The Blue Cup Podcast

Action Figures and AI with Cody Lewis

• The Blue Cup Podcast • Episode 3

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0:00 | 1:09:19

The conversation delves into the realities of the real estate industry, highlighting the common challenges and adversities faced by investors. Cody Lewis shares insights from influential figures in the field, emphasizing that success often comes with struggles and that no one is alone in their journey.

Takeaways

Real estate is not just sunshine and rainbows.
Many successful investors have faced significant challenges.
It's important to acknowledge the struggles in the industry.
You are not alone in your real estate journey.
Even wealthy investors have mishaps to overcome.
Stories of adversity can inspire and motivate others.
The journey to success often includes unexpected events.
Personal growth comes from overcoming challenges.
Networking with others can provide support and insights.
Real estate investing requires resilience and determination.

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SPEAKER_04

Explain it to me like I'm five. I'm a geriatric millennials.

SPEAKER_03

We won't go into it, but I learned that the hard way. It's had a lot of ups and downs. If you're listening or watching, this is a good place for Ryan to tag a gold nugget. Hey, it's Ross Schneider. Welcome to the Blue Cup Podcast. Be sure to like and subscribe and click that bell down below. And stay with us. Very exciting episode today. Cody Lewis is with us. And this guy and his family have some really interesting things going on. And we're going to talk about lifestyle and how the business affords a lifestyle and not the other way around. And um the spousal relationship, I think, is really cool with um the fact that your wife has a different sort of job. Um, but it's a support system for all of us. So we're gonna we're gonna get into that very quickly. Um so just tell me, Cody, who you are, where you're from.

SPEAKER_04

Sure. Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. It's it's a true honor to be on here. Uh it it when when I got the call, it was awesome to that you guys thought of me. So thank you for having me. You know, as you mentioned, you know, I I think I have a kind of a unique background. I grew up in a household full of teachers. My mom, stepmom, dad, sister, stepsister are all teachers. I have a degree in applied mathematics, went to Coastal Carolina and had every intention on being a high school football coach and uh high school teacher. And then at the last second, pivoted. Not really sure what the generalization was there, why I decided to pivot, but I decided to pivot. Went into the business world after that and um, you know, bounced around the state when I was younger. So I say I'm from South Carolina. My dad was a high school football coach, as I mentioned. So we moved a bunch when I was little. Uh, we ended up in kind of the Midlands around Columbia area for most of my life. But I met a girl from Myrtle Beach uh when I was in college there, and she has salt water in her veins. So when we were when she was in law school and we were back in Columbia, I'll never forget we sat down and we did this thing, and I said, Hey, I I know when you graduate law school that the Columbia might not be our permanent home. So where do we want to live? And we wrote down independently, kind of a blindfold test, three different locations, and the only overlap was Charleston. And so, fast forward, I was working for a corporate entity at that time, very large organization, and I I had had a good job. I'd only been there for about six to seven months, and a position opened up at Charleston. And I I went to my former manager because she moved districts and oversaw the Charleston Ryan and said, Hey, I would really like to get to Charleston. Can I apply for this position? Okay. Not not knowing that uh my my previous company had a you had to be in your role for 12 months. I didn't know if they had the same type of rule. Interviewed, got the job. We've been here for the last 13 years. We've built our own family, and it's been absolutely awesome. We love Charleston. When I was in corporate America, I always got recruited to leave. And I would say, listen, I I will I will take your your interview. Come on down Friday afternoon, interview me, stay the weekend in Charleston. And if you think I should leave Charleston after that weekend, lure me out of this place. Yeah, yeah. If you think I should leave Charleston after after the weekend, I'll I'll I'll take the job offer. I've never had anybody tell me that I should leave Charleston. So here we are. You'd be a fool to leave. Exactly. I mean, we're I tell people we're super spoiled. We, you know, South Carolina, I'm really biased. We have uh the coast, the Atlantic Beach on one side of the state, and you can be three and a half hours and be in the mountains the other side. So I think we're incredibly unique with that. We're relatively small, but I think small and mighty.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, very cool. So you have uh twins. How old are your kids? Twin boys, seven years old and growing. Wow.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, but we actually they they do now. They they do. Uh we we we are they are all boy. We're outside shooting BB guns, we're playing tackle football, we're we're we're in all the sports. They love building fires with me. They they help me grill out. I mean, we we do all the boy activities and and they and we absolutely love it. They're they're a ball of energy, they keep me going, they keep me honest. They were bouncing around this morning. I think one of them I normally wake up most days around like four. This morning I was able to sleep in a little bit, and that one of them actually woke me up. He was super proud he woke dad up and was the second one awake in the family. So that was a win for him this morning.

SPEAKER_03

Oh, I love it. Um, my girls like to set fires too, so that's uh I think that's a universal thing. Yeah, everyone's got a little pyro in them at some point in time. Every human likes fire.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

I love it. Um, so tell me about your wife and her career.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, well, that this is the best part about what I get to do. My wife is absolutely amazing. She is the rock of our family. She is the the best part about me, and the and I know the best part about our family. She is a real estate and from a commercial and residential side lawyer. And then she also does a bunch of different business transactions, which to me is a really fancy way of saying she negotiates and reads a bunch of documents on a daily basis. Uh, she would she would hate that I boil it down to that, but she is absolutely incredible at her job. She she has just been an absolute rock star in her field. She continues to grow and get accomplishment after accomplishment. And honestly, I'm always jealous of her work ethic and drive. You know, if I ever find myself slumping or or or wishing that I was doing better, I just look at her and I'm like, wow, you know, she regardless of what's going on, stuff could be hitting the fan left and right, and she just trudges through the mud and keeps going. It keeps working and grinding. And she is absolutely the best part about our life.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, what could be better than that? So tell tell me about your early life. Where'd you grow up?

SPEAKER_04

Uh, mostly Columbia. Like I said, we we bounced around a little bit.

SPEAKER_03

Columbia, South Carolina.

SPEAKER_04

Yes, sir. So we uh we moved around about so we lived in a bunch of small towns in South Carolina from my early, early childhood. But around middle of elementary school, we moved just outside of Columbia, South Carolina, a little uh suburb area. And my dad worked at the local high school, my mom at the time worked at the local elementary school. So the only time I didn't have a parent in school with me was middle school. Yeah, so that was my only like alone time. Yeah. But I after that, I always had a parent there. So I I grew up mostly there, and then like I said, I went to college and most people will call it Myrtle Beach. Coastal Carolina is in Conway, but close enough to the beach. Uh, I think we were about 11 miles door to door from our apartment to the beach. And then after college, my wife got into law school. We moved to Columbia, South Carolina for me again, and then we spent a couple of years there before moving to Charleston, and we've been here ever since.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, I grew up, uh grew up very similarly. My mother was a teacher and then she was a principal. And as you said, I can't remember a time when my mother wasn't at the school where I was attending.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, I I mean I knew all the all the people at the so my dad helped open a high school. It opened in 1992. And until I graduated uh almost a a little bit over a decade later, I knew every teacher, every administrator, I knew every uh every worker in the building because I had grown up around that. I mean, we uh my sister and I always joke, we didn't have babysitters when we were younger. We just went and hung out with our parents in the school, and this was before internet and before phones and all that stuff. So we we drew on the chalkboard, we had to find activities. I used to put across a tile floor. I used to be really good at putting because I put it on a tile floor, but uh for hours on it on end. But when you're you know 10 years old and you have nothing to do in the summer, your parents got to work, you just gotta figure it out.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, it's a pretty unique childhood to um to be that involved with the schools and just kind of plugged into everything all the time. What did that feel like when we went to college?

