Ron and his company help solve a big issue they noticed in the US, lending to foreigners. The only products they could find for foreign lending had incredibly high interest rates. They are seeing a lot of Canadian and Australian investors use their real estate financing programs. Along with their lending, Atlas is also a turnkey company that finds properties, provides lending, and manages the property for their investors. If you enjoyed today’s episode remember to subscribe in iTunes and leave us a review!
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Ron Blum Real Estate Background:
- Principal at Atlas Capital and Asset Management
- Involved in large scale home construction with the largest residential developer of custom (1mm+) homes in Western Canada
- Spent 8 years in constructing residential real estate during the 80s boom years of large scale production
- Consistently purchased and resold better than 1800 properties per calendar year in 2006, 2007, and 2008
- Had 50+ active purchase offers in the 14 state rust belt region of the US on a daily basis
- Background in economics and finance as well as real estate and foreign lending
- Based in Sedalia, Missouri
- Say hi to him at www.atlascamgroup.com
- Best Ever Book: War and Remembrance
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TRANSCRIPTION
Joe Fairless: Best Ever listeners, how are you doing? Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Joe Fairless, and this is the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast. We only talk about the best advice ever, we don’t get into any of that fluffy stuff. With us today, Ron Blum. How are you doing, Ron?
Ron Blum: I’m doing real good. Thanks, Joe.
Joe Fairless: Well, nice to hear that. A little bit about Ron – he is the principal at Atlas Capital and Asset Management. He’s been involved in large-scale home construction with the largest residential developer of custom, and it’s one million plus homes in Western Canada. His company is based in Sedalia, Missouri. He spent eight years constructing residential real estate during the ’80s boom years, and then had larger-scale production since then. He’s had 50+ active purchase offers in 14 states throughout the rust belt and the U.S. With that being said, Ron, do you wanna give the Best Ever listeners a little bit more about your background and your current focus?
Ron Blum: Sure. Our focus is very unique; I don’t know how many people are actually doing this… One of the biggest problems that I’ve heard people talk about here over the years – we try to be responsive to feedback that we’re getting from people that contact us, and for any foreign investors to purchase real estate in the U.S. it just hasn’t ever really been a non-predatory loan setup. Some of these people on here will finance for nationals, and they want 50% down into the hard money… And my background is actually not just in the development real estate, but actually in loan servicing, on the loan servicing platform.
I used to do all the whole loan and acquisitions for Continental Capital Corporation for a number of years, and that enabled us to be able to even further establish a lot of the proprietary contacts that we have, and that we have available for real estate investors.
We are able to go again and provide 30 year fixed rate loans for foreign nationals; however, I do have a lot of domestic buyers that use our services just because it’s a lot less tedious than a typical loan process would be, Joe. People are there on day number 29 trying to fax stuff in the middle of the night so they can get their loans to close…
And for us it’s just pretty standard. The only thing we require is two years of tax returns. I wanna see whatever cash reserves you have, and you run your own credit report, and based upon that information right there, that is all we require to move forward to do a loan.
The other people here in the U.S. that really like our program is that most banks, despite what kind of cash reserves you have, they’re gonna usually top you out at ten properties and not let you buy anymore, and that’s not the case here. We’ll still underwrite the loans, the loans are all underwritten internally right here on my desk, so we’re not really subject to strict underwriting guidelines. The loans will be 30-year fixed rate, 35% down payment; we go ahead and underwrite the rest on a 7,25% fixed rate loan. The only thing that we do ask, the only little hidden surprise in our loans – it’s not a balloon payment, but what we like is we ask that you not refinance out of the loan for the first year.
So we can help you to get in there, and then after the first year if you can find a better rate, a better term, a better loan, you have our blessing, because we want our investors to make money. If getting a better rate and terms enables their cashflow, then we’re happy to go ahead and assist, and give them our blessing.
Joe Fairless: Is there a pre-payment penalty after year one?
Ron Blum: No.
Joe Fairless: Okay, so you can get out scot-free, no fees involved?
Ron Blum: Yeah, day number 366 you’re welcome to go ahead and refinance wherever you wanna go.
Joe Fairless: I was born in the US, so I don’t have the perspective of being a foreign investor, so I will approach this question as though I am not born in the US. I’m living in Australia, I hear this podcast, and I hear you just need two years of tax returns; I run my own credit… And I think the third thing you said – you wanna make sure I have money in the bank; did I write that down?
