Epic Real Estate Investing - Real Estate Business Insights You Won't Hear Anywhere Else - Rob Swanson | 949

Episode Date: March 6, 2020

“Sometimes the path to more leads is not actually getting more leads.” Rob Swanson This Friday, Matt is joined with Rob Swanson, a real estate investor with more than 20 years of experience and owner of Freedom Soft, a CRM software that makes lead generation simple. Stay tuned as Rob shares his insights on lead generation and market shifts you won’t hear anywhere else! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Terrio Media. Success in real estate has nothing to do with shiny objects. It has everything to do with mastering the basics. The three pillars of real estate investing. Attract, convert, exit. Matt Terrio has been helping real estate investors do just that for more than a decade now. If you want to make money in real estate, keep listening. If you want it faster, visit R-E-I-A's.com.

Here's Matt. Okay, welcome back to the epic real estate investing show. Really grateful for you being here if this is your first time. I'm really glad that you found us. And just thanks to everybody for the last 10 plus years now. We've been here day to day and you are sharing this with your friends and your family and we just wouldn't be here if it weren't for you. So I am grateful for you.

And part of that gratitude I like to express in introducing you to my network and cool people that can provide you wisdom and knowledge and just overall make you a better investor. That's the whole goal here. So please help me welcome my guest today. He's a 20 plus year real estate investor, entrepreneur. He's an expert in lead generation and buying strategies and investing virtually. He's got so much knowledge. I don't know if we're going to be able to capture this all in one episode.

We might have to have him back, but I'm going to do my very best to squeeze everything out of him. He's also the owner of Freedom Soft. It's a real estate investor's CRM software that makes lead generation, lead management, lead automation, and follow up and lead conversion simple. There's so many different CRMs coming up these days. It seems like every investor had their own system and they decided to go ahead and turn it into a software, which is kind of the new sexy business, is the new form of cash flows, the software as a service thing. So it's kind of natural that real estate investors would be attracted to that. But our guest today owns Freedom Soft and it's one of the originals. and it's been around and it stood the test of time because it's good stuff.

So without further ado, please help me welcome to the show, Mr. Rob Swanson. Rob, welcome to the epic real estate investing show. Hey, Matt, I am glad to be here. Looking forward to our conversation. Thanks for inviting me. This is going to be a ton of fun. Yeah, it's like deja vu. Yeah, buddy.

So, you know, I've got so many questions because you've got a wealth of knowledge in so many different areas. Can you just share a little bit about your background and what you've got you to be a real estate investor. Yeah. So kind of going back to the beginning, you know, I was a real estate, well, I was a civil engineer by training. So I went to college as a civil engineer when I was 15 years old. I grew up. My dad owned a business. My grandpa owned businesses, both of my grandpa's. So from an entrepreneurial background, but I didn't know what entrepreneurship was growing up. Like that wasn't a conversation that was had. And so at 15 years old, I said, you know what,

I'm going to be a civil engineer. I had an uncle that was a civil engineer. It sounded cool, bridges, roads, that kind of thing. And so I got on this path and I just said all in real estate or civil engineering. And so I got out of college. I got a job as a civil engineer. And lo and behold, all of my clients were builders, developers, real estate guys. And I thought, huh, interesting.

So I started watching and they were making millions and I was billing hours. And I thought, holy crap, I got to get to the other side of the table. because I think what they're doing is better. And so being the sort of atypical engineer, I guess, I was trying to always use my expense account as much as I could, breakfast, lunch, dinners. And I got really focused on the art of asking questions. I wanted to ask good questions because I wanted to learn.