SPEAKER_04

You know, it was it was unique. College was was very different. I had a little bit of a I want to say maybe a unique journey through college. I went there actually, so at every tittion. If anybody knows me, I'm a diehard Clemson fan. Just absolutely diehard. I'm looking at I'm looking at pictures right here. I have the orange microphone.

SPEAKER_03

Like it's yeah, I see the orange microphone. I have a purple one as well. My daughter's at um USC, my sister went to USC, my brother went to USC. I went to college in Virginia, so I don't have a dog in this fight.

SPEAKER_04

Well, I I had every intention on going there, and then just ended up the way things happened, ended up at Coastal Carolina, and I had an absolute blast. I was there and I I went there with a couple of guys. There were three guys at from my high school, it was a pretty large high school. We went to Coastal Carolina, we ended up rooming together about midway through first semester. That didn't work out. So I actually moved off campus with a guy who had graduated two years before me, but played football for my dad, so I knew him. And then at the end of that school year, my freshman year, he decided he wanted different roommates and just flat out lied and said he was getting evicted and all this stuff, and it was a big to-do. And so I had to end up living with my girlfriends at the time. It was her roommate's boyfriend who we met the day that we signed the lease on our apartment. We lived together for two and a half years, we're still good friends. Funny story, he also has a set of twins. He also what? He also has a set of twins. So I have a set of twins and he has a set of twins. So I told him, I told him it must have been something in the water in our apartment.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's funny. I love it. Um, so tell me about sports growing up when you were a child.

SPEAKER_04

I mean, they were they were everything. My dad, like I said, my dad coached primarily high school football, but he coached uh, let's see, girls basketball, he coached girls' softball, he coached baseball. He was the head track coach uh at the last high school, my high school that I went to, his last high school. Uh so I mean I grew up around sports my entire life. Like uh every every weekend, every summer, we you know, we were either in the weight, I was with the weight room with my dad, or I was out on a practice field with my dad, uh, doing all that. Uh, when we went to when he went to that last high school that I went to, uh, he was a head track coach. He had never coached track and he did a great job. And I fell in love. I used to go hang out with the pole vaulters. I thought they were cool because they would fly over this bar that's like 15 feet in the air. And, you know, so I I grew up around it so much so that obviously that's that's what I intended to go to school for. And I actually went to Coastal Carolina and they had a brand new football team at at the time. They started in 03. And I went in and I they were small enough. I knocked on the head coach's door and I said, Hey, I want to be a high school football coach. I'd like to gain some experience while I'm here. I'm not on the football team, but I'd like to help out in any capacity that I can. Well, they made me a student football coach, kind of made up a thing, and I got to coach a bunch of different positions and learn from a lot of great coaches and travel and do a bunch of things that I probably would have absolutely never done. And I probably focused a little bit too much on being a coach and not a student. My grades would probably probably reflect that. My wife would tell you that as well. But it was an absolute blast, and I learned so much. Things that I still do to this day, personally and professionally. I learned either from sports growing up or give me an example. Give me an example about them. My kids will tell you this one early is on time, on time is late. I mean, we are we are early to everything. I I always tell people if you're if you're not early to something, you must have not played sports or been in anything competitive.

SPEAKER_03

Because I remember early is on time. Early is on time, on time is still. Oh, we're just not late.

SPEAKER_04

We're not late. It drives my wife absolutely crazy. Like we're we're we're everywhere we go. I mean, if there's an event and it's a scheduled time, we are there. It's gonna be 20 minutes early. A thousand percent. At least 20 minutes. I mean, uh, if it were my if it were up to me, it's probably more like 30 35, buckled to her demands often. So she she'll as you should, and you must. Absolutely. I gotta she's um she she'll she'll she'll get ready and do all that, but we we're about twenty fifteen, twenty minutes early everywhere we go. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, I know with an attorney, their time is so precious. Oh, yeah. I have an appointment with the attorney, I don't ever expect them to be early. And typically they're right on time or like two minutes late because their time is so valuable and so portioned. And as opposed to you and I are kind of loose, you know, loosey goosey, make a deal, you know, it could take months and make this much money, and we can't really push it too hard. But an attorney is like, no, I get paid by the minute. I mean, attorneys really get paid by the minute. If you if I mean if if I were an attorney, I would break it down and say, you know, 60 minutes and an hour. How long does it take me to go to the bathroom, eat a meal, drink a cup of coffee, and then within that, I'm paying, I'm getting paid by the hour. Yeah. And exactly by the minute. So I I get with with your wife, that could be a um a different it's a different dynamic.

SPEAKER_04

Her her work schedule is way more chaotic than than stuff that we put on our our personal calendar. Personal calendar, I'm in charge of work calendar. That's her. In fact, it was funny. Okay. We had a conversation this morning. She was in a uh honors society in college. Again, wife's way smarter than me. She was in an honors society in college, and she sits on the board now, and they have a a big function coming up in two weeks. And I'm a big believer in calendar. If it's not on my calendar, it does not exist. And so she I said, Hey, well, she reminded me that I need to go buy a new pair of shoes. Uh, my the she doesn't like the shoes that I have, and I agree with her. I'm not I'm not a huge fan. I haven't bought a new pair of black shoes in a decade. And so she's like, Hey, you need to don't forget to go get a pair of shoes. And I was like, for what event? Knowing full well when it is, I and I looked and I said, It's not on the calendar. And she said, she kind of took a deep breath. She said, I will put it on the calendar, just go get your shoes.

SPEAKER_03

I love it. It's such a different lifestyle from what some of us lead, but I I totally get it. So I have a note here that you collect sports cards and action figures. I do. I would love to hear more about that.