Ron Blum: Yeah.
Joe Fairless: How much?
Ron Blum: We do wanna see a little bit of cash reserves. There’s a lot of people out in the world that are kind of — in my opinion may be a little bit misled that they’re not really generating a lot of revenue, and then [unintelligible [00:05:11].06] kicks the bucket and leaves them $10,000 and think they’re gonna be able to parlay it out and become the next real estate millionaire, and that’s not realistic.
Joe Fairless: Okay, how much specifically needs to be in cash reserves?
Ron Blum: We’d like to see 40k-50k.
Joe Fairless: Regardless of the loan size?
Ron Blum: Well, there’s lots of different ways that we can massage this, but primarily what we don’t want is we do not want to hold people’s feet to the fire. We wanna see it in an IRA or a 401k program, along those lines. So it doesn’t have to be money sitting in a brown paper bag right underneath their workstation.
Joe Fairless: Okay. So it’s not as liquid. Is that a benefit to you because they probably won’t be moving that any time soon? Or is that a disadvantage because if they need it, then they can’t really liquidate easily.
Ron Blum: No, it’s definitely an advantage for the investor. What we wanna make sure is — we are not brokers, number one – I’m not a loan broker… But the other thing that we don’t do is we don’t broker properties. We carry all of our own inventory, it’s all in very stable, low-risk kind of bedroom communities. We try to focus on big school districts, and that brings the kinds of tenants that we want. So we carry our own inventory, we have our own construction crews, we even do our own property management.
Joe Fairless: Okay, so this loan program is one rung in the ladder of your overall business, and it’s a way that you can help each aspect of your business, because if they get a loan from you, then maybe they’ll buy more properties, and you’ve got properties, and then you also manage it, so it’s a full-service thing, right?
Ron Blum: Correct. And I’ll tell you, Joe, probably our least-favorite aspect of this is property management, because it is an art, and there’s a skill to it… But again, listening and hearing what’s being related to me from other investors about property management [unintelligible [00:07:09].24] just typically seems to be the biggest hurdle for people. We started on the property management aspect about three years ago; we’re familiar with the properties, we did the original rehabs on the properties, we’re familiar with the communities, and the other thing that we’re very familiar with is the caliber of tenants that we want going in.
I know for a lot of investors Section 8 seems like a great model for people that are willing to assume that kind of inherent risk that goes with inner city investing in higher risk neighborhoods. So it’s just been a pretty much cookie-cutter program where we’re using our own capital to purchase, we’re using all of our own capital to do renovations and to fix them up… And prior to closing we’re gonna be providing an appraisal, a property inspection report and a finished walkthrough video so you can see what you’re getting prior to actually going into the close.
Joe Fairless: Got it. So it’s a turnkey company, from finding the deal, buying it with your own money, doing the renovations with your own money, then you sell it to an investor (domestic or foreign) and then you help them with a loan, and then you manage it… Turnkey stuff, right?
Ron Blum: Yeah, absolutely, and we’ve had very good success in the model. We first started the loan program here a few years back, so it wasn’t nearly as favorable as it can be right now. The typical lenders – they’re charging hard money rates, like 9%, 10%, 11%, 12%, and being in the servicing background, I caught the whole wave of subprime loans that went south here in 2006-2009, so I’m very familiar with what a predatory loan is. The only product that was really available out there for investors that was easy were ridiculously huge down payments. We respond to that need, and we have a lot of referral business… And I would say probably the bulk of our clients right now are coming out of Canada and Australia.
Joe Fairless: Okay. Is that because there’s just a lot of Australians and Canadians, or do you have a particular focus in those markets, or are there certain aspects about those countries that lend itself more towards buying here?
Ron Blum: Well, number one, there’s no language barriers, so…
Joe Fairless: Right, yeah. It’s easier.
Ron Blum: That’s a good thing, but we used to actually work with referral services that we’ve kind of eliminated from our business model now. I would say that probably 75%-80% everything that we’re doing now is repeat and/or referral business. So we’re not a very aggressive marketing company, and to be honest with you Joe, I don’t wanna sell 500 houses a year.
Joe Fairless: How many do you sell on average?
Ron Blum: We’re probably turning anywhere from five to ten a month, and we have the ability to scale up, but I also like to have a life.
Joe Fairless: Yeah, me too.
