Dead Equity: The Silent Portfolio Killer Most Wisconsin Investors Ignore

In this episode of The Wisconsin Investor Podcast, Corey Reyment breaks down a real conversation with a Wisconsin landlord whose duplex doubled in value from $165,000 to $340,000. On paper, it looked like a win.

But when they calculated the actual return on equity, the property was only producing 2.8%.

That is what we call dead equity.

This episode explores how appreciation can quietly turn into underperforming capital, and why many small investors focus on value growth, door count, or cash flow while ignoring how hard their equity is actually working.

Corey walks through:

• How to calculate return on equity step by step
 • Why a rental property can become an anchor instead of an asset
 • The opportunity cost of leaving large amounts of equity untouched
 • 1031 exchanges and portfolio repositioning strategies
 • Cash out refinancing and HELOC options in Wisconsin
 • When it makes sense to recycle capital and when it does not
 • How tax strategy and bonus depreciation factor into real returns

If you own rental property in Wisconsin, especially single-family homes, duplexes, or small multifamily, this episode will challenge how you think about portfolio growth.

Serious investors do not just accumulate properties. They reposition equity strategically.

If you want to build long-term wealth in Wisconsin real estate, you cannot afford to ignore dead equity.

For off-market opportunities and investor resources, visit WisconsinDiscountProperties.com.

