Mike Deaton, founder of Flipping Dirt and Deaton Equity Partners, sheds light on the world of land flipping. His simple buy low, sell high strategy requires very little time and energy, and results in major profits.
Key Takeaways
- The Formula for Simple Land Flipping: There are a variety of business models when it comes to land flipping. Mike’s strategy consists of buying properties significantly under market value, doing nothing to them, remarketing them, and selling them within 4 weeks for a hefty profit. There are very few outside parties and logistics involved.
- Marketing Tips for Land Deals: Mike shares his techniques for marketing and selling land properties quickly. He talks about the websites and platforms he uses to list properties, how and when he works with realtors, and how he approaches conversations with buyers.
- The Tax Advantages of Multifamily: After seeing such success with land flipping, Mike’s tax bill was less than ideal. He decided to diversify his portfolio by investing in multifamily to take advantage of the tax and depreciation benefits that asset class brings. Now, his tax bill is near zero.
Mike Deaton | Real Estate Background
- Founder of Flipping Dirt and Deaton Equity Partners
- Portfolio:
- $1M in land holdings
- 1,000 multifamily units
- Based in: Woodland Park, CO
- Say hi to him at:
- Best Ever Book: Mindset by Carol Dweck
- Greatest Lesson: the current financial environment is providing tons of learning
Check out Mike’s previous episode: 2710 - 4 Strategies to Scale as a Multifamily Syndicator
Click here to learn more about our sponsors:
Transcript
Joe Cornwell (00:02.422)
Best ever listeners, welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I'm your host, Joe Cornwell. And today I'm joined with Mike Deaton. He's the founder of Flipping Dirt and Deaton Equity Partners. He is a land buyer and flipper. He holds over a thousand units of multifamily and he is based in the Woodland Park, Colorado market. Mike, thank you so much for joining us.
Mike Deaton (00:26.058)
Joe, you bet, man. Thanks for having me on the show.
Joe Cornwell (00:28.218)
And I understand you have been a previous guest, correct?
Mike Deaton (00:32.102)
Yes, sir. I was on, uh, I don't remember exactly when, but sometime in the past.
Joe Cornwell (00:35.902)
Awesome. Well, we will be sure to link to that previous episode and tell me a little bit about how your business has changed since you're on the show and what you're focused on today.
Mike Deaton (00:45.514)
Yeah, you bet. So I think when I was on the show last, it was kind of heavy in the multifamily world. So we do a little bit of both. As you mentioned, we started flipping land in 2016. It's a great cash cow for us. We generate a lot of income from that. We got into multifamily, I guess, in 2020, I would say, as a tax hedge. I mean, we were paying a lot of taxes, and so we've eliminated our tax bill through multifamily investments and depreciation.
We do that through various ways. We've closed on our own deals as lead sponsors. We raise a little capital. We help with other people's deals. And so I think the last episode was a bit focused on that. But since then, we've really just been growing our business both in the land, not so much in the multifamily. That's obviously hit its turbulent waters here over the last couple of years. So I'm very optimistic and keeping some powder dry for deals to come in 2024.
But yeah, land is still good. We launched a coaching business this year, early in the year on the land side of our business. So we're teaching other people how to enjoy the fruits of flipping land and making great returns and doing all that. So that's a bit on the professional side. On the personal side, yeah, we're in the mountains of Colorado for about two years, just loving life. We live high up, about 10,000 feet. We're surrounded by pine trees, deer, turkey, all that kind of stuff. So life is good.
Joe Cornwell (02:13.006)
And I saw you're an ultra marathon runner. Is that correct? And what is that? Let's start with that.
Mike Deaton (02:18.514)
Ultra marathon is anything over a marathon distance. So typically they start at about 31, I think a 50K. Yeah, I don't know if I'm an Ultra Marathon runner. I dabble occasionally. So I've done a few 50 milers. I have signed up for a 100 mile race August of next year, arguably the hardest 100 mile race in the US at Leadville. So I am, I guess, looking forward to that. I don't know.
Joe Cornwell (02:47.21)
Yeah, so my follow up question to that is who hurt you and what made you want to do this?