Ron Blum: So we’re able to scale up, and my kids are through college, and doing very well, and it’s another thing that kind of prompted our move just out of the big city itself, and out about an hour outside.
Joe Fairless: Is that the big city of Kansas City?
Ron Blum: Yeah, Kansas City.
Joe Fairless: Okay, the big city of Kansas City, alright.
Ron Blum: It’s a big city for us; now we’re in a little community of about 19,000 people, and we have our three-story turn of the century home right across from the park, and stock fishing lake, so… We’re able to handle more and we’re able to scale more, but we’ve got all the skin in the game.
Then there always seems to be this fine line of having either not enough buyers, or too much inventory, or too much inventory, or too many investors coming at us at one time… It’s a constant juggling program, but after being born and raised in California during that housing boom out there in the ’80s – not to date myself, but we just liked a little bit slower pace…
The one other thing that I always stress to people, Joe, is that we don’t wanna get so big so fast that we’re inaccessible to our clients or our customers. Usually, our customers can pick up the telephone and get us on the phone. It seems like I spend half my evening just texting people in Canada, people in Australia… When you get too big, then all of a sudden it always seems to be the first thing that suffers is client support services, and we don’t ever want that to happen. If somebody needs to talk to me, I wanna them to be able to pick up the phone and get me on the phone.
Joe Fairless: High-level let’s go over the categories of your business, or the departments of your business. One is finding the deals, two is the renovation of those deals, three is finding an investor for those deals, four is getting a loan for them if they go through you, and then five is managing them. Are those the main areas of your business?
Ron Blum: That is exactly my business model, all the way.
Joe Fairless: Okay. Within those areas, how many team members do you have? Because it sounds like you focus more on the quality of life aspect, because you moved outside of the big city, you [unintelligible [00:12:11].04] stock pond, hanging out by a park, but you’ve got these 5-10 houses a month… You said a year or a month? A month, right?
Ron Blum: 5-10 a month.
Joe Fairless: Yeah, that’s what I thought. I wrote down a year in my notes; I knew that was wrong.
Ron Blum: Right.
Joe Fairless: 5-10 a month… So how many people do you have?
Ron Blum: Well, that’s kind of an interesting question. I’ve had the same person doing acquisitions for me now for probably 8 or 10 years, so he knows what my quality controls are, what my procedures are… So I tell him how many houses I need and he goes out and finds them in the cities that I want them in.
Then I have three different construction managers, three active crews at all times, and then there’s me and my wife Debbie – we basically handle all the interaction with all the clients; I do all the underwriting for the loans, I stack files, and then Debbie is kind of your go-to [unintelligible [00:13:01].01] for contracts and property management within lease agreements, and things of that nature. So we run pretty lean, but I’ve been doing this in Kansas City now since I moved back from Canada and took the job over at Continental. We’ve just got a very strong team, and I don’t always have to [unintelligible [00:13:18].01] because they know what we expect.
Joe Fairless: You do have a very lean team… How many properties do you have under management right now?
Ron Blum: I don’t know… A few hundred.
Joe Fairless: A few hundred. So your wife Debbie is the point person for management of those?
Ron Blum: Correct.
Joe Fairless: How does she do that? A couple hundred properties.
Ron Blum: She had a stellar resume, I’ll say that, long before… She was very active and kind of a major player in corporate America for many years, and then she decided to follow me off into this crazy real estate thing, and we’ve been banging away at it for 17 years here I’m of Kansas City based alone.
Joe Fairless: 200 properties, one person… She’s not fishing with you, is she? She’s working while you’re fishing, huh?
Ron Blum: [laughs] Yeah, that’s probably a pretty good way to put it. And then she’s an artist, she has an arts degree, so she paints on the weekends. I’ll tell you, when you have reliable crews out there, and if there is a maintenance concern, the people that are going over there to fix that are the people that originally rehabbed the property… It’s a lot easier for the guy that went over there and put in the plumbing just to go over there and figure out when something’s going wrong.
The other thing too, as long as we’re turning over quality properties, with a complete inspection report and appraisal, then we can attract the kind of tenants we want. A lot of my tenants now, Joe, come from referrals from other tenants that I have.
