Welcome to The Dealpen a podcast that digs into the details of untold stories from crafty real estate investors. And now, here's your host, Avi Rasowsky Okay. We are live in The Dealpen Podcast with Larry Higgins from Skip Genie. Larry, how are you today? I'm great, man. How are you doing, Avi? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for making time to do this. I've been, I just was telling you offline, I've been a fan for a long time and I've been using Skip Genie for gosh, probably, probably seven years. I'd say somewhere six or seven years. I'm sure you have the data on it, but, but I appreciate everything you do. And I'd love to get into your story and your business and how you help Yeah, no, no, I appreciate the support you've given us and I said, you know, we've I know we communicated years ago. I can't remember if we talked on the phone or his messenger, but yeah, I kind of keep. I'm not as active on Facebook as I used to be, but you know, I remember paying attention to your Facebook group and then we've had people that you've referred to us and just added at a distance. I've kind of kept track of you as well and nothing. I Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's funny. Obviously, I know a bit about what you do with Skip Genie, but I'd love to maybe start with just your journey as an investor. I've heard other podcasts where you talk about being in the W2 world and I think something in construction, but maybe if you could give us a little high level on where you've been and how you got to where Yeah. So I was, uh, sometimes I miss that Debbie too. Yeah. I was having this conversation with a younger kid that worked for me the other day, like pros and cons to everything, but no, I wouldn't trade it for anything. No. So yeah, I had a, uh, graduated from Texas A&M and went into a construction project management stuff, building a multifamily in Texas. Uh, worked overseas for a bit, uh, doing projects for the, the military and the state department. Came back home and was doing more construction stuff in Houston. Then I got recruited to a job that was totally outside of anything I'd done. It was to help start up our project management team for a pipe and fitting supply company. Cool boss, cool, owners were cool, money was good. But within a week or two at most, I knew I'd made a mistake. I was absolutely bored. And it was first time in my life, I've had, you know, I haven't had the most glamorous jobs growing up, but, you know, I've torn roofs off, I've paved roads in the summer. whatever, but going to that office, getting up and having to make that drive, just, I dreaded it all. It was, I've never experienced that. So, um, started thinking about real estate investing and finally said, you know what, there's all these other people doing it. I'll figure it out. So I quit my job, little scary. I'd never purchased. I didn't even own the home I lived in then. So a lot of, you know, but none of that's rocket science. It's acronyms and figuring out it's, Go Google it, YouTube, whatever, especially now. This was in 2013, 14. So I learned about mail campaigns like a lot of people, sent my first couple rounds of mailers out. I got all this return mail and I'd been taught you need to skip trace these people. I'd never even heard that term. And long story short, I figured out what it was and I got very proficient at it. But I still had a lot of issues trying to find people. Just the data I was using was inadequate. I learned about kind of what I consider upper tier data. And you pay a premium for it, especially back then. Uh, I got access to that and, uh, that was kind of scary. Uh, I still hadn't even done a deal and I made an annual commitment for$500 a month, which was huge to me. But the, the, the sample sets I'd seen out of that, I was like, it was night and day difference. The level of data I could get through this company versus white pages and Intellius and been verified and, uh, But what I learned, the reason it was so valuable, when I sent a letter, you assume they get it, but you don't have an answer. They might call you in a month or two months or whatever. But I just figured, you know what, instead of, you know, mailing new letters, why not just try and call them? Because back then nobody, there was not a lot of people cold calling back then. I figured out real fast, hey, I get my answer immediately. If I can get them on the phone, I get a yes or no, or let me think it up. I have a disposition. instantly. And then I also realized nobody else was calling. I literally had some, I remember several in particular older elderly ladies that thanked me for calling them. Okay, nice. Yeah, I was like, man, okay. So, you know, I got more and more proficient in doing deals and cold calling and skip tracing to do those deals. Over time, I saw patterns in the type of leads that I could shrink my ratio from leads to deals and the types of leads that tended to be easier to negotiate and that that were just better deals, higher wholesale fees. And I just started getting really