I figured if I could figure out how to provide some value to these guys and hang out with them and ask questions and not a, let me take. information, but in a conversational way, I could get a PhD in what they were doing. And that's what my mission started to be. And I found myself then, because my brother called me one day and said, hey, there's this real estate seminar that came through our town. And they're going to be in Denver. And they're going to be there, you know, Wednesday night, 7 p.m. Marriott downtown. And I'm like, okay, I'll go. Even though I was the conservative engineer that wasn't going to get hoodwink, that wasn't going to get suckered, that wasn't nobody who's going to pull the,

wool over my eyes and I wasn't going to I wasn't going to buy right I was not a buyer I found myself in the seminar and the guy on stage Matt had like he said so many smart things that I could just like that just makes sense like he taught me while I was sitting there and and he did it in such a way that I could see the path of how it could be possible and so I took that and I ended up investing in their course investing in my own education I their course investing in my education. That was an investment. My first real investment in me beyond maybe college and just that kind of stuff. And I just started to take massive action. And I dove into the material and I didn't have it all figured out. I mean, I really said,

okay, I don't know how this works, but I see that it can work. I'm hearing that it can work. I've got the basics. I wonder if I could take my art of asking questions over here that I was asking my clients, builders, developers, real estate guys. And I wonder if I could start asking title reps and real estate agents and, you know, all of these other people get the art of asking questions and ask my way to a closing. And that's exactly what happened. My first deal, I'll tell you this. I don't think I've ever told you this. I was, I had gone to the seminar, I bought this education, got this information. And literally they were like talking like the old no money down kind of strategies. And I'm like, well, that's pretty sweet.

I have no idea how to find that. So I'm in my company truck, right? I was working for this engineering company, company truck driving down 6th Avenue in Denver. And I see the sign up on the side and the sign says for sale by owner. And I'm like, that's what I'm looking for. Right. And so, bam, I'm off the freeway. I get to the intersection.

I go back. I follow the signs. I walk up. I knock on the door. And this little old lady, about 75 years old, answers the. the door and I said, hey, ma'am, I see your, your house is for sale and she starts talking. I have no idea what I'm supposed to say. And there's a cool part to this story.

She ended up owner financing the property for me, no money down, 100% financing. She paid all the closing costs. And she sent, man, and I ended up with $500 a month positive net cash flow. and she sent me Christmas cards every Christmas saying, thank you for buying my house. It was awesome. And what ended up happening with this whole deal was I had no clue what I was doing. And this is the point.

Like I'd never bought owner financing before. I didn't know what I was doing. I put all this paperwork together with this little software stuff that I got, you know, by investing in my education. And I take it down to the title company to close it, Chicago title here in Denver, and they look at it and they're like, you know that Colorado is a deed of trust state, not a mortgage state, right? Like I literally created all these legal paperwork as a mortgage and we're a deed of trust. I had no idea 20 some years ago. And guess what?

It didn't matter because I looked at them and I said, oh, yeah, well, you guys can fix that right now, right? And they're like, yeah, we'll take care of it. Like, so there we are. Like that was my first no money down owner finance deal. And from there, I was hooked. So what was the big lesson there that served you moving forward? Man, if I would have tried to figure everything out before just making the offer and just going forward and just learning by asking questions, I would have never done the deal. Because I had no idea until the moment I was getting paid how this whole thing was supposed

to go down. but people around me helped me get it across the finish line and I made money. And what I ended up doing is I sold it or I leased it with an option to buy. And I ended up with $7,500 down from the tenant for their option deposit. And I had a $500 a month cash flow spread. And I owned that property for the next eight or nine years. That's sweet. It was great.

We've really got similar past, similar stories. I'm not going to draw out all the similarities. The people that have been listening, they've heard, they're probably hearing similarities already. But I can see why, like, I was like, let's have this guy on the show. I mean, I know you started making a brand new presence on social media. I'm seeing you everywhere. If you go to real Rob Swanson on Instagram, you can follow on see what he's all about. And, you know, he talks about cash flow and investing in yourself and entrepreneurship.

And he had a video the other day. we should go check it out on going for the clothes, right? Yeah. Really just going for the clothes, which I really appreciated. And I don't know what this show is going to be like today, because we're just probably going to agree with each other the whole time. But let's talk about some of your expertise, especially. I love the conversation of lead generation.