SPEAKER_04

Well, I think from the action figure side, that's the that's the nerdy hobby that is that's a little bit more recent, but it was interesting. I read an article maybe about a year ago that all these companies, what I've read, I'm referred to as a geriatric millennial. So I was born in the the early 80s. So I kind of blend the gap between Gen X and Millennial. The folks that are my age, these toy companies figured out, hey, they still like the stuff that they grew up with. Now they have disposable income. What if we remade the toys they had but better and charged more for them? So I fell into the hobby a little bit. It it started off with like, hey, I like this one figure that I remember from my childhood. I'll I'll get that, I'll buy that. And then that one led to another, and then you're on a subreddit and you're looking at all the upcoming stuff. I don't know if you can see, it's kind of blurred out, but I have this whole bookshelf that I've commandeered behind me that have just absolutely stuffed with action figures. The I have a closet that my wife, when she listens, is going to be really upset. There's probably like five or six in there. I haven't even unboxed because I really don't have room for them at this point in time. But they just, you know, everyone asks when they find out, they're like, Why do you collect? And I said, you know what, it reminds me of my childhood, reminds me of peaceful times. It reminds me of just, you know, there's we didn't have a lot of things to worry about or think about. There were bills and schedules and calendars to do. And so it reminds me of a simple time and it reminds me of of sitting down on the floor and not hurting my back when I sit up from sitting on the floor and hanging out for a couple hours, playing with action figures, eating some really terrible cereal and uh watching cartoons on Saturday mornings. So they they they bring me joy, is what I tell my wife. They they remind me of my childhood and bring me joy. The sports cards, though, are relatively new. Um, to be honest, what what happened was I said, you know what, these action figures are getting a little out of hand. They're also take up a lot of room. Some of these things are a little bit larger than I like to admit. And I said, you know, I need a different hobby, something that I can scratch that itch, something that I could do differently. Again, I'm a diehard Clemson fan, so I started collecting mainly Clemson sports cards, but then I was like, hey, could I could I make this a side hustle? Could I make a little bit of money? You watch a few YouTube videos, it's incredibly hard. Don't do it. Just stay in the hobby. If you want to buy something, buy it. But don't try to make money off it. So that's that's where I'm at. I I have a decent collection. My kids like to collect the Pokemon cards. They love when I buy a sports pack because they love ripping it open. They want to see if we can make money off this one big card or whatever. They just they're about the money, not about the accumulating the characters. They like they like the sports cards. They don't have really like a favorite sport, they have a favorite college team. One's a Carolina fan, one's a Clemson fan. But other than that, we don't they don't like I like the 49ers as a professional football team. They don't really know most of the the players in the NFL or or anything like that. So they're not super into that, but they do like the really shiny cards. That's really or the patch cards. They they love those kind of things. So when we get one of those, whether it's worth 25 cents or a thousand dollars, they're super excited. And and I I like watching their joy. So I'll buy a pack or you know, a box or something like that, and I'll let them rip it open just to have fun.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. So I um I played guitar and bass guitar in bands in college. There you go. And um really interesting story. Uh just a few weeks ago, I got a Facebook message from a college friend saying, Hey, we live in North Charleston and we want to sell our house. And I was like, How how did I not know you live in North Charleston? Right. You know, because we went to school together in Virginia, and so Scott was a bass player in a band called KYF, where I would substitute in, you know, he was a much, much better player. He was a music major, and uh then we were in adjacent bands, and a lot of people kind of mixed, you know, same singer, same drummer, different band. But when I walked through their house to help them sell it, he has one bass guitar, and it it is a unique, very technical, the the frets are at an angle. Okay, and it's a tonality thing that's just and I'm like, I'm a complete hack. I have I have you know 20 guitars that I can't play very well. Sure. About half of which are bass guitars, and about half of which are loaned out to my girls because they love to play. So my girl, my daughter, Skylar's at USC, was a freshman, and she said, This guitar that I brought with me is just garbage, and I can't. So I gave her one of my best guitars, and I said, But it's in a hard shellcase, and you do not loan it to your boyfriend. You know, this is this guitar is coming back to me someday, but I'm gonna give you a really quality instrument. And you can play it or not play it, but just remember that's my guitar. I didn't give it to you. I'm loaning it to you as long-term loan, as long as you want it. But it's coming back at some point in time. But it's not going to a pawn shop and it's not going to some deadbeat boyfriend. It's, you know, it's a Dedario made, it's a custom guitar made in New York. Okay. It it's not going in the trash, but right, right. So I I understand the collectability thing, but the you know, mine is joking with Scott, my buddy, who's a virtuoso musician. And I was like, Yeah, I got like a this whole collection of guitars that I can't play very well.

SPEAKER_04

But I mean I get so I get it. Listen, I I was I was really at I was an advocate. I was like, you know what, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get these action figures and I'm gonna, you know, these there's these really cool artists online that pose action figures and they do all these like awesome edits and like superimposed backgrounds and all this stuff. And it, you know, it makes me think. I'm like, in my head when I was a kid and my action figures were fighting, these these are the types of scenes I would see in my head. So I'm like, I'll I'll like set up a rig and I'll photograph all these things and I'll do it too. I don't, I just pose them on the shelf and put them up there, and I they're just they're just there for me to look at and bring joy.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, I love it. So let's talk about business just for a minute because we've been doing a lot of personal stuff. And what are you working on?

SPEAKER_04

Well, right now, or within the last little bit over a year now, we've bought, own, and operate a vacation rental here in Charleston, South Carolina. So it is a uh basically an apartment style building. It's a uh single family residence, but it there are three levels in the building, and it's really beautiful. The the RGC, the our that we co manage some of the other buildings with adjacent to us, just did an absolutely beautiful design on building it and renovating it and doing all the stuff inside. And so we My job is to maintain it and make sure that we're still making revenue and booking all the things and making sure our our prices are correct, automating a lot of our systems and things like that. So we that has been my full-time job, if you will, the little over the past year. And it's it's it's had a lot of ups and downs, a lot of learning opportunities for me. And it it's been challenging but rewarding at the same time.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. So it's short-term rental.

SPEAKER_04

Is it downtown Charleston or downtown in the short-term rental zone? So for those that that are not familiar, like Charleston has on the peninsula specifically, uh in Charleston has super strict regulations on who and where you can rent short-term rental-wise.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. So if you're if you're listening or watching, this is a good place for Ryan to tag a gold nugget. I've heard a lot of negative talk about short-term rental in the Charleston area. A lot of negative talk, a lot of negative talk. It's it's not negative, it's just being precise with your location. And that can be, you know, beaches, downtown. So if you need help with that, reach out to us. If you're listening or watching this, reach out to us and we can help you identify some of those zones. And that's a service that we offer. So bring it on. So the short-term rental is your kind of your primary focus right now.

SPEAKER_04

That is that is my primary focus. We we are looking at and evaluating some other rentals in other areas as well. So we, as you said, location is the absolute best thing you can do for a short-term rental or vacation rental. You can't you can't pick up and just move a house or say, hey, I would prefer this location. You got to buy in the right locations. We have a property, downtown Charleston. We absolutely love it's kind of a uh, if you will, like not like a super urban, but urban compared to the beaches of Charleston. Uh, it's in the heart of downtown walking location to all the top-end restaurants and and shopping experiences that Charleston has to offer, all the historic stuff. But then outside of that, we we want to keep adding to our portfolio. And what we want to what we want to add is just a different type of getaway. So we're looking at lake houses in the upstate of South Carolina. So around like Lake Hartwell, Lake Kiwi, somewhere up there, that would allow for a different type of experience, go in the opposite direction. It's kind of unique up there when you're doing your underwriting because it's so close to Clemson University, you have to underwrite, you have to look at the underwriting for both all the sports seasons that they have, but then all the collegiate activities that go on at the university as well. So graduations, drop-off, pickup, all those different things. So you have to look at those spikes as well as like it's on a lake. So you're gonna get summer rentals, you'll get some fall rentals, and you have to look at the revenue. And sometimes it's like unfortunately for me, Clemson's having a really awful football season. They're not they're not renting the it it it does, it does, but they're they're not renting quite as well up there. So I I've talked to some owners and and they're taking a dip right now in their normal pieces.