dialed in. I'm like, you know what, I want to go find the most distressed properties I can find. I don't care if there's title issues. I don't care if I have to go get a genealogist, whatever to help me research. And I got pretty good at it. I know I'm getting a little long-winded here. No, no, it's fine. Keep going. You developed that expertise. Yes. Early on, I did a lot of driving for dollars. That's one thing you used to hear a lot. I guess you still do. If you don't have any money or you don't know what to do, just go drive for dollars. I said, well, if it's that easy, why What I noticed over time and how I kind of identified these leads, not all driving for dollars leads were equal. It's like, as you kind of compile that list, you see, and you start working through it, you see the people that tend to be the most responsive. It's not just a vacant house. It's a vacant house where the owner had died. It's a vacant house that has delinquent taxes. It's a vacant house that has code violations. a vacant house that if you did your research, you saw that there was an expired listing at some point. And then I figured out, hey, I need to try and stack these. We hear list stacking now, everybody, you know, there's all kinds of stuff. Back then it was kind of a novel concept, at least to me. It's like, hey, the more I can stack, the higher the probability there's going to be not just a deal, but a fantastic deal on the other end of that. I took on a partner incidentally, I helped him to try and find somebody because I was getting a reputation for being able to skip trace. We'd start working together, doing deals, trying to really ramp up the, trying to do it at scale. That's when I learned, hey, I don't, I can't, I can't go out and physically drive for dollars and do all my research and skip tracing and all this. I'm like, I know the criteria, can I do this just by looking at a list? I know, like I mentioned, vacancy, death, taxes, loan and default, code violations. And I'll never forget, I put a test list together of 12 properties that had that criteria. Never seen them, I didn't go driving, I just did this from my computer. And sure enough, we popped a deal for like 25,000 off that initial list of 12. That was my proof of concept. I was like, we're done driving for dollars. It's all computer time now. So that's kind of how I got into that nature of those deals. And then just paying attention to the real estate community, you know, Google, you know, pay-per-click and the mail, the yellow letter campaigns, all that kind of stuff. It was so saturated. If I talked about cold calling back then in different Facebook groups, there'd be people just, dude, you're wasting your time. That's a joke. That's too much money, too much time. I mean, people bashed it. They just didn't realize. But I just knew that that was an open marketing channel or way less saturated. I knew that evolution was coming. Yeah, it's happened now. But yeah, I thought, hey, there's we can if we have the technical ability to provide data and the functionality to help people replicate what I'm doing. Or even if it's just, you know, your more high volume stuff where you want to go dial 10,000 people a day, if we can give them that resource, the demand is going to come. It may not be here just yet, but it's going to happen. And yeah, that's exactly what happened over time. you start hearing more and more about, hey, cold calling people, you know, uh, real estate investors creating their own call centers to, to facilitate all this. Uh, the text blasting, you know, that's all that, all that super commonplace now, but you know, back in 2017, 18, very few people were doing text blasting. Uh, And I'm not telling people to go out and do that right now. If you're going to I'm just like, I'm just kind of explaining the evolution there. And you know, when we started, we were super expensive because we had no volume to try and negotiate discounts with our data providers. Okay. Um, I think we were like $1.99 a search. Okay, wow. But it was, if you didn't have the, you know, people that were open-minded and could see the concept were willing to pay for it. And they got the results and they kept paying for it. But over time, as our customer base grew, we just kept negotiating down our data rates and passing that down. So I'll never forget when we were able to price ourselves under a dollar a search. That was a huge benchmark for us. That's funny. Yeah, I would tell people, hey, I'm You can go run a million searches that might buy me a nice dinner. Like we weren't making money on the data. We have the subscription. Yeah. And the subscription is what, you know, that gives you access to a dashboard with the functionality that we have. You have access to me through weekly, somewhat weekly calls. If you have any questions, I'm Yeah, it's funny. It makes it makes me think like, gosh, I wish I wish it was higher price. So you could you could sort of tighten the pool of how many people are But, well, hey, there that goes down. So you've probably seen