it um so kind of the structure of it is at the end of the day you're kind of taking what you can get to some degree right because because you're also dealing with a borer who yep may or may not be cooperative so you can design design it however you want at the end of the day is what you can Implement going to be better than just heading down the legal process that's kind of what it comes down to um but in a perfect world you want to get as large of a good faith down payment as you can because now the borrower has skin in the game right the bigger the good faith down payment the borrower knows if they make this good faith down payment just to appease you for right now and then stop paying they're going to lose that when you go to Legal so bigger is better yeah on the flip side some bars don't have the cash to do it you they haven't paid for 6 eight months and they're like I don't have any money it's like what' you do with the money you're right they don't and no matter what they yeah there's a million situations right like like sometimes yeah they've just been screwing around you know other times they have legit things that have been going on maybe theying the hospital and then they weren't working you know it it's all sorts of different stuff but ideally you want to get the good faith down payment as big as you can you know contract for Deeds I usually have to get at least a th000 bucks you know sometimes I get like 2,000 sometimes I've done them with zero just because it's like well we'll give this a try and if it doesn't work I'll go legal anyways yeah um and then the trial payment I usually make sometimes it's larger than the normal payment that's ideal if you can do it or sometimes it's just a regular payment amount you just want them to demonstrate that they can pay you know reliably for some period of time um and then you do your mod at the end and then you know there's a million degrees of freedom on how you restructure this you can um forgive you know some of the aares potentially or even some of the balance I mean sometimes you can use that if the buyer was interested to leverage a larger good faith down payment yep you could say Hey you know dollar for Dollar on the good faith down payment I'll forgive stuff on the back ends that can be an incentive for them to to cough up there's a lot of degrees of freedom you don't want to outsmart yourself too much I mean the main thing is is the borrower even interested in this and their ability is a good question right um their ability to repay is always something we we talk about and it's hard to figure it out I mean the budget number and is it is it something that they're going to be over the threshold but what we also look into is we're going to resell this thing right what we're looking to do is XYZ so you it's a combination of both right um knowing the fact that they can repay is something we can't predict but at the same time you need to make sure that you're going to make enough profit on the back end that just because it works for them doesn't doesn't mean it always work for you um we've been a situation where we just turn the mod down listen it doesn't work they want a low payment they want lower their interest mod their interest rate from a five to four and it just doesn't work for us yeah I don't lower interest rates a whole lot I mean what I'll do a lot is stretch the term out okay to get the payment where I need it to be so what I like to do a lot of times especially when they have those Rees so normally you got your unpaid balance like let's say it's I don't know $40,000 but they've been behind so there's like a crude interest and late fees and maybe the lender pay taxes or something and maybe your payoff is like 45 yep as part of that mod I like to roll those Rees into the unpaid balance because when you go to resell that loan right everybody's pricing off the unpaid balance not the payoff amount which can be higher yeah absolutely could be down the total payoff amount into the unpaid balance you really can juice the value of the loan that's one of my favorite we got we school and we just modded just recently 54,000 upb legal balance now 76 it's just crazy yeah and you want to be careful about deferring principle because people do that a lot that's you take a part of the principle and you say okay we'll put this as like a balloon payment at the end usually yep and it's not going to Bear interest because usually when people price loans even though that deferred principle has value and it's absolutely collectible most people like don't know how to value that so it can make a little bit harder when and what most people don't know is most of the time that for bar mount isn't interest there's no interest bearing it's literally a balloon of non-interest payments so that can stay 10 grand for 30 years and there's no interest accumulating on that balance so yeah and if you do a yield calculation there is a future value number that you plug into um so you just have to be careful with that it's a good point you know um I know Rachel had a question um in the groups was regarding um just talk mods setting a mod and getting no response uh we've been through numerous loans where we had where you have a great conversation you feel good about stuff and then you get stuck where the you send on the paperwork out and the borrower disappears yeah I've had that happen too I mean I mean I get head faked a lot right yep you know we T to borrowers it's it's just part of the deal um and so you know