The I Love CVille Show With Jerry Miller! - The Kyle Miller Show: Paul McArtor Of Avenue Realty Group Joined Kyle Miller

Episode Date: February 1, 2024

Paul McArtor, Realtor at Avenue Realty Group, joined Kyle Miller live on The Kyle Miller Show! The Kyle Miller Show airs live Thursday from 2:15 pm – 3 pm on The I Love CVille Network. Watch and listen to The Kyle Miller Show on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, iTunes, Apple Podcast, YouTube, Spotify, Fountain, Amazon Music, Audible and iLoveCVille.com.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Kyle Miller Show. I'm your host. I'm here. I'm here to share with you insights of people's stories, extraordinary people that are doing great things in the community, with their lives, in their businesses. And that's why I'm here. I'm here to share those stories with you today. I'm excited with the guest that we have today. His name is Paul McCarter.

Thank you for joining us, Paul. Thank you. You're a husband, a father, a veteran, business owner, realtor, and Buccaneers fan. Buccaneers fan, you got to love it. Been a couple good years. You know, thanks for coming on. I'm excited. Like, I'm always intrigued because of your veteran, right, of being a veteran. You're in the Air Force. My father was in the Air Force. I was in the National Guard. So I always look forward to hearing stories like this and hearing about your career and then the transition from your career to where you're at today and the steps that you took. So obviously

you were part of the military. You fought for our country. You put in your time. You supported everybody here. I'd love to hear a little bit about that and then kind of the transition into where you're at today, man. All right. So like you said, I was in the Air Force. That's actually how I got to Charlottesville. Charlottesville was my last duty assignment. When we came here, the plan was to be in Charlottesville for three years and then move on to whatever the next assignment was going to be after that. Had never even heard of Charlottesville before coming. In fact, I thought I was coming to Charlotte.

And then once I found out that it was Charlottesville, we started asking around and everybody raved about this place that we were coming to. Funny story. When we knew I was getting my assignment, I asked my wife, Jen, like, okay, what's the one, where do you want to go? What's your one thing you want? And she said, the only thing I care about is I want to go to a bigger base than we're at now, which we were at a small base in Massachusetts. The Air Force, she gave the Air Force one way to disappoint her. We came where there's no base whatsoever. So we came here to Charlottesville. Uh,

this was in 2013. So they were starting to do a lot of the drawdowns and stuff. So six months after I was here, they offered early retirement. Um, I had, I enjoyed my time in the military, but I was also ready to move on. So I took advantage of that early retirement. So surprisingly, after being here six months, I was on my way out. Had to figure out what on earth I was going to do next, especially since it was about three and a half years earlier than what I was thinking I was going to get out. So it didn't take very long for us to realize we wanted to settle here in Charlottesville.

We loved it instantly when we got here. I had always done real estate as like a hobby. Investment properties, had flipped a couple houses, just some speculation stuff. So I always enjoyed that, And I always enjoyed helping people that were thinking about it, like just friends of mine, helping them either kind of decide if they wanted to buy or get rental properties or that kind of stuff. So it naturally seemed like, okay, I'm going to do something with real estate. And while I was trying to figure out what it was, I said, well, I'll be a realtor until I figure out something else.

Now, you went to the Air Force straight out of high school? So I went into the Air Force about two years after high school. I didn't do college. I got out, tried to do construction for a little while, and realized I needed to do something. And then joined the Air Force. Did all my college while i was in so i i was able to get an associate's bachelor's and master's all while i was in okay um started off enlisted about four years in i i switched and got commissioned so i ended up retiring as a major nice yeah so so i say joining the air force was the best thing i ever did yeah retiring from the Air Force was the best thing I ever did.

Yeah. Retiring from the Air Force was the second best thing that I ever did, you know, from a career wise. No, I totally get it. So when you were doing the drawdown and you were getting ready to come out, I mean, what were some of the thoughts, some of the things that were going through your head at that point so probably for now everybody has a different story for me by the time they offered the early retirement that was the third round of cuts and i had survived the first two right and it was just getting it kind of in a way getting a annoying. Right. The other ones were a little bit earlier in my career, so I would have been just basically cut or just given a small severance. So the early retirement, I had gotten to the point where I was staying in the military basically to retire. Once you cross that magical 10-year point, every year after that, it gets harder and to like walk away from a retirement when you're right five years away four years away so in a way it was a win-win because they offered

what i was waiting for so i was i was i was happy to get out gotcha um but it was still even with that it was still it was still quite a transition. I was in a, if you want to kind of look at the spectrum of the military with, I mean, the people who are knocking down doors and clearing buildings, combat kind of arms all the way to the stretch of the other side that's more, that's as close to civilian life as you can get. I was probably on that closer to civilian life. You know, I, I did program management. So I worked with a lot of like defense contractors, um, you know, new systems development, stuff like that. Gotcha. So you would think that would be an easy transition and maybe in some ways it was easier, but even then it was still kind of a lot of small things that you don't think about. Like another one that my wife gave me a hard time about, I had been out of the military for probably like two years. And I mentioned something medical.

I forget what it was. And she's like, well, when you go to your next annual appointment, your doctor's appointment, you should talk about that. And I was like, huh, when you go to your next annual appointment, your doctor's appointment, you should talk about that. And I was like, huh. How does that happen? Right. And she's like, what do you mean? I was like, nobody's ever called me to set up an annual appointment. And she said, that's not how it works.

