18 Unlocking Real Estate Investment Success and Building Relationships with Matt Westkott

In this episode, Drew brings on Matt Westkott, a realtor and broker with Team Westkott at Concept Z - Home & Property. They delve deep into the dynamic world of real estate investment, exploring the strategies driving success in today's market. The discussion emphasizes the significance of relationships, and trust, and how these factors can unlock opportunities in the real estate landscape. The conversation also takes a closer look at creative financing, loan assumptions, and investment property trends while highlighting the ever-evolving nature of real estate markets. Learn from their valuable insights on staying adaptable, fostering trust, and seizing opportunities in a shifting market.

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Transcript

Hey, guys, welcome aboard. And today we have Matt Westkott with Team Westkott over at Concept Z. And he's a broker.

I'm happy to have you on here. And today we want to talk about some real estate, real estate investments, our local Sheridan market and your experience in doing all that. And also to start off, I'd kind of like to hear a brief production of where you came from, what you did and how you got here.

Oh, man. Well, first, thank you very much for having me on. I'm honored.

I appreciate you know, my wife always tells people, like, oh, my gosh, matt would pay people to just shut up and listen to him talk about real estate. So I appreciate it, and I didn't even have to pay you. This is great.

Thank you. It's awesome. Okay.

Me, real estate, it's a handful, but I'll try to run down the quick. So I was born in Philadelphia, moved out to Colorado, basically grew up in Colorado, been to Sheridan for the last 25 years. Absolutely love it.

Such a blessing to find the bighorns and Sheridan this amazing community, great downtown and have this amazing family here. So I have five kids, two grandkids. Sheridan's home, man.

Absolutely love it. Awesome. So and then me and real estate and all that, I was always kind of a chronic entrepreneur since I was a little kid.

Lemonade stand, mowed lawns, all these different things. Managed a car rental place in Boulder, Colorado, picked up a little rental, first house, 19 going on 20, and just sort of evolved both a little bit as an entrepreneur and kind of by mistake. I had this amazing realtor that solicited me at 19 to kind of learn the real estate market and be a first time home buyer.

Awesome. So was really my first little dabble in real estate. Meanwhile, owned stuff, managed stuff, had a retail store.

When I moved to Sheridan, I was the advertising manager of the Sheridan Press. Did all these other things, but on the side I had this real estate gig, whether it was my home or anything else. Anyway, so then I just eventually needed to make the leap just out of pure passion.

Had some different investments in rentals, but really wanted to learn more about it. So even when I was the advertising manager at the Sheridan Press, I thought, I'm going to do my weeks worth of vacation and just go take the test just because I want to learn more. Oh, yeah.

And then, long story short, ended up making the leap into the career part of it and been doing it for nearly 22 years now. So you're a veteran at this point, I'm the old guy on the block, which is crazy, except for one of my mentors that I had was in the business over 50 years. So when I look at that framework, I'm like, well, yeah, I'm not even halfway there in my career at 20 some years.

If you think about it, there's not really anything that's extremely you're not doing hard physical work as a real estate agent. I know you are in your private life, but you're not doing hard physical work. It's something that requires brain power and figuring and personality and these other things that can continue on through your whole life.

So you don't have to have a dedicated retirement date. Well, and I would throw out the market's always moving and changing, so you always have to be willing to change with it and learn, which is phenomenal for my personality, just as I would jump around from different entrepreneurial ideas. So the market's changing all the time.

Definitely. Every year you have different projects that you're helping people buy and sell. It's like a new business every time.

It's perfect for my add personality, like get to jump in and kick butt and help somebody and then go to the next one. So it's been great. It's a perfect career for me.

Awesome. Well, I know you as a person, and one thing I love about you is you always have a giant smile and you're always energetic and optimistic. I've always been wondering, how does a person do that? So one of these days we'll have to meet up and tell me your secret on that.

I'll try to think of that one, but that's a natural ability that you have as a person. But it's crucial to be personable and interact with people and have this charisma right? And that's what helps people in their business life as well. Yeah, I appreciate that.

Thank you. That was actually just kind of a side thought there. But what I was thinking about was so in real estate, if you were to say this sector of real estate is what I really appreciate doing, I love doing this because of these reasons.

What do you think? So for me, it's always about people people. And it's never been necessarily like, okay, we're going to work commercial or AG and farm or residential first time home buyers. It's 100% been just helping different people, whether it's families or an individual.

So really, I remember selling 11,000 $13,000 mobile home 20 some years ago, and then that person years later moved on to the next thing, whether it was an actual real property. And I've worked with different families that just barely start out buying their first home, and now I'm working with them on investments ten years later and they're growing this amazing portfolio. That's what gets me supercharged.

It's always the people. And to kind of put it back at you, you've always been this person that was always really jacked up, excited to help people get excited about a home, building something special. So that was the piece that always I had respect for you and I think there was a lot of elements that tied us together.