like like what I do is I try to do everything I can to get some agreement in place to get this thing rep performing but at the end of the day I'm going to go you know through the legal process and and push it to the wall right so you know a borrower can buy Time by doing that you know they can maybe buy like a few months but I mean at the end of the day push is going to come to shove anyhow and um you that's where I get a lot of borrowers like I've had a few they've surprised me where you know they just wouldn't cooperate at all but then you get all the way to the end where they're going to lose the property you know and all a sudden this borrower who couldn't cough up $300 now coughs up like 7,000 in States and and I've had that happen more than once and it it always surprises me when it does so you know she asked the question you know who should send a demand letter you know your servicer your attorney um either you know so so typically I have my just have my attorney send them I like them just to kind of own the whole process um but when I use Alli like send out demand letters as well um and sometimes I'll send that out um knowing that okay I haven't been able to get a hold of the borrower or you know they said they were going to do something and they didn't sometimes just sending the demand yeah them back yeah andan bill mcaffrey called that all the time he doesn't play around right he just sends theand letter out in a package um and I think that's to me that makes a lot of sense and that's what we do uh if I get a loan I'm not gonna I'm not doing door knocks anymore like I used to I Just Jump Right In right and just get a hold that way because the clock starts ticking you got to get that that that clock ticking because some states that could take forever yeah especially now where you know it's hard to get court dates yes and things like that yeah I haven't used as many door knockers I always keep meaning to do that more it's like I forget about it or something but that's not a bad idea too I know some people have some pretty good processes where they send was not even really a demand letter it's just a letter saying hey here's what's going on here's what we're going to do let's talk and sometimes when somebody shows up and delivers it yeah that's a little more impactful than just something that you know goes in the mail usually I just send that stuff in the mail though just to make it easier on my end yeah I know that um it's interesting because for us we typically have used a servicer in the past to send out that information um but we rather have the attorney sent it out now than we did before um just something we just find more appropriate because it's like you're going to get your attorney involved anyway and if there's something that that the um you know serer may not be aware of it it becomes Troublesome yeah and you always want to keep your serer in the loop when you're stting legal right because a lot of times like when I use like like Franco buril for stuff I just work with him yeah directly but you want to let your serer know what's going on and then a lot of times you also want to let them know to not to stop accepting payments sort of a full reinstatement right because if you start the process and then you start accepting payments I can cause you to start everything all over and sometimes that helps bring borrowers back online too right where right A lot of them have been in this mode where hey I'll send some money in here and there you know I'm never quite going to get online and then you know they get this demand letter and they go okay I better send in a few bucks just to kind of keep this rolling and then the servicer says no we're not accepting it they're like wait what huh like what no you I got a fully reinstate at $6,000 what are you talking about and then that's where a lot of times my phone rings directly sometimes when that happens we've been in a situation where the server's like no you can't do that my turn is like yes we can and and it's and becomes a point where it's like it's frustrating because you're saying listen why am I not going to leave listen to my attorney who's licensed in that state to handle things um and can you explain that I've never had that dis you're saying that the serer and the attorney were on different wavelengths as far as what you could do yep and the servicer pushed back on it and I was like what do you like no what were they pushing back on putting the payments on hold or it I it was more of what Pro what we could do and I think it was about the accounting of the the legal ballots okay and we're like listen we want to put more and they're like no you can't I'm like you me you can't like I attorney say we can we can um you know that kind of stuff you know uh I haven't run into that um you know I've had servicers say like once I've sent the demand like I said like well we're not putting a hold on payments until you know you've shown that the demand Letter's gone out and things are are moving which is a reasonable ask um I see H mentioned a comment about he he sends out the noi uh that makes more sense um than the sending a demand letter I would the only conern like notice of intent or is that yeah the only problem with that is I don't know how that fix the clock and a lot of this time once you s demand letter out you want to start pushing that even if they you know they call you up to start negotiating things until I'm actually collecting financials and looking at stuff I'm pushing as