So what I always do for a pro forma is one, I never go off on my own numbers. I always get third-party verification. I am gonna get a manager who's gonna be managing that property, tell me what they think each unit can rent for, whether they whether your neighbor down the street is renting at a higher price or
not.
SPEAKER_00If you're within three feet of me, we're probably talking about real estate, much to my family's chagrin. But here's the thing most people see 7% rates have freeze. I see opportunity. They're waiting for the perfect deal. Well, I've finalized thousands of them, and perfect just doesn't exist. So I talk to operators across every asset class, flippers, multifamily syndicators, note investors, and whatever else is working. No sales pitches allowed, just real lessons from people actually doing it. I'm Ed Matthews, and this is Real Estate Underground. Greetings and salutations, Real Estate Undergrounders. It is Ed Matthews again with The Real Estate Underground. Thank you so much for joining us today and making us a part of your day. Today I am really looking forward to geeking out with our guest. Well, it's not every day we get a PhD on the show, so I'm going to take full advantage of the fact that he's rocking probably a good 50 IQ points more than me. And the the whole idea here is for us to continue to bring you guests and topics that are important as this real estate world changes. And it's changing rapidly, and it will continue to change infinitum. And please keep your comments coming. Please keep sending me emails about questions you have and guests you'd like to hear and topics you'd like to discuss. As always, you can reach me at ed at clarkst.com, cla r k s t.com. And with that, Jason Williams from Ironclad Underwriting, thank you so much for joining us. It's good to see you, my friend.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for having me, Ed.
SPEAKER_00So I'm fired up about this because I if my I usually induce eye rolls when my daughters or my wife are around and I smell real estate on somebody and I totally geek out, whether we're sitting at a restaurant or standing in line at the grocery store or whatever. And so when I get a when I get a bona fide investor who's also has deep knowledge of underwriting and brings a whole bunch of capabilities to the table, I go, okay, cool. This is going to be a cool half an hour. So welcome to the show.
Thank you.
SPEAKER_00So for those folks who haven't discovered you online yet or elsewhere, why don't you tell us a little bit about you and your companies?
SPEAKER_01So I'm Jason Williams. I have a PhD in chemical engineer, and I was an engineer for 15 years, and now I do real estate full-time. I got into large multifamily in about 2017. Been in real estate since 2003, but multifamily since 2017. And while I was like starting my journey in multifamily, I was always trying to learn the numbers. And I never really liked how I'd get a spreadsheet, and half the time the cells were broken and the equations didn't work. So I started developing my own model, and it's really evolved since 2017. So what that's almost nine years now that of evolution. And then I scrapped everything else. So I have a really robust underwriting model for multifamily. And I started people started coming to me saying, Hey, can you show me how to do this or can you show me how to do that? And it's like, okay, I guess I can. I had no intention of it. And then that's how ironclad started is it started as people coming to me for guidance and consulting. And I started turn turned it into ironclad so that now I have a model I can share with people. I have a consulting business where people come to me and let me look at their numbers. And then I also have students too who want to go through a program and actually deep dive into learning how to underwrite.
All right. So let's go with this classes and session, professor. One of the things that you talk about, and I saw this on your website, is the seven red flags. Actually, I think you hid one. I think there's actually eight. No, we're going to talk about that too. But you spend all those years as a chemical engineer and you bought your first rental way back when you said 2003. One of the things that that you hit upon, which we hit upon almost a lot, let's just say a lot. And that is that when we pull the T12 from an offering memorandum and we start to get into the due diligence process, wouldn't just wouldn't you believe that the bank statements don't tie to the T12? And I'm curious about a deal that taught you that that red flag. What was that seller hiding if you remember the actual deal? And how many dollars? What how did that affect the the price of your offer? Because I know it happens more than times than it doesn't, right?
SPEAKER_01So I think it it does happen quite a bit. And generally a T12 is an accrual basis. This is this is what we're bringing in every month. It's like you're gonna accrue taxes and insurance every month. But if you did on a cash basis, it'd be all right, you take out taxes in January. And I live in Texas, so taxes are due January 31st, and then you'd have nothing the rest of the year. So T12 is more like an average for the whole thing. Yeah, you want the income to come in the way it's supposed to, but for the expenses, they're mostly accrued, some are on a cash basis, but almost never does it hit the bank account the way it's supposed to. And sometimes that could be like if it's from a property management who runs the account, they might have a little escrow account where they're paying out the expenses from the revenue and then they dump it into like the owner's account after some of that. So that might be why some of the things aren't lining properly. And so I don't really consider that a huge red flag unless it is significantly different than what the T12 says.
