Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - Would You Buy a Dolphin Resort in Mexico?

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

In this episode the hosts dissect a bankruptcy‑sale opportunity involving dolphin‑habitat real estate in the Riviera Maya, Mexico — and explore whether the outsized risk of “ditch‑risk” is... worth the potential payoff.Business Listing – https://www.keen-summit.com/project/bankruptcy-sale-dolphin-aquariums-real-estate/Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous – the #1 podcast for small business M&A. Every week, we break down businesses for sale and talk about buying, operating, and growing them.💰 Sponsored by:Acquisition Lab – Your fast-track to business ownership. Get hands-on support, world-class resources, and join a top-tier community of acquisition entrepreneurs. Schedule your free consultation at https://www.acquisitionlab.com and mention Acquisitions Anonymous!Tonnesen Accounting Services - Tonnesen provides full quality of earnings reports trusted by buyers, lenders, and brokers on over $500 million in deals each year. Fast, detailed, and affordable. Visit tonnesenaccountingservices.com or connect with Josh Tonnesen on LinkedIn for a free consult.This episode focuses on a unique acquisition opportunity: a debtor’s assets in bankruptcy that include three parcels in the Riviera Maya (near Cancun) — one developed property with a ~71,000 ft² dolphin habitat, and two undeveloped commercial‐zoned lots adjacent to a major luxury outlet mall and the Cancun airport. The listing is marketed via the bankruptcy court (in Delaware) on behalf of the debtor Leisure Investment Holdings LLC.Key Highlights:- Opportunity: Three parcels in Riviera Maya (Mexico) including a dolphin habitat (~71k ft²) & commercial‐zoned land near major outlet mall & airport.- Structure: Bankruptcy court‐administered sale; buyer must navigate liens, foreclosure history, foreign title risk.- Industry risk: “Experience” business with captive dolphins is under regulatory/social pressure; decline in captive marine attractions cited.- Foreign/operational risk: Real estate in Mexico + tourism zone + previous failing business = high risk of security, regulatory, title issues (“ditch‐risk”).- Redevelopment potential: If the marine attraction is jettisoned, land could be repositioned for resort, wedding venue, outlet‐adjacent commercial use—but competition and local developer awareness likely high.Subscribe to weekly our Newsletter and get curated deals in your inboxAdvertise with us by clicking here Do you love Acquanon and want to see our smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. Do you enjoy our content? Rate our show! Follow us on Twitter @acquanon Learnings about small business acquisitions and operations. For inquiries or suggestions, email us at contact@acquanon.com

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous, the internet's number one podcast about buying, selling, and investing in small businesses. Today's deal that we went through had five of us here. And good news and bad news for you guys. I did both of the talking. But anyway, I was pretty excited about it. We did a failed dolphin experience in Cancun. One of the craziest deals I've seen in a while, and it went some pretty cool places.
Starting point is 00:00:22 So check out the episode and see what you think about the deal and hear what we thought about it. Here you go. We'll set Acquisition Anonymous. Hello, another episode of Acquisition Anonymous. We don't have 100% beers anymore. And thumbs downing on just the plus inventory line. Are you ready to take a leap into business ownership but you don't know where to start? Well, look no further than Acquisition Lab, the premier resource for entrepreneurs seeking to buy their dream business.
Starting point is 00:00:49 Founded by Harvard MBA and acquisition expert Walker-Dibble, the lab is your fast-tracked success in the search diligence and acquisition process. With hands-on support, world-class resources, and a community of like-minded entrepreneurs, Acquisition Lab gives you the tools and confidence to navigate every step of the journey. And we're proud to call Walker and Chelsea, the lab's director, long-time friends of the podcast. They're passionate about helping entrepreneurs like you take the next big step. So don't wait to make your business ownership dream or reality. Visit AcquisitionLab.com today to learn more and schedule your free consultation. And when you do, be sure to tell them the Acquisitions Anonymous podcast sent you.
Starting point is 00:01:25 Mills, how are you, buddy? Before we hit record, Michael goes, dolphins or elevators? Elevators will be next week. That's a good deal. Dolphins or elevators. Hello. Bankruptcy sale.