Transcript

A Duplex Win That Isn’t Winning

Speaker 0:39

Hey everybody, Corey Reyment here, your host of today's Wisconsin Investor Podcast. Today, uh I'm gonna share you guys with a little story with you guys. I had a conversation recently with a landlord here in Wisconsin, and he bought a duplex uh for $165,000 in 2017. Today he said it's worth about $340,000. And he was proud of that. I mean, that thing pretty much overdoubled right in value. Um, but when we actually broke down his numbers, he was making 2.8% on his equity. 2.8%. So, I mean, I know some banks right now that will pay more than 2.8% uh with some high yield savings accounts. So he had almost $200,000 sitting inside that property and it was barely working for him. The crazy part, he thought he was crushing it. So today we're talking about something most small investors never calculate return on equity. And we're gonna cover a few more things in this episode, but most importantly, you know, when your rental property stops being an asset and starts becoming an anchor, we're gonna talk a little bit about that today. Uh I've had the same thing happen to me. And, you know, those of you out there that have been in this game for a little while, this is very, very relevant for us today. And so those of you guys who are just getting started in real estate investing, I want to encourage you guys to hang on and listen to this episode yet. Because if you don't have your first property yet, or maybe you just bought a few, uh, maybe you're just flipping right now and you don't have anything for long-term buy and hold yet, but it's something you want to do. This is something that we're hopefully going to be able to plant a seed in your head for future years and your future investment strategy. So here's the psychological trap. Okay, most investors measure success by a few things. One, purchase price versus current value, similar to what I just talked about in the intro here, monthly cash flow or how many doors they own. But a lot of professionals, so if you get up into the institutional areas, you know, they're asking this you know, if I had this equity in cash today, would I buy this property again? So let me reiterate that. If I had this equity in cash today, would I buy this property again? And this is a question that changes everything because once a property appreciates, you're no longer investing the original down payment, you're investing in your equity. And the equity has opportunity cost. All right, so let's slow it down a little bit. There's a few different ways properties can create returns. Okay, so cash flow, appreciation, and debt pay down. The other one that a lot of people don't factor in, that I do factor in into my stuff, is the tax breaks. So today we're gonna talk a little bit about that as well. Bear with me here. But the tax breaks is kind of a hidden one that a lot of people don't um think about. Okay, and so if you have a cash machine right now, so you have a great W-2 job, um, you're flipping a bunch of properties and you're creating a lot of cash, you're gonna be taxed at a pretty high rate. Using buy and hold real estate, and with the with some of the tax law changes that got pushed through again last year, there's this eighth wonder of the world called bonus depreciation. And we have several other episodes where we talk about it, but I do want to bring it up here because I think this is an important factor when you guys are looking at some of this stuff, and it's gonna relate to this topic today. All right. Uh, quick example for you, and I'm just gonna hopefully, if you're not familiar with this at all, let's say you are the high income earner in your family, you're making, you know, let's say $300,000 a year, flipping, or in your W-2 or whatever the case is, right? And you have a spouse who maybe stays home. This is probably the most common way I see this work is your spouse becomes a real estate professional and manages your properties. They log 875 hours of activity in the real estate management business, can't be like looking up properties and making offers and that kind of thing. All right. And uh talk to your accountant about this. If your accountant doesn't know anything about it, get a different accountant. All right. But then what happens, let's say you buy a million dollars of property in a year, and that's your cost basis. The math usually works out that you could wipe out your entire W-2 income from your federal taxes. So if you're taxed at 40% or a blended rate, let's say it's a blended rate of 30% because our tax system is bracketed. Um, the math on that, on $300,000 at 30%, you're paying $90,000 in income tax to the feds. You can now basically keep $90,000 while buying properties that either cash flow, get appreciation, or do debt pay down, or some combination of all three of those things. Okay, so that's kind of the fourth way a lot of these bring you a return. Now, appreciation is one of them. It slows down over time. Debt pay down, it becomes less meaningful relative to your equity. So, what really matters long term, one of the key factors a lot of people are looking at is cash flow relative to equity. Okay, so it's a little ratio. So here's an example. All right, you buy single family rental, $150,000 purchase price. You do it the old-fashioned way, not the Burr way, but you put $30,000 down on that property, okay, 20%. Let's fast forward six years. Now that property is $280,000, let's say you owe $110,000. That means you have an equity. Your equity amount is $170,000 of equity. Okay, so you did good, right? And if you're looking at it as the appreciation, then the debt pay down and creating that wealth cone that I've talked about on a lot of episodes, you're doing well on creating the wealth cone. Let's say this property cash flow is net in your pocket after all expenses, $400 a month. Okay, so that's $4,800 per year. What you do is you do a little