Even if we're just walking by the water cooler. It was all about you as a person. You build great houses, but you brought a piece to that was like, great, that would be a person.

I have no problem referring people to you because I felt like there's somebody that gave a shit, you cared and you would help people. That's the segment of the industry that I've always been jacked up and excited about and people will dive into. Wow, you have great experience with multi housing or understanding cash flow.

It's more about, I'm jacked up, excited to help people. And so if there's a person out there that is really out to just take advantage of other people, absolutely. We want nothing to do with it.

And if there's somebody that wants to have value, they want to improve their personal lives or family or build something, we're all in and we always spend extra time with those people. You brought up a good point. You know what I think is super exciting to me as well, is when you actually make a bond with a person, sometimes you can go through speaking from my personal experience, you can go through these transactions with people.

And you may get to know them or whatever, and you kind of get done with that transaction. And the bond isn't as strong as other people. Sometimes you can build a really strong bond with somebody.

And to me personally, that's the most fun because you love these people. It's like completely you've become their really good friend and trusted advisor, and you feel like they have when you can build that bond with somebody over whether it's working or personal. But we're talking about real estate.

So when you're helping somebody in real estate and you can actually build that bond with people, that's the most valuable thing you can have. Right. I agree completely along, though, just to kind of support that.

Just thinking of just even a couple of transactions we've had just in the last month. And part of the team concept that we have a team of specialists is I am more of the listing agent. So people that want to sell their home, they're getting their house ready for selling.

And I really hone in on that piece of it. We can talk more about it, but it also means that sometimes people are moving the area. So here I've gotten this amazing bond with people, one couple I'm thinking of now, and it's just nothing but hugs every time I see them.

And it's like, oh, they're leaving town, man, these are awesome. But we'll still stay in touch and I know we will, but yeah, just to support what you just said, I agree. You have this bond and connection and that's really meaningful.

That's the most important part of our life. Right. Meaningful relationships.

Yeah. By the way, we sell houses. Yeah, that's perfect.

I think that's awesome. Yeah. One thing that really does is it takes the business edge off of things.

Sure. And I think sometimes people say, oh, it's just business, or it's not personal, it's just business. And I think that's a croc.

I think everything is personal. I do too. And if you want to be a jerk about stuff, then I don't want to do business with you.

I agree completely. Yeah, well, and I think it can trickle into everything, but I think a lot of the people that find a career, particularly in real estate, they get into the people aspect, and they talk a lot about that.
The success rate of being a realtor is pretty low for the first year or two, and it's very tough because it's basically a business.

Right. So if a lot of nine out of ten businesses fail the first year or two, well, you got to be willing to work hard. You got to be willing to do all those things and make those investments for the first couple of years.

And then after that, you might get a better reputation or you start learning things and you move on. But I think the real lifers in a career are people that find those relationships and they find those different pieces of it, and they're like, hell yeah, I'm not going to get rid of this. These are two important relationships.

I'm not going to forget about my kids or forget about my wife. No. And so you have this amazing relationship that is hooked into what you do with your career.

And so, yeah, I mean, 20 some years in real estate, I don't think 20 more is enough, man. Hopefully I can do six. How many more friends can you make in that time? Well, or just more meaningful ones, or keep helping people.

I think of all the different families and people that I have, and they're amazing. It's like, well, yeah, who's going to take care of them if I quit? That sucks. I want somebody that's going to give a shit to take care of these well, and you think about it that way.

If you don't, somebody else is, and then they're going to get subpar service, potentially. Well, or if they find somebody better than me, I need to learn from that somebody. There you go.

Right. Or they can go leave me and go work with them and let me learn from them, because I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. I'm just curious.

I've kind of been tossing this around my head a little bit. You're a listing agent, but you have two others on your team, right? Well, three. So my team really, the whole idea of it is that we treat it sort of our mission, if you will, is that we're helping people with one of the most important things in their lives, right.

Whether it's their home, that home might also be their retirement plan. If it's a business and they're helping with that, or their retirement they're getting into rentals. So we really put it on that pedestal as this is one of the most important things in their life.

And a home is more than just an investment, right? It's where you raise your family. It's where you spend a bunch of your time. It's a really important thing.

So we hold it really high up there. So that's the first part. That's the why behind what we do and then how we do it is we work with a team of specialists.

So the team of specialists that we have really has morphed over the years. And I always love to use some of the early on sort of examples with the teammates where we had two different people, and one was worried about files in the organization, and you can guess who that might be. And then the other person was like, well, did you call this person or call that person? And they had opposite roles at that time.

One was more of a listing coordinator or listing manager and sort of the detail person and some marketing. And then the other person was a buyer's agent. And basically I said, okay, hang on, stop.

You just do what you think needs to be done. Obviously, they had a focus and a desire to want to organize the files and the other person who was in the opposite position, so in the end of it, I was just like, look, just go do it. We'll figure out a way to just share all the commissions, work as a team, truly work as a team.