Right. Like, you know, like the same thing happened with flu. I went the first three years. I didn't get a flu shot. Right. Because I was used to getting like an email that basically says, come down to the didn't get a flu shot. Right. Because I was used to getting an email that basically says, come down to the lobby and get your flu shot. Yeah.

And they line you all up and boom, boom, boom, they give you all a flu shot. Right. So there was a lot of kind of really small things like that that you don't think about. Yeah. Until you get out and you're in the quote unquote real world. Right. And you realize these are things that people have – They have to do themselves.

These are things that people learned when they were like 20 years old. Yeah. I look at it, right, and you look at – and the military, it's just a huge corporate structure. That's pretty much it, right? Yeah. But their product is – Killing people. Yeah. But their, their, their, their product is killing people. Yeah. So killing people and breaking things. That's what a lot of people say. And so you look at that, but then you're, you're married to it. Right. And you have your contract

with them and you're within the rules. You're not within the normal rules. You're within, you know, military code. Um, and then you have, and they basically tell you, Hey, go eat, go do this. This is the, go eat, go do this. Here's your schedule. Boom, it's all laid out. And for somebody who's used to that, I'm sure getting out of that, and you're a major, so probably a little bit easier transition. There's a lot of different things.

But if somebody who's more on the unlisted side, maybe that's only been there six, seven years, and then getting out of that and not having that retirement, I'm sure that could be really scary for them. Well, the retirement definitely, I mean, the retirement, the healthcare that comes with all that was obviously made the transition way easier. Right. The, I think I mentioned earlier before the show started, you know, I've, I talked to some other like veteran owned businesses and stuff like that. And a lot of those guys are, you know,

just a few years in than they've gotten out. Well, well, Jerry, one of the guys that's on the shows here a lot, David Tritchie, that's with, you know, that owns Skuma. Like he's, he's a veteran. Yeah. And I may have it wrong wrong i think he served four years six years something like that i might have that wrong a little bit um so yeah so you do see this whole kind of range from people who have been like career that aren't going anywhere close to home then you've got people who um you know serve two three four, then they head right back home where they're from. Right, right. So it's an interesting – there's a spread.

Yeah. So you get out of the military. You start – you're interested in the real estate. You're helping people with that. And then you start – you become a realtor? Is that the next step that you did? Yeah, so before I even got fully out, I did – I went through – got my real estate license, went through the whole, you know, go through the class. So you're planning for this.

All that. Well, six months in, I put in for the early retirement. From the time that I showed up to Charlottesville to the time I was out of the military was about a year. So I had about six months to where I knew I was going to be getting out and was able to do that transition. So yeah, I went, got my real estate license. I was still actually in the military when I started practicing real estate. I was in that transition, so I could have a few days off every week. So I would basically go in and do my military stuff,

you know, Monday, Tuesday. And by military stuff, it was really just getting ready for retirement. Yeah. Because it takes a while to go through all the stuff that you have to do to retire. And then I would do real estate, you know, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Right. And then I'd start it over again. Back at it. Yeah. And it was funny when we talk about like

the, the obstacles of transitioning that people don't think about. Uh, when I signed on with the first brokerage I was in, I was going through training. The first thing they said is you need to tell everybody, you know, in town that you're doing real estate yeah and i was like fantastic that was four people right yeah that's all i do i mean because especially i worked for the defense intelligence agency which is here in charlottesville everybody knows inject yeah dia is on the same campus well you're working classified programs and stuff like that you don't you don't know everybody in the building because you really only work and talk to the five, six people that are working your particular stuff that you can talk about. Yeah. So even though the building had however many thousands of people in it, I knew six. In fact, when I first started real estate, if you asked me to name everything where

I knew it was in Charlottesville, I knew where my house was. I knew where DIA was. I knew where Lowe's and Chick-fil-A was. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. I had never, I didn't know Crozet. I couldn't have told you where Crozet was. Right. You know, I, I, I kinda knew Green County because there were people that I worked with that turned right out of Injick than left. But it was really funny. It was a struggle because a lot of people, I think, get into real estate because they're familiar with the area. They grew up here. They knew. And then they got to learn real estate.

Right. And I felt like I knew real estate, but I needed to learn Charlottesville. Right. Yeah. So that was an extra little. And so I was a realtor a while ago. Right. And realtor, I know one of my friends is going to get really upset with me.

Oh, yeah. So she's like, realtor. Don't pronounce that I. All right. All right. So, but I have, I got rid of my license a couple years ago. But I've been in real estate since 09 here in Charlottesville. And I've bought, sold, sold houses to people.

That whole thing. I've done it all. And being a real tour was not really my thing. For me, it was, well, one, you're on all the time. And coming in through 2009, 2010 is whenever I was doing it. And I was young. I was 20, 23, 24, something like that. And getting people to work with me at that point. I wasn't, I guess, as skilled as others. I mean, I did still do some transactions. But I would see these deals.

And I would be like, man, you've got to buy this deal. This thing is a great deal. You've got $60,000 worth of equity built in right now. And all you've got to do is paint the walls. Do a little this. Do a little that. And you're good to go. And I just got tired of doing it. And so I said, screw this.