And this is where one of your expertise lies. Yep. And I don't know, I'll kind of just put it a context around it. You know, maybe a few years ago, hands down, number one, lean generation source would have. have been direct mail. Yep. And it still might be, from your experience, I don't know, but I've certainly gotten more

creative with my lead generation since. So I'm doing some different things. What do you seem that's working best in the market right now? Yeah. Well, I have a unique perspective, right? Because we have, you know, through Freedom Soft, which has been around for 10 years. And I acquired the company about five years ago. And we dismantled it, ripped it to the bones, and rebuilt it into what,

I really thought a real estate investing CRM software system should be. So my unique perspective is I get to see what a lot of people are doing. And I can tell you today, a lot of people are using text message marketing. They're using cold calling. What you said, direct mail, has almost been virtually abandoned for the most part by the masses, at least. Right. Because there's the perception that there are easier other ways. And I can see this because inside of our platform, I can see texting orders go through.

I can see the usage of the phone system and I can see the direct mail orders go through and I can see the use of the direct mail system. And they've gone like this. Direct mail is down and the phone systems are up. And so when, you know, my go-to, Matt has always been direct mail. It has been good for me for a very long time. And what I always try to do is I try to zig when everybody else zag. So we're very heavy on cold calling in my real estate investing operation. I mean, we build our lists.

We segment those lists. We scrub those lists down. We skip trace. We do that all inside of Freedom Soft. And then we build outbound calling campaigns for our guys and they go call. Well, we also drive in a lot of leads, and I still like direct mail. I get a very good, attractive return with my direct mail, I think for a couple reasons. Number one, we know how to match the message to the market or the message to the list that you're sending to.

We're pretty good at that. We also know how to build lists that most real estate investors are kind of ignoring. And one of the things, I'll kind of share this little tip. you've got a lot of folks. This might help some people. One of the things that I do is, you know, if you're building, say, a list of, say, absentee owners and everybody goes in and they build their list of absentee owners and they show, they say, show me everything with, you know, 100% equity, then show me everything with 70% equity and then 50% equity. And like, they just keep going down and they build, they build this list down to maybe a thousand records because, you know, I can afford to do a thousand pieces of direct mail today or this month, right? And so everybody builds their list in the same way. And so what we try to do is say, we'll go in and we'll build it how everybody does it.

And we'll build it up to that. And usually they start 50% equity, then they'll go 70, then they'll go 80, 90. And they'll get up to, say, 95% equity. And that gets them a small enough list of 1,000 records. And we'll say, you know what? That's what everybody's doing. Everybody's buying this same thousand person list. So we'll go build a list between 75%.

and 85% equity or 70 and 80% equity and we'll eliminate and we'll skip the list that everybody else is buying by just picking a little segment of the equity rather than up to the end of the anchor. And that has proven good for us. I've done that test and I've looked at the overlap. And usually when I build a list as compared to what I think most investors are doing, I'll maybe get about a 15% overlap. So that means if I build a list of 1,000, I'm going to have about 150 that overlap with everybody else,

but I'm going to have probably 850 records that most people, not everybody, but most people are not going after. So that's just a unique little thing that we've done, and it's worked really well for us. Right. No, that's good. I like what you just said. You like to zig when everyone else is zagging.

Yep. And, you know, when I hear people start to say that direct mail isn't working for them like it used to, I was like, oh, good. Thank you. I know you're not going to be around using it much longer. And I'm going to continue to do it. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, one thing that we've really gotten into the list stacking over here. So we've been looking for the high levels of motivation and pulling lists from, I mean, everywhere, right?

Yep. everywhere. Yep. You know, they had a paint contractor come out. I was like, okay, if they go on the list, they got their own little section, right? And, but we really even focused on what the actual direct mail pieces look like, right? If you, I mean, I own rentals, you own rentals. You probably get a stack of mail all the time because you're an housing owner.

And so I get to see what everyone's sending. I was like, okay, well, I got four of these cars this month, so we're not going to send that one, right? Right. But, yeah, so good. So direct mail. and you're seeing the texting working, the cold calling. Anything else?