SPEAKER_03

Come on, support your team, go rent it anyway.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, uh, but then you have things like uh unforeseen events. So there's been a lot of rumors that have come to fruit fruition now that Clemson was going to bring back uh play, allowing artists to play inside of the stadium, the football stadium, uh Memorial Stadium at Clemson. So uh the first concert since 19, I want to say 1996. You'll have to uh fact check me on that, but I will I think it's 1996 was the last uh uh concert held in Memorial Stadium. The first one is gonna be 2026. It's George Strait and Cody Jones on May 2nd. So all of a sudden, if you have a vacation rental, May now becomes a way better prospect for you. I might be your renter for George Strait. We got we got our tickets early. We'll be there. So if you if you're if you're there, we'll be in the uh what's that, the north side. Is that correct? Yeah, the north side, the home side.

SPEAKER_03

Interesting. So they haven't done concerts in what year? 20 years. I mean, that's 20 years.

SPEAKER_04

30 years.

SPEAKER_03

30 years. I wonder why.

SPEAKER_04

Uh I'm not sure. There was some from my understanding, uh, it the field is in a lot better shape than it used to be in the 90s. I think where our technology and what Clemson does for the field is a lot better, but I mean, it's incredibly detrimental to host a concert on a football field. Okay. So, you know, I think they hold normally around like 82,000 to 84,000 fans. I saw that with the concert, they're gonna allow, but with the field access, they will allow up to 90,000 attendees. So it's gonna be great. But if you're if you're in the market like we are for a vacation rental, that now opens up a different revenue stream when you're underwriting. And so you have to look at, okay, if they're gonna bring back the summer concert series, now I have another revenue stream coming in, and my prices may be more, maybe a little bit higher in the summertime where maybe they weren't as high. You get some lake rentals and stuff like that. But now in May, which was probably a dead month, I would imagine, looking at some of the underwriting, you may get some spikes. So, you know, it's those types of things that you have to know your market, you have to know your environment, what you're doing. And because again, you're so close to the university, you have to look at what they're doing as well from uh academic sports, and then outside of that as well, how to add all that in there.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, it's like any economy. If it's just uh if there's a dominant force in the economy, it can be very volatile as opposed to what I one of the things I like about Charleston, South Carolina, where you and I live, is we have Volvo, we have Mercedes, we have Boeing, we have Google, we have a tourist, good tourist economy, we have a good hospitality economy to go around the tourist economy, and and it's a stack of things, as opposed to a place. I grew up in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and went to James Madison University, and JMU pretty much runs a town. And Clemson's the same way, and USC not quite as much because it's a capital and there's other, but James Madison in Virginia has made a huge impact on that town. And so what you're saying about Clemson not hosting concerts for that many years, and then they make the change, it has a huge impact. So it's really knowing your market can be critical. So fun story.

SPEAKER_04

Well, listen, I this is the first time hearing that you went to GMU. So they were a uh de facto rival of Coastal Carolina. So uh they came to Conway uh in 2006, I'm pretty sure, as the number one team in the nation. Shauna Clears came out victorious. Uh, but no three years later, we went to uh JMU. I was not there at the time. We but we the coastal went to JMU and got our butts handed to us. So I might have been there. It was 2009. I want to say somewhere around there, I think is correct. Uh it was uh it was after I graduated. I graduated in 08. It was after I had left. I would say within a year or two after I left, they were up back at JMU and they got handed a big L at that point in time.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, we're a um big fish in a small pond.

SPEAKER_04

Know the feeling.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, um, my friends are diehard seasoned ticket holders. You know, we're in our late 50s now, and Mike, my buddy, texted me. He was like, You coming for a game? I was like, it's a seven-hour drive. And he said, Well, he said, Well, Scott lives near you. You you and Scott come. It's like, all right, fine. Well, you know, we'll think about it. But um, yeah, I went to homecoming in 2009 or 2010. So I wondered if if that was the game. Yeah, they're my friends are ecstatic about the record. I mean, the the JMU Dukes have done very, very well. Yeah, absolutely. What are we, division three? Is that right?

SPEAKER_04

No, we uh well both both coastal and jmu have stepped up. So they are now part of the the what they're calling it. It's not that there's a group of four, which is or the power four, and then the group of five. So they're in the group of five. I want to say James Madison, Coastal's in the sun belt, or as we like to call it, the fun belt. And then I think JMU is either in the sun belt as well, or maybe conference USA. I'd have to double check.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Well, you you love the sports and the engagement. Why did you choose the career that you have as an entrepreneur rather than being a coach?

SPEAKER_04

Well, you know, honestly, there were a couple of reasons. It really came down to if I look back, my senior year, I had an opportunity to interview for what they call a graduate assistant job, which is for those that are not aware, in in most uh college athletics, to get your foot in the door. You basically work for free for a couple of years. So you what you do is you trade your time for a master's degree. So they they kind of disguise getting your master's degree as a way to pay you. So you go in, you get your master's degree, the school pays for your master's degree. Honestly, that's really arbitrary for most people because they're going to be a coach the rest of their life. They they go get a master's degree in some like I don't want to belittle it, but some like entry level, like the easiest thing that they could possibly do. And then you work outside of that, you work for the whatever athletic team you're you're on the thing for. So you do that, and I had an opportunity to go interview at this really small college in Oklahoma. So I was looking at doing that, but I had already met my now wife. We had been dating for a little while, and I said, okay, do I want to hitch my wagon to her early on, or do I want to go try to pursue this thing, which I would probably, I mean, there's a I think better than 50% chance I would have bounced out like most coaches do. I'd have ended up in high school, which was what I was gonna go to go to anyway, but I wanted to try the college route for a little while. And I just I didn't want to, I knew I wanted to be a family man at some point. I want to be a dad, I want to be a a husband to my you know now wife, and I knew that that's what I wanted to do. And what I didn't want to do was bounce around. And most college coaches, every one to three years, they're moving. Yeah, it's a it's a cowboy, it's a cowboy job. Exactly. And it's and it's you know, I did that a little bit when I was younger, it, but we were in the state of South Carolina, so it did we didn't move far. You know, I know I have a buddy that's in college coaching. He's lived in South Carolina, he's lived in Tennessee, he now lives in Virginia, and he does it. He does a great job. And I texted him the other day that his team's doing really well and they're they're rocking and rolling, and he loves it, and his family supports him, and most most of those do. And I just I that was not the life that I wanted at that time. So I sat down and had just like a exactly and so I ended up in the uh I wasn't an entrepreneur at first. Actually, I went into like a corporate nine to five and I did that for a while. And ultimately, what landed me or started my train down, the train thought down to being an entrepreneur, I was at a very large organization. I was doing incredibly well. I had a sales team that I had taken over for about four four and a half years, and I took them from a half a million dollar sales organization to a 4.1 million dollar sales organization, and we were rocking and rolling, but the company globally decided that my position was no longer necessary. So they cut my position. And so there were 440 of us worldwide that no longer had a job. Now, we were lucky in that they gave us a landing spot temporarily internally, but it was more of a retail type focus as opposed to my B2B focus. So I was selling to other businesses as opposed to retail. The retail lifestyle did not fit me. It did not fit my family at the time. And so that I ended up with a few other corporate jobs, but when the opportunity jumped at me to to chase being an entrepreneur, I didn't want to be a number on a spreadsheet anymore. I wanted to try to take my my future into my own hands. So how do other people do what you've done? You gotta have a you gotta do your research ahead of time. You gotta have, I would tell you you need to have some finances in your back pocket, at least to get you through a couple months to make sure you got things going on. You got to do your research. Don't jump in blindly. I've seen a lot of people do that. You know, I I think a lot of people can do this. One, you just need you got to do your research, but you just gotta have the gumption to just say, hey, I gotta rip this band-aid off and do it. There are a lot of people that coach and play from the sidelines. And and I can tell you now being in the fire for the last five years, it's a lot different when you're doing it yourself than like reading or thinking about it. I still read a lot of entrepreneurial books, a lot of business books. I read one recently, and the guy had a lot of good concepts, except he had never been an entrepreneur. He's actually a career academic, and he had a lot of good ideas, but some of them I just didn't agree with because I'm like, this really wouldn't work. I mean, do they work or not work? All of his stuff was theoretical, and he he was right, he was really more disproving people that were doing the work in the field versus what he proposed you do. So anyway, uh I I think if you're gonna do it, if you're thinking about doing it, it can be incredibly powerful. You know, the the lifestyle that I live empowers me to do things that I I never would have thought I did. I'm a better husband, I'm a better dad, I'm a better friend because the the lifestyle that I have, uh while we're still working and grinding it, want to be more successful, it a lot, it allots me things and abilities that I would have never had working a nine to five job.