Joe Fairless: When she’s spending time on, let’s just say, 200 properties, since you said a couple hundred… When she’s spending time on the 200 properties, managing it, what is the percent breakdown of her time where she’s spending it? Just if you had to guess…
Ron Blum: Oh, 75% of her day is property management… But again, we have good, responsible tenants, we screen them thoroughly…
Joe Fairless: But when you say 75% is property management, that’s a fairly broad term. What specifically — is it leasing, renewals, is it maintenance requests? How is she able to do this?
Ron Blum: Well, it’s usually maintenance requests, with all of the same personnel that we’ve been working with… One of my construction managers I’ve been with since 2001. That’s when I was just kind of tinkering around it, and not really making it into a business per se… And the property management aspect, I’ve gotta give it to Debbie – she is a champion, thoroughly screening these people… If you ever had an eviction on your record, you’re not going in. You’re debt-to-income ratio is not acceptable to us, you can’t go in.
And in a lot of these neighborhoods [unintelligible [00:15:46].07] These are not high-density rental areas. These are owner-occupant neighborhoods… So we want that owner-occupant type of mentality, and really the only thing that — ideal relationship is the [unintelligible [00:15:57].22] before the third, and we can leave the people alone, and that’s what people want.
Joe Fairless: Cool. Let’s see… The different aspects of your business that we talked about – where do you make the most money and where do you make the least money?
Ron Blum: We make the least amount of money on property management.
Joe Fairless: Is that all Debbie’s fault?
Ron Blum: No, no, no…
Joe Fairless: I’m kidding. [laughs]
Ron Blum: Debbie’s quite a trooper, but… No, the thing is, Joe, is that here in the Midwest region, or at least here in Kansas City, the standard property management fee is 10% of the rents that you’re collecting now. I would say that our average is somewhere between $900 and $1,200/month, and we have just a flat fee of $75… So that’s not even really a money-making apparatus for us. We just do that as a service for our clients, so that if they ever do have any maintenance issues, that we can use our own crews and kind of keep it minimal.
I’ll give you a little for instance… A few years back – this is kind of what really kind of prompted us to reassume the property management role, instead of having it farmed out to a third-party contractor or a company… Is we wouldn’t hear a whole lot once we finished up with the property and they had a tenant, but then as some months rolled by – and this has happened with two or three different companies; it’s so frustrating… One person – apparently the base in their toilet cracked, and they’re sending me a bill asking me if I can assist with this $345 repair. Well, I can go down to Home Depot right now and buy a toilet for $60, and my guys will have that in in 15-20 minutes. So the property management for property management companies – that’s a revenue stream for them. It’s not really a revenue stream for us, it’s a courtesy that we provide.
Joe Fairless: Yup. It’s almost a necessary evil that you have in your business.
Ron Blum: Yeah, it kind of is, with the fact that we’re underwriting a 30-year loan, the fact that we have all the skin in the game at the front side, and the fact that we’re managing it… We’re not here to sell a property and wash our hands and walk away and wish you the best of luck; we’re here as a support system for you, which when you’re an out of state, or particularly an out of country investor, you’d better be sure that whoever you’re working with has their act together and can provide all the services, because what you don’t want is you don’t want three or four different hands in the same pie from somebody over in Australia.
They have their own lender, they have their own property management company, they have a realtor looking for them, they’re trying to coordinate rehab crews… It’s too much.
Joe Fairless: Yeah. It’s a smart way of controlling the process as much as it can be controlled, and when you’re working with – I imagine – investors who are looking for a turnkey operation, if you can provide everything in one system, then it’s a much smoother conversation and so much easier than if you’ve got a lot of different vendors and groups.
Ron Blum: I mean, I do this for a living; I sometimes have probably 50-60 work weeks, and on weekends we’ll take emergency calls, but for the most part, I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve got a cookie-cutter system, and sometimes I’m surprised that I don’t have more frustrations than some poor guy sitting over in New Zealand who’s trying to navigate the U.S. real estate market. [unintelligible [00:19:21].17] You’ve got too many people that are involved in the thing, you know?
So we do want that peace of mind for our clients, but the other thing too is we rarely have a client that buys one house from us and then they’re not back in another month or two or three, or referring moms and dads and co-workers… So that’s why I don’t have to really be aggressive with our marketing strategy; the clients find us.
Joe Fairless: Where do you make the most amount of money.
Ron Blum: Oh, when we turn the house.
Joe Fairless: Renovation to sale?