there has been some stuff come down that makes it a little bit harder to comply with higher volume dialing and robocalls and stuff like that. Someday, I think the day will come where the technology exists, Yeah, it's gotten insane with how many calls come in. And then if you're a real human being calling somebody, you get the brunt of their frustration where it's like, well, hold on. I don't fear the day that that happens. Granted, we have a mix of customers. Some are only doing a handful of searches a month. Some do tens of thousands every month. If that day happens, what I like about it is all of a sudden that marketing channel becomes wide open again because most people Hey, when I started out, I hand dialed all day. Everything was from my phone. I've never personally used it. I've had callers that use dialers. This is totally legal. Again, I'm not an attorney, but calling one by one from a cell phone, does it get more expensive? Yes. If you hire a caller and you're not going to be able to do as many calls a day, but that marketing channels wide open people's phones, you know, this, uh, somebody's actual phone doesn't get blocked as spam. There's not as many people calling. And I think there's a lot of opportunity if that day comes where they actually shut Well, it's funny. Before we started recording, I was telling you about another gentleman I was having an interview like this with just yesterday. And he made a comment that made me think of you. He said, look, Avi, you know this just as well as I do, the best investors are the best researchers. And if you can research better than anybody, and because he was going through a list of thousands of mobile home parks, and he called it down to 10 that made him a ton of money. He did that by really being specific with getting that list down to exactly what he wanted. It sounds like that's what you did on your own as you were building up Skip Genie, or maybe you did that before you built the company. I'm not sure Yeah, no, it's, it's funny. You're talking about that list. I used to joke around. I feel like Rayman sometimes, like just looking at a list, it could just be a list of Harris County in I just scroll down and I'm, you know, or just reading skip trace, even bulk results of thousands of people. Yeah. It's, you kind of know things that just things that pop out at you. If I see a percent sign, on an appraisal district. Generally that's care of, generally that tells me, even if it doesn't say a state, something's going on. It's in a state situation or a prison or nursing home. Or someone else getting the mail for the owner. Yes. When you see a percent sign or the C slash O, that just pops out. And that's a little thing, but when you look at thousands and thousands and thousands of these, you just see the patterns in I don't know if I've shared this with you personally, but you were instrumental in me changing my marketing. I used to do a lot of Google, basically inbound Google marketing, really hot leads, but I was getting frustrated with them back in 2019, 2020 timeframe where lead costs were going up. The amount of leads was so low, especially if you wanted to stay local, which I was At the time, not to delve into it too much, but I was going from a national campaign into a much more localized, just buying stuff in my own backyard here in the Charlotte area. I heard you talk about how to attack that trifecta, right? You kind of referenced it before, but the vacant house with the deceased owner and tax delinquent. And I said, all right, let me shut off everything with Google. And kind of like you did, I did a test. So let me test it out. And I swear it was like, within the first month, great deal. few phone calls and I was like, all right, that's it. I'm all, I'm all in now. And I, I never went back to Google again. It's always been targeted outbound, um, which can be really, it can be hard, but you know that you're doing things that pretty much no one else is doing. Um, can you talk a little bit about that? Like how you, how you identify, uh, priority Yeah. It's you talk about the Google, I've never, I've never made any claims just to just so people know, I'm not saying other, other strategies don't work. Mail campaigns, pay-per-click, buying leads, whatever. You can make any of that work. And, but a lot of it just depends on kind of how do you want, do you want to, do you want to make that work? I don't, I don't want Yeah, I played around with doing a little bit higher volume at one point. And it began to feel like a job. And I hated it. Because now, the types of deals I'm used to doing, I had no competition, they weren't shopping my offer. And they were, right, if they engaged in in a and talks with me to sell that property, nine times out of 10, they never ghosted me. They stayed there. It was just so much easier. I'm not a sales guy. I'm very open about that. I don't consider myself particularly good at it. But the nature of the deals we're talking about, you don't have to be. I mean, a lot of times I talk about it. These people didn't