Starting point is 00:01:40 Okay. We just hit record, too. So you're coming. Okay. I'm excited. Well, okay, guys. I, hold up. I got to get my microphone close.
Starting point is 00:01:52 Now, can you hear me better? We, this is the deal. second most likely in the history of the podcast to end you end you up naked in a ditch somewhere in the jungle. So I want to pitch this to you guys. Hey, boy, can't wait. I love ending up in a ditch naked in the jungle. Would you like to? I think it's going to be in the trailer, isn't it?
Starting point is 00:02:15 The number one deal that gets you that way, I think, was also located in Central America, wasn't it? And it was a problem. It was the whole thing. on it was the casino that later we found out was a brothel that was the issue. All right. So this one is from Keene Summit Capital Partners. It showed up in my email today, which shows you guys how classy I am that this deal was said to me. It is a bankruptcy sale. It is a dolphin aquarium and real estate. And it says land in Mexico, three unique parcels. It is a bankruptcy auction in Mexico. The property is in the area of Cancun. Bid deadlines are
Starting point is 00:02:52 November 21st and the auction is November 25th. that's subject to bankruptcy court approval. Keen's Summit Capital Partners has been retained by leisure investment holdings, LLC, the debtor, pursuant to a bankruptcy court order to meet the market the following real estate. So all the stuff, it is in Cancun, so Riviera, Maya, Mexico, and it's land in the River of Mayo. So that's like you fly into Cancun and you go there. So it's 1.8 acres next to the Go Grant Hotel outlet in Riviera and Maya, and it is the largest luxury outlet mall in Latin America.
Starting point is 00:03:27 Recently opened in 2023 and 2024, it is only eight minutes from the Cancun Airport. The land is mixed commercial. It has part of it includes also, I'm sorry, the additional thing next to it is a 3.9 acre property with a 71,000 square foot dolphin habitat. It has frontage on the Agarian Reform Highway, and you can get it there.
Starting point is 00:03:50 And so basically, there are these three lots together, two of which are undeveloped and one of which is developed, and the other one is a dolphin habitat. All right, that's it. And it's called the Marine Land Dolphin Adventure and they actually also have other ones as well. Oh, no, that's a different one. Okay. So anyway, this is the bankruptcy sale thing. They have multiple listings on the same page for some reason. So I started to read the cycle one. Are we getting dolphins? Are we getting dolphins included?
Starting point is 00:04:23 Heather's If there's dolphins included, yes. If the dolphins were euthanized, then, yeah, yeah. Have you guys ever been part of a bankruptcy proceeding or a bankruptcy auction? As a lender, which
Starting point is 00:04:38 is sort of different, yes. Yeah, you were the, you were coming after them. I got involved in one where a competitor company went bankrupt when the owner of it committed suicide. And it was a really bizarre thing where we enlisted an attorney and the guy was like, look, you're never going to win this because basically it looked like the people that own the land underneath the competitor were going to go after all the assets. And he's like, just don't bother. So that's as far as they made it.
Starting point is 00:05:11 Right. I think that's the problem is there's competing liens in. any kind of bankruptcy situation. It's all about the court sorting out who's going to get paid and in what order. And so I guess my concern here is that this is real estate in Mexico and to my knowledge, and I could be wrong about this, I don't think you can get title insurance in Mexico quite the way you can here in the U.S. And so in the U.S., if you did something like this, well, you'd at least be insured in your lien, you know, your title. And these are messy title situation. So that's my first concern is that you're in a messy title situation in a foreign
Starting point is 00:05:48 country. It's interesting. They have a link to the bankruptcy notice, which it's a Mexican property, but the bankruptcy notice is in Delaware. Very interesting. So it was probably a, it was probably a U.S. entity and a U.S. lender, but part of the collateral was just this, you know, Mexican asset is what they listed as. Interesting. I did due diligence, a site visit on a business that we were trying to buy a business from somebody who had bought it out of bankruptcy. And I like that place in the value chain a little bit better. It's kind of like trying to buy real estate at a tax auction, you know, where you're bidding on the lien. And if then the the property holder doesn't pay in the next 12 months,
Starting point is 00:06:43 then you have a quick claim deed and you end up coming up with the property. That is a very difficult thing to do as like the first mover, but I really like the idea of somebody buying this, handling all the legal, handling getting clean and clear title to it, and then buying it from them. Yeah. Have ever talked to you,
Starting point is 00:07:01 speaking of tax lien sales, have ever, have ever talked to you about my adventured tax lien sales that I did in my 20s? Oh, who wants to hear about this? Some people were going out and partying in their 20s. Michael was having adventures in tax lien sales. Okay.