Ron Blum: Yeah. That is the revenue stream right there. Like I said, a lot of this other stuff – it’s more of a courtesy that we’re trying to provide help to people to keep expenses down and not go out there and get ripped off by property management companies or shady contractors.
Joe Fairless: The acquisitions person who’s been with you 8-10 years, how does he/she find the quality deals?
Ron Blum: Well, you’ve gotta kind of poke around. There’s still some good availability on MLS. We’re on Craigslist, we’re going to — what’s the new one? Facebook Marketplace. Just wherever we can find them.
Again, there’s certain cities that we like, there’s certain zip codes that we like, there’s a certain demographic of the renter that we want… Our ideal and/or typical renter is dad’s a cop and mom drives a school bus. That’s our target right there.
Joe Fairless: Based on your experience, what is your best real estate investing advice ever?
Ron Blum: Don’t get greedy and don’t play with the money.
Joe Fairless: Don’t get greedy and don’t play with the money? Did I hear that correctly?
Ron Blum: You heard exactly right.
Joe Fairless: What does that mean, don’t play with the money?
Ron Blum: Well, real estate is not really a complicated thing. I think a lot of people complicate it too much themselves, and they don’t realize where they’re going before they really embark upon it… And the next thing you know, they think they’re going into a deal, and the costs have increased 15%, 20%, 30% more than when you’ve originally started. We provide a good property with a certain return, and we don’t play with the numbers and we don’t try to geek out every dime of profit that we can get.
In fact, a lot of inventory right now — when people are looking at or considering our inventory, I don’t just send them a financial analysis of the property or proforma; we include recent MLS realtor comps, so people can say “Okay, listen, I’m buying a house for 100k, but look, the neighborhood is selling for 120k. So do I really wanna change pricing around?”
Our typical benchmark for cash on cash return is anywhere from 10% to 13%. And if you’re in a stable neighborhood, in a stable property that’s appreciating in value, then you’re in great shape. But too many people embark on a course of real estate and all the players that are involved are greedy, and they’re playing with the numbers. That’s the kiss of death for us. If I go down to a car lot and I ask “How much is this car gonna cost?” and they tell me “20k”, and I go back three days later and now it’s a $35,000 car – well, that’s playing with the numbers and playing with the money, and we just don’t do any of that.
Joe Fairless: We’re gonna do a lightning round. Are you ready for the Best Ever Lightning Round?
Ron Blum: Fire away!
Joe Fairless: Alright, I will. First, a quick word from our Best Ever partners.
Break: [00:22:32].18] to [00:23:36].25]
Joe Fairless: Best ever book you’ve read?
Ron Blum: I’ve spent a lot of time looking on your website, and I know you’re knowledgeable, but I really do like the fact that you cover a broad range of topics.
Joe Fairless: What’s a favorite book of yours?
Ron Blum: Oh, a financial book?
Joe Fairless: Yeah, any particular book.
Ron Blum: War and Remembrance, and The Winds of War. World War II fiction on a military guy; I come from a military family, and it’s probably some of the finest literature I’ve ever read.
Joe Fairless: Alright, noted. I got that written down. What’s the best ever deal you’ve done that wasn’t your first and wasn’t your last?
Ron Blum: Oh, probably the best ever deal I did – maybe three year ago we did financing for a mortgage investment corporation; we bought two streets of beautiful three and four-bedroom duplexes. That was a complicated and challenging deal. However, during the mortgage meltdown when all this inventory was becoming available, we came up with proprietary software that any house [unintelligible [00:24:31].08] rust belt region that was listed for $21,000 or below, our computers automatically generated the bid [unintelligible [00:24:37].03]
We averaged somewhere from 1,500 to 1,800 houses. They were not high-quality, they were all (in my opinion) junk properties in junk neighborhoods, but there was [unintelligible [00:24:46].09] That was pretty challenging, too.
Joe Fairless: When you get what you ask for and you buy those properties at $5,000 and you’ve got thousands of $5,000 property purchases – what do you do with that?
Ron Blum: Well, I’m finding an institutional guy – hence the background in loan servicing; I used to do all the loan acquisitions for Continental Capital Corporation, I ran the whole servicing division for it. That is not a product for the meek of heart. That’s the type of product that institutional investors will be buying, and they buy 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 of them at a time, but they also understand that it’s all very high risk and half that portfolio is gonna end up being throw away inventory anyway.