Okay.
SPEAKER_00It's I I learned from a mentor of mine that my first Latin term actually, which was that pro forma means I'm lying to you. And so the one of the things that I've always seen and I see a lot in the offerings that that we see here in the Northeast. So I'm based in Connecticut, that's where we tend to buy. And a lot of times I'll see a rent roll that looks clean but has a rollover cliff behind it. And rent growth only exists in that spreadsheet when in reality those are vacant units and they're projecting, okay, the neighbor 10 doors down or 10 properties down, got this for a similar size property, but their quality is way better than our quality, but I'm still gonna project rent. So, how do you suss that out? What are you looking for?
SPEAKER_01So, what I always do for a pro forma is one, I never go off of my own numbers, I always get third-party verification. I am gonna get a manager who's gonna be managing that property. Tell me what they think each unit can rent for, whether they whether your neighbor down the street is renting at a higher price or not. I want that manager who has experience in that market to know, all right, at this amenity level and this class property, this is what you can expect rent to be. We can push a little higher, but we can expect it to be around here. And so that's what I use for my performance numbers. I never come off of, I never use the straight from the T12. I if I'm just running basic numbers before I get a budget from the property manager, I might budget. All right, I'm gonna at least use the current market rents, but maybe I'll bump it up $50 or whatever. But generally I use the third-party verification. And then you hold your feet to the manager's feet to the fire whenever they're running the asset.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I couldn't agree more. The the the fact is that what we do is very similar in that we run our numbers. We were talking about this, I was talking about this with another guest a few episodes ago, where I'm more interested in learning why not to invest in a real in a deal rather than finding reasons to invest. And when I don't find reasons, not when I am not able to find reasons not to, that's not good news. That sets red lights off in my head. It's okay, what am I missing? Right. One of the things that I learned from another one of my mentors, Charlie Dobbin. Charlie, if you're listening,
hello. The is how purchase your purchase price when you close, how that affects not only your taxes, but also sometimes in a lot of cases, insurance as well. And so I'm curious about your thought on that. How do you approach that?
SPEAKER_01So again, third-party verification. I am gonna reach out to my insurance broker. Like as soon as I start actively and interestingly in going after property, I get a lot of deals all the time. And a lot of times I say, Oh, yeah, I'll run the numbers, but I'm not really interested in them. But the ones I'm actually interested in, I will get an insurance indication from my broker who will pull the comps from all the properties in the area for similar size and vintage and everything. And then he'll give me a range. Maybe for a hundred unit, it'll be like, all right, you're gonna have a range from 90,000 to 120,000 a year or whatever. And I'll use the higher end. So, really, he's going off of like replacement costs. What would happen if one of the buildings burns down and how much is it gonna be to replace it? So the purchase price really isn't in that at all. But you have to account for purchase price because your lender who requires insurance wants to make sure that they're gonna at least get their money back if the whole thing decides to burn up. So it does come into effect, and but I let the insurance guy take care of that for me right off the bat. Taxes, on the other hand, Texas is a weird state. We're a non-disclosure state where we don't have to disclose what our purchase price is. And so a lot of times in Texas, they reassess every single property every January. They send out your all right in March, they'll say, All right, this is what we think you your property is valued at. And then you can protest it or you can accept it. If you accept it, you do nothing, and then you owe the taxes for it the following January. If you protest it before May, there's a date in May, and you'll hear something back like the end of July. I have another third party, I have a tax advisor who all he does is try to bring my taxes down, and he saves me like 20,000. He saved me 20,000 one year, 11,000 this year, and then I have to pay him a fraction of what I would have paid overall. So again, third parties is what you want in that regard.