SPEAKER_03

Talk about that for a minute, about the lifestyle and what does that look like and why is that?

SPEAKER_04

Well, I get to drop my kids off at school every day. I get to pick them up from school every day. And let me tell you, my again, my kids are seven. So Luke Combs has this song called Front Port Front Door Famous. And I absolutely love that song because my kids are still in that age where when I come home, and I don't travel a lot and I don't go a bunch of long distances a bunch, but when I come back, even if it's a short trip or or just working for the day, out not in my house, they still scream dad when they come to the door. And that that is the best medicine, the most energy, just everything bundled up. Like there is nothing better in this world than than them doing that, and then I get a hug and a kiss from my wife when I get home. So when I get to pick my kids up and they still love seeing dad in the car rider line picking them up after their after school care, they sprint to the car. Like that, that is everything about what I want to be. It's everything that this this lifestyle affords me to be. I'm a coach at every one of their little league events, you whether I'm the head coach or assisting, I get to help out. I get to be a part of that. The other day I picked them up early from after school care. We played catch for an hour and a half. Like I mean, there is nothing in this world that to me that's better than being a husband and a dad. And this lifestyle allows me to do that. And I would have I could have done part of that from a nine to five, but I'm still beholden to somebody else, and I'm also making somebody else a lot of money.

SPEAKER_03

Right, right. Well, and in in my experience, it doesn't take as much money as we think it will to make that happen, especially because you have a spouse and I have a spouse who has some sort of income, and it's it's so great to be able to make that choice, and to be able to make, I mean, I'm working on a deal right now that'll make me $200,000. That's a lot of money. It's gonna take a lot of time, it's gonna take a lot of effort, it's gonna take a lot of risk. It may not work out the way I think it will, but to have the opportunity to even pursue that to me is amazing. And and and still my kids are all driving, so they're a little bit older. But to be able to go spend the weekend in Columbia with my daughter at college, right? Or to my other daughter was with us last night and I saw her for breakfast this morning, and I didn't have to rush off anywhere and not have breakfast with her. Yeah. So I mean, it's it's a it's a small thing and it's a big thing at the same time.

SPEAKER_04

No, uh absolutely. I mean, uh, my wife and I, most I'd say 99% of all mornings. Sometimes that she has a crazy schedule and she has to get into work super early because she's got to do a document signing. But every morning after we drop off, our kids are in school by 7.15 every morning. We get back to the house. That's our quiet time. We sit down beside each other, we put our phones away, and we grab a cup of coffee and we talk about things that are either on our on our mind personally, professionally. We we sync our calendars, we're talking about things that we got to get done that day. What are like the top three to five things that we we absolutely have to get done today? What are what are things we gotta get done this week? Or do we have weekend plans? You know, I gotta get the school snacks today for the party tomorrow. Yeah. You know, those types of things. So exactly. So we have to we we get to sync up, but I get you know, 30 to 60 minutes with my wife every morning where we just get to sit there and we get to chat and we get to be two human beings sitting beside each other doing that. And so again, I wouldn't have had that otherwise. I yeah, I was on the road two to three days a week, you know, I was flying somewhere, driving somewhere, I was in hotels, you know, all this stuff. But now I get to sit beside my wife, and then you know, after this, I have a reminder on my calendar. I gotta go set out meat because I'm I'm the one who cooks for our family. So I gotta go set out some meat for tonight for what we're having for dinner. And I got I get to be I get to do that and I get to make sure we have healthy, nutritious meals and not all the time, but most of the time that we doing that kind of stuff. So it again, it's just everything I'm definitely in this for like I want to get paid, I like what it uh affords me financially, but at the end of the day, the the tax incentives, the time with my family, the time with my my kids, my wife is absolutely the best thing about what I do.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, I love it. I love it. Um, talk about industrial investing, and you mentioned tax incentives, so two things.

SPEAKER_04

Industrial, so I'm a big believer in industrial investing. We we don't have anything under our belt right now, but it is uh it is incredibly uh impactful in my opinion, if you can get something like that. I I'm a big fan of the triple net lease. Uh yeah, you get you get the what's the right word? I I'm gonna say freedom, but it it's probably not the right word, but you you get the most flexibility because you as an owner are responsible for maintaining the least amount possible on the building where your your tenants are are the ones upholding, but it's their space, it's their business operating in there, so they're gonna up maintain it to the best of their ability because they need that building to stand up to continue to do what they do and feed their families. So, you know, the I think the returns are are maybe not as exponential as some people like to see in certain aspects, but they are just steady, eddy. And if you can get a good industrial property and get some good tenants in there, your returns are gonna be good, but then over the long term, they're gonna be even better. Now, you know, things like your IRR and stuff like that, if you if you have investors may not be as strong if you you're trying to get out in like two years or something like that. But if you have a buy and hold strategy and then you sell when you want to, I mean, industrial is one of the best asset classes, I think, out there. Okay. I think that's really where you can cut your teeth, you can get something in there. And I'm always a big believer, you know, when when I first got started in real estate, we were looking at more high-end multifamily type properties. And that, you know, we got in at a time that was really interesting. It was right during the the big like drop in rates. And we were my group and I, we were, we were looking at it really probably the wrong way. We we looked at it from a more traditional standpoint of the asset is the asset. But what we failed to see at that in that short window is that our the asset was actually the rate at the time. And so we didn't move on some of those properties because we were looking at it more of a like a true long-term hold, five to eight year hold, uh, that you see more traditional, like multifamily type opportunities. But more people were trading those in a 14 to 20 month period because the rate dictated that you could and it would drive the value up. So we moved on from that. But in that time, we really started evaluating industrial properties. And I mean, we kept falling more and more in love with them. I'll tell you, like in Charleston, it's it's you know, especially on the peninsula, it's incredibly hard to get your foot in there. Uh we were trying to buy it ourselves, we were not raising capital for it or anything. So it's a little bit harder. But I'm always a big fan of starting small and building your portfolio. So don't ever be afraid to go out and buy something a little bit smaller, hold it, create some value, sell it or refinance it, take that capital, put it into another project and do it that way. I'm just the more and more I've been in this real estate game and world is I'm a firm believer in starting small, cutting your teeth, and doing it. Now, there's gonna be an argument of economy of scale. You can do it big early on, and you definitely can. And some people can do that. I would argue that for the majority of the people, starting smaller, cutting your teeth, growing your portfolio at a nice rate is gonna be better for you. I looked at the S P index over the last 25 years, and I wanted to go back 25 years because the last five years have just been like explosive exponential growth, and everyone has their their thoughts on is it inflated, is it not inflated, whatever. Look 25 years. We went through two financial crises during that time. If you would have invested in 2000, The annualized return for the S P index is 11.1%. So you could have just sat money in the SP index and just continu like if you just put $500 in there annually, annualize you would have made 11.1% over the last 25 years, compounded. So that is incredible to have that kind of return. So if I'm going to do a lot of work and invest in real estate, I need something around that or better. Right. So that's what moves the needle for me. Now I'm also a big believer in you don't put all your eggs in one basket, whether that's real estate or stocks and indexes. You got to have a portfolio. You got to spread it out. I'm a big, big, big believer in real estate. Obviously, with what I do. Yeah, I learned that the hard way.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