So we're not worried about the financial part of it. Just go help people. And so they end up flip flopping roles based on their strengths.

And I think that's the heart of it is like, if we really give a about clients and helping them with something that's really important, then let's just use the individual strengths. You go do what you're good with and do it for the client. And so that's how we really started to separate as a team.

So what we have right now is one buyer specialist, and that's their focus, is when stuff comes new on the market. So even when we walked in, you were asking me like, hey, did you see that new one? Well, I'm sure our buyer specialist was looking at it probably before you were. And so that's what they need to be focused on.

They don't need to be focused on the open house coming up, or is the marketing done right on one of our listings? It's too much, right? So if they can narrow down and focus on certain key people, which is the hunt in our market, and making sure that there's options and negotiating through repairs. So that's what she's very good with, and that's all she needs to focus on. And then we have our listing manager who is like, in front of his computer, leave him the hell alone.

He wants to make sure everything's organized in brokerment and all these different little details and making sure that when stuff's out there, it's accurate. So then that way, when there's an agent that wants to write up an offer, they're using accurate information, things are done right, and I'm not as detail oriented. Right.

And then my wife, Heather's amazing.
She's been in real estate for over 18 years. She's non licensed, but she's the one behind the scenes that's checking on those national websites.

The national websites screw up all the time. They change it every month. Right.

When you think you've got it figured out, get over it, it's changing. So she's into that. She's onto social media more, whereas the rest of us aren't as much.

So you need somebody that's into that, and I'm the guy that talks too much, has the experience, is out there, but then can kind of take that high level planning approach. I love to meet with somebody when they want to talk high level stuff and get a really good plan and then really try to coach them to reframe it in maybe a little different way, so then that way they can figure out, all right, you want to do these ten things. That's great to get really successful for where you want to go.

Maybe it's just their first home, or maybe it's they want to evolve into investing, but let's figure out the general plan and forget about the nine out of the ten. You need to kick butt on this one thing. So get them framed into that and say, great, now you don't need me.

You need this teammate, or whatever. But I think having that person to help you decide what you should be going after and then hone in on that thing, I think is so key. So reframing real estate is what I really like to kind of think about.

And then the working part of the team is I am the listing agent side of it. Okay? So that's sort of the first part of the why it's one of the most important things. How we do it is work as a team of specialists.

And part of the team of specialists is even like, our professional photographer, absolutely kick butt. He's part of our team, too, even though he's not in our photos. He's a key ingredient.

No different than you have a team of specialists.
Like, you probably hire an electrician, you probably hire a plumber. All those pieces are part of it.

And then what we do is help people buy and sell real estate. But really, it comes with that why, and that how which is even more important than just what we do. Yeah, so that was a long winded example, but I think it's super interesting how you guys found your own positions within that team.

I should try that someday. It's a little bit risky of experiment because they could be like, well, what I want to do is take lunch break. Sure.

Obviously if they're a person who doesn't want to work, then you know they're not a right fit for your team. But you knew you had the right team and you just need to figure out where they needed to go and what they're naturally going to work on is something that they want to do and they're already good good at, right? Yeah, I mean there's some things that I'm just not good with. So I could say that's my weakest link, I need to get better at it.

But the other is, hey, let's find somebody who is naturally very good with that and they want to do it. I think the big most and key ingredient is just in our case, but really I think in a good team is, hey, what is the why behind all of this? We need to give a about our clients. And so that's always been my thing is hey, in real estate they have this fiduciary responsibility.

You need to put your clients before you, I would say, and you have to give a shit. You really have to care. And so if we really care whether you like to work or not, you're going to work.

And if you really don't care enough to go help these people, then yeah, you can't be on our team. Like, this is what we do, this is what we're about. And I think you do the same thing, man.

So speaking of working hard and stuff, how has it been lately? Obviously the rates have gone way up. Costs are super high through the roof and same with building, they're super high. Everything is just way inflated.

And in my career I've never seen rates like this or anything. And I'm curious, how does that affect your workflow? Are you guys just busy as ever?
How's the local Sheridan real estate market doing right now? Yeah, well I think on the work is one question and then shared market is another one. So I think work, there's a lot more work going on but a fewer number of transactions and some of them really spread thin.

But that's very true in what I would call a shifting market, which is segue to the real estate market right now. So I remember sort of sidetrack, but I remember looking at a graph here recently on talking about the interest rates and how they've changed over the last 20 or 25 years and going back to 2000, 2002. They were like in the sevens.

And I was like, oh, yeah, I remember fixing some fourplex that I bought at a 7.85 or something like that. And I was like, yeah, that's so great, I got a 7.85.

Well even to go back in time, the late ninety s, one of the first real estate purchases I did, I remember buying down like three or four points and I got a 9.99. I was so excited that I got single digits. It was like, yeah baby, I'm under ten.