SPEAKER_00So Connecticut and most and all of New England, I believe, much to my chagrin, are is a disclosure state. So they reassess typically every two years, depends on the state, but here in Connecticut, it's every couple of years. And the the thing that I see a lot of investors get dinged on and get surprised on, which can be a huge problem, is the the property is assessed and appraised at, let's say, a million dollars, but it was that was done three, four years ago. And you bought the property at 1.5 million because the the previous owner did a good job. They held down CapEx, they held down their overall expenses, and and were able to significantly increase rent. So NOI went up and thus the value went up significantly in a fairly short period of time. And you buy that property, and the following year you get whacked with a gigantic increase in taxes. That's mill rate didn't change that much. What what changed is the NOI and the value, and when that deal gets processed through the county and then ultimately through Department of Revenue, they are through the county and then through property taxes, you get a huge tax bill that you weren't expecting. And I've seen more than one deal, more than one investor get get bit on on something like that.
SPEAKER_01So in Texas, suppose you you're buying a property for $10 million, it's worth $10 million. And a while says it's $10 million, and the tax value is three and a half million. Okay. So what will the county will do first? They'll say, Well, I see there's a loan on this property for $8 million. So we're gonna say you bought this for $8 million. So guess what? Right off the bat, they more than doubled your taxes, but it's still less than what you would have paid if you disclosed, yeah, I bought it for $10 million. Jokes on you. But then that's why I hired my tax advisors, because then they'll go in and they'll say, All right, look at all these other properties. This value should be lower because one, they go through the rent roll in T12 and everything, but they also compare it to all the other properties in the vicinity. Because if they're evaluating one at say 100% and one at 40%, then they need to start bringing everything back up to 100%. And there's some actual tax law precedents in the Houston area where they actually had to do that, and so that's why you have guys fighting for you because I I'm not gonna be able to do that on my own.
SPEAKER_00That end, there's only so many things you can do in the day and do them well, right? So especially if so, these tax consultants in your part of the world are are they paid on an hourly project basis? Are they
paid on a percentage of what they save you? How does that work?
SPEAKER_01So on my residential stuff, they get paid half of what they save me. If they don't save me anything, they don't get paid. For the large multifamily, I think it's 15% or 35%. I forget, I think it's 15% of what they save me. So so when they save me eleven thousand dollars, I owe them like sixteen hundred.
SPEAKER_00Money well spent.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, right on. So you also have an interesting perspective on debt. And I'd like you, I'd like you to talk about your position on agency debt.
And then also I'd like you to walk through when you're doing when you're looking at deals, whether you're underwriting for yourself or for clients, what does an ideal debt stack look like these days?
SPEAKER_01So I invest in a small town two hours northwest of DFW, and I've tried agency debt for purchases, I've tried agency debt for refines, and every single time agency has fallen through for me. So yeah, you need like your agency card where you have three years of experience with multifamily, but then they start saying, Oh, you need three years of experience multifamily in this specific market. It's like, would I have it? And DFW is like, yeah, DFW is not the same, and so they shot us down for that. They shot us down, it's a small value, a small balance loan in a very small market, so we we're not even gonna lend that year. We already maxed out our capacity on that, so try again next year. It's like seriously, so I have a better case in my mouth for agency in that regard, and I no longer chase it because it's just gonna be set up for uh a letdown. I know people who've actually got agency, got through it, and then at the 11th hour, agency pulled the plug and say, No, we're not gonna fund this. And so they left those people, I think it was on a purchase high and dry, and so put those people in a bad shape. And so I no longer chase agency. Agency, yeah, it has better interest rates, sometimes it has better terms. You have different loan companies you have to do where you have to keep a certain level of maintenance up, but you're gonna have that with any type of loan, bridge loan, they'll have some, they'll want to see what your capex budget is, and then they'll approve it. Bank loans, they're gonna look at it and they're gonna see what your capex budget is and make sure that you do it per schedule you say you're gonna do it. So all the lenders are gonna have those same types of loan covenants, but agency, I think, goes in and inspects every year, whereas like a bank will inspect as you do the projects.
SPEAKER_00So let's talk about doing the projects in CapEx. I I know you have some pretty strong opinions on what what budgets
in CapEx need to look like. When you're underwriting for a client, say for instance, what are you recommending they keep as a CapEx uh specifically your contingencies?
