🚨 Choosing A Market: The 5 Key Metrics That Could Make or Break Your Next Deal

Choosing the right market isn’t a gut decision. It’s not about where you think rents are high or where you heard investors are flocking.

Most investors fail because they skip the data and jump straight to making offers.

🚨 Big mistake.

Before I ever invest in a market, I analyze 5 critical metrics that instantly tell me whether there’s real opportunity or if I’m about to waste months chasing deals that won’t pencil out.

In my latest video, I’m breaking down:

✅ Metric #1: The sneaky market indicator that reveals long-term appreciation potential
✅ Metric #2: How to instantly tell if there’s ENOUGH deal flow (so you don’t waste time)
✅ Metric #3: Why home values matter EVEN if you’re buying apartments (this one surprises people)
✅ Metric #4: The #1 overlooked stat that silently KILLS your ability to scale (99% of investors never check this)
✅ Metric #5: The data point that separates profitable markets from cash traps

This is exactly how I analyze markets in real-time before making a move. If you want to build a real estate portfolio that grows without relying on luck, you need to watch this.

The investors who master this process scale faster, waste less time, and close bigger deals with confidence.

The ones who don’t? They keep spinning their wheels on markets that will never work for them.

00:00 Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:35 The Importance of Scaling Up
01:42 Developing Your Acquisition Criteria
02:20 Live Case Study: Skokie, Illinois
08:02 Defining Your Buy Box
08:39 Exploring Different Asset Classes
20:26 Evaluating Market Demographics
26:42 Pivoting to Nearby Markets
29:37 Final Thoughts and Next Steps