And I kind of had to shift back and kind of look at that. And I was like, interesting. Well, and when I also started my career, just early 2000s, we used to use other investment strategies like the 1% Rule and all these other sort of things, which are super old school to talk about now.

But yeah, with the interest rates being there, it's one of the indicators of how somebody's going to need to look at some of the investing. But I think our prices really are high and there's a shifting that hasn't really gotten back to that yet. So whenever there's a shifting year and I look back on that, meaning that it's going from an extreme seller's market to maybe more of a buyer's market, I call it a shifting year.

And it's because one part of it, it could be perception or pricing or whatever is maybe really inflated or really high or low or whatever. And then it's not realized in the market yet. People haven't gone to there yet or accepted it yet.

So it's a changing time and lots of stress and fear and people figuring it out, people needing a lot of help, needing a lot of discussion with all of it. So a lot of work, but maybe less transactions or a little less going on. Yeah.

So when you're coaching somebody through selling their house or does that come up, hey, the interest rates are really high right now and this is how we should approach this listing. Yeah. So I think on both sides there's buyer or seller, I think it's kind of important of just kind of where you're at.

So when somebody is looking to sell right now in our market, which is true in any market, if you can just kind of step aside from all of the noise, focus on the one property that you are looking at selling and make sure that it's competitive. So let's just use one extreme of a few years ago when the market was really appreciating fast. Lots of multiple offers in all segments, whether it's commercial or land or all of it or any price range too.

It's all very sort of raging, if you will. But if you can look at what you're competing with at that time and still make it competitive, then you're going to bring more people to you and get the property sold at a reasonable time frame. And so much of that is a calm, collected discussion before you go to market.

Same with buying, hey, what are you going to buy or what are you looking for? Let's have a calm, collected discussion before you jump into that and figure out how you want to purchase something and compete within what your options are. And sometimes the timing doesn't work. So for example, now the market might be coming back down in a segment so same thing if you're selling a house or a lot or anything, how many in that price range on a particular area are you looking at? But the other question is how many are selling in the last six months? Because twelve months ago was different than six months now in Wyoming.

So in the last six months, how many have sold? Well, there's six competitors and one have sold. Okay, well, we're coming into winter now, so if you're lucky, one more out of the six is going to sell in the next six months. So if you're going to price yours the very highest out of the six, you're probably not going to sell yours in the next six months, right? So if it's the most competitive and I say competitive because the property you're trying to selling might be the biggest square footage, so maybe you price it the same as everybody else's, but you have the most square footage that might be competitive enough.

Each little aspect to it you can jump in. But yeah, that's super interesting. Competitive is really key.

And I remember a mentor, sort of an old school guy, both in an up and a down market. He did not do a lot of analytics. It wasn't pretty, it was old school.

And I remember he would say, all right, I'm going to sit people down in my office and I'm going to print out everything on the market in sheets of paper. It wasn't anything electronic, right? Sheets of paper. And he'd lay out on his desk, his great big desk of all the different ones that are on the market right now.

And he'd be like, all right, let's just look at it. He goes, Yours beats the crap out of these two. All right? So he'd push them on one side, but these are bigger and newer and nicer and sexier and everything.

So you can't compete with that. I mean, he just literally did it on the table as this great visual. That's so true.

I think in any market is to bring in that piece, especially in our market. We're not a big Denver, Colorado, where there's thousands of listings on the market. You really can look at our market, and depending on what market or what segment, you might have a few dozen, but sometimes it's only a half a dozen.

So it's easy to print out papers, show them on your desk and say, where do you really want to fall? So that's my answer to that. There was another question in there. What did I miss? I don't know.

I can't remember. But I have more. Okay, go for it.

Fire away. Have you seen people starting to get creative yet with their financing and with their offers and even the counteroffers from the sellers? Yeah, and I think it's from that competitive part that I was just saying. And I think it's always important to be that way.

And I'm seeing the different offers or creative offers at different parts of the market. So the one part to just kind of elaborate on a little bit has to do with the price range of residential. So we're still really seeing, and a lot of the average or the mean sale is still in that 400 range, whether it's four, four and a quarter or whatever is kind of the middle market, if you will.

So under 400,000, there's still a lot going on. There's many buyers that can get these great first time home buyer loans with decent interest rates and they're fixed and they're still wanting and needing homes under $400,000. There's still that higher demand in a lot lower supply.

So if something can target those first time home buyers, which is a neat and clean, cute, fixed up, good house, those are very marketable, more buyers out there than we have homes. Now, the exact flip side of that is about 800,000 on up. So now usually in our market, it's going to require more down, different income, much tighter everything right? And fewer number of buyers at 800,000 on up than we have 400,000 are down.