SPEAKER_01So again, third parties, after you do your due diligence, you're gonna want to get the reports from the third parties on what they think needs to be happened to bring up your units to a certain standard, any deferred maintenance, plumbing. Yeah, you're gonna scope all your lines, get that budget from the plumber, and then for your plumbing, you're gonna multiply that number by three and sometimes four because every single property I've had from a 1950s build up to early 2000s has had major plumbing issues, and so you're gonna want to set aside plenty of money for plumbing. So literally take the number the plumber gives you and multiply it by four for that for the plumbing part. Yes.
SPEAKER_00Um yeah, I once engineering. I'm sorry, I once had I bought a property in here in the New England area and passed inspection. And we scoped. I didn't see the video, but I was I was I got the results of the report that the plumbing was scoped, and a year and a half later the the central sewer line basically disintegrated. And what would have been a five or ten thousand dollar fix when I bought the place was a forty-four thousand dollar fix. And this was just a small 10-unit building, right? It was a disaster of what happened. And I hear you on contingency.
SPEAKER_01You're preaching to the choir so on the plumbing, even if you saw the videos, I have videos and I can't really tell anything from them. I'm not trained for them, it all looks the same to me. But if you if an experienced plumber looks at it, he might say, Oh, look, there's a crack in that pipe. It's like, how do you see a crack? Always a black and white picture, and you just it doesn't look like anything. But I had a plumbing issue where we had to. This isn't a 72 unit, we had to house people in a hotel or whatever for two weeks while they fixed the plumbing on that. They had to go into the bottom floor and tear up the flooring on them while they replaced the drain, and that that sucked. And then the same property, another issue was a gas leak. We didn't even know about the gas leak. We just had the gas company out there detecting and say, Oh, we have a gas leak here. This was Thursday before Easter, so right before Good Friday. So we basically had our gas shut off from Thursday to Monday or Tuesday. All Easter weekend, nobody had heat, nobody can cook, nobody could do their laundry on site. And so that was a horrible experience. And that that fix was like a 40k fix. And you don't even inspect gas lines, but yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's yeah, contingencies are important. Typically, we'll keep uh minimum six months operating costs, plus it plus
it at least a uh we add 10 points minimum to every project in terms of rehab, just to make sure. And larger prior projects where we're where it's like a C minus type property can be as high as 20% because you just don't know what you don't know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, for for reserves, I will do I typically like to do six months of operating expenses and debt service. Depends on the property. Sometimes I might drop it down to three if you're comfortable with it. It's all about risk tolerance. So I'll advise my clients say, hey, what kind of reserves do you want? Right now, I have it for three months. Do you want it for six months? During COVID, you had to have 12. Months and you actually had to escrow that. And then at the end of the 12 months, you got it back. But that was during COVID. That's not really a requirement, a lender requirement anymore.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we used to carry three months, and the pandemic taught me that we didn't have enough reserves. And so that's why I doubled it. And I haven't come across a lender who required 12 months, but they definitely like it that we do six automatically right out of the box.
SPEAKER_01So during COVID was the only time that I I've heard of lenders requiring 12 months. And I think agency required that. But since you raised the money and you and they held it for 12 months, 12 months and a day, you got it back.
SPEAKER_00And interesting. Okay. Time for our new segment, Questions from the Underground. One real problem, answer straight, no filler, and no theory.