hard as I can to get that foreclosure legal still going on because I mean I can get judgment in hand it's golden right if I can get the judgment and get that piece of paper saying that Authority is there I in a default I can go back that judgment I don't got to start back over yeah that's a good point right so so if you're going down the legal process and the borrower comes online and says hey I want to work out a deal and then you put a deal in place um you don't actually stop the legal process until the money like hits yes the serer and clears yes is a lot of times people send in checks and they get kicked back for non-sufficient funds yeah sometimes the borrow is like oh you need a check for $5,000 I can give you a check no problem here you go you know yeah you want to make sure everything hits the serer and you know actually clears before you stop anything yeah it yeah the rber has to hit the road before you and it's and I get the fact that a lot of people get excited right um about when they get their deal in and they're like oh this is awesome and at the same time I get that but I've been through times where the borrow played around for like four or five months and you oh you didn't get the wire I don't know what happened let me go back to the B and you're like oh my god um and there's a point where you say you know what I'm done with this game boom we're going forward so yeah you take any of that I take none of that stuff personally yeah that's just part of the way it goes um and and really I kind of don't care what they say I care what they do right at theend of the day if they don't do certain things I'm G to head down the legal process so I'm going to do what I need to do to get it ready so yes I mean they can buy Time by by screwing around and then you know once you get to the point right where yep if it's somebody you know you can't trust them to follow through on what they say then you know you give them you don't you don't give them benefit of the doubt no anym so I mean the worst case is if somebody really plays around they can cost you a few months and in Ohio that can be your your 15 16 18 month process and indeed process can be two years in a blink of an eye and at the end of the day they file bankruptcy and you're on the election on the you know foreclosure auction date and now you're exter more and it just kills your returns yeah it does but I mean I don't mind giving up those few months now and then because if that helps you get it reperform then that's that's huge so I'll do everything I can to try to get it reperform a lot of these people too right they're super disorganized right like like I've had a lot of people where they intended to get on track and they just kind of yep screwed up and they eventually did and you know that couple months of ding around actually allowed us to get things back on track and get it rep performing yeah but it's just part of the part of the deal I mean I think as a numbers game right so and I and I just try to be like very nice but just like very plain like you know the other thing i' had to do too is explain to borrowers right I think some of the loans like I buy they've kind of been passed around a little bit and and a lot of people have the model where they'll buy a non-performing loan try to work it out if it doesn't work they'll just resell it you know maybe take a small loss and sometimes borrowers get conditioned to um expecting that oh this guy's just going to give up you know if we just run around in circles for a few months and I have some letters they even send them that just kind of state like nicely but plainly like hey a fusion notes like I realize your loans been bought and sold but here's what we do go out of our way work with you but at the end of the day this this will this is going to get resolved we're not reselling your loan yeah and a lot of people your mind they used that and say listen you're going to come and go as well what you're going to probably sell my to Lo in two months and I'll be out of it anyway so why bother responding you're right yeah demand letter is huge for us um say men if you see the post um that I'm not seeing them for some reason but yeah yeah it's um I'll try to send it to you as well but uh it's inside the event page as well but uh one of the questions was during the foreclosure in PA the his noi worked real well since legally you can't send the man letter um now I don't do them most of the case because it doesn't start a clock you're right right right now is a different time for a lot of things there are certain things you can and can't do like we talked last week cash or Keys is a really big problem in certain States so yeah I agree with you that man uh good point so the next thing it came up that we're you know I tried getting some of these questions that we had um about automating your note business um and some people use there's a bunch of different Services out there and we talked a little bit about this last week um and for us um we have our portal which we cure all the data for all the different resources we have from you know about assets and then we plug into our big calculator and then we use spreadsheets in trillo and those kind of facets um to automate our stuff but then we have our email automation as well not just MailChimp kind of thing but we also have um automation to email uh attorneys who are in that state and we're looking to bid on an asset once we get accepted it automatically sends an email to them that's interesting I