And so the supply is really increasing over 800,000, meaning that there are more houses coming on the market and available than we have buyers. So from that point of view, 800,000 on up, the seller needs to be creative, competitive, and offer some different financing stuff on 400,000 down below, the buyers need to be creative and think about different ways to be able to get those. So being creative on either side of that market, some old school people used to refer to this as a dual market or a split market.

I think that's a nice or accurate term to be able to use. So the creative stuff on the lower end are people are coming in, being suggesting that they're doing very little or no inspections at all, offering better prices, putting a little more on the appraisal. So in their offers, they might come in and say, yes, I have a loan, we're going to do four days of inspections.

It's contingent on the appraisal, but that's kind of it. And they want this home and it's ready to go for them, or they're fronting it with if there needs to be a little bit of work. The buyer is saying, hey, we're going to do the chip paint, we're going to do so the buyers are offering a lot more sweat and taking on risk for getting a house that's really low risk.

Good clean house in a good area and share in Wyoming. Under 400,000, still a great investment. So it's a low risk purchase.

So the buyer is doing creative things to take on the risk themselves or the work. And then 800,000 on up, for example, then the seller doing creative financing things like offering to give a lot more credits to buy down points and buy down points for those people that. Don't know, are basically a cash bribe to the bank to lower the interest rate.

The bank needs to make some return on their loan so you basically pay them upfront. So then that way they can have less a return in their interest rate. So real world, if the interest rate is seven and a half percent, a buyer at 800,000 might pay $12,000 to lower the interest rate a half a percent.

So it can make a lot of sense for the buyer because now their payments are closer to where they were a year ago. And it makes sense to the seller because they're basically taking twelve grand off the top, but they're getting it sold, and they're getting it sold sooner than later to be competitive. So those are the two different kind of financial things to be competitive in the different segments of the market.

That's awesome. So what about like loan assumptions or anything like that? Have you ever seen that happen years ago, long time ago. And we might get back to there.

I think it's a if the timing of everything works really well, it can work well. I've seen different things like that talked about over the years. And sometimes it's a marketing ploy.

Hey, we've got this house. There's a loan currently on it for a qualified buyer. They might be able to get a 3% interest rate and then it might bring more buyers to the table and then they're interested and they might try to do it and it doesn't work out.

But the seller is willing to give a credit to help them pay down the interest rates or something like that. It does happen. I have seen it probably less than a handful of times.

Seems like most loans are not assumable, correct? Right. But on the private, say somebody may not owe anything on their house and maybe they would own or finance it or maybe they owe a little amount and the down payment would pay off the house and then they could own or finance and carry it for the next five years or whatever with a balloon or something like that. Well, and those have happened also only a handful of times in my career.

But I'll tell you this. So I like you Drew, I trust you. But if you came to me and said, hey Matt, I want to borrow 500,000, be like, okay, we got to talk, you got to tell me more than just you want five hundred K.

Right? So I think there's got to be some element discussions about each other's. Character. I think you're very high character, so I'd be a good person to talk to.

But I think the times that I've seen at work is normally there's a relationship. So I've had some great owner financing opportunities with investments that people have given me and it's been amazing. They're friends.

They're friends and clients. I knew the property, we work together. I have one family that I'm still paying off a loan on.

And I've gone to him several times to say, hey, you ready to pay me off? And he's like, no, please don't. Okay. But it's this sort of wonderful relationship and this trust and this sense of character.

That's where I see them really working out. Whereas using it as a marketing idea to bring people in, it might work, but you still got to have that trust. The seller who has basically all the gold chips has got to really trust the person's character.

And I use that because when you look at some of the old school commercial financing, there's cash, collateral, credit, blah, blah, blah. One of the C's is character. So you got to know that are they the type of person that's going to return their debt and be honorable and responsible and respectable? That's huge.

It seems to me like owner financing is more common in commercial property. Correct. And investment property, why is that, do you think? It's because the seller is maybe just more privy to that? I think I would owner finance for somebody as long as the circumstances were right.

I mean, it probably wouldn't be everybody or anybody. But one thing it does is it gives you the opportunity to actually make money on your money. You're literally making an interest on top of your money.

Correct. So speaking of investment property, how do you think our current market is for investment property? What's the hot item out there right now? So I think one of the key elements to investing is that if there is a hot item, there's probably a whole bunch of people running after it. So it's no longer a hot item anymore.

Right. And I think that's been true in all segments of the market all along and there's still a little of that going on. And so the example would be property under 400,000 needs a bunch of work.

We'll use the term buy make pretty and there's people out there that are still fighting over those because it's a low risk market in our area under 400,000.
They like to say, well, we're just going to throw some lipstick on a pig, which is horrible. But hopefully they're taking a product that can't be sold to the first time home buyer and they're changing it and making it to where it can sell to a first time home buyer.

So I love that there's people out there willing to do it. You're helping our community. You're doing a wonderful thing.

I hope you profit on it. And there's some really good ones out there that are doing it. I hope they're making a little bit of money to keep going.