Any nuances there? Yeah, here's what I always tell people. So I always tell people, sometimes the path to more leads is not actually getting more leads. And let me explain what I mean by that. I think I know where you're going with it, but I'm not going to do it. Okay. All right. Let's see if we're thinking the same.

So I break this whole acquisitions thing into four segments. You said them at the beginning. I think it was in my bio or something. thing. But you've got lead generation, which is all about your list building and what audience you're going to go after and that kind of thing. You've got lead management, which is this thing in the middle, which I think a lot of people screw up. You've got lead automation, which I believe you really have to keep simple. And then you have lead conversion. And so let's talk about these two in the middle first. And then we'll jump to the conversion side. I think you, as you just said,

you guys have talked about lead generation all the time. You and I just covered it a little bit. But I think lead management and lead automation is a very missed and very overlooked thing for real estate investors. And what I mean by that is lead management is all about giving you the ability to look at your leads pipeline in such a way that you know, exactly what's going on. You know what your pipeline looks like. You know the leads that you've generated, the lists you've built, what opportunities you have just sitting on your dashboard right in front of you Monday morning, Tuesday morning, Wednesday morning. And I'm a big believer, Matt, that you organize before you automate. So what that looks like, and this is why I bought Freedom Soft because

I had this vision for how I wanted my lead management to go because I realized that the fortune is in the follow-up, right? You've got to follow up on your leads. You've got to dive back into the leads that are already in your dashboard and do various things to re-engage and re-ignite lists. But then the margin is in your mouth. And so we're going to get to the closing and the script as we talk. but I'm a firm believer in organized before you automate. So here's what Freedom Soft looks like is we designed it. I designed it.

And then I had my developers build it around this concept that we call lead central. And what that means is at the central hub of your business are lead campaigns. And everything sort of links to and connects to those lead campaigns, whether that's your phone system or the permissions of your team, who has access to it or your websites or whatever else you're going to link to this hub, which is the lead campaign, you use lead campaigns to track your marketing messages, lists, and audiences. So we break things into various lead campaigns.

Then we create what's called a visual leads dashboard. And so inside of Freedom Soft, whether you're looking at your global, leads or you're looking at a campaign level, you see a visual leads pipeline in front of you so that you can log into your dashboard at any moment and see what status every single lead in your entire system is at and how many of the total leads are in that status. And so we give a nice visual, it's really simple. We look at this pie chart and we see all of all of the numbers. From there, groups and tagging really again really simple to to take segments of those leads by status and do different marketing to them so here's how we do it let's say i go create a a yellow letter postcard a

handwritten yellow postcard and i send out a thousand postcards and i get let's say i get a four percent response rate i get 40 inbound calls well as i start working those leads, I'm going to update my status. And what we've done is we've created a sales pipeline workflow in our business. So a new inbound lead starts as a new lead. And then we do contact attempt, one, two, three. So three strikes you're out. If we'd never contact you, you go into what's called cold follow-up. If we do make contact, but we can't quite get to a close or a deal today, you go into warm follow-up. We know there's somebody on the other side of the line, but you weren't quite ready today. So it's new inbound lead, contact attempt, one, two, three,

cold follow-up, warm follow-up. And what we're trying to do is get to an active lead where an offer has been made, right? In real estate investing, Matt, you know this as well as anybody. If you're not making offers, you're not making money. One of the KPIs that we track is make offers. Our guys have a requirement of how many offers they have to make every single week. And if they aren't making them, they're required to go look at their visual leads dashboard and say, okay, what's in my cold follow up, what's in my warm follow up, what's in my contact attempt one, two, and three, what are my active leads? Where can I go make an offer today? So we make offers. And then we move that visual leads pipeline, you know, a week, two weeks, three weeks. As soon as the

status in Freedom Soft gets updated, it triggers automations. And this is why I'm a huge, like, preacher of organized before you automate. It's funny to me, you said it at the beginning. You know, a million and a half guys have come out with their own CRMs. And not to put anybody down, but, you know, what I see is they've organized chaos or they've automated chaos because they haven't organized something first and then automated it. And so, you know, they talked about, you know, millions of automated action triggers happening inside of our CRM every month. Okay, great. But guess what? Now your teams are so scared to touch any button because they don't know what's going to happen that are those automations really helping you? A stat we track in