I haven't taken it to that degree but yeah and our big calculator which we'll be releasing hopefully in next week it it actually has the serer and attorneys who are licensed in that state to do business so if you're looking at an asset and saying G I'm going to buyas asset and you typically use say Madison now you're in a top spot because sometimes they're not covering in that state so now you have to hook up with FCI or SN or you know L home or whatever so it's a we put that in there because we then automatically say listen expect this loan it goes to you know shantee you know if we're Madison or wherever we're at hey expect this loan to be coming in soon FYI here's what's happening with the borrower and it's almost a summary email right to the service or right to our attorney I gota give and then we can reply back and have that email in our threats um so uh I haven't gone quite that far with it I'm I'm more into just tracking like like the ones that are in diligence just like the process and a checklist of what I've done and things like that so so your checklist is a spreadsheet or what's your checklist look like so the checklist for that right so once I get like an offer accepted um I've got now we just actually turned it into a Google doc um where it's just got all the steps and so it's just got all the assets that are in it and that's where I can keep track of where it is like was the BP ordered if so what date or did it come back what was the result and then like if there's anything that needs attention I kind of put it in red you know so I don't forget and then I put like funding information in there as well that sounds similar because we have a checklist for our Master checklist when we're buying asset and what we have is a column called error or problem and you put an X in it and what it does it filters out the entire checklist and makes a second Tab and says any errors it listing here so then it filtered out the entire checklist to only the errors so then we what to follow up on yeah and usually I don't have so many going at the same time that it's that it's that challenging but when I do have when I live in a situation where bids have been accepted but I haven't closed yet yep you usually just just every day I'm going in there yes and and checking and make sure everything's being and we pull lot of our data from our calculator from our bid calculator right it goes from Google Sheets or checklist to our bid calcor which is in Google Sheets and it pulls in the upb it pulls in next due date it pulls all the information right into that same checklist and then we confirm it against the borrowers you know the the the sellers information as we get it go look at the servicing sheet and all that stuff um because sometimes they send out tapes and the data was pulled like a few months ago so by the time you get the loan the upb is different because maybe some payments have rolled in so yeah absolutely you got to make sure that it's all accurate we've been in situations where we've been on a loan and the BP that was on the the sellers tape was the wrong one they flip-flopped it on the sheet so when we went we compared our BP and looked at their Bo in the collateral file found that that it was flip-flop well listen you had a value of 85 in this thing it's really worth 50 you know um we're stuck we're really you know we can't really move forward on this deal unless we dropped this bid and they're like yep we're sorry we apologize but that checklist allow us to flag it and flag that for each asset when we run through it yeah and I never I never put any stock in seller bpos anyways you know that's those like trust but verify things yeah absolutely and it's more of a you know when we're doing due diligence if we're getting a situation where our values are stilling you know solid numbers and the seller BP's way off we want to look at that and see what what we missed if they're collaborating with us it makes sense you know um so's real communicative that's that's always a good sign when they're kind of quiet and be like just put in offers it's kind of like H yeah really anything here or not so your due diligence process do you have automation there or is that manually done to collect information or um and to process your bids and track bids and stuff like that yeah I mean it's it it's more checklist based than anything I mean a lot of this stuff is hard to automate you know going through and looking at values like a lot of that's a manual process um you know I've got some tools I've built to pull Zillow data using the API so some of that stuff I can automate a little bit um um you know some other little tricks to pull um like if if I'm going through a big list um then pulling links like the Google Maps and stuff like that um but generally if you're buying like onesies twoes you're you're just kind of going through a lot of that stuff manually the main thing is though having a list of knowing what to do so you don't miss yeah anything and keeping track of where you are right because if you're working on five different assets and they're in various States it's really hard to keep track I think the big thing is not having to keep track of stuff in your head and having like a stepbystep process to um to run down um but yeah I haven't quite figured out like the push button due diligence yet that would be nice yeah and you know with our portal you know we we found it that Zill scraper didn't pull everything we wanted to right there's a lot of things like