It's a good thing, but it's also very competitive. There's a lot of people fighting over that. So I'm kind of spinning your question on what's the hot item out there? I think the really hot item goes to me being the old school guy is looking at the individual strengths.

So going back to coaching individuals, being a really good investor, I'll joke with a roofer, like, great, you need to find a house with the roof, and that's a no brainer. Like, this is exactly what you need. Right.

And that's sort of the obvious example, but sometimes it's less than obvious. Maybe somebody has the means to be able to buy the property with a couple of lots that are all goofed up, and you need to subdivide them. And maybe there's other problems with a sewer line, but you got to wait a year.

So a really good hot item is if the individual investor can have the understanding and scope to be able to buy that property, maybe rent it for a period of time and deal, solve all those problems of the property. And again, now that's a super win, right. So they're going to be patient.

Maybe the market changes to the better in the course of a year and a half, they're going to solve all these problems for the property. But again, you're solving the problems for the community. Right.

So now you're taking one crappy property that can hardly sell, somebody's jumping into it, solving all these problems, and now they've got, like, four items, four products to sell at the end of it. And yes, they're going to make a bunch. Thank you.

I'm glad you do. And will you please go do another one? Yeah. So I think that's really such the if I were to say the hot item, I would reframe it.

That what is the hot new way to go about it is the old way is look at the individual, see if you can figure out what their strengths and coach. That the same with the team thing, right? Figure out where their strengths are. But I think that's really critical right now.

So it could be anything. It could be residential, it could be storage units, it could be land, it could be commercial. If there is the right property that comes along, solve the problems, work from there.

And I think you're going to see more problem properties on the market, and they're usually the ones that aren't snatched up right away. Yeah, those are the hot ones. I've actually already noticed that there's been some price drops, and I don't do house flips personally, but I've thought I'm pretty sure you could buy this house and flip it pretty easily and make it because this house would not be sellable to a first time home buyer.

Right. But you could fix it up and make that now a possibility. I think you should get into flipping, Drew.

I have too many things. Well, and that's okay. And just like we were talking about the specialty, I wouldn't want to organize files, but maybe you can encourage maybe there's people out there listening right now, and it's like, yes, go find those properties.

Not that are obvious, that are less than obvious, or maybe something is overpriced and it's the type of person that wants a low offer to consider it. Yeah, that's the thing is sometimes people are afraid to put in a low offer because they think they're going to offend somebody. But I personally say, hey, if that's what you think it's worth, we can talk them about it.

And maybe that person has just been waiting for someone to bring them an offer. I think so too. Yeah, I think so too.

So tell me a little. I'm going to put it back at you first. You bet.

So tell me a little from your experience of investing, what you've seen maybe in the last ten years and what you're seeing shifting just in the last year or two. Okay, so when I first started doing some investing, the options, in my opinion, so I actually did exactly what you said I would find properties where I could improve them in some way or another. And I knew I could do it confidently.

Excellent. I have done flips, but I've never advertised it as a business. I've done a couple properties on Coffee and Avenue that were retail type places, even empty lots that had just been sitting stagnant for a long time on the market and the price kept dropping and that type of thing.

So I approached it in this way. It's like, hey, I see the beauty in this property and nobody else has for some reason. And I believe I can put money into it and make it better and mark it up some and make some money that way.

And that's what I've always done. And honestly, I've never once sat on a property and I've always done it small scale. I've never done anything large scale.

And I've always found these opportunities fairly easy to find because I wasn't really truly looking. They always just like, hey, this one makes sense. Well, how come nobody's bought that? Yeah, exactly.

So it seems like it's really easy to find, but I think it takes a certain eye to find that, right? It does. So I've always felt like investment properties around here had been fairly easy to acquire because of that. And I don't really have a really good insight or knowledge on why that is, but it seems as of lately, back at, say, two years ago, when prices really started jacking up, the properties got super competitive and prices were just, I mean, multiple offers.

And at that point I wasn't even hardly looking. It's like, I don't know if I want to compete with all these people, right. And people had, in my opinion, maybe overpaid on certain properties and stuff like that.

And it's like, why would somebody pay that? I don't get it. In my mind, they paid way too much. It was over asking price and it was high to begin with.

Right. For the last couple of years, I hadn't really bought too much. But as of now, I'm starting to see these properties pop up that are distressed or maybe decreasing in price because nobody's buying them for one reason or another.

And it does kind of open my eyes again. Now here's another challenge I see with our market today is we have tons of new developments starting there's. Developments that are just starting on the north end that are going to be add more supply to the market.

Yeah, a couple of hundred houses I think right there's. The one on the east side over by Fifth Street over there. And I don't know how many units that is, but that's a big development.

Right. The stuff up by the hospital, there's all this new construction development going on in residential specifically. I don't really know of any commercial stuff going currently.