Transcript

0:00

Hey, what is up everybody? My name is Matt Drouin. I'm the host of the Go Bigg Live Real Estate Investors podcast. The show to listen to if you're a residential real estate investor looking to scale into bigger commercial real estate deals. Today I have a very special show. This is actually the conclusion series of this whole experiment. We started back a couple years ago called Go Big Live. This is a one-on-one episode series where we're going to go. In this video, we're gonna go into how to develop your commercial acquisition criteria step by step. Alright, so backing up a little bit, if you haven't been listening to this show, I have a question to ask, right? Are you tired of hustling for one tiny duplex at a time? Feeling like you're picking up pennies when you could be grabbing. Fistfuls of dollars with bigger deals. In today's episode, we're going to crack the code on scaling up your real estate game commercial style. By the end, you'll know exactly how to craft your personal acquisition criteria or your quote unquote buy box for commercial income properties, step by step and stick around because I'm going to reveal the one unspoken data point that 99% of investors completely overlook a market metric that could make or break your entire strategy, but we'll get to that soon, I promise. We're talking high impact commercial real estate here, multifamily apartments, retail centers, industrial buildings, the kinds of deals that dwarf the returns of another single family fixer upper. If you've been frustrated with the snail's pace of small rentals, imagine doing one deal that equals 10 houses in value. Sounds great, right? But it requires a smarter approach than just Zillow doom scrolling and crossing your fingers. So in this video, what you're going to learn is, number one, the surprising truth of how few commercial properties actually sell in a year. We're going to uncover this shocking percentage soon, and we're actually gonna pick a subject market to see is there actually enough product in that market where we can actually have a high degree of success of landing that first larger deal? And why knowing this, we'll supercharge your market selection so you can make heads or tails of markets very quickly. How to build a buy box. Alright, A laser focused set of criteria that filters deals for you. So you only spend time on winners. We're gonna do a live case study on a special market that I've never even looked into before, to just show you that this can be applied nationwide. picked out Skokie, Illinois as a as a test market to go in there and look at that market to see what type of product there are is and what type of acquisition strategy we can develop in that market. Why Skokie? I am a. Nineties kid and I was a fan of the usual suspects where Keyser Soze was fooling the cop that was interrogating him. And I just picked that. Okay, and if we can't find the product in that given market and we need to pivot to a nearby better opportunity, how to find those markets that will enable you to have a high degree of success in not only landing your first larger deal, but also enough room and runway within which to scale in there. This video is also gonna be packed full of actionable types of things you can do at the end. Step by step to start the journey from here. Next week episode we're gonna go into detail on OPM and how to build out your other people's money infrastructure. So capital never need is going to be a bottleneck in you scaling it to larger and larger deals. And of course by the end, I'll tell you on how to get a free one hour consultation with our team to apply this to your own situation so you can start landing big deals this year and said and abandoned this small deal strategy that drove me insane for the first 11 years of my investing career. All right, so if you're liking what you're hearing on this channel, please be sure to subscribe and leave a like or comment. It shows me that okay. I maybe what I'm putting out there is not a hundred percent pure gold, but my intention is to put as much value out there as possible when you like and subscribe. This helps trick the Google algorithm to distribute this content, to bring value out to more people and spread the word. Okay, so step number one is in the previous episode we talked about clarifying your goals and your investment. Why? So before we even talk numbers and markets, we need to zoom out. If you caught my last podcast, you already know the importance of defining your why and setting clear investment goals. In this episode, I went deep into how to determine exactly how much commercial income property you'll need to reach your financial goals. So if you missed it, be sure to check it out so you can set those goal posts with clarity. So I would actually pause this, go back to the episode if you haven't heard it there because setting your goals is gonna be very important. But here's a refresher. Ask yourself. Why are you moving from residential to commercial? Is it the higher cash flow? Scaling your portfolio, faster, attracting investors, or all of the above? Grab a notepad or that coffee stain napkin and jot down your top goals. Alright, bigger impact. Per deal In commercial, most likely you want more dollars per transaction. For example, a single 20 unit apartment complex can generate the income of 10 duplexes with far less hustle. Remember, my early part of my career, I was closing one to two deals a month, and