I ran into an experienced investor I've known here in Connecticut for a bunch of years, and he asked me if it's time to cycle back to cash flow deals or to keep riding the appreciation wave. I told him he was out of his mind. It's always a cash flow play. Appreciation is just the cherry on top. It's not the basis of a business plan. Hold a property for 10 years or more, and appreciation is, without a doubt, a proven way to build wealth, but make it your primary deal driver, and you've built yourself a house of cards. The moment the economy catches a cold, you'll be under a ton of financial pressure, basically overnight, and it's brain damage you don't need. In 2011, I bought a four-family at 11 Clark Street in East Hartford, Connecticut, for $99,000. It cash flowed pretty much from day one. We hit singles every month. That's the goal. Over time, those singles turn into doubles because rents went up a little bit, and we did a good job of managing expenses, so the margin began to grow. The home run came in 2024 when we sold it for $410,000. An income property is worth the cash flow it produces. When rates go up, values go down. So you only buy at the number your business model is predictably profitable. Pay more than that, you're not running a business, you're gambling. It has to cash flow as close to day one as humanly possible. If the building needs a renovation, that goes into your project plan. But once you start renting, every unit has to make money. Buy it with that margin, put it in long-term debt, and the whole business comes down to two things: your expenses and occupancy. So you do three things. You source your expenses as often as you reasonably can. You serve your residents well so they stay. And when a unit opens up, you ask your residents for a referral. Here's your homework. Pull your trailing three months. Does the building cash flow? Does each unit individually cash flow? Yes to both. You're on the right track. If not, you have some work to do and you break it down unit by unit. That's questions from the underground this week. If you're stuck on something, send it to me and I'll take a swing at it on an upcoming show. So let's let's get into the final five. I'm curious, I'm always curious about entrepreneurs and leaders and how they approach their
weeks, right? And like we were talking about before we hit the record button, if you decided, you know what, I'm gonna go hit golf balls this week and you didn't show up on Monday, financially, you run very successful businesses, I'm sure you'd be just fine. Excuse me, I'm sure you'd be just fine. And so that tells me that the reason we're recording here on a Wednesday, next Monday, you're gonna show up to work all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed again, tells me that you're there for a different reason, right? And I look at that as purpose. What gets you out of bed on Monday morning?
SPEAKER_01So a couple things. The reason why we're doing the whole real estate and getting into multifamily and being entrepreneurs is my wife and I have four kids, three daughters and a son. And our son is 16, he's profoundly autistic. He has maybe 150 words, he's still in diapers, he goes to ABA therapy 30 hours a week, and then goes to school for 20 minutes a day so that the school can get their money for having an autistic kid, even though they really don't do anything. But my wife and I want the only thing our our daughters to worry about is loving our son is named Anson, and not have to worry about him financially. How are they going to be able to afford his services that he needs? We've tried state services before, and what it ended up doing was really limiting us on how much income we can make. And they also provided subpar, I guess, services, and it actually got to a point where it's like they said he no longer required the services. So not understanding how, but I think the state is just looking for any way to kick people off, and so we didn't want to be dependent on the state, and we don't want to be limited on how much income we can make. So we want our girls to be able to again love him and advocate for him, but not have to worry financially for him, and live on their terms, right?
SPEAKER_00And your terms right now, that's awesome. Well, that's amazing. So I'm always interested in the mentors and the help you've had along the way, and I'm curious about the best advice
you ever got. And who was the person that gave it to you?
SPEAKER_01So my mentors, I got into real estate following my dad, and my wife's grandparents were in real estate since the 70s. So we looked at them when we first started out, but when we got into multifamily, we met Joe Fairless, and he's been our mentor ever since.
SPEAKER_00We worked with a bunch of episodes ago.
SPEAKER_01We worked with coach Trevor McGregor, who's also Joe Fairless's coach. So though that's who we surround ourselves with. And I don't know where I first heard this, but the advice that I always give people is don't take advice from someone who's not where you want to be or where you want to go or doing what you want to do. Because when I had a W-2 and I was an engineer and people heard that I was in real estate, they said, Oh, you should sell that, and blah, blah, blah, real estate's for suckers and stuff like that. And if I listened to them, who one never owned any real estate other than their primary residence, I wouldn't be where I am today. And so it's like, I'm not gonna listen to you. You can talk who you want, I'm not even gonna pay attention to you. And so that's why I tell people is like, only take advice from someone who's doing what you want to do or where you want to be.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I was once told never hire a financial planner who doesn't drive a car nicer than yours. And so I couldn't agree more. Yeah. The fact is that we're all reading, we're all reading from a similar, the same book, right? And you know, you may be a few chapters ahead of me, I may be a few chapters ahead of somebody else. I want to know what you know. I don't want to know, yeah, the person who's a few chapters behind me can add value to the conversation, but the person I'm really gonna learn from is the person who's five chapters ahead of me, right? Couldn't agree more, couldn't agree more. Speaking of that, yeah, I'm curious about how you take in information. What books are on your nightstand? What book is on your nightstand, either physically or on your iPhone?