I'm buying my own things. And so that's when I turned into an investor and started buying my own houses. And, you know, it's interesting that you say that because I kind of have almost in a way did the reverse. So I have some investment property stuff, still have some down in Georgia where I lived a few assignments ago. I have people ask me all the time why I don't have investment properties here in Charlottesville. And I tell them I have some investors that I work with that are always asking me to find them things. And I always feel like if it's a good investment, I have realtors who are, or I have investors who are counting on me to bring them deals. It would be really kind of unethical in my own head for me to do the deal. So if I see something that's a good, what I think is a good

investment, I pass it amongst the few investors I work with and then none of them take it. Well, then I wouldn't feel so bad, but then I'm wondering what I'm missing. Right. Cause like, why, why do I think this is a good deal? And like these other four people passed it. Right. But that's one, like I said, I get a lot of people that ask like, you know, Hey, you see all this, why don't you have rental properties here? Why don't you have investments? Why aren't you doing flips? And I feel like I have clients that hire me to find them those. So it's interesting that you did that same, because I can completely see how you do that off ramp. Right. I got tired of the 9 p.m. phone calls. I traded 9 p.m. phone calls from clients to contractors. So it is what it is. But I always felt like I was trying to help somebody

get something. And it just, to me, it just didn't mesh. I liked, the biggest thing for me is also home inspections. I don't know about you, but with home inspections that I see, I see some of the craziest things in home inspections and people asking for ungodly things. Oh yeah. And I know that houses, look, if anybody's ever listened right now, learn this one thing, anything can be fixed with money. Oh yeah. Oh, and especially other people's money. Yeah. There's not a problem out there that cannot be fixed. And when I see people walk away from things or get so uptight and there's like this emotional charge to it, it, it, it, it baffles me. And you know, what's funny about that? Um, I was having this conversation. We have, we have some new agents in our office and I was having

this conversation with them. I have seen more million dollar deals fall apart over $1,500, like a $1,500 repair because there's egos involved. The seller is refusing to do it. The buyer is refusing to buy. And you have this deal that you would think that that would not even register in the equation. Right. And then you see houses that are you know, are a $300,000 house and people, both buyer and seller are doing everything they can to make, to make it work. Yeah. So that's a dynamic that I've always seen that I thought was really interesting, but it is,

you can see both buyers and sellers. And this is one thing I really like about real estate. You can see people totally approach problems from different angles. Yeah. And sometimes you don't even know why they're going the direction they are. Right. And you have to work and try to bring them around because as a realtor, your job is to obviously get your client what they want, but sometimes your job is like protect your buyer or seller from making a bad decision.

Like you're almost protecting them from themselves sometimes. Yeah. Um, to where, you know, they're ready to throw this deal away because, you know, they'll just sell it to the next person. And you have to explain, you know, know that's there's some ramifications you go back on the market now you have a red flag all that or vice versa you're able to you know you got a buyer ready to walk away and it's like you know there's there's not a lot of houses out here we it's probably better for us to make this one work right you know and that's that's the conundrum that I have whenever I'm dealing – because I deal with it a lot. I've sold over 400 houses of me owning the house and dealing with the buyer on that side. And I typically just try to just take care of everything because I don't want to have anything come back to me.

Well, and that's another – I've actually helped the buyers buy one of yours before. It was the first time we interacted. There's such a wide spectrum of flippers. We'll use that word because that's what everybody understands. To where you've got people who flip houses that do a fantastic job. They're completely above board. They do a good job. They fix problems.

And then you have some, and you get to know them. They're completely above board. They do a good job. They fix problems. And then you have some, and you get to know them. You have some that you walk in, and it's a complete disaster. And you can tell that they absolutely knew what they were doing when they patched that hole and covered that right or you know and that's one of the things that um every when i look at a thing and i see that it's an investor selling the house or something like that it's always like okay what are we walking into right is it somebody who's trying to hide and we're trying to find the stuff that they're hiding right or is it one that we can have some confidence that yeah either they fix the problems or if we find something, they're going to fix the problem.

And that's the thing. Some people think that when we do these flips and we flip these houses that, I mean, we've got contractors in there, in and out. And we're trying to manage everything. Did this, did we this, did this get done? We have our processes and checks and stuff, but still things miss. And then here's the other thing. 90% of the time I throw a home inspector in and look at my houses before I throw it on the market so I know what are the items that are coming, and I fix those things

because I know if these little things that we missed, right, and it could be, hey, the electrician, when he put the thing in it, it popped off the back. Yeah. Great. Easy fix. But it's those little things that get in the back of the mind of the buyers that, well, these guys are cutting corners. I tell all my contractors, listen, I don't know electrical. I'm not an electrician. I'm not a plumber. I said, listen, my goal is to make this home safe and functional. Does it have to be DIY all the time? No.

Not DIY, but like Pinterest model? Oh, yeah. It doesn't have to be that way all the time. Does it have to be a million-dollar house? No, because this market doesn't handle the million dollar house. Let's make sure when we put this thing on the market that the buyer is going to have a safe house where they can live. Well, and a friend of mine, they do flips and stuff like that. And their goal, which I really appreciate, their goal is to try to have an affordable house. Yeah. Right? I mean, you do see these people who are, you know,

flipping a property in Belmont, and they're trying to make that, you know, this three-bedroom, one-bath house, and now they want to be able to sell it for, you know, $600,000 because it's just got all the bells and whistles and gold-plated this and that. Right. A lot of people don't understand,

when we talk about affordable housing, we talk about all that, like the, the investors and the flippers who are taking that rundown house and just kind of bringing it up to nice standards, but not crazy over the top. Right. Or, or a very, very important component to like delivering affordable housing onto the market. Yeah. And everybody thinks everybody's getting rich. I don't know a single investor who's ever gotten rich off of one deal. No. Right?