equation. You take your $4,800 divided by the $170,000 of equity that you have, and you're getting a 2.8% return on your equity. So here's the question: ask yourself this would you invest $170,000 today to make $4,800 a year? That is the real question. Okay. Now I had this same exact question last year. I was looking at some of my properties, and we're gonna talk about some of the reasons why you may want to, you know, uh think about how to better utilize your equity. But one of the things that I I looked at was I had a few properties that were paid off, and I did the same thing, and I looked at like, what am I actually netting on these properties every single year? And some of it really wasn't that significant. Now, some years you're gonna have some big repairs, and so you may want to look at this over a context of several years and kind of take an average maybe of the net income that you made on the property. But I looked at uh I think I had three or four different properties that I looked at, and they were starter properties, right? So if you're out there and you're listening to this, I'm a big fan of just pick-up deals, just get assets under your belt and start owning assets. I'm not saying you got to do it in a war zone per se. You know, luckily in a lot of areas in Wisconsin, we don't have those. Milwaukee is probably the one with the most war zone areas, we would call it. A lot of other places, our worst is like a class C style. So just pick up properties and just start adding to them because then you can do this game that we're talking about today, where eventually you're gonna have equity that you can then think about what to do with that equity, which is a fun position to be in. So this is a really fun topic to talk about because it's it's great when you're in a position where you have some equity that you can actually mess around with. And so I looked at several of my properties and I ran the same equation and I thought, goodness gracious, like A, the properties that I had all this equity in were like class C. They're like, meh. You know, tenants were A, they were okay. Um, they weren't the best. And the cash flow that I was bringing in really was not performing at the number that I thought it should have performed at for the amount of equity I had. And I and I looked at it, and this is last year, about this time, you could take, say, any amount of money and you could put it into a high yield savings account, and you were getting like 5%, 4.75% interest on that. And so when I looked at that, I said, geez, if I could do something with this equity, I'm gonna make more putting it even just into a high yield savings account right now than what I'm making on this property, right? So that was something to consider. And so a lot of times people think like, oh, I want to get all my properties paid off and I want to own them free and clear and everything else. And that's great. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do that. Some people, there's certain reasons you do that. I know guys in my network, they've got 70 you know paid-off rentals. They're living a very good life, okay? Or what they want, they want simple and they want no stress. They have a very, very good life, but they are not maximizing the equity that they could be. You know, they could have they could probably double or triple the cash flow that they have just by utilizing some of these techniques, okay? Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about Wisconsin here and what's actually happening here. So over the last five to seven years at a lot of the Wisconsin markets, you know, we've we've seen massive appreciation in entry-level housing, which is kind of unique for Wisconsin. Typically, we're we're in that mid-portion, like we don't see a lot of really high ups and we don't get a lot of really low big lows, we'll get the little bumps up and down. All right. But we saw some pretty massive appreciation. I think 20 during COVID years, we saw like 20, 25% appreciation in some markets, which is just insane for Wisconsin. Um we had rent increases, but you know, not always proportionally to the appreciation. We got some older single family rentals that now have a lot of inflated equity. Uh, we saw cap rates on the commercial side of stuff really compress. You used to be able to buy stuff at like 10 caps in the multifamily space when I first started. Now, these were value add pickups, but I mean, there's still maybe some of those deals out there. But I mean, that was more commonplace back then. You were underwriting deals at nine, ten caps, and we're not seeing that now unless you're out in the sticks somewhere with, you know, a lot of rural stuff. So here's a shift. You know, what we're seeing right now, we're starting to see more smaller multifamily opportunities coming up. So, in fact, the week that I'm recording this on our buyer's list at Wisconsin Discount properties, we have two multifamily deals out to the market right now. Uh, we're seeing more value add deals coming back. We're seeing longer days on the market in some submarkets, but even that's this time of year starting to change again. Um, we're seeing on the buy side, so if you're in acquisition mode, you're getting more negotiating power. Sellers are understanding, hey, those days of 30 offers on my property, if I list it and go in tens of thousands of dollars over asking, are gone. It's now it's gonna sit for a little while, you're gonna have some negotiations, there's gonna be some inspections, it's back to, I would say, more of a buyer market is what we're seeing right now. And that for us creates opportunity, right? I mean, so on both sides, you know, when the market was crazy hot, it also created opportunity because you could buy something, and by the time you were done flipping it, you know, it took you four, it looked actually like the longer it took you to flip it, the more money you made