Mike Deaton (02:52.118)
Yeah, exactly. Right. And what masochistic mindset do I have? So I don't know. If you're a runner out there, I'm sure you can sympathize. I got into running as a 5k person and for some odd reason, it just tempts you to see how far you can go. So, you know, it's a means to an instrument. It gets me off the couch in the in doing things.
Joe Cornwell (03:07.65)
Well, that's very cool. Yeah, very cool.
Mike Deaton (03:14.506)
I live in a wonderful part of the country, so I like to trail run. I get out. It's my spiritual, you know, part of my spiritual routine is just to get out and really be appreciative of nature and spend some time out there. But it's also, it's a challenge, right? It's something to do. We've all got our own Moby Dick out there somewhere.
Joe Cornwell (03:30.89)
Yeah, no, that's very cool.
Yeah, I'm not a runner, so I cannot empathize, but yeah, no, challenging yourself is definitely a cool, uh, character trait to have. So I do get that part of it. Um, so yeah, as far as the real estate, let's focus on, uh, starting with the land flipping, cause again, that's not something I'm familiar with. I've heard a little bit about it, but how did you even get into land flipping? What led you down that?
Mike Deaton (03:59.134)
Yeah, it's a great story. It's a great business model. So I grew up, let's say, spending about 25 years in corporate America. Out of school, got into manufacturing. And so I spent my time really in operations and supply chain. I just kind of went up the ladder. I worked for Microsoft for many, many years running their reverse logistics operations. And so that's kind of where I came from.
In 2016, was living in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and both my wife and I found ourselves out of work. There was a layoff at Microsoft, really for me to go forward with the company. You kind of need to be in the Seattle area where their corporate is and just wasn't going to work out for various reasons. Similarly, my wife's side, she was working in healthcare and they were consolidating away from the Dallas area to their headquarters in Fort Smith, Arkansas.
So we both found ourselves out of work, and our immediate reaction was, holy crap, we got to get a job. And so we started doing all the things that you do to land a W-2 job, networking, polishing up the resume, getting out there. And I personally was just kind of sick to my stomach, like just the thought of interviewing. Was I going to have to relocate? What kind of company culture was I going to get into? Some of the companies I was looking at were like Amazon, Apple, Tesla. They're just, I mean, they're great companies to work for, but it's a grind. And so I really wasn't just thrilled about jumping back in. And so parallel to all of that, we'd been looking at ways to generate cash flow on the side. Just had revisited Rich Dad Poor Dad, had this concept of cash flow quadrant, building businesses or investments that generate cash flow. And so we already had real estate in the back of our head.
In that process, I was listening to great podcasts like this and a few other, and I heard some guests that were doing land flipping and generating triple digit returns on their investments. And so it piqued my interest enough to buy what it was called a toolkit at the time that was kind of a primer on how to get started. But I had been working full time, so that was really just sitting on the back of the desk collecting dust. I wasn't taking action on it.
Mike Deaton (06:21.018)
And so in that moment of crisis and not really having, I mean, our income stopped because we didn't have side income. So one of the downsides of having a W-2 and nothing on the side. So we decided, let's go explore this a bit more. And so we went to a workshop. It was called a boot camp. And we met some other people that were doing it, got a little more confidence that it was, okay, this could be a viable business model. And we just decided, let's go all in. Let's give ourselves a 12-month runway.
We had some money in the bank, and so we had a little bit of seed capital to start with. And we just launched this like a business. We set up an LLC. We got coaching and training to help us accelerate growth. And we went all in at it. And we had success. It took us a few months to get the pipeline filled up with a few purchases. And then we got a few sales after that. And then ever since then, it's really been a high growth business for us.
As I mentioned, we started making enough money that our tax bill really hurt. And so we started looking at how do we diversify and minimize that tax bill, and that's what brought us into commercial real estate. But that was really our foray into land, was just hearing about it from other people that had some success and getting educated. It's really the same way we went about with multifamily, quite frankly. But yeah, it's a great business model and we love it. It's like I said, it's our cash cow today, has given us and fueled a life that quite frankly I don't think I would have necessarily enjoyed had I stayed down the W-2 path.
Joe Cornwell (07:56.47)
So how, what year was this when you first got into the land?
Mike Deaton (08:01.426)
It was 2016 where we started really doing our education and then right at the beginning of 2017 we launched our own business.