the if it's been listed for sale for my knowledge Zill doesn't allow that um that's not part of the API which frustrated us because sometimes shows last sold instead of but if you go in manually and look you can see the way absolutely but we wanted that last sold last listed so if that thing is listed for sale we want the price and the date and hopefully the agent yeah it's weird right so people aren't familiar with that if you go to Zillow right there's the data they show on the page for the property but then you can use what's called their their API to do a call like automatically to pull data on a property but not some data and there's some data you can get using the API that they don't show on the website and there dat they put on the website you can't get through the yeah API so it's it's kind of weird the way but they actually if you use the API you can get like a the mid-range Zilla value which is the estimate that they put but then they also give you like a high and a low yeah and that kind of tells you what their level of confidence is if the high and low are real tight then usually it's more like Urban Market with lots of sales and you can believe that a little little bit more than normal I never believe Zilla values very much but sometimes you get these really big ranges and that means that they don't really have good data this Grand to 300 Grand something to do with one of them right yeah so um so we Dave we'll get to your question just a second Josh asked what language do you use for the API so for our I mean for for us it's it's it's a we don't use an API well we do uh we have a way we we don't even pull from Zillow um because we have some great sources that we have go through and we pull a lot of data through our portal at jkp um but from our knowledge when we used to use the Zill API it's a really easy key you put it in and you can go through it there's no fancy language I guess it's Zill scraper out there but it's through Excel yeah I do it through Excel so I guess it's just like a VBA code there's just a macro that runs and pulls it yeah um so one of the question that Dave uh MCO asked about training you know um where would you recommend I think he asked about going to like note school as well what's your feeling about trainings I know you had training when you got in what's your thought right at this moment I don't really have an awesome place to point people you know to go from like zero to one um a lot of those like not school I've not done I mean I've talked to a lot of people who have I've heard a lot of good things about it um I've not seen the training but I know like Kim Banks Foster that we mentioned earlier she's got note investing Academy I haven't seen her stuff but I respect her a lot so it's probably worth looking at um it's a challenge I mean I say one thing just to be aware of is don't pay like boatloads of money I keep caring about these like Ultra expensive yeah Mastermind and I would I would not go there and I would just also if you're going to take training T the person to understand like okay what am I going to learn what am I going to be able to go do because I've heard a lot of stories of someone offers some training they get people all excited and they give them enough to like wet their appetite and it's like oh well if you want like the real secret now you can buy this new thing and that's more expensive and then they buy that thing and then like oh well if you really want this stuff it's like you know you don't want to be it's like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football sometimes so right so I like that you do make sure they're very plain about what am I going to be able to go off and do am I going to be able to go off and um filter through assets put offers in on them and then know what I'm doing after I get them or is it more like raah Rah raah here's all the potential of yep you know what what you can get so so you know you have a training course in due diligence um and it's the step by step of how you do your due diligence and as we both know there's multiple ways to do different things but having that recipe is always helpful um I know people who've gone through note schooled gone through some of the gurus um and there's always a piece missing right and I don't blame the trainers for having a piece missing sometimes because they don't cover everything all the time um one of the most common ones we here is like no one talks about like tape headers right um and what do they mean and so like that but I think that oh like the glossery of what do all yeah you know like what do next do compared to you know PID date and um the the the payment string what's that key mean and you know there's a ton of different headers that we and I you and I kind of learn by doing not really by training right go through and say oh that's what this means or um you know dates on a thing and some people say why is there a date and amount and you realize that was a payment amount for that month but there's no real training on that which is interesting yeah person on due diligence I created that because I notic there were a lot of people who had taken other trainings yes they would get stuck on that point so it's good for I kind of understand notes at least a high level I kind of know what I'm doing I can bid them but I want to make sure I can scrub them well so it's like a real specific thing the problem with it is if you're somebody who's like okay I'm new to notes I do other stuff I want to figure