So if you have asset managers and you know what you’re doing from the institutional investment point of view, I would never advise anybody buy any high-risk cheap property. They always look good on paper, Joe, but they don’t always turn out that way.
Joe Fairless: What was the financial result of that acquisition process?
Ron Blum: Well, we bought them at 5 and we sold them at 7, and back when this huge tsunami of properties was being dumped back on the market, there was a product out there called the quitclaim deed that a lot of people used to like to buy. The banks used to like to sell them by quitclaim deed, because all they were really doing is they were saying “I can’t ensure it, there’s probably still a loan against it…, you might owe $1,000 in water bills…”, but you can buy it for $5,000. So what we did is we incorporated this program where we were automatically submitting bids, and what would end up happening is we would buy them for five and we would sell them for seven.
I had probably a drastic cost in between there, so we weren’t making a million dollars on a deal, but if you make $1,000 for your company 1,800 times a year, it’s not a bad day at the office.
Joe Fairless: Yeah, because the closing costs and things on that $2,000 profit probably get eaten up with a thousand maybe, so you’re making maybe about a thousand.
Ron Blum: Yeah, probably. We figured anywhere from $800 to $1,200 typically. But [unintelligible [00:26:51].27] we were able to specifically find and meet a demand that was out there at that point in time, but be able to [unintelligible [00:27:05].08] and a warranty deed, and it was a gangbuster. It was nuts for three years. Just crazy.
Joe Fairless: What’s a mistake you’ve made on a transaction?
Ron Blum: Ugh…
Joe Fairless: I loved that sound from you after I asked that question…
Ron Blum: Underwriting. Underwriting can be [unintelligible [00:27:23].00] the Calyx mortgage files, and a lot of times I think that I’ll have everything that I need, all my ducks in a row, and I’ll have to call back a client or send an e-mail to a customer, like “Oops, guess what? You’re gonna have to refine it and resend it. I forgot this, I forgot that…” So it’s the attention to detail in underwriting.
We don’t service our own loans. This is just like a conventional loan when you go and you buy a house for your wife and your kids, you prepay one year in taxes and you prepay one year of insurance, and every month you’re [unintelligible [00:27:52].07] you’re paying principal interest taxes and insurance, [unintelligible [00:27:57].06] handles all of our loans, and they board all of our loans there… But for me to get in to board the loans, my underwriting, Joe, has to match theirs identically if they were the loan originator. So yeah, the hardest part of every deal is just all the details that go in all the mortgage software.
Joe Fairless: Best ever way you like to give back?
Ron Blum: I think that we’re providing good service, and a lot of people who find me tell me – and this happened a number of times, where I’ll be talking to somebody in Canada or I’ll be talking to somebody in Australia and they’ll say “Well, I just don’t like your rate terms. 7% is a lot.” And I say, “Well, you’re welcome to shop around”, but typically my phone ends up ringing again.
The other people that like our service is people that are very well off investors and have a good amount of real estate, and they own ten homes, or they own ten duplexes, whatever the case may be, and nobody’s willing to extend any additional credit to them if they’ve hit that magic cap of ten. So we just try to identify the challenges and push through them. If I’m your real estate guy and you’re looking to me to manage property, to loan on the property, to provide a good appraisal, to be able to give you plenty of due diligence, to know if you’re making an informed decision or not, then you’d better have a lot of confidence in that guy.
With the amount of repeat and referral business that we’ve got – it tells me that we’ve gotta be doing something right over all these years.
Joe Fairless: How can the Best Ever listeners get in touch with you?
Ron Blum: A couple different ways. The easiest way is to go to our website, which is AtlasCamGroup.com, or just go ahead and google us at “atlas capital and asset management” and you’ll find us.
Joe Fairless: Ron, thank you for being on the show and talking about your business, the 360 approach that you take, certainly lessons for any investor/entrepreneur. One of them is there is benefit in controlling the entire customer experience, from start to finish. A lot of businesses in real estate are one particular aspect of the process, and not as many are 360, like yours is, and you’ve found success doing it this way. That’s the large takeaway I got from our conversation.
Then also some tactical things that you had mentioned, about not manipulating numbers when you’re running them to make them look better, so that you can go buy it, but in reality you’re gonna get burned in the end anyway, so you might as well not do that… As well as some tactical ways that you all are finding deals.
Thanks for being on the show. I hope you have a best ever day, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Ron Blum: You too. Thanks, Joe. Have a good day. Bye-bye.