Joe Cornwell (08:08.91)
Okay, and what markets were you initially buying in?
Mike Deaton (08:13.502)
Yeah, good question. So we were living in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, as I mentioned, and we were kind of leaning on the adage of you should buy properties in your backyard or where you have boots on the ground or that you're familiar with. And so we started looking in Texas initially. And ideally in the land business, it helps to find a market where there's a lot of land. And so we weren't really looking in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, especially where it's, I mean, all the land there is spoken for in some fashion.
So we started looking more in East Texas. We had a bit of initial success, nothing substantial. Then we went out to West Texas. And then ultimately we found a few places in Colorado where we really loved it. There was a lot of trees, it was mountainous, it was very rural. We had success really in all of those markets, but we personally love the mountains and pine trees. And we were much more comfortable selling those types of properties because we actually, buyers can feel your energy coming through. And so, like I said, we started there in the Texas market and now we're predominantly in Colorado, although we buy and sell properties all over the United States. There are great markets in just about every state.
Joe Cornwell (09:28.37)
Interesting. So give me an example. And I mean, you know, whatever, whatever size deal you want, because like I said, before we started this call, I don't know anything about land flipping. It's, it's an aspect of real estate I have never dealt with. And all of my experiences as an agent and investor, never dealt with land in any capacity. So give me an example, walk me through it.
Mike Deaton (09:48.31)
Sure. Yep. So it's a very simple basic business model at its highest level. We buy properties under market value only. So we go out and we'll find a market, we'll assess the comps, and we will make offers only under the market value and significantly under market value. When we buy it, we do nothing to it. We just flip it, we remarket it, and we enjoy that profit. And so for instance, there's an area in Colorado we like to frequent.
As I mentioned, it's mountainous. They're typically five-acre lots that are platted out in this area. We can pick up those lots for anywhere between $2,500 and $5,000 per property. For instance, let's just say we buy a $2,500 piece of land. We've made that offer based on the fact that we know we can sell it for $10,000 or $15,000 on the market. Once we have transacted that and put it in our name, we'll then remarket it. And we sell them one of two ways.
We typically, and the majority of what we sell is on owner financing. So we'll carry the note, essentially, on your property. If you want to buy a property from us from $20,000, we'll agree on payment terms, $400 a month, $500 a month for five years. And we'll take that. The other way is obviously cash. And so if you want to buy it outright on cash, you can do that. And so on that $2,500 piece of property, we may make $15,000 profit. And there's really very little expenses that go into that as far as overhead. There's a little bit of transaction cost. We don't involve title companies or realtors or lawyers or surveys or any of that. It's really just kind of a bare bones aspect. And so in a nutshell, that's it. Now there's obviously nuances once you get into any business and do things beyond that, but yeah, that's a basic level.
Joe Cornwell (11:49.91)
So how do you convey title? And obviously it may be different, I'm based in Ohio, but how do you convey title without title companies or lawyers? How does that work?
Mike Deaton (11:59.082)
We just transact directly with the county. So a lot of counties, I would say 95% of the counties in the US, subscribe to a digital filing access. And you can do that through a company called Simply File. And some have particulars on how they want a deed formatted. Like they want a certain margins on the side or certain verbiage in there. But you figure out what the county needs, and we just transact that. And so when we buy a property, we typically handle that ourselves. A lot of times we will go through a title company just because sellers are more comfortable working with an official agent. Title company can act as an escrow agent, and there's not this debate about who's going to pay who first or who's going to transact first.
And so majority of what we do, we don't need to do that. But sometimes we'll go through. I mean, obviously it adds cost into the deal. And there's margin to play with, but on some deals, not a lot. And then on the sell side, if we own or finance it, we'll usually do a contract for deed. So somebody will need to pay off the property in full before we will transfer title into their name, but we'll do it the same way. We'll just put a deed that we're transacting a property into Joe Smith's name, and we'll transact that direct with the county.
Joe Cornwell (13:21.266)
Okay, makes sense. How are you finding these vacant lots? Are they all vacant? Are you flipping any other developed lots or developed global lots? Or is it mostly rural stuff for enjoyment? I guess there's two questions there. How are you finding these and what does your typical lot look like that you're selling?