this out I want to wrap my head around it it's not going to help you with yeah you know your business model and bidding and then it's not going to help you you know after you go and close somebody so it's it's like really specific and highly detailed around like that one step so it's fairly um you know it's kind of nichy it's not like a a toz sort of a thing yes and it's sometimes hard to do all that you know it is sometimes hard to get everything into one because not everyone learns the same way as everyone else does um with our what we're coming out with frost is we're trying to cover some of the topics that people we've seen post a lot and say okay listen we're g to break down our answer and you know kind of figure out what will help and I think what we're trying to do is just kind of it's not going to be expensive it's not going to be crazy it just helped them get over that threshold of being a new investor and just some tidbits here and there and just to go over things that we feel like you know we've heard a lot of questions about mentorships like how do you build that that was one of the videos we put in there um what to do in the process of you know a lot of questions like most people don't know what the difference between a mortgage note a mortgage and a mortgage note a note and a mortgage is and simple things that people may not want to ask but we put in the video so not to say ours is perfect and danam is perfect but just getting in there but I think Josh put a good point on the on the the the event page is reading and doing and networking on Facebook probably taught us the most I would say oh yeah there's so much free information out there I mean if you put the time in just from going through the various Facebook groups and and you know some of the stuff that's on YouTube um you could put it all together the problem with it is it's not organized right it doesn't right like walk you down the trail there's like tidbits here and tid that's there and then putting it all together can be kind of overwhelming so I don't know if anybody's got like a great solution for that yeah as of yet but I mean I ask questions on those things like all the time because you know the other thing too you gotta understand is everybody like no matter how long they've done it is like learning new stuff yeah every you never get like all of the information so Patrick asked if we ever heard of a Millionaire Maker coaching group no I'm not familiar with that I've heard of it um there's so many different R for specific or like real estate in general maybe uh Patrick feel free to you know comment in the thing I've seen it I know I've heard of it but there's so many of those kind of you know glamorous groups to make you a millionaire that I just for me I've always backed away from that and work with people that I know and I always tell people you don't need to connect with somebody that is like you know highest level of you know doing a million deals a year you just need to find someone that's like just a step above you to kind of connect with right and just teach you things that you may not know you know are they said whoever you work with make sure they're like an operator too right because things change over time like I've I've seen some stuff out there that you know hasn't been updated in like five years and a lot of the times is they're they're you know we find we've we've seen a lot of these you know coaching methods who the people have been around for like two years three years and not that they can't be good at it but it's it's it's a struggle for me to get into a coaching group that the the lead person has been doing here for only a few years it just you know every deal is completely different and if you're not in a lot of deals or active for a period of time even talking to other note investors you lose the experience right um but that's a frustrating I have um so one of the questions Patrick says it's not tran I'm not familiar with a Patrick um but Dave asked about uh he has an LLC should you have an LLC or wait till he build a portfolio I for I admit my first loan I bought in my personal name um I wouldn't do that ever again um but the question is where's our liability right yeah and that's that's that's a little outside my wheelhouse I mean my answer would be to go get an LC but I'm not as smart as a lot of other people on business structures and all that's a little outside my Lane I mean I know maybe enough to be dangerous with that so I kind of hesitate to get into yeah I'm not giving a legal advice but I'll give you from a different perspective if I'm gonna sell a loan to somebody and I'm selling to you and I'm selling to Dan deppen and I say well what's the company and you say um to my own name it it it kind of roughs me the wrong way sometimes it just it legitimatize you as a person and they're not expensive to open um the structure of the LLC it would definitely talk to your accountant um and your attorney to see how to structure it but you know you don't need to go run a fund right but for buying California can be expensive like I heard I think they're like maybe like 800 bucks so it kind of depends on the state like Colorado is cheap um these I think like 50 bucks and like 10 bucks a year or something like that but some states are kind of prohibitive so and the other question is do you have an IRA if you're just doing it in your own name you you want you know if you're turning it into a business then you should probably have an LLC or or