I was burning the candle both ends. And in the previous episode, I actually admit that I didn't even know how I did it. Okay? So it's about working smarter, not harder. You probably have a full-time job. You probably have a family. You probably have a, a kids' baseball practice at seven o'clock on a Wednesday night. Being the real estate hustler and doing all of these things can put your marriage in great jeopardy. Okay? Using this strategy of buying one larger deal a year, just think about it. If you could just focus on buying one deal per year and putting all your energy and focus behind that. All right? Number two, efficiency of scale. Managing one property with 20 tenants is tons easier than 10 properties with two tenants each. Management intensity is. Far less when you have more units and more squirter footage into under one roof. Three, the equity multiples you can achieve with commercial real estate. Doubling and triple your money over time is just absolutely explosive. So commercial properties. Often appreciate based on income, more than just sales comps with the residential. So increase the NOI or not operating income, and you can create value essentially out of thin air. We just signed a lease just recently with one of our buildings. It was a 15,000 square feet of space with a New York State commercial office tenant. And once we got the. Ink on that lease, the value of the building increased$1.8 million and increases the cash flow increase of the cash flow$125,000 a year. Okay, so that is a super, and I've expressed this before, you do not need to be busy chasing a bunch of deals out there. Just imagine if you just do one, right? So knowing your why keeps you focused and motivated. It also influences your criteria. For instance, if your goal is stable cash flow to quit your job, your buy box might be focused on fully leased stable assets. If it's rapid equity growth, you're, you might seek value add opportunities especially if you have a longer runway to exit the W2. Value add opportunities where your patient don't need the cash for right now can be great to position yourself in that in that category. So that's the reason why the why is all important in this is how much time do you actually have? Do you want, do you want to eat a poop sandwich before going to work and, going to work for another year or another five years is going to is that gonna absolutely kill you? Then probably the focus on the former is probably gonna be of importance. Think of it like deciding to finally stop dating and get serious. You're defining what you want in a long-term partner, except here, it's property. So no more swiping white on every cute duplex that comes along. You're going to be picky with purpose. All right. Step two, define your buy box basics. Now that your goals are clear, let's translate that into a buy box, which is basically a fancy term for your target deal criteria. This is the profile of properties you're going to pursue relentlessly and with intention and ignore everything else. It's like your shopping list for deals, so let's build it. So number one asset class is a huge question. I get A lot of people have the, want to have the warmth and comfort of residential. Some of my clients are just like, I don't wanna do residential anymore. I don't wanna deal with tenants. I wanna deal with lower management intensity assets. So let's go through the property types, decide what type of. Commercial property aligns with your goals and experience. So here's the common options. Number one is multifamily apartments. So great for steady rental income and familiarity. If you've done residential, these are often have lower vacancy risk. Everyone needs a place to live right and easier financing options. Most banks and lenders love apartments. Number two is retail or office. They can offer longer term leases, let's think 5, 10, 15, 20 years with tenants who might handle their own upkeep. Typically with retail specifically, the tenant takes care of everything that's within the box. Okay? So there's a lot less management intensity with this type of asset class, but watch out for market trends. Retail and office can be volatile in the Amazon and Zoom era. Number three is industrial and warehouse, often simpler type of properties, concrete shells, fewer toilets to fix. And right now industrial has been red hot with e-commerce growth manufacturing. And the whole nine yards. Try to find an industrial space in your market. If you're in a stronger market, you generally can't find it. Vacancies hit record lows around 3.9% in 2022, which signals that there is rent growth to be attained in the future, rising to only 5.9% after a flood of new supply in 2023 in certain markets across the countries. And then there's specialty or other types of asset classes. Maybe in mobile home parks, self-storage, et cetera. If you have a niche interest, these can yield great returns, but require specialized know-how. So pick one primary asset class to focus on first. Why? Because each market and strategy is different in this video. Also, if you are flexible between the asset classes, I'm gonna go into the exact methodology on if we can't find enough product in that given market for let's say multifamily in Skokie, Illinois, how much retail strip plazas exist there? They're between, let's say, 5,000 to 25,000 square feet. So it's better to get deeply familiar with one property than to scatter yourself trying to analyze apartments