Mike Deaton (13:41.022)
Yeah. We, I would say, almost exclusively do business on vacant properties. We've bought a few with structures on them, but it's usually only by chance. We're typically going to either the county directly or there are a bunch of list services. They're the same services that people use in the real estate world, Datatree, those types of services, list of owners and you can sort that information by vacant land. The counties all categorize their properties based on commercial. Does it have, is it residential? Does it have structure on it? They put a value on the structure. So there's ways to filter out where the vacant properties are. Sometimes we will filter that down to a particular size, say we want between one and 10 acres.
Sometimes we'll go, I mean, we do a lot of 50 to 100 acre properties as well. It really just depends on the market and the value of the property. But there's different ways to get a hold of that information as well as to filter it however you want to. But, you know, it's typically vacant land that we're pulling in.
Joe Cornwell (14:55.906)
And what is the largest lot you've transacted?
Mike Deaton (15:03.698)
We've done 150 acre property here in Colorado. It was actually two properties neighboring one another, but same owner. So, we transacted that and it was a great property for a hunter and we sold it to a hunter and he goes out and enjoys it. 2024, we've got our eyes set on doing more of that, trying to step up into not necessarily larger acreage just in and of itself, but larger value properties.
Our margins will probably be a little thinner on a percentage basis, but the net profit will ideally be more than others.
Joe Cornwell (15:40.202)
Yeah, I mean, as an agent, I can imagine, if you're selling $125,000 lots, that's a lot of work, volume-wise, it's a lot of transacting. So I mean, what does a typical year look like? Obviously, I'm sure it varies, but how many of these transactions are you doing? And how much time per transaction is that taking you to move these?
Mike Deaton (16:05.142)
Sure. Yeah, exactly to your point. I mean, when we started out, we were a little all over the place. And throughout the process of just getting more familiar with the business, we zoned in to... Because exactly to your point, you can buy a property very inexpensively and you will sell it inexpensively, but the same amount of work goes into doing one at any price level.
However, once you get farther up in value, buyers are a little less open to selling you their property for pennies on the dollar. Somebody who has a 1,000 acre ranch is going to hire a realtor to sell their property, most likely. They're not just going to grab some letter out of the mail and say, yeah, I'm going to sell my property to these people for a fraction of what it's worth. And so there's really kind of a sweet spot in there. And it's this $10,000 to $50,000 value retail that we find a lot more... We get a higher percentage of responses back on our mailers, but at the same time, you can buy a thousand acre ranch and you don't need to make a whole lot of percentage margin on it to make $100,000 off of it or something like that. So a typical year for us is we're transacting five and 10 properties a month. The amount of work that goes into it. At this point for us, we have a lot of virtual assistance.
We have team members that will scrub lists, send out mailers, get responses in. And so, you know, we've set up our business in a way that we dabble in it. Like we set the stage. We will direct the team a little bit more about, hey, this looks like a good market. Maybe we're not going to try here. Let's try a certain number of solicitations in this market. We have a few other things going on right now, and so our team does a lot of it. Percherent's action on a piece of property, I would say, it doesn't need to take more than a few hours really of work because you're sending out mailers in a mass, 1,000 mailers at a time to solicit potential sellers.
Then, okay, you have a few conversations with people. The transaction itself, it doesn't take very long at all to customize a deed off a template, file it with the county. There may be some notarization that has to take place and that may take a bit of time. Where things can get a bit time consuming is with marketing and sales. It just depends. If you have to, if you have a lot of tire kickers, if you're having a lot of conversations, okay, there can be some time there. But even that is inconsequential, I would say.
It's not that deep of a time commitment. We know people that do this an hour or two a week on the side, they just want some side hustle income. And then there's other people that do it full time that are working personally on their business. And then there's another handful of people that set this up like a business and they have a team, and they're running it like a business.
Joe Cornwell (19:26.782)
So how often on these properties you're putting under contract, do you physically go out, walk them, look at them, anything like that, physically inspect them?
Mike Deaton (19:40.082)
Yeah, good question. So, you know, the shorter answer is theoretically you don't have to do it at all. Our early days, so when we moved to Colorado in 2017, and we were buying and selling in a couple of areas that were maybe a four hour drive from where we lived, maybe less than that, three or four hours, and we would, if we had a handful of properties in our inventory.