Starting point is 00:07:16 So tax liens, right, if you don't pay your taxes, they put a tax lien on it, and then other people can come along and buy that tax lien. They're in most jurisdictions, like here in Texas, like there are very strong regulations that protect you as a person, if you don't pay your taxes. Like even if I buy your tax lien in Texas, you refuse to pay it after several years. I foreclose on your property. Even after I foreclose, basically the person who didn't pay their taxes has like up to three years to pay their taxes off and get their property back from you. So it basically creates the situation where it's actually really difficult to make money or to like know what you're going to do with the property when you own tax liens. You're hoping to just basically collect the interest on the states or the county's behalf. there are some counties that are much more liberal about the regulations of what happens if you
Starting point is 00:08:10 foreclose on somebody for not paying their taxes after you buy their tax lien. And one of those was in El Paso County, Colorado. And so in the 2000s, I used to, my cousin would go to the auction and I'd give him money on my behalf and he'd go buy tax liens for me and him on properties. And basically the hope was that somebody would not pay their taxes and after a couple years you foreclos on it and then you just get to keep it. And so you were kind of this happy at one point when you did get paid because I don't know, 15 or 20 tax liens making
Starting point is 00:08:41 10% or 12% apiece. But the other point, you were like, oh, I got paid on that one. Like I was going to get a property, you know, a $200,000 vacant lot for two grand, right? If you bought the taxes. So ultimately we stopped doing it just because it's relatively small amounts of money you're deploying.
Starting point is 00:08:57 It's $5, $7,000 here. But yeah, it was good times back in the day. Wild West. Is it still doable, Michael? I think they changed the rules to make it more tougher, but I'd have to go look. This was like 15 years ago, 17 years ago I did this. I know people who still do it in South Carolina. I mean, it gets posted publicly. There's a list of all the, you know, delinquent taxes. You have to do a ton of due diligence. And a lot of it is like sight unseen. You know, you're just trying to ascertain, you know, exactly where the value might be. But the people who do it are really, really good. good at it. But the house that I bought, somebody had basically paid like $3,000 all in and got this piece of property. And I bought it from them for $30,000, but the house was actually worth $60. But it was just this like very complicated process. And bankruptcy to me is very, very similar, where if you
Starting point is 00:09:51 have not done this before, you would be a fish out of water and you're going to get absolutely taking the, you know, to the cleaners. But if you know how to do this, there's a lot of that can be added, just like anything that's difficult. Like if you were doing remediation of contaminated sites for environmental issues, that's really hard to do unless you've done it like 25 times and you know all the oops to jump. Yeah. Well, bankruptcy exists like in the court system is like this whole parallel other court system where there are very few, if any, opportunities for appeal. Like basically the judges are the last great dictatorship in the United States is like these bankruptcy court judges. They just make these arbitrary fairness judgments and all this kind of
Starting point is 00:10:36 stuff. So to your point, like every time I've waited into something like this, Mills, it's the first thing I did was go find somebody who's an experienced lawyer in bankruptcies because this is like the dark arts. You don't know unless you have a guide. I think like when you're doing due diligence on something like this, the question that looms in the back of my mind is what do I bring to the table that makes me think that I can actually run a dolphin resort better than that. than the people who were doing it before and ran it into the ground, you know? Was that a question for Heather? I mean, I think I could.
Starting point is 00:11:09 I'm thinking I could. Heather, what makes you intimately qualified to be a proprietor of a dolphin resort? Oh, I just like them. So it'll work somehow. It'll work itself out. Yeah. It's like if you love what you do, you never work a day on your life. There's just down there playing with the dolphins.