something else depending on the situation um if you're just doing it for like savings or whatever maybe that should be like in an self-directed IRA anyhow just something to think about yeah Patrick I I saw the comment I'm going to hire for now just because I don't legitimize the the the coaching it looks like some of you're just trying to promote so I'm GNA hide that just for now because I don't know it and I don't want to advertise on the on the group here um before I get to dive into it and kind of see what it's about so um Josh made a comment about um you know LLC Patrick is saying about you know LLC I'll tell you ours LLC um but I do yeah you know that's what we're structured in um and I never had a problem with that um and whatnot so if you know if you guys have any more questions F to jump in one of the last questions that we had in the event that I saw was uh Josh asked a question how do you go from two notes to 10 to 30 right um and for it's funny because you go one step at a time um I'm glad he didn't ask how do you go from two to 100 that's a totally different conversation then go from 2 to 10 but I think that typically when you go from 2 to 10 you're buying a block of five assets you're not buying one one11 one you're typically buying a pool small pool po small thing um what would you suggest if someone wants to jump from there have two and they have opportunity to get to to 10 what would you give advice to say about that I mean I say you need some kind of system in place you know usually like have some kind of CRM and and when it comes to tools I'm not hard over about like what the tool is it's more like what you're doing with the tool so there's a lot of ways to do it I use pipe drive for my CRM but there's probably 50 other things you could use to make that work um but you need some kind of database we've got every note deal in there where you can keep like the pertinent information you know what's going on with the taxes where's it service at what's the situation with the insurance some place where you can have notes on it some place to set reminders and set tasks so like the big thing is following up on everything because you cannot you know it happens all the time right with you know whether it's servicers or attorneys you have to kind of trust but verify with everything so you need some kind of tool where you can set those reminders like for example let's say I got a court date next month I'll set a reminder for the day after that to check in with them and say hey what happened did it happen was it um you know was it moved to another date or was there some result um so you need that and then you know some kind of personal it's a check ongoing checklist for your deals right yes so I use pipe drive as kind of the main database and then I use Trello for like my day-to-day stuff yep you know so if there are things that are like super critical to get done that day you know I put that in trell so it's kind of a combination of tools there there's a lot of ways you can skin the cat the hard thing when you're new is understanding what to do because that's the other thing I haven't really seen like I've kind of figured it out the hard way you know what do I need to do when so I've kind of broken things down now where like every six months I just order tax reports for the whole portfolio because I had one that went to tax sale one time and I didn't know it they won't necessarily tell you um and you know I freaked out I was able to and I got it taken care of but you know wasn't a big deal but I'm like all right I need a process in place to keep that from happening so I have some stuff I do like kind of every month or every quarter and I have those reminders set up so I just kind of do it that that's the best way to get there we have it we have a similar situation we have all spreadsheet right and we have a flag that alerts us when we're a month away from a deadline of tax to do keep his eye on it um and you know and getting servicing notes and and you know Force Place Insurance of like Hey we're it Flags us when it's 11th month or whatever you know it's a six month policy the fifth month it Flags us and lets us know um you know and those kind of things Flags us for us I'm a spreadsheet crazy person right and we still got to do our our Excel versus Google Sheets one day I think it'd be great for um but I think that you know for us you know it worked out um so for someone that's going from 2 to 10 do they need these big systems and I agree with you they don't um yeah it doesn't have to be a big system it just needs to be something yeah your head once you go over to a couple yeah the first couple you can sort of just keep in your head or you know do sticky notes and that kind of quickly becomes impossible I know somebody they can if you mention a loan number they know the entire deal mention a street address they have no clue you're talking about how they remember it I have no clue but that's how they I always go by street address which is tough because loan servicers tend the numbers yeah and I get it because numbers typically aren't duplicated right typically um you know it's difficult you know we we were going bya last name until we got to a Smith and we're in we're in big trouble there um he mentioned about bringing up um starting up drafting up Sops and then hiring a bookkeeper in office um when did you transition from doing bookkeeping yourself and then tra this to a person what was that like for you for us I actually still do the