FreedomSoft is, which I think is pretty cool, FreedomSoft users close a deal every three hours. that's a pretty cool stat. And that is consistent stat back to 2016. How many users do you have? We've got several thousand. Okay. So we've got a big, it's not like four guys closing deals, right? We've got a big audience of users that are closing deals on a regular basis.

And so those are the kind of things that we track and try to make lead generation and lead automation sync together. And then we get into the lead conversion side, which is all about the script, right? Pros use scripts. I mean, I'm a pro. I've been doing this a long time. You're a pro. And guess what? I don't get into a seller conversation without having the thought process of I'm going to

follow this script because guess what? In 20 years, I figured out what works. And I'm going to do the same thing over and over and over and over again because now I have predictable, measurable results. Right. So consistent approach produces. Yeah. That's it.

That's it. So those are some of my thoughts, man, on, on like, you know, lead generation, lead management, lead automation, and lead conversion. Yep. The fortune is of the follow up, which we've all heard before. Yep. The margin is in your mouth. I'm going to borrow that. You're ready.

You're at your first. I'll give you credit three more times and then it's going to be mine. You got it. But that's brilliant because it's so true. I mean, I draw a diet. I don't have those exact words. but I draw a diagram that illustrates that exactly. And yeah, I spend so much time with my clients getting them ready,

you know, getting them ready as to what to say. Otherwise, if they just go out there, I guess kind of organized before you automate, they go out there and fire off a direct mail campaign and they're scared to death because they don't know what to say on the phone when the phone starts to ring. That's right. That's wasted money. That's right. Right.

Yep. I mean, I'm a little bit along the lines of how you're, were describing your first deal as well, like you travel as far as you can see. And when you get there, you'll see further. You're putting money out there. You've got to be a little bit more cautious, right? And I just hate to see people get burned out and say, all the leads suck, right? Right. They don't. Yeah. Right. Well, that is one of the rules. If you're, if you're going to be on my team here, I will never hear come out of your mouth, the leads suck. Yeah. Because if what I hear comes out of your mouth, the lead suck, you don't have the right mindset. And we measure a

few things, right? We measure KPI's for our team. How many sellers did you talk to this week, whether those were inbound calls or outbound calls? How many calls were made to follow up or new prospecting? How many calls were made? Then what we measure is we measure the length of those calls. And so let's say, for example, our guys have 100 call per week minimum limit. That's the KPI. They've got to make 100 phone calls. Then they have. They have a hundred phone calls. then they have to have five 30 minute conversations. So the number of calls measures the effort. The length of the phone call measures the quality.

And then they have to make offers. And so are they doing the right thing? And so what we break this down into in our KPIs is, number one, are you putting in the effort? Number two, do you have the skill set such that you're having a long enough conversation, you know, and we found that a 30 minute conversation gives you enough time to build rapport, find the pain, solve the problem, and make the offer, minimum of 30 minutes. And so we measure 30 minute conversations. And if the guys, if our guys are coming up short of that consistently,

then we go back and we look at, okay, where are they getting off script? What's derailing and shortening the conversation? And so, you know, what we try, we just try to measure things in a way that creates consistency, if that makes sense. Sweet. All right. So I've got a bunch of notes here as to where to go next. You got it. Cool.

Yeah. The conversion part, the script, what else would be the most serving? Let's talk about this. Because I know you help and you coach people. And so do I. And one of the bigger concerns of every single person. that comes through is that their market is saturated and there's too much competition. Yeah.