We would take a day trip and go out, walk the properties, take some photos. I got a drone, so I will go take some drone videos and flyovers of the properties. We'd just kind of make a day out of it. It was really just more getting out and having fun than it was a need to go out and explore the properties. There are other ways to skin that cat. A lot of people don't even get pictures of the actual property or anything like that. It's good to ask if you're buying a piece of property from someone, if what they're presenting to you are the actual photos of the property or if they're representative of the area or things like that.
I know a lot of people that will put up other people's pictures when they're representing their property. But there are people on Upwork, Fiverr, Craigslist, you can find people in those markets a lot of places that will go out and take pictures for 50 or 100 bucks. You can go out and get some actual photos of the property. We've done that before when we've bought properties in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, places where it's just not realistic for us to get to, but we want to actually have some eyes on the property. We typically don't do it anymore when we're buying a property. We can use the tools online good enough. One of our lessons learned is when we first started out the business, we were very picky about our properties. We were looking cosmetically, is it an attractive property? Are people going to like it?
It doesn't matter. Looking back, that's the one lesson we take away is we should have bought every property we could have got our hands on, because you can sell that property and you can make a hefty profit. And so today, we look at things like, is it landlocked? That's a big thing. Some people will try to sell you a property, and that's why they want to offload it, because it's difficult to get to or you can't get to it. There are a few other things that may throw you off if there's a trash dump next to your property or something like that.
But quite honestly, there's somebody that wants that property too. So it's more and more on the buy side. We don't really do too much other than an online look. And we really check the, it's more the chain of title that we're looking for. Is it a clean property in terms of, you know, does it not have any liens or things like that? And on the sell side, we just, you know, be open, honest, be a good representative. I don't want somebody coming back and saying that they want us to take back a property, because it wasn't what they thought it was.
But yeah, I mean, we don't do it too much anymore. We do it if it's fun. We'll go out and do it. I mean, we love getting out. We have a Jeep. We'll go play around out in the rural areas and check things out.
Joe Cornwell (22:49.674)
And on these, once you're listing them to sell or however you're selling these, I assume you're listing most of these, how long are these taken to close typically? So let's say from close to close, buy to sell. What is your average hold time on these?
Mike Deaton (23:04.502)
I would say it's less than four weeks. We buy property and we sell them pretty quick. Over time, we have a few different avenues. We have cultivated a buyer's list. We have a list of people that have expressed interest over the last seven years. We have a pretty hefty list that we can go out and pre-shop properties to, and we can sell a lot of properties that way.
There are free channels. There's Facebook Marketplace, there's Craigslist, there's eBay if you want to put it on eBay. There's a few different places where you can advertise, and there's a really active market for those types of properties. And then there's paid sites. You can go on land.com, and they have a whole family of sub websites and places that you can have basic memberships. You can have premium memberships. There's Zillow.
And then in some cases, we'll more and more these days we leverage realtors because they can do a lot of the legwork. They'll go take photos. They'll list it on the MLS. So entertain their own buyer pool. But a lot of different ways you can get this done. But for us, we don't keep property in inventory very, very long. Really it's a conscious decision. I mean, honestly, we flip properties pretty quickly just on their own. But if we get a property that's aging, there are other ways to to get that moving.
I mean, we like the philosophy that money loves speed. And so we just like our inventory turning and reinvesting and doing things, at least on the land side. When we get more into residential and commercial, I really like the buy and hold mentality and just keeping cash flow coming in. But for land, it's a pretty quick turn. There's a wholesale marketplace within the land flipping community. We buy land and we sell land on wholesale terms. So it's this middle ground between what we can get it for and what the retail is. So there's still a margin to be made, just a bit of a less one. And then we'll go deep discount on some properties if it's just not turning to just to get it moving and to reinvest.
Joe Cornwell (25:12.482)
Well, and my last question on this topic, because I could talk about this all day because I'm fascinated, is are you buying things that are like developable lots? And let me preface this with saying that the only familiarity I have with land flipping, we'll call it, is people buy rural lots or less desirable lots and then they get it rezoned or they change the, you know, whatever, development ability of it, and then they can now, they're taking this from a $100,000 lot to a million dollar lot, just from some of those things. Is that what you're doing, or is this strictly buy low, sell high on, as is, so to speak?