They're just not that. They're making $30,000 on this house. They spent six months on it. Yeah. And it's also the H it's the hgtv yeah thing right people people are like i i get it when people call me and they're like hey i want to buy a house i'm like okay well what are you looking for i want to i want to be able to buy something for about a hundred thousand and then be able to flip it and sell it for like five it doesn't like that doesn't get those calls that

doesn't exist oh yeah i know i will say I haven't gotten very many lately. Right. But it's because they see on HGTV somebody flip a three-bedroom, two-bath, and they make $60,000. And it's like, yeah, but that was in California or Toronto. Right. Like they didn't – you see a rundown three-bedroom, two-bath, and it's $250,000 cause it needs a bunch of work. When you have that fit, it's not a $500,000 house. It's still a three bedroom, two bath kind of thing. I think the biggest profit I made on a, on a single house flip was like $150,000. But here it was in, it's in Charlottesville. Um, it was a-year process. We had to take down a house. We had to deal with asbestos.

And then we had to rebuild a new one. It was two years. We made $150,000. But it was every day. Something's going on. We've got to schedule. We've got to do this. And I had a partner.

Yeah. Well, and one of the things, and you see this with business in general, not just flipping houses. People don't value risk, right? People don't value the homeowner or the flipper, the business person, the entrepreneur. People don't value risk when they do stuff. They think everything's money. They see somebody successfully running a store or a restaurant or some other business. And they don't realize that if that business fails, they lose their house, right?

Because they've mortgaged their house to be able to do this business or like, or, I mean, or they're poor, like they, you know, I, I just talking to a friend today that had kind of gone down a new business enterprise, and it just didn't work. Not because they were bad. It just – most small businesses fail. Right. And they probably lost $60,000 over the course of the last year. And people ignore that because they see the success and they're like oh like they're you know they're not doing

anything but their employees are doing all the work and they're just making money right it's there because they did something well let's talk about this let's talk about hidden costs of things right you're doing a development right now yeah oh yeah. Right? You bought this piece of land, right? Yep, bought this piece of land with the idea that I was going to build some affordable, not affordable by the definition of whatever that you can't possibly do, but affordable like moderate priced apartments is what I wanted to do. 32 of them. Right.

Be able to provide 32 good entry level apartments for people to live in. Right. Be able to provide 32 good entry-level apartments for people to live in. Right. And now it's going to be eight $500,000 townhomes. Eight $500,000 townhomes. Good job with affordable housing. Right. We just – Right, yeah.

We wanted this plan, but – And I've seen that, and just so – I've seen that in – you can talk to a lot of developers. Again, everybody thinks every developer's after the money. There's projects that you can see where people are trying to do the right thing, and they just can't. Well, why? So a bunch of reasons. I'll use my project that's very early in development.

It hasn't even gone to the board of the planning commission, so hopefully I'm not shooting myself in the foot with these conversations. First, you've got zoning and you've got density. So we all have heard on the news about the upzoning and stuff in Charlottesville. Right. I'm going to take a step back, get on my soapbox a little bit. The biggest flaw that people have when they start talking about affordable housing is the biggest flaw in almost every conversation I have. You cannot make an expensive house affordable.

Right. Right. Like it's, it's not possible to do it. So anytime I see a program that's goal is to make an expensive house affordable, I hate it. It's a waste of taxpayer money. So examples of what I mean by that. Down payment assistant programs, I'm not saying that it's not helpful to the person buying. It's an awful way to try to do affordable housing because you make an expensive house affordable for the first buyer, then when they sell it it's an expensive house again right right so it so that money got thrown

in there for basically the benefit of one person right who who cashed out which that's why people buy houses so they can cash out right um so the only way to really make affordable housing is to be able to make smaller, cheaper, more dense housing. It's not rocket science. That's what we need to be able to do. some reason that can't be explained with any common sense, the zoning just stops at my property line and my property is a lower, lower density than the property next. Right. With no actual, like reasonable reason for that. So, you know, that all of a sudden took me down from being able to do 32 to like having to shrink way down right and then other things that get put in that i like to say are rich people problems right so my property is going to be on um in between two rows that are considered entrance corridors

that you know it has to be pretty And according to the architectural review board, they're going to have requirements. Now I haven't met with them, so I'm not going to throw them under the bus yet. Cause I don't know exactly what those requirements are going to be, but there's going to be additional requirements because they want it to look nice because it's the entrance corridor into Charlottesville. Right. Well, everything that's nice costs money. So instead of having a nice basic backyard, I'm going to have to have something that makes it look like the front of the house on both sides. Well, the front of the house is more expensive than the back of the house. That's where you put your stone and your finishes and all that kind of stuff. Another great example.

So I'm looking at building eight units. So everything that I talk about has to be divided among eight. Right. Well, they're insisting that I build a playground. Okay. Well, so a commercial playground, $30,000. Right. Okay, $30,000 divided by eight units.

I'm looking at like somewhere between $7,000 and $8,000 that's going to be spent. Well, the calculations according to the account is I'm going to have two kids live there, right? I mean, affordable, fair housing. Anybody can live there. Right. But their calculation when it comes to school and stuff is the projection is there will be two kids. Well, every one of those houses has to be $7,000 more expensive. Because of that.