And you've got this experience in investing virtually. So you know how to do that, but then you also invest in your own area. What do you say to that? To somebody says that the market is saturated, there's too much competition. I need to look elsewhere. Change your mindset because it's not true. You've told yourself and convinced yourself of a lie. It's not true.

I've been doing it for 20 years. and the things that I've been doing for 20 years still work today because I'm consistent. And I put in the effort. We've mastered the skills. We've gotten to the point where we know what works and we just keep doing it. And so when people have that limiting belief mindset, I say fix it. You got to just purge it out of your head and take the actions because guess what? The six other guys that could be your competitors, they have the same fears.

and they're spending more time thinking about their fears and not doing something. So if you can just set your fears aside and do the action, do the work, you'll reap the rewards. I have told people that a thousand and a half times. Yep. If you do the right activities and you do them consistently and you're doing it with persistence, there's no way you're not going to get the results. Correct. No way.

Correct. And anyone can do what I just said, but most people will not. and there is your opportunity. Yep. That's just how I see it. There is, Matt, you'll find this funny. There is only one thing. So back in 2007, as the market was crashing, I put together the Colorado Property

Investors Association. I ran it for five years. It was great. I served the local investor community. I created a name for myself through that process. And I got to know basically everybody in town. And so I created the, Colorado Property Investors Association, and I had this approach that I was just transparent.

Like, I would teach people what I was doing, and I didn't hold it back. And there's one thing that I taught back in 07, 08, 09 that I looked back and I thought, oh, man, do I regret ever teaching that? And it was this. I used to buy one bedroom, one bath houses that were around 900 to, 1,100 feet, but they were marked as one-bedroom one-bath houses because I knew that I had the footprint to go into that one-bedroom-and-one-bath house and turn it into a three-bed and one-bath house for about $3,500. Just a few, you know, demo a few walls, put a few new walls up. So I was looking for a footprint, yep, a big enough footprint with small one-bedroom, one-bath. So I was buying

one-bedroom one-bath pricing and selling three-bedroom one-bath pricing for about three, $3,500 bucks, and that difference was about a $50,000 spread. I taught that. And guess what? It still works to this day. You could go into your market, if you're listening to this, go look for the one-bedroom, one-bath houses that are 1,000 square feet or greater, and you've just found yourself a little gold mine.

And so I taught that, and I used to just clean up on these deals. And all of a sudden, I started having competition. My students are actually outbidding me on some of these houses. And I'm like, oh, that kind of sucks. But okay, good for them. It's good. But yeah, it was fun to teach people because I taught that strategy. And out of the hundreds of people that I taught that to,

maybe only a handful, half a dozen to 10 guys ever went and did anything with it. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Totally. I mean, that's kind of Gary V's whole mantra. I give away my best stuff for free because I know you ain't going to use it anyway. Right.

But it makes me look cool because I'm giving it away, but you ain't going to use it. Right. So I just thought that was so interesting. Yep. You mentioned something about the market crash and everything. Let's kind of wrap this up. I certainly want to let's do this again because I got five,

six other things that could fill up two more episodes. But, you know, we've been in this good market for a good long run, potentially one of the longest runs ever when it comes to market cycles. Yeah. What trends or what are you seeing happening in the market and how is it changing the way you operate? Well, so we could dive deep on this. We could do a we could do a 30 minute, 45 minute show just on that topic. Back in 2007 when I, because I was tracking about 8,000 cities, 43,000 zip codes across the country. I built a little software thing back in the day that was going out, pulling all this data. And I could see the supply. demand numbers getting weird. And so I exited my portfolio. And then as then,

you know, here's the date. It was Monday, August 13th, 2007 was the day that Wall Street effectively stopped buying the debt. Okay. And so a buddy of mine owned a mortgage company and they originated loans and they sold all their mortgage loans off to Wall Street and in pre-packaged deals. And he calls me up and he said, man, my business is gone. And I said, what do you mean? Wall Street stopped buying the debt. So at that moment, next comes Bear Stearns collapse, AIG collapse, you know, all of this. And the whole, the media is all over this fear. And so I realized, okay, there's an opportunity here. And so I put my first $10 million fund together. I had done a lot of private money up to that point. But I got a big capital partner out of Stanford