We won't go into it, but I learned that the hard way.

SPEAKER_04

Sure.

SPEAKER_03

Another, another story for another day.

SPEAKER_04

Um, but you mentioned like the tax incentives. If you're not familiar with the cost segregation, if you buy a property, highly, highly, highly recommend doing one of those if you're going to hold it for four to eight years or whatever it may be.

SPEAKER_03

But all in all, and I'll interrupt you for just a second to say that for my in my experience, the great thing about cost segregation is I could just hand it to a professional who would do the cost segregation, feed it back to me, I pay them a fee, and it goes to the IRS, and it's done. It's not like I need to Google it and figure out how to do it. I mean, there are cost segregation professionals. I mean, it was it was phenomenal. I was like, really? Okay. Where do I sign?

SPEAKER_04

I so Russ, we we l I had just cut the check for our cost segregation two weeks ago. So we we we bought ours, like I said, a little over a year ago. We we finalized our cost segregation. I mean, literally to Russ's point, that is literally what happened. I we interviewed a company, I hired them, we scheduled them to come out.

SPEAKER_03

It's so my point is to the to the people listening and watching, you know, you can do this. It's so simple. It sounds daunting, it sounds complicated, it sounds like high-level stuff. I mean, the first one I ever did was a $50,000 investment. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't a million-dollar investment. It was 50, it's all I had. I think it was 55 that I could put. I felt like I was, you know, playing blackjack in Vegas with a nickel. You know, it's just I only have a nickel, but it I mean, it had such an impact over three years with the growth of it and then the cost segregation, it was I was blown away.

SPEAKER_04

Uh I mean, it it is phenomenal. Now, I'm with you. It's it's one of those things that you think it's incredibly daunting going through it. Like you you read like what it does for you, but then when you go through it, you're like, that's it. Like I filled out a form and then you did all the work for me.

SPEAKER_03

Sure. Yeah, great. Yeah, it's it's an amazing thing. And I want y'all to all ask about costs again, and not that I know how to do it, but I know people who know how to do it.

SPEAKER_04

Well, my wife would be remiss too from a tax standpoint. If you're in South Carolina, make sure you're filing for your if you buy a new property, make sure you're filing for your ATI exemption. My wife would my wife would definitely tell me it that to to say that. And I've I've definitely learned from her a lot of things. And like I said, she's way smarter than I am. So uh if you're in South Carolina, file for your ATI exemption. If you're not sure what it is, ask your closing attorney, they'll be able to help you out.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, yeah. Attorneys are so valuable for that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_04

You know, that's a good point. I I think one of the things, and and I'm married to a an attorney, so I'm I'm just unbelievably biased. But yeah, you know, I think you know, whether it's our CPA, our attorney, all the professional folks that are adjacent to us really help drive our business. And I look at them as partners as opposed to to somebody that I have to cut a check to. Right. And I look to them, and if you have a good attorney, you have a good CPA, you have a good maybe business manager, whatever it may be, like they are assets to your team. And you know, you're paying for knowledge, not time. You're paying for experience, not time. So when I when I have to stroke a check to our CPA, now luckily I'm married to attorney, so my fees are a little bit lower. But when I stroke a check to a CPA, I don't think about it because I know what he's doing for us in the background and the experience he has. And I look at him as an asset. We we don't make a move without letting him know, like, hey, this is what we're looking at. What is the implications if we do this, good or bad? So I look at all the professional folks, similar to all the the trades that I have that work for us and do great work for us, that they are just as important to us as I am to the organization.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've I'm a licensed commercial agent, licensed residential agent, and I ask people to rely on me. Just just let me let me handle it. Just give it, give it to me. Don't try to figure it out. I'll explain it. I mean, I'm not it's not smoke and mirrors. I'm going to explain the process and walk you through. And when I was a remodeling consultant, same thing. It's like, don't, you know, do your research, bring it to me, but I I can tell you what the building codes are, and I can tell you what's going to happen or not happen. I can tell you if that wall's load bearing or not load bearing. Let me take you through that. But then when I need an attorney, I need I'm not an attorney, never have been. Not planning to be. I'm not a CPA, never have been, not planning to be. Don't want to be. So, right. Just the same way that you deal with the remodeling contractor or an agent as I am. Seek out the people that can that can make it easy and cut and dry. I love as cut and dry as we can make it. Attorneys have a little struggle with that because not everything's cut and dry.

SPEAKER_04

But uh that's what that that's what a good AI model is for. Take what they say, throw it in there and say, explain it to me like I'm five. I love it. So you have a podcast, or you had a podcast? We did. We had a podcast. We we did I will I'd have to look back and see. We did over a hundred episodes, but it was somewhere north of a hundred episodes. Oh, okay. So we we called it the real estate unsuccess stories. So we focused on folks that would come on in the industry all across commercial, residential, uh real estate, and they would come on and tell kind of the the dark side, the bad side of real estate, because what what I saw, and and nothing against this on like LinkedIn and all that kind of stuff. Everyone's like, hey man, real estate sunshine and rainbows, you're gonna be a millionaire, you're gonna do all these great things. And I had an opportunity to talk to some really influential people, some folks that are way out in front of where I ever even think I could be one day, and you know, some very large names, but they all had similar stories that they all cut their teeth, they all had mishaps, they all had things that they had to overcome. And what we wanted to do was just bring to light that hey, if you're going through this right now, if you're kind of in it, that you're not alone, everyone, including folks that have you know millions of dollars in assets, tens of millions of dollars in assets, have done the same thing. You know, we had a guy um that told a story, a well-known investor in the the multifamily space. One of the guys that he got mixed up with turned out to be in the mob. And that was kind of an interesting story. We we had some folks that got held at gunpoint over some different. He was he uh the one of the guys, he was doing a 1031 exchange. The exchange house, the guy was was mixed up with the mob. So wow. So the so they that did not end well for him. He was he was embezzling money and he was taking the money from the 1031 exchanges and using it personally. So not only did this gentleman that I was interviewing, his money got stolen, but it just so happened that the mob was using him for some of their real estate transaction 1031 exchanges.