bookkeeping myself yeah because I'm I'm I'm a weirdo but I enjoy doing that and I like kind of having my finger on the pulse of exactly everything that's coming in and everything that's coming out and I can do that really quickly my dad was an accountant I grew up around that stuff so I don't doing that I actually did try to Outsource that to somebody um yep earlier this year and it was kind of a thing that I really enjoy doing and I get a lot out of it so was pretty hesitant to do that and I didn't want to really spend the money on it if it's something I like I'd rather spend money on the things that I don't like doing but I'm like well I'll get this done and then they raise their prices and I go okay I'll deal with it and then they wanted me to pay for like the part of the year a had and years I said okay forget it I'll just keep it myself so I haven't done that um uh but I do have somebody that works for me Wendy who's been just awesome um and we do have a lot of standard operating procedures that I've created so what I've done is is I don't do it with everything but a lot of times if I'm doing something I don't have anop for I try to like write it down okay here are the steps here's where you go here are the links and sometimes they make a quick like couple minute video um and now Wendy makes her own and and fixes them wow it's kind of the self-sustaining thing so if I still to the point where I need to bring on you know additional help that'll be a lot easier because if you bring somebody on now you can say okay boy I think you should on this this and this and here are the Sops and and go at it so I've got it yeah try to set up to scale more you know beneficial and I would agree what you're saying a assistant seems to be more of what you need than a bookkeeper or X Y and Z right yeah it depends on what you know right if you're if bookkeeping is completely alien to you then then getting a bookkeeper is going to make a lot of sense um but where I find makes it hard to scale is just all the little stuff that comes up the back and forth with servicers attorneys and you know letters you get from the cities it's just kind of like death by cuts it adds up especially when you start yeah feeling so so that that's the kind of stuff I look for help with it's going to be a little bit dependent on your situation and the things that you really like doing and the things that you're good at versus the things you're you don't like doing and you're not as good at yeah it's it's it's yeah that's the problem is knowing your strengths is the the biggest Game Changer in this knowing what you're good at um I know Josh talked about um smart sheets I'm not familiar with smart sheets oddly enough I haven't played with it much I've heard of it and I looked at it one time but now I can't remember what it was I have come across I have to go back and look that up again I don't he say you can go from a group large task to steps then you go to the sheet mode for individual tasks selling probably would help me because I probably have a lot of the fancy craziness and it probably organize a little better I'm going Josh I thinke appreciate you bringing it up um but you know I definitely should look into that because between the spreadsheets and Trello and like that um and our proprietary that we have going inside it it could get lost sometimes um but interesting but Sops for those who are not familiar it's just your the way you do things your methodology of processing things and putting that together is valuable because if you get sick or whatever you can hand it off task off to somebody else and they can kind of continue it and and and work it just like you would be there right and if you go to have to hire somebody else because you get too big or whatever the same thing be handed down I say the example is look at McDonald's They you get hired you're watching a video I did it when I was like 15 right and you watch that video and every beginner does that and they have an entire process so you can go from Step Zero to at least step one of working the job yep so cool don't put two bananas with them out the gate right I mean the other thing keep them simple don't over complicate things and I think that applies whether you're building a spreadsheet or process just try to keep it as simple as possible and really I'm I'm talking about me when I say that and you know you're It's oddly to say this but I've looked back and had to change some of myself over time and go well I'm not doing it that way anymore oh my stuff continuously evolves yeah yeah yeah cool all right well Dan I man this has been a full hour I didn't expect to be as long this has been great um guys I appreciate everyone jumping into the group uh event and jumping in we're going to try doing again next week um yes kiss method um try to do this again next week do another event page and uh if you have questions feel free to put in the group and you know we'll do our best to answer during the week but also we'll put into the event and you know answer it live because it would be a good conversational for guys who may have missed that post or whatever um yeah I know Josh and and whatnot so we definitely want to give some feedback we want to help you guys out as we do this and kind of Branch out and just reach out to more people hopefully so Dan I appreciate you joining me hope you guys have a great holiday weekend um and I'm sure we'll be talking soon all right sounds good see you later take care everybody thanks a lot.