Starting point is 00:11:28 I only had one thing to say to that. But people. I only have one thing to say that response, which is, how do I invest? I saw a term in the bankruptcy document that you had a, I thought was interesting, called Stocking Horse Bitter, and I had to look it up. And it's in bankruptcy cases. A Stocking Horse Bid refers to a deal with a potential buyer that is hidden from the public creditors and the courts.
Starting point is 00:11:53 Usually when a company is preparing to file bankruptcy, it chooses an entity from a pool of interested bidders to make the first bid to buy the company assets, the selected bidder sets the pace for the other bidders. Stocking horse bidder never heard it before. Didn't know that. I think this one's interesting because, so Michael, you were sharing something, and this is just because I'm a Florida kid growing up. So this is the marine land. This is why it was down at the bottom. It's like these are the guys that owned the marine land in St. Augustine. And so my brain instantly goes to all the videos you see of all the like killer whales that have been abandoned for all alone. And actually two just got freed this a week, apparently, maybe from this site.
Starting point is 00:12:37 Because whoever it was, they were in bankruptcy. I didn't actually click for details. But I think what's interesting to me is I've, having grown up in Florida and like my, there's a marine land over where my mom used to live. And then you drive by and there'd never be people there, right? And it's like, to Mills's point is if you're going to buy a business like this, what's the plan? Because obviously, you should not be buying this with the plan of having it be an adventure land with dolphins that you can, you know, have fun with because that didn't work. Very largely, it didn't work in all of these locations that they're now selling as part of the bankruptcy. And I'm just curious what the use would be, right?
Starting point is 00:13:18 They're selling it as real estate basically like buy it and into something. my brain instantly went to like wedding venues, right? It's beachfront property next to, you know, an outlet mall. So then I was like, well, it's not a hotel. It's an outlet mall. So that's a little different vibe. But I just think it's interesting. And then the fact that it's in Mexico brings up a gazillion questions in my head about Mexican law.
Starting point is 00:13:47 And like, well, you know, what are the regulations that you're subject to with owning a dolphin adventure park. Or like if you buy this, I'm curious, like marine land has giant tubs or whatever you want, big pools, right, that the animals live in. Like, are you buying those that where now you're going to have to, if you try
Starting point is 00:14:07 to repurpose the land, the cost of relocating the dolphins, because let's just assume they're still there and then destroying you know, all the infrastructure. I don't know, man. It's so much bigger than just the bankruptcy person. of the land. Yeah, look, like, you could do some pretty weddings there, I'm sure, and, like, offer the
Starting point is 00:14:26 pretty good with the dolphins. Yeah. Come to Mexico and get married with the dolphins. I could see a pitch there. Yeah, Bill, should we go ahead and go to the get found in a ditch part of this deal? Yeah, this is this is cartel country. When Michael sent this out to our group, group chat, I was like, whoa, this is the winner for ditch risk, which we coined on the pod several years ago. when we reviewed the Mexican brothel casino. So, Michael, what is the official definition of ditch risk in a deal? I don't know. This?
Starting point is 00:15:03 What does it mean to say this deal has ditch risk? Oh, it means you're wading into an environment where some bad dudes are going to show up at your front door, and they're going to find your body in a ditch somewhere because you're not paying off the right people or you're in the wrong business entirely. And, you know, some gringoes waiting into a dolphin and land habitat in Cancun, like, feels right up there. Yeah, I mean, there are, so I have a friend who operates a business in the Philippines. And he has a staffing business.
Starting point is 00:15:40 He has functionally a skyscraper in the Philippines. Hundreds of people there, and he'll staff the people there, and you can rent them, basically. So it's a staffing agency in the Philippines. And I was talking to him and he's like, oh, yeah, we have a bribery budget. Like absolutely every single month. Like you got to know who you got to grease or like your power gets turned off. You know, all of this stuff or like everybody that's parking at your building gets a ticket or one day there's a cop in front and says that nobody can come in.