SPEAKER_03

So where where was the mob person on the um in the transaction?

SPEAKER_04

They were a client of this gentleman of the uh 1031 exchange president, and he embezzled and used their money incorrectly, and they handled the uh repercussions themselves, let's put it that way. So we're talking like mob violence here? Uh he was the the 1031 exchange person was found in a car.

SPEAKER_03

Okay. Wow. That's about as real as a goats.

SPEAKER_04

I mean, that was that was probably the the craziest story that we ever had. I mean, a lot of them were were more like, hey, uh, well, one gentleman actually he lost a quarter million dollars in a deal. I mean, just what just went from making money to flat broke and then rebuilt his entire empire from there. So, I mean, we did I enjoyed it. It was it was really eye-opening for me. One of the one of the things that I've learned in this this whole time doing this is I really helped, and I think it's just in my DNA. I like education, I like educating people, like educating myself. Right. So we we had a meetup group at one point in time.

SPEAKER_03

Your family is all teachers, and my wife is a um Montessori, a public Montessori school principal. Okay. So she was an educator, special needs all the way up, and now her career is she's the principal of a public Montessory school, which is a heavy duty job. I had no idea until we became involved. She leaves about six in the morning and comes home at seven at night. So education is a deal.

SPEAKER_04

It is, and and I'm a firm believer in it. And and everywhere that I go within the real estate world, I I try to either share knowledge that I've gained, or as I meet people that are definitely more knowledgeable, more experienced than me, I try to share their knowledge with other people as well. Yep. All right, so we got to talk more about this mob thing. If I don't remember if we we kept the episodes up or not, I I would have to go back and look. But if if it was one of the I would read that. I want to say it was in the first like 25 episodes. I mean, the whole time my jaw is just on the floor as this gentleman's telling the story, and it was truly the most unique story I've ever heard. Like, we again, I I interviewed a ton of people. I was super uh grateful to have all the guests that we did. I mean, we had the people like Rod Khalif and like all these great guests. Sure. And and but that story to this day sticks with me. Like I can I remember it like it was yesterday. Uh mainly, like I said, my jaw was on the floor the entire video. Just like what you said, what? Hold on, back that up one more time.

SPEAKER_03

He did what yeah, yeah, it gets real sometimes. It can. Don't get mixed up with the mob. I don't plan to. I'm I'm a little old for that now. Yeah. The unfortunate thing is in my past I might have considered it, but at this point, I'm just too old for that. So there you go.

SPEAKER_04

Do it on your own, it's a lot easier.

SPEAKER_03

Um, yeah, we're we're gonna have a uh a property manager on one of our next podcasts, and those stories are just unreal. Eviction stories and tenant stories and those things, they just really, really get nuts. So, what do you do for fun? What do you do to blow off steam?

SPEAKER_04

You play video games, you play golf, what well, I pretend to play golf. I'm absolutely horrible, but I love getting out there. Anytime I can be in the sun and and and and being on the golf course for a couple hours, I'm I'm a big fan. Now my kids are starting to get into golf. So I'd read this thing the other day. Well, if you if you get your your kids into golf, you'll always have a golfing buddy for the rest of your life. So we're trying to get into that. I work out three to five days a week. I I like I said, I get up at around like four, I'm in the gym at around five. That's typically how I blow off steam. But I do play video games. We have an active Thursday night group that we have been so during lockdown, kind of in the COVID years, we we had this idea. Uh, we had some friends of ours from high school that that we all lived relatively close by, but obviously we couldn't leave at the time. And I I I hit everyone up and I was like, hey, uh, what if we did our back when we all lived close to each other, we used to meet up Thursday nights to grab a beer. And I said, Well, what if we did that but virtually? Like we all have good internet, like all of our games we can play online and do that kind of stuff. So for the last five years, we have all got together Thursday nights around like 8 30, and we play hour, two, maybe three, depending on the night, and we just kind of hang out digitally. I mean, it's it's not ideal. We definitely do it a lot more in person now that we're not, you know, sequestered to our our houses. We we still to this day, I mean, we're recording this on a Thursday. I've already gotten a text this morning like, Hey, the new video game thing that we're doing tonight is out. Make sure you have the download and all this stuff.

SPEAKER_03

It happens to be Thursday, so your your buddies are hitting you up, like, you in tonight.

SPEAKER_04

Oh, that we will. My wife around 8 30 tonight, she'll be like, Did you get the call yet? And she's just waiting on that ding to come on my phone. And when it does, she knows I'm escaping upstairs for for some some getaway time. And you know, we we bant, we're we're normal guys, we banter, we we make fun of each other, and we're not very good. We're all over 35, so we're not very good. Uh, but we like to have fun and pretend like we're still children. I love it. Absolutely love it.

SPEAKER_03

What are you doing with your kids after school today?

SPEAKER_04

Today, well, we got to go get juice boxes uh for they got their party tomorrow, so we'll have to do that. But this afternoon, we're probably now that it's stopped raining here in Charleston. We've had just a couple of days of just like absolute rain and and clouds, and we average, I think, over 300 days of sunshine. So the sun's out. I'm looking at some blue skies in my window right now. And so we're we're going to be practicing a little bit of baseball this afternoon. I say practice, we'll get out there to throw, we'll hit some balls off the tee, and we'll just get out there and have some fun. Anything to get them running around and kind of doing. And they'll start they start basketball, I think, in two weeks. So we'll probably also hit up a couple of foul shots when we get back to the house on the house goal and do it that way. But you know, we'll we'll play it by ear. No, no hard schedules. But again, I'll get to pick them up and we'll go hang out.

SPEAKER_03

So it'll it'll be a lot of fun. Well, they're lucky to have their dad in town and present and involved in general terms. What do you think about the impact of AI on what we're doing?

SPEAKER_04

I think if used correctly, it's a tool and an asset. I think if you lean on it too much, you know, you don't truly understand what's going on or if it's telling, you know, saying the right things. And I think, for example, as have we mentioned a bunch of times, my wife's a lawyer, and I'm in charge of making sure that things like our house rules, terms and conditions, and all that kind of stuff are up to date. We change things from time to time. Well, one thing that I noticed was, you know, I would ask her, I said, Hey, I need to update this clause, whether it's the force majeure, which is our name storm policy, if you will, clause, or if we need to update our parking clause or anything like that.

SPEAKER_03

Oh, episode on force majeure.