because the the cost of your holding cost actually was less than what the market was appreciating. So it was kind of a crazy time. But you don't know when that's gonna end, right? We saw like as soon as that ended, it boom, it turned off like crazy when interest rates went up. Um now here's here's the thing. Like, if you can take the stuff you're like, do this equation, and if you can take the stuff you're getting, you know, 3% return on your equity, and now you can turn that into say 7 and 9% return on your equity, you know, you're not just improving, you're really compounding so much faster. And this is how investors go from four units to 20 units. They're recycling that capital and they're putting it to work in better, more effective returns on that money. So they're not saving more money. It's not like you're gonna save up a bunch more cash. You're just reallocating the equity that you already have that you built over time. So let's go, we're gonna go into a couple different strategies here. Okay. So, how do we do this, right? Let's get into some of the basics here. Number one, you can do the strategic 1031 exchange. So if you're not familiar with the 1031 exchange, basically what that is, is you sell a property and you have a gain on that property. Typically, you're gonna be taxed on that gain. Plus, if you've taken depreciation, you're gonna pay back that depreciation at this time. Okay. And you do this 1031 exchange, you get to offset those gains and you get to basically kick the can down the road. Okay, so you don't pay any tax on the gain, but you do have to put it into another property. So I'm going through this right now. The one thing I forgot about with the 1031, and I'm being reminded, and then I'm in the middle of it right now, is if you do sell a property, you have to buy something of equal or greater value. So the property in Florida we sold, we sold it for 950,000. I was gonna put that into some land uh that we could eventually maybe build on for a family residence, or just in, you know, let it appreciate and um and maybe do some other cool things with it. And the land is 675,000. I was like, oh, sweet, I got all this equity. I'm gonna repurpose the equity because I'm not getting the return on that equity on the Florida property like I thought I would get or like I want to get. So I'll put it over here. It's a different use. It maybe isn't, you know, in what we're talking about, return on equity, maybe not the best return on equity, but it serves other purposes for me. And then I realized, like, ooh, I gotta come up with another basically $275,000 of property to buy so that I can effectively do this 1031 exchange. All right. So you don't have to go necessarily like bigger, you don't have to take like, you know, a single family home, sell it and buy a big multifamily. Okay. You can also just sell and get into a better class of products. Okay. So for example, one of the uh class C, I would say, properties I sold last year, I basically took that equity in that property, sold that one off, and I converted it into a side-by-side duplex. So same, you know, it really wasn't a great improvement in overall, I would say, cash flow or anything like that, but I did get into a better property, easier property to manage, easier property to sell in the future. Probably going to appreciate at a little bit better rate than what that upper lower duplex was getting. Okay. It could also look like, say, you got three single family homes kind of scattered around. Maybe you sell the three and you 1031 into maybe one eight unit. All right, and reduce some of that management complexity, some of the operational efficiency increases you want to see. Um, you know, like it's it could could get rid of some of those C classers and move up. I know this is a thing I see a lot of experienced investors doing. They start, like I said, they acquire assets, just chew them up, eat them up, they get them under their belt, and then at some point they trade up. Basically, is is you know, think of Monopoly. You got the single family house, you trade up to the hotel. That's what they're doing in a lot of these 1031 uh situations. All right. Sometimes you don't sell. So here's a story on one of those properties I was telling you guys about that I evaluated last year. I did a cash out refinance on it. And I had a pretty good rate from a credit union. And so we talk a lot about lending options here in Wisconsin. We're very blessed, you guys. If you're not working with community banks right now, you are missing out on a really big opportunity to be a lot more competitive. The problem with a lot of the community banks, though, we don't discuss as much, is they're a little bit higher rate than what you could get at a credit union. The problem with credit unions is they typically want to see stabilized properties. So they're not as big into like the value add game as what a lot of these community banks are willing to do. Their tolerance for that is not nearly as great as a tolerance for what the uh community banks have. Okay, but they do have better rates. And so I got some pretty competitive rates from one of the local credit units, Covantage, last year or a year before, even it was. I can't even remember now. But basically, I took two of those duplexes that had a ton of equity in that wasn't, I wasn't really getting much out of it. I pulled cash out, and then I went and deployed that into a uh hard money lender here who had a fund. And I was getting, I think, 10% on the money at that point. And so I looked at it, I said, okay, even if I break even over here now on this equity that I pulled out, I was getting about a four percent basically return on my equity. It was probably lower than that now that I think about it. It might have been in the it might have been around the two and a half mark as I'm doing the math mentally in my head here. And I had them paid off, right? And so I