and strip malls and warehouses all at once. As a saying goes, the fox that chases two rabbits catches none. Two. Now we're gonna go into deal size, alright? Units or square footage and dollar range. Next, define how big is big for you. Are you talking about a 10 unit apartment building, 50 units, a hundred units, a small retail plaza of 10,000 square feet? What can you realistically handle and finance right now? the name of the show is misleading. I say a lot, go big or go bigger. But the reality is that if you're doing your first larger deal and your life depended upon it, and you had a$20 million deal that was in front of you, if your life depended upon it, could you raise$5 million worth in 30 days or less? Okay. If you're, if you said your life dependent upon it and you're like. No, I don't think I could do that. Then generally you wanna peel back and ratchet down what the deal size is. Generally, my clients are closing if multifamily deals between 10 and 50 units is generally what the range is. So you make, you wanna make sure that whatever you're doing in terms of this next jump is going to be achievable, but also significant. Significant meaning that you're actually pushing the boundaries of where you're at. We wanna get you outside of the comfort zone with your first larger deal. So if you've only bought,$300,000 duplexes, maybe you are targeting something in the one to$5 million range for your first commercial deal. So big enough to level up, but not so huge that you're out of your depth and over your skis. In unit count, that might mean 10 to 30 units in a multifamily building that's dependent upon markets across the country. We're gonna go into Skokie, Illinois and see, what they trade for in terms of price per unit. Or if it's warehouse 15,000 square feet possibly. We're gonna pull that data using CoStar. It's a service that I subscribe to, to find a ballpark that stretches you but is going to be feasible. Then this becomes part of your buy box example, seeking 20 to 50 unit apartment buildings, two to$5 million purchase price. All right? And this should be in line with the market. So when you're communicating with brokers, you don't get looked at like you have three heads. I'm looking to buy, a hundred unit deal for$10,000 unit. Okay? Broker, other investors, sellers are absolutely not gonna take you seriously. They're gonna take you as a nube and then you haven't done the research yourself to be educated in that market. And then the other thing we're gonna target here is target returns and yield metrics. What numbers would make a deal worth it to you? Alright. The common metrics that we use are cap rate. This is the unlevered return or income capitalization rate. Maybe you say, I want a, at least a 6% cap rate going in. Keep in mind that cap rates can vary market to market, and we're gonna have more on that soon. Cash on cash rate of return. If you're raising money or just measuring your own, you might target a 8% cash and cash return in year one or whatever. Okay, so keep in mind, alright, for the money that I'm raising out there or or putting to work my own money, how much do I want get in terms of a cash, on cash rate of return to build up this property acquisition criteria? And then value add upside. Perhaps ability to increase net operating income by 20% in 24 months. If you're doing a renovation or a lease up play, for instance. Be specific. A clear number helps you quickly nix deals that don't measure up after you put them through underwriting and deal analysis. Number four, risk tolerance and strategy. Are you looking for turnkey properties, lower risk, lower return, or distressed value add, higher effort, potentially higher return. Note this in your criteria. For example, a core stabilized asset or a opportunistic fixer upper, it will guide your search on how to evaluate markets. For the most part, when I'm guiding clients through their personalized acquisition strategy, generally speaking, do not want to buy properties that are a hundred percent vacant or extremely distressed. There's plenty of deals out there. If you're picking the right market with an amount of product that exists in there, that you are going to be able to find a, easy wins, right? Like singles and doubles. To use baseball terminology, you do not need to hit a home run every single time that you do a deal. I love singles and doubles. Actually, they've been the best deals of my investing career. They looked mediocre on paper when I first under underwrote them, but those deals I thought were gonna be a home run. Extremely distressed value ideals. I was buying super cheap, ended up taking years off my life. And might not be the best thing to do when you are already pushing yourself and then pushing yourself into a deal that has a lot of hair on it. So after we've documented all this criteria, now we're gonna go in and zoom in on a market. So first we're gonna go in, and when I do this with clients in our onboarding process, I always want to focus on their own backyard or a market that they have significant experience, where they have relationship infrastructure built out, where they have market intelligence and knowledge. I'm going to. Try to exhaust that market the most. But let's say you live in Skokie, Illinois and we're doing this together one-on-one as me with a client, and we're going to explore this market and see what we can actually do with it and if we can actually find it potential deals there.