For this. thousand dollars more expensive because of that for this and then you look at it and you and if you go up and down my the area where i'm building this there's four or five different neighbors in there all of them have the same little playground yeah good lord just like just build a park right that's going to be better right right instead of us all having the same little playground that has the same three swings one one slide, monkey bars, I have a park that has maybe some basketball courts and some other gathering places that kids can go to. That's something there. But now all of a sudden I'm going to have to have green space that's community space. I'm going to have to have this playground.

Well, that means I have to have an HOA. It would be much easier to just divide this property up. But now I have to have this playground. Well, that means I have to have an HOA, right? It'd be much easier to just divide this property up and just like, but now I have to have this HOA. HOA is going to have to cover, you know, the lawn care. I'm probably not going to be able to have a public, a public street. So it's going to have to pay to plow the street, do all this other stuff. Again, dividing that by eight units. And a road, I don't know if anybody realizes how expensive a road is. A couple years ago, I was looking at it, it was $200 a foot.

Yeah. A linear foot, right? Yeah. And so how long are these driveways? 800 or 1,000 foot? That's not a long road, 1,000 feet. Yeah, and that's the thing is when you have people that are already living in houses dictating what other houses should be, they ignore the fact that people have to pay for this thing. So like an HOA of $100 a month, I'm not a mortgage guy, but your calculation,

that's probably the equivalent of spending an extra $20,000 on a house. Yeah. So that's not free. Yeah. But from like a lot of the, when I talk to a lot of the people in government or have been or just that are speaking out against things,

like when that playground is built it it impacts the price of the house right they don't really it seems that seems to be lost a lot of people well here's what i think paul i don't understand why they don't allow um trailer parks anymore and and and this, I've seen, and I do this, I look at all the counties, because I buy land and I do all this stuff in all these counties. They don't allow trailer parks anymore. That's really where your affordable housing would come from. Now, you can cut it up and put one trailer

on a three-acre parcel, but my grandmother, she lived in Pennsylvania a few years ago she moved down here but she lived in a nice park like the grass was like they had it was like competition if like one neighbor went out and cut the grass like the whole neighborhood cut grass there was like it was a nice paved driveway, concrete driveways into their house, but a paved road that went around. I grew up in Florida, also lived in Alabama before I joined the military. There are some really nice places that are trailers. And I get it. We find there's the rundown trailer parks and that happens.

But you know what, though? As much as you hate those, as much as people will – those are affordable places for some people to live. Right. Growing up, early in my high school years, like my parents got divorced. My dad moved out. I moved out with him, and we moved into a trailer park. Right. Um, in that trailer park, first off, if you've never lived at a trailer park, it's an, it's an, it can be an amazing place.

Like there's a whole variety of, of, we can talk about diversity and lifestyle and stuff, but you had everything from people who had lived there for decades to people who were in some kind of transition in life to people who were just moving out of their parents' house. And it was a very affordable thing. I mean I could use my piece of property. It would be beautiful if I could – using the same density. If I could put eight trailers on there. Now, the neighbors wouldn't be happy.

Because everybody wants to argue about a trailer park. I could put I could probably put them on there for what, $60,000? And there could be affordable housing there. But yeah, I actually had that conversation

with somebody that works at, what is it, Clayton Homes, that's there on 29. Yeah. Because I had a client that was looking for one. And he's like, if you can find me, he's like, I could fill it up. He's like, I could fill up a trailer park

with people owning the trailer and putting, he's like, I could fill it up in three months. Yeah. It's, I could fill it up in three months it's I don't know why but I have an inkling I just think people think there's a stigma to it but you can

rich people trying to decide what affordable housing should be right and affordable housing is not a $500,000 townhome it's not even a $300,000 townhome I remember when I got out of high school I was looking at houses. Like all I could afford at that point was like $175,000 was what I could afford. I can't even buy a house right now for that.

No. Oh, my God, no. And it's the same – again, it's the same thing. Like I – you have people who are trying to do the right thing like i was not trying to build i wasn't trying to build slums right like i wasn't trying to build i was trying to build and other people have done this i was i was trying to build good safe nice yeah moderately priced houses right um and everybody there there's a you know you always hear the term missing middle right like everybody focuses all the county rules and city rules so it doesn't

sound like i'm just blaming the county they're all they're all focused on like affordable housing which is depending on what program you're doing 80 of the median income 40 it depends on what program you're talking about we also need to find houses for people who make like the median income, 40%, it depends on what program you're talking about. We also need to find houses for people who make like the median income. Right. And right now there's all this push about trying to make houses for lower income. Right. And everything, market value is being pushed really expensive. Where is that person who wants to be able to, that can and wants to be able to buy a $250,000 house. It's been a few years ago now. Up in Rutgersville, Ryan Holmes built a neighborhood.

I think they were selling, when they opened up, I think they were selling like six to eight houses a day. They sold out that entire neighborhood in a matter of a few weeks because it was smaller houses, they limited the upgrades they could do. They were affordable houses. People were just fighting over them. You can't tell me Ryan Holmes thought that was a bad business model. Most of these builders, if you could tell them,

you can sell and build and be done with a hundred house neighborhood in a year right they'll be like and i'm gonna my margin's gonna be a little bit smaller but i can do that and i have 300 buyers lined up we're gonna be done yeah right i mean that and that's that's where there's this like stigma to where um i said at the beginning we try to avoid politics, right? In politics, people like to have boogeymen. Right. And when it comes to like when a topic of affordable housing comes up, the boogeymen are the greedy developers and the greedy builders and the greedy landlords and most of the people I talk to that are in that, they're not.