Mike Deaton (25:54.25)
We typically, or we only purely flip right now. So we don't mess with rezoning. There is a play to be made should you want to do it and have the skill set and the time to do it. So yeah, you can buy and try to rezone. We know people who've bought hundreds of acres and platted it and put in dirt roads and a little bit of basic infrastructure out in West Texas.
I know some people who are part of a syndication that bought property just outside of Austin that they put entitlements on it. And so they did exactly what you're describing. They just bought the rural land and they put the entitlements on it. And then they, I don't know what they 10x the value or whatever they did to do that. All the way up to putting in the infrastructure, right? Putting in some pavement and waste management and electricity. So
All that can be done. We just keep it really simple because it just adds layers of complexity that we haven't really felt the need to get into, quite frankly.
Joe Cornwell (26:58.158)
Okay, very interesting stuff. I learned more about land sales here than I have in my entire life. So I appreciate that. I do wanna touch a little bit on your multifamily. I know that was kind of the focus of your last call. So we won't spend a ton of time on it. But briefly, you said in the intro that your focus for multifamily, the reason why you pivoted into that was because you were making so much money selling land that you needed some tax sheltering there. So that's obviously a great problem to have.
What markets are you buying multifamily in? Tell me a little bit about that side of your business.
Mike Deaton (27:32.278)
Sure. We're fairly market agnostic. We have been up until now. We had some early deals in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Those have gone the cycle, so we're out of those. They were great deals for us. We have property in Iowa that we're partners in. We have a few in Texas that we're partners in, all over Texas, quite frankly. So a bit agnostic.
And that's, it's just been where we've looked. Since we moved to Colorado and especially here in the Woodland Park area the last two years we started looking at Colorado Springs, the market's super, super hot. And so we actually thankfully didn't pull the trigger on any deals here, just the market went south right about the time we were looking around and deals weren't penciling out really good. So hopefully they'll come back around here in the next year.
Joe Cornwell (28:28.502)
And so are you actively operating these, managing these? Are you passively investing these? Like what's your structure on your actual investments? Okay.
Mike Deaton (28:34.91)
We have a mix. So yeah, we've passively invested and we have our own self-directed IRA that we passively invest in. We also passively invest through our business just for the tax benefits, as well as we have been lead sponsors on a few deals on that side. So we kind of go across the board.
Joe Cornwell (28:57.526)
Okay, and well then I'll ask you this. I've been asking almost every guest this, but what do you think is going to happen in the, we'll keep it to multifamily market next six to 12 months. What are you thinking in underwriting and seeing?
Mike Deaton (29:11.466)
So it's a mixed bag, honestly, and it's market dependent. But in general, I forget the number, but there's a massive amount of deals. I would say 2021, November, December, I believe was the peak of closings for multifamily deals. The typical structure of those two, three-year refinance on those value add type deals, right? So there's a massive amount of deals that have already started to. Their term is up, right? They need to either refinance or get out. A lot of those deals are in trouble. There's some floating debt on those, floating debt without rate caps.
And so there will be a lot of distress in the market. Different lenders, it feels like are taking different approaches. Some are working with operators. A lot aren't. And so as far as opportunistically, we're looking for some troubled assets in good markets. That being said, the lending terms are still not great. They're just not. The interest rates are high, the LTV is low, so it's hard to make your traditional value add pencil out even at that level. You kind of have to look for those distressed assets.
At the same time, the investor base is not really energized too much to get into multifamily. So raising money for some deals is difficult. I know a few people who are doing cash purchases on assets. We're taking the approach, I think we're scaling down a little bit. So we have typically looked at 100-unit higher type properties. We may go a bit lower and look at something around the 50 to 100 unit where we can JV with people and potentially get better terms or even self-finance some of these. Owner financing is a little better in those type of situations where you have maybe some older buyers that do have good terms outside of those distressed ones.
Yeah, it's going to be a difficult time, but there are other properties that are doing okay. I mean, there are some that got good terms on their loans and are out of that messy middle that a lot of properties are stuck with. It's hard to say. I mean, I don't want to get caught forecasting what's going to happen. There's so many variables at play between election year, geopolitics, who knows what inflation is going to do.