Matthew Drouin's video recording-2: 16:04

All right, cool. The screen you're looking at right now. By the way, if you are listening to this on the podcast platform, this is a screen sharing intensive episode, so make sure to hop over to YouTube to actually watch this. Hopefully you're not driving right now, but you're gonna get a lot more value. Actually looking at my screen. So this is CoStar LoopNet. This is not something unless you're an active real estate investor like myself that has an advisory service business where I advise other investors how to do the same exact thing. I pay$10,000 a year. For this software. Okay. The reason why CoStar is so powerful is that they are the largest research organization in the United States next to the Bureau and labor statistics. So they have a ton of data on properties and markets across the country. That being said very powerful tool for for my own business and scaling, as well as servicing my clients as well. We looked up Skokie, Illinois here, and now we're gonna zoom in. The first thing I do, step number one on when I've, take, taking a look at this market and trying to rule it out or rule it in is I'm gonna look at the area and I'm going to go to the filters here. And I'm gonna go on property type. Okay? So I'm gonna look at multifamily units between. Five and 50. Remember we said you know what, I don't think I could raise$5 million within 30 days. But I think I, if my life depended upon it, I could probably raise, 500,000 bucks in 30 days and so on and so forth. So right now, what we're seeing right now, and this is why I can rule out. Multifamily for Skokie, Illinois is because we have 111 properties. These are all of the properties that meet the criteria in that market. The reason why that is, is because generally speaking, two to four. Percent of properties change hands each year. Okay? So if we're looking in a market where there's only 111 properties and we're thinking about, two properties might change hands in a year, and I guarantee you there's gonna be one of those properties you're gonna get outbid on, right? Because there's gonna be somebody with a 10 31 exchange that's gonna overpay for the property to save a few bucks in taxes. So that is not a good enough sample size. Generally what I wanna see is I wanna see something that's got a market that has it, at least 500 in a certain product type. Okay, so we have one or two things here. We can either change asset class, and this is the one things that I, that I'll generally do to stay within a market in your own backyard.'cause remember I've gone through this before. Focusing on a geographic location is how you build competitive advantage. You get to know all the players, all the brokers, all the lenders, and what types of collateral they like. You build this whole relationship infrastructure in that community. And nobody else coming into your market can beat you on that. Alright, so we're gonna take a look at this and we're like, ah, alright, multifamily in this area right here might not work, but let's, I'm just curious. Let's take a look at retail and look at retail between 5,000 to 20,000 square feet. Okay. Not that much of a big difference. 5,000 to 20,000 square feet. 5,000 to 50,000 square feet. We got 107 properties. Still not meeting it. So let's switch back to to multifamily. Okay. So if we're going five units to 50, then we're gonna go out And we might look at Skokie and also a couple of surrounding towns, assuming that they have the demographics that we want to really, and assuming that they aren't such a long drive away from each other. Generally speaking, if it's an hour, if. Maybe two hours away, I would say, okay, great. But when you're talking about setting up a tour to walk a property and with a broker and it's or direct with a seller and it's two hours away, that can get old very quickly. And remember, you want to build in a market where you can actually. Have some runway within which to actually scale. So let's go here. We're gonna take a, polygon to tool here and then just draw a polygon around here in the areas that are north of Chicago, for instance. So I have no idea how far away these spaces are, so right now we have a way to actually, okay, now this is multifamily, five to 50 units. There's 7,378 properties. This is definitely more than enough to work with, so we can actually shrink down. This geographic area. We're gonna look into other adjacent areas. I'm trying to just illustrate this to you on this training so that you can then apply it and finding your own target market for your requisition criteria as well. Now that we have a good sample size, what we're gonna do now is we're gonna research, what are the demographics for the actual market itself? And before we do that, we're gonna go into the actual analytics tool here that we have with CoStar and take a look at this market now. We