Right. They're not those people. Like if you've ever met Frank Bailoff with Southern Development, nicest freaking guy you could ever meet. Right. Like I don't get any kind of inkling from him. Now, he's a businessman. He's a fantastic businessman. Southern Development is a fantastic company.

I don't ever get the inkling that he's just like at it for the money. Yeah. Right? He wants to build good homes. And he popped in my head because Southern Development just did like a realtor update and was talking about like their neighborhoods coming in. One of the neighborhoods they were talking about, they've been working on that neighborhood for 14 years. Yeah. Yeah.

Like how much money has already been spent? And it's an expensive game. Yeah. The dirt. The development in the dirt is really expensive. People don't understand. Why don't they just move some dirt? No.

It's hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not only that, the engineering. Yeah, it's to get to, it's to of thousands of dollars. Not only that, the engineering. It's to get there. And that's the thing that people don't understand is like when they now sell those lots, either as them being the builder or they sell it to another builder, they have to absorb all that cost

from the last however many years. And it's got to be added in there yeah and like people i don't think see that you you hear so many people talking about like oh we don't want to have housing there because of the views or oh it's going to be too dense it's going to be all that and it's all people who already own houses yeah they're always the ones, the whole not-in-my-backyard kind of nimby people. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I wish I could, I wish people would bring those groups in.

Like I was talking to one of the board of supervisors, like how many times have you ever sat down and like talked to a developer? Right. And it's amazing how many times the answer is no. And they just come up. I feel like they just sit back there and go, oh, what else can we do to make this nice? We want to make our county nicer, nicer, nicer, nicer, nicer. And nice costs money.

Yeah. Like why? I mean, some of this sounds stupid, but it adds up. Like, why does my eight-unit thing, why does it need to have sidewalks on both sides of the street? Yeah. I mean, like, it sounds stupid. Like, well, it's only eight townhomes.

It's not a cross-through road. Right. Like, why does it need a sidewalk? Why does there need to be a tree in front of it like some of these things that people they don't think about but they add they just add that little bit more and you start tacking on these things that add a thousand dollars more to the house two thousand three all of a sudden the house is twenty thousand dollars more well then you got to get into and i know this kind of taken a turn and gone more into development and cost and

everything let's go back to something else well i i mean i i wanted to say then like where do people I know this has kind of taken a turn and gone more into development and cost and everything. Let's go back to something else. Well, I mean, I wanted to say, where do people get these jobs? I'm passionate about this kind of stuff, too, because I'm always asking these questions. Because business creates jobs. Jobs creates us being able to go out and purchase these properties and do that. So in today's economy, like where are most of your buyers at right now? What, what, what professions are they having or that, that you see? So I, I still obviously I built my business a lot on originally on like relocation,

military relocation, university relocation, stuff like that. So a lot of them coming in are obviously connected to the university. They're connected to the military. It's amazing to me how many people are now coming to Charlottesville because they can work virtually. Yeah. And they're working for a company in New York, DC, wherever. Right. And they're settling in Charlottesville because, because all the reasons we like Charlottesville. So we get a lot of, we get a lot of those. We also get a lot of where one spouse is doing that. And then the other spouse is getting a job here locally.

Also, obviously retirees, you know, we get that. Is that mostly from like upstate, like New York, North, North, or where do they, where are they retiring from? Right now I have a few different retiree buyers that I'm working with. A couple of them moved here from North, from Florida or, um, yeah, we're coming down. I don't know if you used this term when you were doing real estate. Have you ever heard the term of a halfback? So what is a really common thing that happens here?

It's people from like New York, the Northeast who move south, usually to Florida. And then they realize it's too hot, it's too flat, it's too far away. So they move halfway back and they settle in Charlottesville. Asheville is another really popular one. So it's amazing how many times I am talking to somebody who's relocating and they're looking at here, Asheville, Raleigh. They're kind of that whole Virginia, North Carolina area to just be a driving distance back to their family in the northeast.

Right. But not have the harsh winters. Yeah. So I work with a variety of people. And I also luckily – a lot of my business is repeat clients. So I have – where I've helped somebody who's a nurse and then i've helped somebody else that's a nurse in the same office you know kind of thing so yeah um but it it's hard back to what you're originally talking about like it's hard to start a business here

well it's hard to start a business anyway well yeah but um why why would you say it's hard to start a business here um a big part of it is cost of labor. Yeah. Right? So for a few years, I owned a retail store. We were talking about that before the show. From the – I'll wait for people to throw barbs at me about – when I bought the store, this was in 2000. Oh, my gosh.

When was it? 2018? Mm-hmm. probably somewhere in that ballpark um i was able like the starting person was making like this is this is a high school kid this is a person who just like this is like career was eight was 8 50 an hour and then the people who were working there that really kind of could do their stuff was like $10.50 an hour. In two years, that went from the person knowing nothing. I was having to pay $10.50, $11.00 just to get them to come for an interview. Right. And I couldn't keep anybody longer without paying you $15 an hour right so

that seems like small dollars but when you're looking at an entire payroll going from like the average of being you know 10 bucks an hour to now the average is being like 13 right your margins are small yeah you know and the other i was having this conversation with somebody the other day. A lot of people also don't understand how much it costs a business to hire somebody. $15 an hour is a popular slogan that people use. You as a employee,

or let me take that. So it's not the employee's fault from a business owner standpoint, if the employee cannot return 45 to $50 of additional revenue, it's not worth having a position. Yeah. Right. Oh, 100%. You take your $15 an hour. You, you multiply that times, you know, you know, one and a half person, you know, one and a half times, usually they take an account, payroll taxes, workman's comp. Yeah. Then you're doing training. And then as no matter the greatest employee in the entire world, even myself, even the greatest employee in the entire world, still even the greatest employee in the entire world still there's a certain pain yeah you know hr if it's big enough you have hr you have all this well then you have to make it worth going through all of that right right and so then you say you

go like oh if it takes 45 to 50 an hour and you start talking about like a fast food restaurant right like how many additional hamburgers does that person have to produce? Without raising the cost. That's where you see everything. This is another example of like that's not a greedy business owner. That's not somebody who's trying to make thousands of dollars off the back of their employee. That's somebody who is just legitimately trying to justify hiring a position.