Connecticut, they were about $175 million fund at the time. They're about a billion dollar fund today. And they carved off and they gave me about $10 million. And so I went all in with the $10 million bucks and we bought fixed and we sold. We bought fixed and we sold and we worked our tails off and we made a ton of money in the crash and it was fantastic. But it's also Matt, what I call my $30 million mistake. Like all the old school hard money guys in town that literally the crusty chain spoke and note guys were telling me, hey, you know, kid, you're young, you got access to the capital. Here's what you do. Buy everything you can get your hands on, board them up, disconnect utilities and just wait. Rent them as you can fix them up, but don't worry about it.

Just sit on it. We did it in 73, 74. We did it in 9091. It's the same thing in 2007 and 8. And I said, yeah, but Bernie, it feels different. It looks different. And he's like, what do you know, kid? And I didn't listen to him.

And so we worked hard for our money. We bought them. We fixed them. We sold them. We bought them. We fixed and we sold them. If I would have just taken every dime of that $10 million and just bought everything and just sat and waited, I would have turned that 10 into 40 and we had made 30 million bucks. So almost no work.

Now, so that's like I went all in in the last crash and I made a $30 million mistake. So that resulted in me saying, what did these guys know that I didn't know? Like, how did I miss it? And so I went back and I studied the crash of 73, 74. I studied the crash of 9091. And I studied the crash of 2007 and 8. And I found three storms that converged each crash of the last three housing market crashes. So here's what they are. Number one, there was a presidential transition. Matt, at the time that we're recording this, we're, what are we staring down the face of, right? So there was a presidential transition. Maybe a second term. Yeah. And that's my point, right? So people keep asking me, when is it going to crash again?

Well, there's three things here that converge the last three times it crashed. So let me tell you, and then I'll give you the answer to kind of what we were just alluding to. Number one, presidential transition. Number two, financial policy change. Because presidential transition, and they come in and they change the financial policies to make the, the other side look bad and fix all the evils of the last four or eight years, right? Followed by stock market turmoil. Okay.

And so you've got presidential transition. You've got financial policy change. And you've got stock market turmoil happened, converged in all three of the last housing market crashes. So people ask me, hey, Rob, when is it going to crash? You said, you know, you wrote this book. You've studied this stuff. What is it going to crash?

And I say, well, it depends on what happens in the next election. because if the income of president gets another four-year term, we don't have a presidential transition. So I don't believe we're going to see financial policy change, and I don't believe that's going to trigger stock market turmoil. And so if we do see a change of the guard at the presidential level in the next, whatever it is, six months or so, then I think that whole crash cycle moves up. So I think we're probably two years, a year and a half, half to two years if there's a change, I think we're four to six years if there is no change. And so that four to six puts us out to 2025-ish, right, as an average.

And if you look at the last, all the cycles, and you can kind of see this because of eight-year terms, eight-year, four-year terms of the presidential transition, the cycle is about 17 to 18 years between crash and a 17-year cycle would or an 18-year cycle ish will put us 20-25. And so if it's consistent, that would put us at 2025. So I'm not the guy that's that that is trying to predict the exact moment in time, but I definitely have studied and looked back to say, okay, what were the triggers that caused the crash? What were the things that converged consistently in all three of the last housing market crashes?

And then going forward, what is my strategy today before the crash? What's my strategy during the crash? And what's my strategy after the next crash so that I can maximize that opportunity? So that's where I'm at today. So is it just business as usual right now until you see the change? Yeah. So business as usual, yes. but I really buy conservatively on cash flow.

And I do that. And I look at markets, I look at there are boom and bust markets that historically over the last 30, 40, 50 years skyrocket up and crash, skyrocket up and crash, right? So you've got boom and bust markets and you have what I call price stable markets.