said, you know what? I'm gonna pull this equity out. I'll pay that. I think I was paying now on my rate, I got like high fives from the credit union. And so maybe low sixes. And I went and I took that equity and I traded up. So now I'm paying that six percent off, but I'm getting 10% on that equity. The other piece to that, too, from a liability standpoint, when you have paid off properties, you're a bigger target for lawsuits. And so I don't like having a lot of paid-off properties. I know that's different than uh some other people would maybe advise you, but for me, that creates a big bullseye the more equity you have. And so I like to have uh be able to pull out a good chunk of the equity when I can and when it makes sense. Okay. So you can pull that out, you know, you can you can deploy it into a stronger deal, you can put it into some investments. The cool part when you pull it out is it's tax-free because it's a loan. So again, it's all about tax savings. It's not what you make, it's what you keep, right? And so if you're always selling properties too and you're not 1031 and doing some of these strategies, you're gonna lose a big chunk of that equity to taxes. All right. So this works really well if your property is still gonna cash flow when you do it. You gotta still run your analysis on that. Um you gotta you know, get debt terms that make sense. Again, if you have a stabilized property, though, beautiful thing is you can shop that around to a bunch of people. And don't just look at rate. Here's some more advice for you guys. This is a little tidbit. Even if you get a great rate, I'm seeing some DSCR lenders do this. They're offering some really attractive rates. And then when you get into the nitty-gritty and you go to sign your loan paperwork, they're slamming you with fees, and your prepayment penalties are astronomical on some of that stuff. So, what that means is if you say in three years decide I want to sell this property, or you refinance another property and you pull a bunch of equity and you want to pay this one off for whatever reason, they're gonna hit you with some pretty big penalties for doing that. And so be aware of those things. When you're shopping loans, you've got time most of the time when you're in a good position like this, when you have equity. So you can pit these guys against each other, get the best rates, get the best terms, get the best points and fees, no prepayment penalties, all those types of things. That's where a lot of that's gonna make more sense. Um and then the last strategy I'm gonna talk about today is pruning your portfolio. So this is an underrated one. Um, you know, everybody who's got a decent portfolio has a property or two or more that's a problem property, it might be a management heavy property, or just straight up low performing property. And so, you know, if you ask yourself, if I wouldn't buy this today, why am I holding on to this? And big institutional investors do this all the time. They prune, they cut, they get rid of stuff all the time. And smaller investors like like to hang on to stuff, right? It's like the I don't know, it's like the hoarder in us and investors sometimes. We just want to hoard proper, oh, we did all the hard work to get the property. We want to hoard it now. Well, sometimes maybe that's not the best thing to do. In fact, right now I'm working with a couple, some some some listeners and previous guests of the podcast here right now. They're pruning their portfolio. And so they're repositioning equity, which is really cool. It works for me. It's a good win-win deal. I'm gonna take over, I think, 22 units of theirs, and we're working on a deal. They're gonna get that off their plate. They're self-managing, they're they're 45 minutes from their house. So anytime there's an issue, they have to go out there and you know, take care of it, or try to dispatch the people that are in there they're in their network 45 minutes away. They got to try to get them to drive 45 minutes. It's kind of a pain in the butt for them, right? And they've got some equity there. And so it's a portfolio though. So it's really hard for them because they can't they could pool all of those together and try to get some kind of second, second lean on it. But again, it's not just about for them the equity piece, it's also the the management piece and the time and those kinds of things. And they're gonna trade up and get into some a bigger um uh commercial asset. So they have a deal worked out on the other side with the sellers of the other one. So it's a really cool situation where their pruning works for me, and I don't know if I'll hold on to them forever. Maybe I'll just keep them for a little while and then I'll trade that equity for something else. But uh those are some things to be looking at, okay? And most people, most investors, they don't recycle the capital. The taxes scare them, like we talked about, emotionally attached, can fear the timing of the market. Um, or they might equate selling with failure, right? But again, trim the fat, get rid of the the junk, and a lot of times get rid of the anchors, and you're gonna be able to excel a lot quicker. So selling a property to upgrade your portfolio is not quitting, guys. This is leveling up. And I'm telling you, the investors who build serious wealth, they're not the ones that hold on to everything forever. They're the ones who reposition intelligently. Okay, so again, even if they are aren't selling anything, I guarantee you the top investors that you would talk to out there in the state and all across the country are the ones that are constantly asking this question about how hard is their equity working? What kind of return are they getting in their equity? And they're always looking for ways to reposition those properties and reposition that equity. So when should you not recycle your capital? So let's balance this out. So do not recycle