Starting point is 00:16:10 And that is functionally one of the services that he is providing is he's abstracting away all of the local messy. operations so you can just have an employee overseas and pay monthly for them. And they have a place to go, et cetera. But in so many countries, I mean, we really take it for granted here in the United States that we have rule of law and generally uncorrupt politics, or at least our corruption is more above board. We have a specifically a brand of American corruption, wherein we donate to their reelection campaigns.
Starting point is 00:16:43 But we don't have, you know, naked under the table bribery corruption. But many, most other countries do. I mean, especially kind of third world style. So if you are going to have a physical asset or a business entity in these places, you kind of need to learn the rules and follow them. And you hope that the way you learn the rules is not when a guy in a trench coat shows up on your door. Congratulations. You're the new owner of the dolphin habitat.
Starting point is 00:17:11 You owe us 10% of revenue every month. Yeah, they didn't tell you in due diligence. It sucks for you. Which they won't tell you in due diligence. It's not above bore. Hey, Michael here. This episode is brought to you by Toninson Accounting Services, the leading provider of quality of earnings reports for small and mid-sized business deals.
Starting point is 00:17:30 Every year, their team reviews over $500 million in transactions, and the reports are trusted by buyers, bankers, sellers, and brokers nationwide. What sets Toninson accounting services apart is premium quality work at an unmatched price, a full quality of earnings report for just $6,000. You'll get more depth and insight than firms who, charge twice as much, which is why so many dealmakers turn to Toninson accounting services when accuracy and speed matter the most. There's a link to Toninsonaccounting Services.com in the show notes or reach out to Josh Toninson on LinkedIn for a free consultation,
Starting point is 00:18:01 where he'll walk you through the process step by step and answer any questions that you have. Tell them that Acquisitions Anonymous sent you. I mean, if you stack up the hierarchy of difficulty on this, let's just say you were trying to buy a piece of real estate in Mexico. That comes with its own complications. Now you're buying a piece of real estate in Mexico that is in a foreclosure auction, so you're not going to get access to all the info that you need at a time. And it has defunct operating businesses, you know, probably multiple revenue chains. This is three different parcels, some of them operating, some of them are all land.
Starting point is 00:18:40 My mind just goes to, like, what was the pitch deck to the investors like, like five or ten years ago, when this was like, guys, like, it's going to be such a good deal. We're going to do a dolphin lagoon in Mexico. Like, they were promised the world, you know, and the pro forma looked amazing. Like every pro forma always does. And now fast forward here we are, you know, looking at. Even more so that there's a lender. You know, at least investors have upside.
Starting point is 00:19:08 This is in bankruptcy court for a lender to try to liquidate this asset. So the equity investors are wiped out, but a lender's trying to get some of their money back. I can't fathom a lender in the U.S. doing this. This is, I wonder what kind of lender that would be fascinating to know. The bankrupt party here is the local entity, but was it run by somebody that runs the same thing in Miami or in California or in Florida? So you would think it's maybe less crazy to go, hey, we run this dolphin show here in Florida. It does great. There's a ton of tourism in Riviera Maya.
Starting point is 00:19:44 It's the Cancun Air Force right there. we're going to rubber stamp the thing, clone it out. We got this perfect property right by the beach. There's this huge mall right there. We're just going to drop it right there. We'll bring a couple of our dolphins so they can train the other ones, you know, or whatever. And you're good to go. So I can see how, and maybe the debt is, I mean, it's secured by the land.
Starting point is 00:20:05 It's perversely, weirdly easy to get a mortgage and not debt and operating business. So maybe that's what happened here. Yeah. Could be. there's your list of creditors my goodness oh boy okay we got to holy cow what a leisure investments holding triton investments holdings ms leisure company icarus investment holdings several spanish entities or mexican entities essay to cv mainland leisure ink i mean the cap table and the lean structure on this thing seems insane i think we should also talk about the other thing is this is a business
Starting point is 00:20:44 type whose time has come and gone. Like it all, the peak moment when things like SeaWorld or things like this ended was when, you know, Blackfish came out. I don't know if you guys saw that documentary in 2018, 12 years ago. That's what I was going to say. Yeah, it's a shift of the industry for everything. Who wants to take their, I don't want to take my kids to go see a flipper trapped in a backyard pool.