There probably is stuff and I hope you can educate me on that. But now that makes me wonder, are we going to overdevelop for our intense prices that we have right now? Right. You know what that drives me to believe is that I think the commercial industry needs to ramp up to help fill that supply of the residential.

So we need businesses, we need stores, we need manufacturing and stuff like that in order to fill all these developments that are just coming up. And with our current population, I don't think they're going to fill with our current growth rate, I don't think they're going to fill very quickly. Now, we also have to remember that those developments might be a year from start actually breaking ground on the vertical structure.

That's right. And we don't know what's going to happen at that time. But I'm looking at where we're at right now in this minute.

I think I'm a little bit nervous for all these new developments. So my personal thing would be focus on more of a commercial investment. Well, it's interesting and I agree with you that we're seeing a lot more developments on residential.

I actually applaud it in many ways looking from sort of the big picture and particularly with the affordable housing discussion and I really look at that as it's always been a supply issue. I've also seen some great subdivisions come up the last few years. Some that are one and two acre sort of plots.

They're just absolutely beautiful. I think they're well done where they have some larger sort of common open space areas. And so I think they're a really great way on how you go about doing some of these sort of lower impact good subdivisions.

Right. But it also then means that the lot is a little bigger and a little more expensive and it also means that in these subdivisions they're going to require sort of a minimum square footage, 1500, 800 sqft. So now all of a sudden you're priced at six 7800,000.

Right. So a lot of those lots were going to be adding more supply in that market that I was just saying that is getting trending more towards a little more supply. Now, some of those lots that you talked about in the newer subdivisions are smaller lots, cheaper lots, and they don't have the same restrictions of square footage, so new construction can build on them, and the starting point for a home can be less.

So I actually like that supply entering the market. I see it as two completely different segments within residential. But yeah, you still got to build them.

So they're just lots. Those are lot developments. We don't have 200, 500 new homes, right? It's just the lots.

And it might take ten years to build them out. It might take 20 years to absorb them fully. But I love the opportunity that that's going to hit a different segment, a different price range, an element of our market that's still low supply.

So whenever I see the new subdivisions, I'm always looking at what are the lot sizes, what are the restrictions, what are the use, what's going to fill in there? And so I applaud the ones that are emphasizing more of, and I don't want to say affordable homes, but just smaller homes. And then that makes it truly more attainable, right? So I like that. And then I still really believe that.

Okay, I got a crazy story for you. Let me just shift gears and you've heard some of my crazy stories. So a few moons ago, like at the tune of like 18 or 19 years ago, I was a single dad there for a little while, just went through a divorce and two kids.

And Simon's this amazing human, one of my older boys, and he wanted to play a game. And we're big game, family cards, board games, whatever. And he's like, dad, let's play Monopoly.

It's like, I got laundry to do and dinner to cook. And you still got homework, son. And you want to play Monopoly? It's going to take a while.

Yeah, and Monopoly takes like 3 hours. Let's play uno. No, I'm going to play Monopoly.

All right, but if we're going to play Monopoly, I'm going to lean in and I'm going to play against you. I ain't going soft. Let's do this.

He's like, all right. So we sat down and he's just like, all right, I want Boardwalk and Park Place. That's what I'm going after.

I was like, all right. So we sat down and he really hoarded his cash and would collect the 200 and whatever as we're playing Monopoly around. Go.

And he really wasn't buying these that came up me. I basically bought any opportunity that came along that I did not go broke. And as you can tell, like 45 minutes into it, I own 90% of the board.

And he had Park Place and is still going for Boardwalk. And so you can kind of guess that the game went pretty quickly and then they started to learn, like, oh, yeah, I guess if you're holding out or trying to be very selective like you just said, I'm only going after commercial. Right? So I would say learn from the story.

That be open to when the opportunity comes up. It might be a rundown trailer and you've never flipped a trailer before, but maybe that's the right thing. Maybe it's land way east.

Maybe it is residential. Maybe it's a million dollar home that's got a $2 million value. So I don't know where the opportunities are, but I would encourage just to have that same open mindset and maybe look for it differently, just as you've always been very good with.

And I know those properties that you've done, they were great. And we all said like, yes. And in my mind it was, he solved a problem.

You did the ultimate pretty, but in a different way. You brought vitality to it. You made it exciting, but it's true.

Even in a simple little residential flip by making it to where a buyer can't buy it and then now you make it to where they can buy it. That's vitality. You brought vitality to the neighborhood.

Somebody that's proud to own that home, even if it's a little tiny little home, it doesn't matter. So if it's commercial on coffee, there's this kind of rundown thing with nasty paint and trim and everything else and the roof's about ready to go and everything else, and you're like, oh, my gosh, there's a missing opportunity. Yes.

But I think that's the heart of it. So I'm kind of pulling a switcheroo on you. But I really believe that, and I think I've seen that and be open to it.

You might be looking for just that Boardwalk and Park Place, but St. James is not bad either. I'm using Monopoly reference here, but I don't know, what do you think about that? Okay, so one thing that I really picked up on is your core belief in real estate is the people you're dealing with.