Right, right. You know, and here's the other thing. I'll play the devil's advocate on that because you're saying, hey, the employee's good. How many of them are out there at $15 an hour that are dedicated to that work? Like when I started, it was like, I think my first job was, uh, I think it was maybe $6, 25 cents an hour, $5 and 25 cents an hour was my first, my first job.

So, and now I think I was, um, I was the, uh, I was, I was at a golf, golf shop, not golf shop, but I was, uh, maintenance. And that's what I, that's what I did for my first job at 15. And, um, but But how many are dedicated? How many show up? I talk to business owners all the time and they're like, I can't find good help. I can't find good help. I can't find good help.

And I don't know if you know this. This is why I started one of my companies. And I was like, all right, all these people can't find good help. I'm going to provide them good help in the virtual side of it, actually. So I have a virtual assistant company that helps individuals. I marry basic mary but um i connect business owners with virtual assistants

and connect them and they have online and which a which a lot of realtors you and other business owners i know use virtual assistants they they add, they're, they're, they're a force multiplier. Right. Um, that, that's actually a really, an interesting thing as you, I think people don't think about in the future as more people are like, Oh, pushing to be able to work from home. You know, everybody's, Oh, everybody should be able to work from home. If you can work from home and you don't ever have to go to the office, that means that somebody else can do that job that isn't living in Charlottesville, which isn't necessarily living in America. So people don't realize that they're making themselves easier to outsource. That could be a whole show on its own. Talking about the dedication, I can remember having an employee one time called me on a Friday night.

Hey, I need to have tomorrow off. Right? I need to have tomorrow off. I'm like, well, okay. So the first step is try to trade with somebody else. Yeah. And they're like, trade, nobody wants to work tomorrow. Tomorrow being Saturday.

Nobody wants to work tomorrow. I'm like, okay, well, what's the problem? Well, I'm in D.C. with some friends of mine. I don't want to come back. So this isn't somebody dealing with a sickness or a – I just don't want to show up. This is like, I don't want to show up. And I said, well,

I need you to be there. Like there's nobody else replacing me. And they're like, okay, I quit. Yeah. So I just quit,

right? This is Friday night. They were working at another place. I saw them. They were working at another place on Monday. Yeah.

And I don't, I don't think people need to have blind loyalty to them. But the market is – the labor market is so hard from a – you as an employer, you have to kind of accept stuff that you probably normally wouldn't. And I'm a believer in like employees need to be treated right. But then people complain about like the service they get at places, and they have employees that aren't there. I'll tell you this is another one that I sometimes get some reactions to, but that's okay. And the truth hurts sometimes.

When I owned my retail store, it was a franchise. Most of the stores throughout the country that I had friends with, their evening shift were high school students. Right? I mean, I had a job after I graduated high school. Right. It was kind of almost like a rite of passage. Because of the way our school system is, high school doesn't get out until later, after everything else. So, like, when I went to high school, not the whole, when I was back in my day, right? But when I went to high school and a lot of other places, high school gets out at like three o'clock.

It means you can be at a job at four. Right. Well, here it's really hard for a high school student to make it to a job by five. Well, my store closed at eight. Yeah. I couldn't use high schoolers as a labor. And a lot of, if you go to a lot of places, you know, restaurants and retail stores and small businesses and stuff,

like most places you go to, high school labor is a big factor in the workforce. And it's not here in Charlottesville. And this is, again, where rich people, and when I say rich, comfortable people. The big kind of discussion is, well, the psychological studies and all that, high schoolers learn better later, going to school later and stuff. the psychological studies and all that. High schoolers learn better later, going to school later and stuff.

And I'm not discounting there are people smarter than me when it comes to that subject. But what people don't understand is there are a lot of families that like, that's important to them. Like either the family legitimately needs that additional income or the kid themselves wants to buy a car. And they're kind of robbed of that opportunity.

That's a thing I think a lot of people don't notice that's a big impact on our labor pool here in Charlottesville. Sometimes, and this is my personal opinion, and this might piss some people off, but sometimes I think all these studies, like studies say this, studies say that. Well, if studies say, I don't know what, I know Albemarle and Charlottesville are not in the top 100 in the, in, they're not even, I don't think they're in the top 200 in, in high schools in the state. I know Western, I think they're in the top 15. But those two, Albemarle and I think Charlottesville, are not in the top 200. Now, all these studies that say kids learn later on, then show it. You know what I mean?

And again, it's a situation to where I don't blame the people for trying to make the right decision to help kids in school. Like this isn't – but you have to sometimes realize that there's circumstances that aren't perfect for everybody else. Like when I know somebody who works at a high school and they talk about a couple of their lower-income kids end up skipping the last period or even two periods of high school because they have to get home because their little brother and sister get off the bus because elementary school gets off at 2.30.