It's a once in a lifetime, hopefully it's a once in a lifetime occurrence, but it has been a once in a lifetime occurrence to have a pandemic shutting down supply chains at different times, all of them coming back online at different times, rents going up, largely because of a lot of these syndications, by the way, but rents being pushed up, and then the Fed taking aggressive action. So it's just, it's a tricky time.
But I did see a great graphic not too long ago that 1975, peak inflation, peak interest rates, if you decided to wait until conditions got more favorable, you'd have been waiting 15 or 20 years. It's just a matter of making deals work and knowing what you want to look for and being out there. But I do think there will be some deals. There'll probably be a lot of competition for those deals though. We'll have to see.
Joe Cornwell (32:54.314)
Yeah, no, that's, that's great perspective and yeah. And, and, you know, obviously none of us have a crystal ball, but I love throwing that question out there just to hear, um, what people are seeing their perspectives on, on the forecasting, so to speak. Um, yeah, it'll be interesting to see, you know, I'm not sure if we're going to have the great wave of inventory that a lot of people have considered happening. You know, I think that could be a good thing for the market overall if we do have a watch. But like you said, there's so many people that have been waiting on inventory to tick up that, you know, buyer, the buyer pool may continue to expand and it may not feel any different than it does now or has the last year or two. So great perspective. I appreciate it.
You are ready to transition to the best ever lightning round?
Mike Deaton (33:39.47)
Oh yeah, man, let's do it. Lighting around, I forgot about that. Let's go.
Joe Cornwell (33:41.834)
Yeah, awesome. What is your best ever book recommendation?
Mike Deaton (33:47.242)
Well, best ever book recommendation is still probably Mindset. I think I brought this up on the first occurrence, but there's a book by Carol Dweck called Mindset that really gets into fixed versus gross mindset. Best one I've read recently is one called Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks, which really talks about how you can leverage your strengths over time. I think a lot of people have different strengths when you're pre-40, let's say, versus when you get over 40 or 50. You can reinvent yourself and leverage other aspects of your talents in other ways. So really great book on how to keep a career alive for a length of time.
Joe Cornwell (34:25.026)
Best ever way you like to give back.
Mike Deaton (34:28.722)
I love coaching. When I was in corporate world, it's really what I enjoy doing. Since I've been out of corporate world, I've found ways to continue being a coach. So I do a bit, a small amount of personal coaching, life type coaching with just a few clients. But my wife and I started land coaching this year as well. So we have a couple of coaching programs where we'll teach people how to make great money. And we've transformed a few lives in 2023, which was a huge win for us. And we're looking to do more of that in 2024. So.
That's far and away my favorite way to do it.
Joe Cornwell (34:58.946)
I'll say I may be your next student. I'm very intrigued by this whole land flipping thing. So you may hear from me. And give me a mistake in an investment deal and the lesson you learned from.
Mike Deaton (35:13.49)
Well, I think as with many people out there, I would say in multifamily, we were involved in a deal that closed in November 2020. And it closed with a variable rate and without a rate cap. And so it has been a grind. But it's hard. There are a lot of lessons out of that.
A lot of those are rear view lessons, and so some of those are hard, but they're lessons none the same. But certainly the fundamentals have to be there as well as it's good to have as secure financing or as let's say fixed type financing as you can get. But yeah, I think a lot of people are going through it.
Joe Cornwell (35:58.383)
And where can people reach out and learn more about you?
Mike Deaton (36:02.442)
You know the best ways for me, I'm active on LinkedIn. You can find me, I think it's Michael B. Deaton is my handle, but you can find me there. Also if you go to flippingdirt.us, that's with our land program and there's some contact points there to find out. In fact, I think by the time this airs, we'll have a flippingdirt.us slash freedom, which will put kind of all of our landing page type information, a little information about the programs, contact information, things like that.
Joe Cornwell (36:32.83)
Also, we'll be sure to link to those in the show notes as well as your previous episode. Mike, thank you so much for joining us. And listeners, if you got value from hearing Mike's story and learning about land flipping like I know I did, then please leave us a five-star review on the app of your choice. Make sure you're following us on social media and hope you all have a best every day. Mike, thank you again.
Mike Deaton (36:53.258)
Joe, thank you.