SPEAKER_01So I've actually
alluded to this the entire conversation where I have third parties, and one of my favorite books is Who Not How Dan Sul by Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy. And I I enjoy all of Dan Sullivan's books, Ben Hardy's books, but that one really sticks out because that's what my wife and I are strongly believe in. She stays in her lane, I stay in my lane. We both work on our superpowers, we don't work on our weaknesses and become mediocre at everything. And if we are lacking in a certain area, we partner with somebody or hire it out or just work with them. But that's how we do it. So do not how I totally agree.
SPEAKER_00It's the the mantra here is okay, we want to do something, whatever that is, because we have multiple businesses here as well. And my first question to the team is okay, point to the human being who owns that because it ain't me. I don't have time, right?
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00And that's the thing is, and one of the things that you know, books like Dan Sulvan's book, Michael Gerber's book, the EMyth, the various versions of it, there's actually a pretty good real estate version of it. But they all talk about looking at creating systems, right? And then using oper, you know, creating some form of operational leverage where you are identifying and understanding the process, input, output, and everything that happens in between, and then building a system around it. And I actually just wrote a blog article about this in terms of how we do it. It takes we look at every process. We jokingly call it the what's stressing Ed out, at least that's what I call it, because it's we're looking at processes. And if it's frustrating us for any reason, we're looking at it from uh what are the inputs, what are the outputs, what happens every step of the way, who owns that? And there's a difference between somebody who's operating a process and somebody who owns a process, right? The operator is just executing check boxes, right? Checklists. I do this and this. The owner says there's actually a better way to do this, there's a faster way to do this. And and so that's those are the people and the things that I'm always looking for. And I think I learned that in Dan's book. But the the the idea is to have system owners, not just babysitters, right?
SPEAKER_01And the and that's that's hard to find is finding someone who wants to take ownership. I've gone through so many people, and everybody just wants to be an employee. They don't want to take responsibility for anything, and it's super frustrating.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and but here's the thing, and we had Nick Huber on a while ago, and he said something that I found very interesting and profound when in how he runs his businesses. His goal, he comes at it from a different perspective and looks at it as my job is to create a system that an average human being can succeed at. Right. And I say, okay, that's an awesome place to start. He's 100% right. He's tremendously successful, so it's obviously working for him. But the fact is that I also think what you and I are talking about is really important in that you need someone who's going to leave it better than they found it. Whether that is removing steps, removing moving parts in any way, shape, or form, enabling it using a technology. I'm a former Silicon Valley guy. I'm a, I'm a I'll automate anything if I can figure it out just for the intellectual stimulation, but even the uh the fact that it's it allows us tech is a force multiplier, it can be when it's used right. But yeah, no, that is, I couldn't agree more with the approach. I'm also curious about the lessons we learned along the way. And I I, as I've said on previous shows, I
really believe that we learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes. And so I'm curious about a decision you had way back as you look back, knowing what you know now. What's a decision or a mistake that you made along the way that you look back and go, man, if I had that to do over, here's what I would do. How would what was it and how would you handle it today?
SPEAKER_01So we're actually in the middle of this one. We're doing we're developing a mobile home community in central Texas. Everything that we looked at looked good. The zoning was right. It's outside of city limits, but there's a pre-annexation agreement. And yeah, the zoning's for mobile home community or mobile homes. So we're good to go. We bought this land and we're about to break ground, and then all of a sudden we get to the city, and this is oh no, the zoning's wrong. Is that but it's for mobile homes? It's like, yeah, it's 18 acres, and you can put a single mobile home on there, and that would suffice, but you're wanting to put 100 on there, and so you can't have more than one on this property. It's like, what the hell? And so now we're working with the city on the pre-annexation agreement to allow us to instead of having to re-plat every single plot or every single lot that we're gonna put a home on, we keep it as a single plat, and all the homes can stay on it. It's like going from R2 to an R3 zoning, so it's not a huge change, but it is something that we have to fight, and we've been fighting for it for over a year, and so that's a whole year of costs that we weren't expecting to incur of debt service for a whole year that we weren't expecting to incur. We're expecting to get a construction loan and break ground, and that didn't happen. So that that is I would deep dive further into what the actual zoning is. Our engineer should have also caught it along the way, and they missed it. So a lot of people missed it, and we're trying to get it cleaned up. It's just getting timely and costly, and I would have rather not have done this if I knew it was gonna happen.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but you're way smarter today than you were a year ago, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and and and also is we've never done mobile homes, we've never done a development. So it's like we have a partner who does mobile homes, we had a partner who does development, and so we have this Venn diagram of wherever we're in the middle of it, and so that's how we come together.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, right on. I hope that I hope you're able to navigate that because dealing with bureaucrats and planning and zoning people, they're only doing their job, I get it, but man, that is strat inducing.