SPEAKER_04

But it, you know, previously I would say, Hey, can you write one for me? And she has a bunch of stuff she's written before. So typically she'll pull it, reword it, make it fit for our our our property. However, what I do now is I'll run it through an AI model and I'll say, you know, here's what I need it to say. Here's the one from all the big OTAs. I'll feed it a bunch of data and then I'll say, write one for me. You know, here's information about my property, uh, write one for me. And then what I'll do is I'll take that and I'll send it to her and I'll say, Hey, bless it or change it. That's all I'll say. Bless it or change it. And then she'll either reply back with a thumbs up on the email or she'll redline it and then I'll use it. And it's and it saves us a ton of time. I was waiting again, I get free legal work. Sorry, for those that are not married to an attorney. Uh, but the caveat to the free legal work is I don't get, I'm not at the front of the line. She has to pay the bill, she has to bill hours. So, you know, it could have been a week, two weeks before she got to it. Or, you know, I'm asking her at nine o'clock at night where she's physically exhausted. I'm like, hey, can you just look at this force majeure policy real quick? Not tonight, buddy. Right. And so um the that's what happens to year 40. You're talking about force majeure policies at nine o'clock at night. Um but nope, nobody has energy for force majeure at nine o'clock at night. So so now I think with with AI, it's just made it a little bit easier for us to to have these types of conversation. And I tell it, I'm like, write it in legal ease. And you know, again, always run it by an attorney. You got to have somebody with local knowledge, state level knowledge, county level knowledge on on what to write and do. So I would not trust it to just be my attorney. It is, I have definitely caught it saying incorrect things. However, I think if you're using it as a tool and you understand how to use it as a prompt, then it it's definitely something that is great. I mean, I fed it one of the best things that I did was I fed it a bunch, I found a bunch of short-term rentals, and I love their descriptions. I love their descriptions are great, and I fed it all those.

SPEAKER_03

That's one of the ways that I use it, is when I'm a listing agent. I will write what I think is a really cool, you know, very provocative listing description of this property, and I'd send it um through Grok or um Chat GPT, and it comes back and it rewrites. It's like, fuck, that's so much better than what I wrote. And so then I'll and and there may be a you know a misnomer here or there that I'll correct, but it was like, this is the thought organization and the even the emotion of it is better. It's like I'm a human and this machine is has better emotions than I do.

SPEAKER_04

Well, I'll I'll put it so for anybody that has a short-term rental, here's the here's the one that like has blown me away that I use it for. So so occasionally in all of our units, unfortunately, they do not have the same appliances, right? The dishwasher, we have two, we have three three units. Two of the three have the same dishwasher, one does not. They each have the same TV, but like the HVAC is a little bit different, so and so forth, right? Occasionally we'll get a question from a guest. Hey, how do I use X? Whether it's the oven, the microwave, the dishwasher, the TV. So I took some time. I'm a big fan of using different AI models for different for different responsibilities. Notebook LM, which is good one of Google's models, is really good at if you give it data, it'll spit out, like you can give it PDFs, websites, things like that. Just feed it to it and it'll spit out some really cool things. Well, it has all of our user manuals for all of our appliances. So when a guest asks, How do I use X appliance? I put it back into the notebook LM and I say, tell me how to use this appliance in three to five steps based on what the guest is asking. And it spits out a response and of and I'm telling it, and I have a saved reply a message that I kind of use as a prompt. And I'm saying, hey, reply to this as you're replying to a guest, but tell it in three to five steps how to do what the guest is asking. And it checks the user manual and then replies, and I just copy and paste it and put it in a reply. I never have to read a user manual.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, it's astonishing. And I'm sure I use it. I'm Gen X, but I probably use it like a boomer. Ryan's behind the camera, nodding furiously. Right, yes, you use yeah, you use chat GPT like a boomer. Even though I'm I'm Gen X, I'm not a boomer. But yeah, I mean it I'm um I'm fascinated with it. As I said, I'm messing with Grok and have used Chat GPT a lot. And it helps me clarify my thinking. It's weird. It's like having a having an editor or a personal assistant or somebody that I could say, you know, read this and improve it for me. But it's AI.

SPEAKER_04

Yep.

SPEAKER_03

And it's AI. I mean, I should I don't like the word but so and it's AI.

SPEAKER_04

And I think, you know, I spent a lot of time, probably more time than I like to admit. I like to I will go on YouTube as like a way to learn things. I'm a visual kinesthetic learner, so I will be on YouTube a bunch. I've learned and have saved a bunch of creators that that it's all about writing the right prompt, right? It's prompting the AI to do the thing. So I've learned some tricks of the trade. I have some saved prompts that I I repeat on a regular basis because I don't want to rewrite the same thing. So if you can get your prompt, like one of the things I learned is hey, give me this response, but before you do, ask me five more questions to clarify what you need from me to do so to do it. And then it asks questions. And sometimes you feel like you're writing, you could have just written the whole thing if you would have just answered those five questions yourself. But oftentimes I find I'm not as strong of a writer as I am a numbers guy, that it'll it'll spit out a way better response to like you were saying, Russ, than I could have ever written.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Yeah, I think I'm a great writer until I run it through an editor. Not so much.

SPEAKER_04

Correct. I do I do keep my yalls in there. I tell it to keep my y'alls. Y'all's are really important.

SPEAKER_03

Okay. Very important. Um, and back in the 1900s when I was in college, my kids love to say that to me.

SPEAKER_04

It irks me every time I hear it, someone's like, Well, how about this? I I got one for you. My right again, my kids.

SPEAKER_03

One suitcase and a typewriter. Typewriter. That was all of my equipment for college. And Ryan wants to know if they had electricity in those days. We did it. It was an electric typewriter, actually.

SPEAKER_04

There you go. My my kids asked me how long cars have been around and I s uh the other day, and I said, son, they've been around for a long time, like a long time. You know, I'm thinking back in my head, like nine 1902, 1905, somewhere in there. And I didn't say that out loud, but I'm trying to I was doing the math, and he goes, you know, probably since the 80s. And I was like, Stop. Don't you ever, never say that again.

SPEAKER_03

Yep. So AI is a brave new world. It is. Again, use it as a tool. I'm embracing it as much as I can, and it's definitely a tool, and hopefully not our cosmic overlord.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, no, it's almost like we should uh they should make a movie about it going bad.

SPEAKER_03

There have been a few.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, there've been a few.

SPEAKER_03

Cody, it's been an absolute pleasure. I love what you're doing. We didn't really talk a whole about a whole lot about real estate or investments or but those we know that those things support your lifestyle. Absolutely. And that's really what this is about. It's not so much a mechanical at all. It's more about the why. And I really appreciate you you sharing with us. I want to thank everybody who's been watching or listening. And this has been the Blue Cut Podcast. We can be found on Instagram and on the web under Good Faith Property Solutions and on YouTube. And we'd love to hear your comments. I mentioned it several times through the podcast, but we'd love to hear your comments. Agree, disagree, ask questions, suggest new topics. We get so much better if you make comments. So find us on social media, find us on the web, and like and comment. And Cody, again, thank you so much. And thank you to everyone listening. Thanks so much, Russ. See you next time.

SPEAKER_00

You went to a bar. Refuse the show. I didn't buy no beer until I tell you what. My name is Russell. I'm on the mic. So listen to my podcast show. It's got a podcast got a podcast show.