You love the people. Now here's the thing. How is a person going to ever come across these deals where you can flip or that you can help them sell or any of these things, whether it's investment or simply for helping somebody else make the investment, without these people? If you don't have relationships with these people, if you're not truly, honestly interacting as friends, and you are friends, then these deals don't just come to you.

Right, I agree. I feel like that's the whole learning lesson from our talk today is people and how you interact with them. You don't want to be I can't think of the right word, like ungenuine.

Right, right. But if you're naturally the type of person who is friendly and interactive and energetic and positive, I believe that that attitude with people gets you further than being an old scrooge. Agreed.

And I think that also equals money. Yeah. I don't believe that money should be your key focus.

Sure. But if you can make people your key focus, then the bonus is you can make money. Right.

If you're providing the value to others and the community, you're going to get value in return to yourself and your family so you can continue to give value to the community and others. I agree completely. That's awesome.

Yeah. I love, know and even as you're talking and I think about the times that I've picked your brain on building and I'll just grab you and hey Drew, what about this or that the other. And I think that's great fun interaction.

And you're absolutely right. The people that are sort of hiding and they're being scrooge and they're not sharing or interacting, they're not going to do as well. And then the people that can get out and be in the learning mode constantly are so much more successful.

Real estate and real estate investing, there's so many pieces to that. You might be a good framer. Right.

But then if you're doing some tricky candelever on a thing, it wouldn't hurt to go ask and learn or even jump on Google and try to learn before you jump into this project. Again, I'll go back to if this is a really important thing, building a home. Is it important? Yeah, this is a really okay, well, let's get the best group of people we can to go build a house.

It's like, what do you do? Well, we just build a house. No, we're doing the so investing, same sort of thing. But I do think it's a constantly moving target and I like to think of it as a shifting market right now to kind of bring it back to investing.

And so you got to be open to maybe other things that you hadn't looked at before. Yeah, that's a valid point. Yeah.

And I think that's or to do it differently and that's harder for guys like me that have been in the business for a couple of decades, hey, there's this way to do it. And I'll catch myself as somebody saying, hey, what about this? And I'll be like, oh, we've done that before. Don't say that, Matt, that's awful.

So then I might share, like, hey, from my experience it hasn't worked, but let's talk it over and maybe there's a new way to do it. Slightly different circumstances. We're about out of time.

Cool. But I want to ask you this to wrap it up. Let's just say you had the perfect opportunity in real estate investment, specifically come up in Sheridan.

Are you confident right now? I'm always confident in the project. And again, I know you're looking for a yes or no answer. Answer however you like.

Yeah, I'm very confident that there are investments going on right now. We see them every day. There are, but each of them you need to take time, you need to figure out your options in purchasing.

I love inspections. Do every inspection. When I buy a property, I bet I spend three times more paying for inspections than the average client.

Just love to have them all. Let's figure out everything. It's such cheap.

Like, yeah, somebody, I spent $500, I spent three grand. Let's figure out everything. Love that.

And then you can determine what's really good way to go. So, yes, I believe that if you take that approach and you learn we're doing it right now. There's investments going on right now that are good in all segments and area of the market, but it has to do with the people.

If the people are doing it right, they might back out, go find another one. But yes, the investments are good with the right people. Well, and I'll just double down on that.

I'm honestly, personally very confident in Sheridan. I think that when other markets are not as well, sheridan seems to do fairly well. And so I'm excited for our future here, and I believe there's a lot of opportunities coming up.

Well, let me just add on that too, just really quick. So not growing up in Sheridan. Sheridan's an amazing community in every way, right? So my dad was a demographer for years.

He'd sort of study populations. Well, people want to live closer to mountains and water, like in our world, if you look at the populations right. Well, the mountains hold the water, so it's kind of a double whammy.

But you also over 911 and everything else that's transpired over the years. Safe community is good too, right? And then you look at the different amenities and stuff. Sheridan's got some of the most amazing philanthropy from walking paths and schools and everything else for our population.

It's amazing. So the value in Sheridan county is huge. And that's why a lot of people are attracted to invest here, is because we're kind of like the blue chip.

It is pretty darn safe. Even looking at the ups and downs of the last few decades, sheridan's had less of an impact because it's still this amazing community place to live. That's not changing, right? Yeah, well, I sure hope not.

This is where I call home. Me too. But I mean, just to be kind of objective with it, I don't see that changing for decades.

So it is a pretty wonderful and yet safe. And there's a lot of upside for all those things. From the historic downtown to the mountains and everything, there's some huge landmarks that's going to make this really solid.

So we need good people. Find good investments, go kick butt. We need more of it.

That's awesome. Hey, Matt, I appreciate you coming in, and we will have to do it again sometime. Thank you, Drew.

Keep doing what you're doing, man. All right.