SPEAKER_01So I think they are amending our pre-annexation agreement to a little to change the zoning so that we don't have to do anything else. But we're not gonna find out until October's meeting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Only government time.
SPEAKER_01So this isn't this is like September now, because I think this will be aired probably after I get the results back from the meeting, just to let you know the timeline for your audience.
SPEAKER_00So we're recording on September 9th, and this is probably gonna air sometime in late October, early November. So hopefully uh you can send me an email and let me know that this got approved and I can amend our conversation here.
SPEAKER_01All right.
SPEAKER_00Last but certainly not least, how do you define success in your lo in your life?
SPEAKER_01And you hear all the success success is a journey,
not a destination type thing. I believe that, but also when I left my W-2, I was able to go on a two-week film on excursion with my daughter with the scouts, and I didn't have to ask my boss for time off, I didn't have to use vacation, I just up and left, and every year we pull our kids out of school, we drive down to Salt or up to Salt Lake City for the best ever conference, which is Joe Fairless's conference, and we just take them out of school and we take everybody up there for a week, everyone has a good time. We go hit the national parks up there, Zion Marches, drive through Moab and all that. It's fun, and so Bryce Canyon. So we do all that, we don't even have to ask anybody for any time off. We tell the school, our kids are in private school saying, Hey, we're taking them out. I don't haven't seen any truancy issues with too many uh missed days of school with the private schools, so don't have to worry about that. So that that is what I think of success. So the time freedom to be able to do whatever I want with my family. When my kids have events at the school, I can go up there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, a very close friend of mine is a council president up in the here in the Northeast and the with the Boy Scouts of America. And it's a I think it's fundamentally changed his life in terms of his experience as a scout as well as his experiencing mentoring others. It's it's a tremendous organization. If if folks were actually let me take that back. So when you're not talking about real estate, what do you like to do for fun other than what you just described?
SPEAKER_01I am involved in the scouts.
All my daughters are in scouts since they started allowing girls into the scouts a few years ago. We tried other programs, scout-like programs, and they all were eh. And so Boy Scouts is good. My daughter, my oldest daughter, is an Eagle Scout. I'm an Eagle Scout. My dad was an Eagle Scout, so she's the third generation in that. So she's really proud of that.
unknownI'm sure.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. But I also as I I've since I've discovered AI and what AI can actually do. I've I do a lot of creating systems and automations, and anything that gets left to the wayside or put on the back burner, I'd now get it automated so that it's not forgotten about. And so I have all I was looking today. I have 89 projects and 24 automations going all the time. And so that's what I'm doing with AI. So that that's fun.
SPEAKER_00And then so we're gonna do another show where you and I geek out on AI because I'm a similar personality. We automate, if we do it twice, we're gonna automate it, we're gonna find a way to automate it. So if people want to learn more about you, ironclad, your courses, uh, your consulting, what's the best way to get in touch?
So I'm on LinkedIn. Jason L Williams PhD, I think is my name. Also, I ironcladunderwriting.com is my website. I have my online model there. You can sign up to be a beta tester on ironcladunderwriting.com forward slash beta tester. I have a lot of free resources there you can access if you want to learn more about underwriting. I have a podcast as well. You can listen to my podcasts. I think I have almost 70 episodes that go out weekly. So I've been doing it for a little over a year now. And it's all my my partner and I all we do is talk about underwriting and we talk about different aspects. A lot of things that you were and I were talking about, we go into depth on in on my podcast. So that was pretty good. And so, yeah, really, that's how you can get hold of me. Ironcladunderwriting.com has has everything that you need.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. Jason Williams, thank you so much for joining us. I really enjoyed this conversation. This is one of those conversations where I wish we had two hours because I think we could probably get pretty deep into some of the stuff that we were talking about. Continued good fortune, and uh let me know how you make out with planning and zoning.
SPEAKER_01I will. Cool.