do a much bigger deep dive on this, and we don't want to pull in areas that are, junk properties in areas that are high crime, extremely low income. They're just not gonna be a good investment criteria for us. What we pull through here is we see, market cap rates is 6.8%. This is generally, good enough for, we don't want to have cap rates or market cap rates in a market where. They're so high, and these are typically in higher crime or rural areas where we have the, they're great on cash flow, but they're not great for forcing appreciation.'cause remember, the lower the cap rate, the more explosive each dollar of net operating income is to the underlying asset value, which allows you to quickly and rapidly increase value in the property. So then you can refinance those properties. Pay your investors back and rinse and recycle that over and over again. Another thing that I like here is it has a decent market rate. Anything that's less than 5% is generally a strong demand market, so I like that as well. And then also the right here I also gonna look at area income. So I'm gonna jump over to an actual, other report to go in and formulate this test of value. so when we're looking at a market, this demographic report that I pull for all the markets in which I serve clients across the country is gonna be really important. Alright, so what I want to look at, and the numbers I'm looking at right here to evaluate the health of this market is that one is the immediate household income and the one, three and five mile radius. Generally speaking, I want to have invest in areas that have. The one mile is higher than the three and five mile, for instance. In this case, it's lower. Not by much, though. Not too much. Much of a concern for formulating investment thesis. I like the fact that, hey, there's a household size of 2.7 2.7 per household, and there's two. Vehicles per household. One thing is that when you see average household size three and one vehicle, that's typically a indication that it is a more income challenged market. And it is generally not going to be a market that at least ourselves would invest in because we want to invest in workforce and above type of income housing. The one metric that nobody talks about is median home value in a given area. The one thing that I do like about this this metric here is that the home medium home values are pretty flat across the one three and five mile. So we're gonna research the actual, market, the actual market for single family homes, why does this apply to apartments for instance? The reason why is because I've operated assets in areas where. Rental monthly rental prices were on par with what it costs to own a home on a monthly basis. When you account for mortgage taxes and insurance and when you have that dynamic where they're meeting head on head with each other, I. Then you're going to have a a very poor retention factor with tenants, for instance, because you're gonna have tenants that are going to use you. They might be a decent income, but they're going to use you to stay for a couple years until they save up for a down payment for a house. And then they're gonna say Sayonara or Goodbye. And retention is an absolute deal killer when it comes to influencing the profitability of an investment. We make money when residents stay for the long term. So we're gonna take a look at here as I pulled a a house that was in line in alignment with that. Median home value. And we found this property that is right here in Skokie, and this is one is$345,000. Two bed, one bath house. We looked at the actual market. There's a lot of two, two bedroom apartment inventory because this is more of a family oriented area based upon my very limited research. Remember, I've never looked at up at anything regard to Skokie, Illinois. So if there's anything that I'm putting in here that is wrong and you're from Skokie, definitely drop in the comments below. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna run the actual mortgage payments when you account for mortgage taxes and insurance. And right here, I could do this more scientifically, I don't even know this is actually correct. But I'm just going through the actual methodology that you can do to figure out whether a market is for good retention and also upside to potential growth in rental income. So on here we have a total estimated$2,424 a month. Now we look at the market rent per unit for rent. This is about a thousand dollars per month difference. When we're looking at this, and especially if we go down here in this market analytics report and we're looking at by bedroom right here, we see two bedroom apartments that on average are around$1,600 a month. So there's still a good margin between renting and home ownership that can create good fundamentals for within this to be a good location to look into and add it to your short list.