Those are markets where prices go up and down just on this rolling wave. They don't boom and bust. They're just price stable. And so what I discovered in my research looking at, back is if I just break markets simply in that way and look at historical, today I buy conservatively on cash flow in price stable markets because one thing happened in all three of the last housing market crashes in well-positioned single-family homes and or really single-family homes for the most part and well-positioned multifamily rents went up. I can talk about mathematical

mathematical model of why in supply and demand created that. But that's why today, I believe that we're not at the peak. I'm not sure when it's going to peak over and crash, but I do believe that we're on the upper 75 percentile of where the market can go, just from a peer affordability standpoint. We can't go much higher. And so I'm in what I call a price stable market today, buying conservatively on cash flow, knowing that when the market crashes, rents historically, the last three times have gone up. And so that's where I'm at. I like it. What's a conservative cash flow purchase to you? Emphasis on the conservative part. Yep. So I'm really big. Like when I kind of teach people to invest in real estate, build their cash flow, I tell people to go build your buy box. Like, understand.

what makes a good deal a good deal for you. And so I'll tell you what mine is. I like to buy in price stable markets. I like to buy in C class neighborhoods. I like to buy brick or stick houses. I like to buy between 900 and 1150 square feet. I like to buy three-bedroom one bath. I like to buy in such a way that I can bring private money in and cover all my costs and expenses, refinancing, them out and get all of my capital back. So I've got to buy cheap enough that I can refinance out at a 70% loan and pay off the private lender and probably stick a typically my buy box says stick five to six thousand bucks cash in my pocket. And I'm looking for $250 to $300 a month net positive cash flow. So that's that's my buy box. And so when I go looking for a deal,

it either fits that criteria or it doesn't fit that criteria. I know exactly what I want. That's very good. Yeah, we call those our minimum deal standards over here. Perfect. Perfect. Investors are shoppers of deals.

That's right. There's just too many people that go out and buy stuff. And they don't know what they're buying. It looks like a good deal. So let's buy it. No, You got to know what you're looking for, right? Totally, man.

Totally. I can't believe it's taking us this long to connect like this. This is crazy. But let's do it again, all right? Love to. Pleasure. So for people that want to get in touch with you, what would be the best way for them to do that? Yeah.

People can go out to rob swanson.com. R-O-B-S-W-A-N-S-O-N-R-B-S-W-A-N-R-S-O-N-R-Swanson. And I've actually written a book. Matt, I haven't released it yet, and there's a few reasons why I've been tickling it for about the last 18 months. and I haven't released it, but people can go download a free chapter or two if they go to Rob Swanson.com and just look for the book. And the book is titled Cash in, What to Do Before, During and After the Next Housing Market Crash, and I lay out in depth and detail a lot of the stuff that we started to just precursor on right now. And because there's a whole segment of that plan,

And what do you do in the downward fall of the crash and then post crash? How do you recapitalize your dollars? Right. And what I call build wealth faster. So that's the best way. I see in your in your bio says released early 2020. Yeah. We are early 2020, sir.

When's it coming out? It's coming out. I'm just working with a publisher now to get everything just finalized and edited. But we're there. Fantastic. Well, congrats. You'll come back and we'll talk. and we'll talk about the book once it's available.

Love it. You look at sneak peek at robswanson.com. And then if FreedomSoft sounded interesting to you, go check that as at Freedomsoft.com. Yeah, Freedomsoft.com. And we do a lot of training on stuff, right? So we really educate the investor audience on lead generation, on lead management, on lead automation, and on lead conversion.

And so, yeah, if you want to dive into that topic, with us, we'd love to, love to teach you. Super. All right, bud. It's been a pleasure. And we most definitely will do this again. Sound good? Love it, buddy. You bet. All righty. So that's it for today. God bless to your success. I'm Matt Terrio. Living the dream. Yeah, yeah, we got the cash flow. Yeah, yeah, we got the cash flow. Yeah, yeah, we got the cash flow. You didn't know home for us. We got the cash flow.

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