if the interest rate is incredible. And irreplaceable that you have on your property, don't do it. Okay. I know it's going to be intuitive. I have a couple of these right now. I'm looking at the equity and I'm like, oh my gosh, I have so much equity here. I could do so many cool things with this. I could refinance this thing. I'd have all this cash from my bank account. I could go invest it in something else. The problem is I have some incredible rates that I locked in during the COVID years. And I've got some really good. I think I have a 10-year lock on two of them and a 20-year lock on one of them. And it's just like really, really hard. Here's what I did do, though. I found a lender out there who is willing to give me a line of credit on that equity. So this is another strategy. If you can't, because your rate is amazing and you can't or don't want to go ahead and refinance that property or sell it, because again, you've got an amazing rate on there, you're paying off incredible amounts of principal. It's cash flowing, it's hitting a bunch of boxes for you. Think about getting a line of credit on that and talk to some lenders. Now, whoever has your first position loan on it is probably going to be your best chance to get a second position loan on an investment property or HELOC, okay? Home equity line of credit. Um, but this can be a really cool tool. Right now, some of mine are running at six and a half to seven and a half percent. And again, you if you think you can get a better than a seven and a half percent rate, you go deploy that capital. Even if you're only making three and a half percent spread on it, say you invested for you're getting seven percent, let's say, or six and a half percent, you go invest it and you're getting 10% return. That's money on debt equity. Otherwise, I was sitting there. So you just leveled up. Let's say you were making 3% on your equity, not counting your debt pay down and those other things, just on the equity we're talking about. All of a sudden, now you go pull a line of credit and you're making another 3% spread. With that other 3%, let's say it's in a passive investment, you don't have management, you don't have all the other things you got to deal with, you just doubled your return on that property annually. So something to be considering out there, okay? Another one, don't recycle if this property has strong long-term upside. Okay. Now, again, I when I say recycle, I mean trading up, selling that thing. It uh refinance is not what I'm talking about here, pulling equity up. Okay. If you don't really have a plan, here's the other thing, right, guys. If you don't have a good plan, like just stay put. If it's working, it's it's cash flowing, you're getting some debt pay down, whatever the case is, um, you know, then that's fine. What I would advise you guys to do is contact us or me and if you're thinking about doing any of this stuff, and let's look at it together because I made some mistakes in that whole process that I'm telling you guys about. Like one of the things I really wasn't thinking about uh was the cash flow I was getting on the one of the properties that I sold was really, really high for my cost basis. Like I didn't actually do that equation very well that I'm telling you guys about today. I just looked at the equity and I wanted to trade out of the class C property and up into a nicer property. What I didn't consider was what I'm telling you guys today was the refinance strategy. So rates were high. I was like, hey, let's just take it out of here. We'll go put it over here, and then the excess stuff, we'll go in and invest it in a fund. And I did not consider that even if I would have just refinanced that property, I still would have been making a really nice spread, and I could have taken that equity and put it somewhere else. So I had 1031 exchange, but I still had realtor fees that I had to pay. So if I took a chunk off the sale versus again, if I would have just refinanced, I get up to say 80%, I pull out all the leverage I can. Um, I would be actually pretty close to what I netted on the sale, right? So they're gonna, you know, realtor fees, closing costs, all that other stuff. So that's something to be thinking about. Have a plan with that. I had a plan, it just wasn't a great plan after I thought about it, and I didn't talk to anybody about it. I don't know why. So, you know, reach out to people in your network who maybe have been there before, can just put some eyes on it, give you guys some different ideas, and we're happy to do that at Wisconsin Discount Properties if you want us to. Okay. And another reason not to recycle your capital here is um if you're really emotional, if you're acting emotionally, right? I see this a lot. You guys hear me talk about this of why we love our process of how we how we put deals out to you guys, is it eliminates a lot of emotional decisions, right? When you walk through a property physically, you get very emotional about it, or some people do. They get very emotional, like it's gotta look right, it's gotta smell right, it's gotta be this, it's gotta be that, it's gotta just feel the energy of it, whatever it is, right? And they make emotional decisions versus logical or calculated decisions. So get a plan, be thinking logically before you're gonna do any of this stuff, right? Because capital recycling is gonna require discipline and strategy and intentionality, all right? It's not a like, hey, let's just sell this thing because I'm bored or let's just refinance because why the heck not? It'd be cool to have some some cash, right? Um it's you gotta be thinking strategically. What's your long-term vision? What's your long-term plan? And then does this work into that plan? All right. So this is something I would recommend you guys do. Uh, I do this a few times a year. Again, I don't I don't do it like like a crazy man, but I'm always looking at my um