Starting point is 00:21:10 Like, that doesn't sound entertaining. Or would I want to be teaching my kids? fun looks like. This is a very quick cursory review and I'm not sure if this is true, but it looks like a death potentially with a lack of successor is what's causing this to happen. So it sounds like if I read it very quickly correctly, like the primary owner-operator died, then his wife took over, she died and there was no clear successor. So that's what ended them in bankruptcy. Again, that was quick cursory like standing articles. Died or failed to pay the protection racket.
Starting point is 00:21:45 But I think I like, and Michael, you pointed at what was in my head that I was going to bring up a second ago was like that I think it's interesting because these are historic, this is the conversations I literally was just having with the member. These are historically well-performing industries. It's been around for a very, very long time. And I know that as buyers, we take comfort in historical performance. However, there needs to be some recognition, right, especially as you see downtrending performance in industries about like what's causing that. And in this, I do think that it's a cultural shift, right?
Starting point is 00:22:25 Like we have moved away from valuing the experience of watching caged sea animals. And so this industry in general has seen a decline in performance. And so I think it's just a good learning moment to say like just because, something's been around for 100 years or 50 years doesn't mean it's going to be around for another 20. You need to make sure that you're doing a deep dive into how the market's performing and what our values and norms are as a society and make sure that you're applying some critical thinking skills there. That sounded rude. I didn't mean it that way, but you know what I mean. So I googled this after I chat, GPTed it. But the New York Post has been all over this,
Starting point is 00:23:09 basically doing exposés on the conditions that they had the dolphins living in and that there was lots of dolphin death. Five bottlenose dolphins died within eight months right before bankruptcy. Just kind of like, and this was a place, it wasn't just a dolphin habitat thing. You would actually go swim with the dolphins here. But I'm wondering if those deaths are following the lack. So it said that the husband died like years, 2018 maybe, and then the wife died in 2014, and then they declared bankruptcy in 2015. It's like if no one knew what was, and this is the importance of succession planning, right?
Starting point is 00:23:44 If no one knew what to do, then yeah, this is, they're going to die, right? Like, everything's going to go to, you know, a mess, we'll just say.
Starting point is 00:23:52 Right, so you guys like to steal off. That's what I'm hearing. Love it. I love it. I can even imagine a scenario. Like, if somebody paid me a million dollars
Starting point is 00:23:59 and I didn't have to actually have any cash outlay, I don't think I would do that. Yeah. It's a nightmare. It's not something, it doesn't pass the it doesn't pass the cocktail party test
Starting point is 00:24:13 where you're like, oh, what do you do? Oh, I trap dolphins and while they're alive, I let humans swim with them. I'd make them dance. For my own entertainment. Well,
Starting point is 00:24:26 I mean, my, your kids would be so proud. So, but you're not buying this as a dolphin habitat, right? You're buying this to flip it,
Starting point is 00:24:35 you know, fill in the pools, and build, of Riviera and Maya Beach resort. Like it's clearly what's going on. It's obviously like, okay, so then it comes down to real estate and real estate's all about location. And one of those parcels is like in the middle of the, you know, the luxury, you know,
Starting point is 00:24:53 retail outlet or whatever that they say. And you can see it's just a raw piece of land in and amongst a larger development. Why in the world isn't the, the mega developer who developed the luxury retail thing scooping it up? And they might. They might be who you're bidding against. But I just think, you know, I like buying real estate. I only buy real estate in my backyard because that's all I know.
Starting point is 00:25:18 There are people who buy stuff sight unseen and they underwrite things that they've never or will never see or touch. That's just a really difficult thing to do in Mexico at a bankruptcy auction, you know, and for all the reasons we've said. I mean, historically, Cancun was the safest part of Mexico because supposedly all the cartel money was planted into these resorts in Cancun. But recently, like at least in my friend's circle, people used to go to Cancun all the time, aren't going anymore because there's all these anecdotes of people walking down, you know, men walking down the beach and firing machine guns into the resorts. Like, you know, a few episodes like that and people aren't going anymore.