25:27

So step five, case study decision, conclusion. Skokie, in or out. All right, so we've went through this. The market has strong fundamentals, but due to the actual number of properties that are in that specific product category is going to be slim pickings for you in which to scale. And by your, say, let's say your fir, first, second, third, fourth, and fifth deal. Because the law of the first deal. Is real. It's gonna take so much time and energy to land your first, that your second, third, and fourth and fifth will happen to rapid succession. It's not going to happen in this market because there just isn't enough product that is there. We don't have to rule it out completely, but we have to make a choice. Stay in Skokie. But broaden our criteria to increase the odds in terms of changing up asset classes or being inclusive of other asset classes, which we are, we're opportunistic investors that focus just in Rochester, New York. We own, multifamily office, retail, industrial, okay. Or choice B. Pivot to a nearby market or be inclusive a nearby market, to really get that sampling of property product so that you're gonna have high probability, assuming you're putting the work into build relationships with property owners and real estate brokers, you can have a high probability of doing a. One to two deals a year. So for this exercise, we're gonna pivot. We're gonna choose choice B. After all the episode we promised, we'd pivot to nearby market if needed. We're not married to Skokie, although it would be ideal that we could do it right in our backyard and stay there, but. It's just not gonna work, right? We don't have enough product if we're gonna stay in the lane of just multifamily, let's say. Okay, so if data says we can do better next door, we will. So in pivoting and seeking greener pastures nearby. Where do we go? Alright, so I did some research on some adjacent markets. The beauty of real estate is that markets are often clustered. So if one suburb is too small, the next town or city metro might offer more opportunity. So near Skokie, we have a few options. There's Evanston, Illinois. There's just east of Skokie, similar median income of$95,000 a year, and even higher home values of$434,000. It's a bigger city, has a major university, Northwestern, which is a good thing for actually, having a backbone of medical as well as a education'cause it's very recession resistant and also it's got a 78,000 person population as well. Importantly, it has more multifamily properties and listings as well as just a general product being out there. So this suggests a bit more liquidity in the marketplace in terms of transactions or deals trading hand. Also being a college town, there's gonna be constant rental demand as well from students as well as employees of the university. Chicago North side neighborhoods, Skokie Borders. Chicago is far north. Areas like Rogers Park or Westridge. These are urban neighborhoods with hundreds of apartment buildings. In fact, Chicago as a whole has far more inventory. Crexi for instance, showed that over 225 multifamily listings for Chicago are active right now. If our goal is a lot of deal options venturing into the city could make sense. Cap rates might be similar or slightly lower. Deal flow is definitely higher. I'm not against low cap rate markets. Okay. I'm against paying a low entrance cap rate in that's lower than what the market cap rate is. Definitely. But lower cap rates generally signify that you have to enter into different strategy than our traditional framework, which is, is raise money from private investors and increase the value. Increase the value very rapidly, refinance the property, deliver the capital back to the investors. This is going to be more of a long-term equity based approach rather than cash flow. And it's fine. And I love a lower cap rate, high demand high barrier to entry markets, but it's just a different strategy. Okay. And then there's other suburbs that, like Niles, Morton Grove. These are adjacent to Skokie. And they might be similar in terms of liquidity, small, but if you could include them with a total acquisition footprint for an area and there's not too much problems with logistics between those locations, then we could check those ones as well. Now that you have the tools to develop your buy box or your acquisition criteria, then it's time to document that and really communicate that out to everyone that is in your sphere. Those are brokers, other investors, friends and family. This is gonna be important with OPM professional contacts'cause being specific about your criteria is actually going to not pigeonhole you. It's going to lead to more deal flow because people can remember specifics. They cannot remember. Oh, I'm looking to buy any deal that makes sense. Small, large, multifamily, industrial, anywhere in the country. It really becomes vacuous and people are not going to think of you because they don't have that reticular activation system that is activated that ties you to that specific vision of that asset class. And the specificity around that we actually developed right now. So being specific out there, it's not gonna pigeonhole you. It's actually gonna lead you to more deal flow. For this reason only is that. If you're looking for, brick constructed, units that are between 10 to 50 units, pitch roofs in Evanston, Illinois that are, that were priced between two and$5 million, then you might get deals that are out that are outside of that. I have this happen to me all the time. We own or buy. Pretty historic brick buildings in Rochester, New York. So we're known as buyers of that type of asset class, but I get stuff all the time, and usually other investors and brokers preface a conversation with Hey, I, Matt, I know it's not a pretty brick building, you know the stuff that you usually like to buy, but. it's a 1970s built. It's got a mid-century modern flare to it. But it might be up your alley, but I figured it would be your cup of tea. But I want you to know about it, right? Those are the types of things that can do that to help enhance your deal flow. But we're not talking about deal flow right now. We're just talking about acquisition criteria, so that when you're out there and building your OPM infrastructure and talking to people about what the next chapter of your life looks like, investing wise, they can at least visualize it. Okay. Because hey, I'm looking to buy a 10 to 20 unit apartment building in the RO in Rochester area within the next 12 months. Okay. Or I'm looking to buy something somewhere at some time. People are not gonna remember that, and they're all also not gonna take you seriously. So when you've actually done your homework, you have your acquisition criteria, then people are going to take you seriously as an investor. That's done your homework. You identified a market, you identified a thesis, and so that's the first step. Next episode we're gonna talk about. OPM and how to build out your OPM infrastructure. This is the number one thing, the most time sensitive thing. So don't think that you can start going out there and chasing deals, making offers at this point in time. You gotta work on your OPM infrastructure because this lie, it absolutely annoys the hell outta me that find the deal and the money will come is not true at all. All you have to find the money first, okay? Meaning that you need to build the relationships first and then. Go after the deal. So we're gonna talk about that next week's episode. In the meantime, if you found value outta this, please leave some comments below if you think that I could have covered things differently or improved it. Please leave that feedback below Any questions And also if you are looking for, and then also if you are looking for help in transitioning from residential to your first larger commercial deal and break and smash those financial goals at Lightspeed by going into commercial, this is exactly what we help investors do. Be sure to find the link in the description below and book a free one hour consultation with us. This is not going to be a hard sell or anything like that. We are just looking to learn about what your objectives are, and oftentimes we can't help everybody, all right? And whatever we offer is not for everybody either. So the most part we wanna take, that hour, add as much value to you as possible to give you clarity and insight and confidence in charting forward, whether it's with us or without us. So be sure to tune in next week and we'll see you then.