personal financial statement, working with lenders and those kinds of things, and I'm reviewing my portfolio at least a few times a year. If you if you're up for it, do it at least annually. All right. And once a year, look at that equity, look at your net income from it. At the end of the year, when you get your books back from your bookkeepers, hopefully you're working with bookkeepers, not doing it on your own, you're gonna see okay, I netted this amount of money on it. Here's how much equity I have, do the quick equation, and then ask yourself, you know, which ones of these are underperforming? Where could I put this capital to work harder? And I'm telling you guys, if you do this at least every 12 months, you know, your growth trajectory changes dramatically. All right. Now, if you only want a couple properties and you're okay with that, then just ignore this and maybe this is just good food for thought for you. But if you really want to grow and you're looking to scale and you have some big visions of where you want to see your portfolio and where you want to see yourself financially and your wealth, this is this is a must do. Okay, so look at that stuff. If I would advise you today, if this is all brand new for you, go pull your properties up, figure out roughly where your equity is at on those things, and run that equation quick off of last year's numbers and see which ones are are the turds and chop the turds and which ones are maybe you have some equity, want to keep them, pull some equity, it'll still cash flow, redeploy that into something else, or maybe we 1031 exchange and do those sort of things. So if you're listening, you think like, hey, I might have some dead equity here, it's not a bad thing, actually. That's a good problem. That means you've built wealth, you've created that wealth cone that we talk about. All right. And so the next question is like, are you just gonna let it sit there or are you gonna make it multiply? All right. And we've been having more and more of these conversations lately with some of the local folks here that are on our buyers list and are buying deals from us, and they're sitting on a lot of equity. They've been in the game for a while and and they're sitting there, and and sometimes the answers hold it, sometimes it's refinance, sometimes it's selling reposition, sometimes it's you know, stay put. But like I said, if you guys want some help thinking through that strategy, reach out. And if you're not on our buyers, our buyer's list yet, um, you know, that's where you get access to a lot of these opportunities, these off-market deals. A lot of the people that we're having these conversations with are people who bought deals from us back in 2019, 2020, 2021. And now we're having these fun conversations with them about what to do with that equity. So um reach out, right? Because these assets, the properties, they're tools, right? I always think of it like chess pieces. You're just adding more chess pieces to the chessboard. And the more you get on the chessboard quicker, the more that equity grows and the and the more fun you get to have, you know, as you're looking at strategies to redeploy that equity and to do some cool things with that equity. So, guys, if you got some value out of today's episode, as I say on every episode, please share this. Please give us a review too. Five stars is what we shoot for. Okay. If anything less than five, please reach out to me and let me know what we can do to make this more impactful for you as you guys are listening. But if you got value, it does it, it's a huge thing for me. You go on Apple or Spotify and rate us and review us and share these. That means the world to me. Um, if you're on YouTube and you watch this on YouTube, if you can comment on these, just let me know. Hey, what was your biggest takeaway in today's episode? That would mean the world to me as well. That helps us a ton as we continue to try to grow the audience and help more investors out there reach their potential. Right. And if you're not on our buyers list, as I said earlier, and you want access to these off-market deals, go to Wisconsin Discount Properties.com right on the home page. You're going to see a little spot to put your information in there. And then Connor or Reese from my team will reach out to you after you submit that and get a lay of the land of where you're currently at and where you're at, whether you've done zero deals or you've done a thousand deals. We can have that conversation with you, kind of figure it out, and put you on a path of how we can work together to help you grow with whatever your goals are going forward. We also have a ton of resources on that page too. So there's an uh resources page, we've got calculators on there, we've got um lenders lists, we've got all sorts of things on that um page. And last thing I'll say if you are out here and you're in the Madison area, we are going to start hitting up the Madison area here in 2026, and we are coming to Mad Town. So if you're anywhere in the proper Madison area and you're not on the buyer's list yet, get on the buyer's list. We actually have a spot on the website now when you're submitting to select Madison as your market. And if you are looking to get in as a career, we are hiring a few people for that area. So we're looking for some great salespeople who can go and meet with our sellers and negotiate some contracts for us so we can put them out to you guys on the buyer's list. So if you know anybody in the Madison area that is interested in getting in the industry and as a career, they have to have real estate experience. In fact, my top guys are all former cell phone sales guys. So if you guys know anybody out there, we would love a referral and love to chat about what that opportunity could look like. So thanks for tuning in, guys. Hope you guys are having a great week, and we'll see you on the next episode.