Starting point is 00:26:00 and I think this has clearly become cartel country, and you're either on their side or you're a victim waiting to happen, and that's what's going on. Rule of law, critical to all forms of capitalism, is the foundation on which all capitalism is built. I actually, I had a friend who he,
Starting point is 00:26:19 so this is an interesting aside, I was with him last week, and he has a company called New Story, and they build affordable housing in Mexico. And I said, well, what is your cartel? strategy. And he goes, well, we just don't do business into towns where the cartels are. This whole whole strategy. But we were talking, we kind of put together that, you know, capitalism is the source of kind of all human flourishing, you know, that you can look at kind of
Starting point is 00:26:45 where capitalism gets introduced and just societies, you know, explode in a positive way, life expectancy increase, you know, all infant mortality goes down, et cetera. Like capitalism is like the best thing that has ever happened to humans, period. But the prerequisites for capitalism are first rule of law and second functioning capital markets. So a big part of what he does is use, he does business in places in Mexico that have good rule of law. And he oftentimes is issuing like some of the first mortgages and like cleaning up the title to these properties and making them mortgageable and bringing in the capital to so people can actually get mortgages. And once you have rule of law and you have functioning capital markets, meaning you can originate mortgages, then
Starting point is 00:27:29 then you can build houses, then you can build communities, then you can have local business, and kind of everything starts rolling from there. But I thought it was really interesting to think about sort of the necessary substrates of capitalism, which are rule of law and functioning capital markets. So next time people are bagging on, you know, saying that, oh, we'll just let this thing slide, or, oh, we're going to pursue a non-market-based solution to that problem. Remember, property rights and functioning capital markets are the thing on which all of our capitalism is built.
Starting point is 00:27:59 And if you don't have those, you can't buy your dolphin part in Mexico because you can't be sure that you'll keep it. If this was in Canada, we'd all be like, cool. But it's like, it's the other end of the spectrum. And I interviewed a candidate for an executive role about three months ago. And I'm going through and learning the guy's story. And he was massively overqualified for the role, massively overqualified. And he'd been an executive and a CEO in Mexico. And he was married to an American woman.
Starting point is 00:28:28 And they had just picked up during the pandemic and moved to everything to the United States. And I was like, why did you do that? Like you had this amazing career, this whole network. He went to like the Harvard of Mexico. And he talked about within six weeks, a six week period, his best friend had been murdered by the cartel for not paying them off in Guadalajara. And his father-in-law had been murdered in Puerto Vallota area for not allowing the cartel to ship drugs off of his property.
Starting point is 00:28:59 He had told him, give him a middle finger and said no. And he and his wife just couldn't stay in Mexico anymore. So the guy basically had been running these 60, 80, $120 million companies as CEO, had a great life living in Mexico City. And basically, like, they felt like they needed to run from the entire country and ended up here in Houston. And it was just like, wow, like life comes out to pretty fast sometimes. I think that's like one important note on this is the risk-reward trade-off.
Starting point is 00:29:26 the person who ends up doing this, if it goes well, they probably like 20 or 30x their money. You know, like it's just going to trade for such an attractive price because of all the risk that is priced in that nobody's doing this for like, you know, an 8% cap rate or something crazy. Like they're going to, it's going to be a huge return on invested capital. But because they may do 10 of them and like three work. Yeah. All right. We are at the witching hour. Does anybody have anything else to add for this? I will just speak for all of you. Maybe Chelsea, we could just hear you give this a thumbs down and then that will just count for all of us. Is that kind of what you're thinking? No, I'm all in and I want Heather's face and dolphins as my ads. Yes. I'm just kidding. No, we're in it, Heather. I just want to go, I just want to go take care of the dolphins. I don't want to do well. I don't want to be there. I need to be. I'm not going to sleep at night until I can.
Starting point is 00:30:24 figure out if these dolphins are still there or not. That's what I'm going to even go do. Like, Chelsea couldn't make the next recording. She's actually down there freeing the dolphins. All my calls are canceled. Labs shut down. I'm going to save some dolphins in Mexico. Thanks, guys.
Starting point is 00:30:42 All right, everybody. Thanks for being here. We'll catch you next week. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell a friend about the podcast. That's how we grow. All right, we'll catch you next time.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.