Right. And the parents have to work. So these kids are getting off the bus. So go back to back in my day. High school was the first ones that got to school. I got to school at 7.20. And they were the first ones that get out. Older siblings were home when their little brother and sister got off the bus.

High schoolers were, like, all of this where if you talk to parents, they're fighting to find childcare from elementary school. Like, a lot of high school kids were that branch, either because they were a sibling or they babysat in the neighborhood. And trying to do this like perfection, like being able to do that stuff is great when you're in an income level that you're not reliant on, you know, the kids not reliant on having a job. Like I had to have a job when I was in high school, not to help pay,

not for the help pay my parents electric bill. Right. But like, if I wanted, you know, we were low enough income that like, if, if I wanted a vehicle, I had to go like get a job and buy it. Right. If I wanted to go to the movies on Saturday, I had to use my money to do it. And people who are not in that situation discount all that. Yeah. There's a lot to be said. I homeschool because I like to travel, because I like to have my own schedule, because I like to do what I want to do when I want to do it and how I want to do what I want to do, when I want to do it, and how I want to do it.

When I see, one, I don't want to get too political, but I just don't feel sometimes that, and this isn't against the teachers, but the whole school system, I mean, what are they teaching? We don't teach anything about money. We don't teach anything about taxes.

We don't teach anything about real life stuff. There's a lot of high schools that are starting to push in courses to do that. But we don't. But yeah, it's not like it should be. And what I really dislike about the whole school system too is, you know, we pushed back in my day when I was in school, I graduated in 2003, they started making the transition right then as far as taking out the vocational stuff and then pushing everybody to go to college, go to college, go to college, go to college, get these loans. You can never default on them.

You're going to be in debt for as long as you're alive. Take out $70,000. We'll give it to you. You're 18 years old and you can get $100,000 worth of loans. You're going to be a teacher with a $100,000 loan at $35,000 a year, and you're going to pay that back over the course of time. That's another story. But they started taking the vocational stuff out.

Kids nowadays, I don't even think I'm going to send my kids to college. Now, if they want to be a specialty, then go to college. That's where I'm kind of thinking. You can learn anything that you want out there without going to college. The vocational schools with masonry, carpentry, plumbing, those things, I think, need to be put more in schools and have more influence and not be such look down upon careers? Because there's guys out there, there's girls out there.

A plumber can make $100,000 a year. I'll give an example that it blew me away. One of the properties that I helped somebody buy had a basement rental. And, you know, so I helped them find a renter. The girl that ended up being a renter, she was, she wasn't old enough to drink yet. She was either 19 or 20. She was moving here from Texas by herself. Because she had gotten a job making $50,000 a year as a welder.

I saw the girl's TikTok. I know who you're talking about. She moved here, and I'm like – it blew my mind to be 19, 20 years old, making 50 grand, like no debt, right? No debt. I mean, I've got, so I have two daughters. Love them to death. They're, my oldest is, yeah, they're 12 and 10, right? So I mean, this can change a thousand times between now.

But like my youngest has said, well, what if I don't want to go to college? I'm like, you got to have a plan. Yeah. Like I have no interest in in the Air Force. One of my assignments was teaching ROTC. So I saw a lot of my cadets and other students. There were a lot that went to college because they were just putting off having to decide what they were going to do. So they went to college because it was 13th grade, right? That's what we're supposed to do. Yeah. But then I saw students, a lot of them were my cadets, that had a plan. We're coming. I'm here for four years. I'm getting commissioned. Boom, I'm going, or I'm doing this. And you saw such a difference. Now, when I – you asked way at the beginning of the show, did I go straight into high school.

I couldn't have gone to college at 18 years old. Yeah. So did I go straight into high school? I couldn't have gone to college at 18 years old. I had an opportunity. I had a partial scholarship. But from a mentality standpoint, I just wasn't – I couldn't have done it. Yeah. And I think too many people just put off making a decision. You work a lot with the trades, obviously. I mean, the plumber I use is dying for people.

The HVAC guy that I use all the time, they're dying for people. My electrician, last time I reached out to him, it was going to be like three months before he could get to my house. It's nuts. Because they're just so swamped. Yeah.

But I am happy that at least I feel like there used to be a stigma, right? Like you're not going to college. At least I think that stigma has really changed. Yeah. Because I think everybody now sees, well, I'm in debt and what did it do for me? Yeah. Like, wow, that was a good decision that I made because that's what, that's what they pushed. Everybody needs to go to college. Everybody needs to get a degree. Well, when everybody has a degree and everybody goes to college, it's not really worth much. Well, and that's why like you were, when people are like applying for jobs and people get mad because it's like, why is this entry-level job asking for, you know, asking for a bachelor's degree?

And it's because for a stretch there, it really kind of was a red flag if you didn't go to college because like everybody did. So why, why didn't you? Yep. Yeah. Paul. Thanks for coming on. thanks for coming by already man we're done yeah thanks for coming in i told you we could fill up an hour yeah yeah i appreciate it thanks for coming in chatting with you about this um guys how how's anybody find you to work with you um you can google paul mccarter that That's the easiest way. I'll pop up. I'm with Avenue Realty.

So phone number 434-305-0361. Cool. Call or text kind of thing. But yeah, I'm fairly easy to find. All right. Well, Paul, thank you. Guys, appreciate you sharing this experience with you with Paul. Looking forward to next week. And from there, I hope you have a great week. Thanks for coming. Yeah, thank you.