even realize they owned it or still owned a property and could sell it. So they were expecting zero. If I offer them anything, it's more than they ever thought they were going to get. But yeah, as far as your question was like kind of Yeah, let's say someone doesn't even have any experience doing outbound, or here's a good example, because I know a lot of people like this. They're trying like crazy to just call, call, call, but I have a conversation with them and I can tell, my goodness, they're spending so much time on a bunch of people that have no interest in ever talking What would you advise to someone like that who's really trying to make it work, but they don't understand there's a smarter way Yeah, so I want to try and see if I can find a text message. So yeah, again, high volume dialing can absolutely work. If it's you doing it, you're out there, you're kind of new, and you're just calling a list of, let's say, high equity absentee owners. I want to run my head through the wall. That is so mind numbing. Again, is there a chance that these people would like to sell? Yes. But is there any real motivation? Unless you get lucky and stumble on somebody that their circumstances have changed, they need to sell that house fast. If you're dialing yourself, you need as few dials as possible to get a deal. And you need true motivation or true distress that would maybe help you get a better deal. So what I always look for is, we mentioned the trifecta, but the general rule of thumb is the more distress, the fewer leads to get a deal. That's a solid, that's just a fact. That we'll say is a fact. The more distress, the smaller number of phone calls, the number of phone calls goes down to get a deal. So what I established early on, why I looked at all the common denominators and me having conversations that led to contracts and deals and so forth, it was the owners were deceased, the property had delinquent taxes, and it was vacant. Those three right there. And since then, I learned other stuff. Hey, you know, code violations with tax delinquency or code violations with just vacancies good. But if I can get code violations with vacancy and deceased owner and tax delinquency, even better, it's gonna be a smaller list. Every time you add a piece of criteria, your list gets smaller. So, and you're in Charlotte, that's not gonna be a real big list. So over what you do on your next step is like, Hey, I'm going to loosen it one, one bit to give me a broader range of leads. I realize I'm gonna have to contact more people to yield a deal, but it's still better than just high, you And when I say deceased owners, so I'm not talking probates. That's one thing I should probably clarify. I've never chased a probate list again. by all means, I'm not telling you not to, or you can't get deals that way. I was just never, just logically I know that's a heavily saturated and targeted list. And it's not even just investors, that's realtors too. So when I say deceased, I either know because the appraisal district tells me by saying the estate of, not every appraisal district does that, but in Texas, once, to this day, I don't know exactly how they know. but when the county knows, they will put the estate of. So now I know that person's deceased. And they could also be on a probate list, but I don't know that. But if I know it's the estate of, and it's vacant, and it's tax delinquent for five years, Odds are it's not on a probate because if they had the means to probate, they probably had the means that this property didn't fall into these circumstances. Exactly right. I was just going to say to your point about not chasing probate, some of my better deals. Yeah, they never filed anything with the estate office at all. They just let it sit, nothing happened, no papers were filed. People die every day. And again, the deals I'm talking about, some people may be, oh, that was great, you did that, 2014, 15, whatever. No, people die every day without wills, and the family doesn't have the means to, or maybe there's a loan on the property. And trust me, if you're not the borrower, and there's no will, especially in the case where there's no will, get that bank to talk to you. It's so hard. You can do it, but again, But I've had to fight battles where there was a loan in place and just to try and get that payoff statement. And so for a lot of families that they can't, they either they don't have enough energy or the resources that maybe they think it's gonna cost them$10,000 to get an attorney to help them solve that. They just don't do anything. And then you end up with this property showing up, jumping out at you on the screen as a likely lead. And like I said, in those circumstances, let's just say, go back to the trifecta. It's not a matter of if, but how often. You will find people that they either didn't even realize they had any interest in the property, they had legal ownership, or they may have realized it, but they thought the bank had foreclosed on it or the county had already taken it. Or I remember one guy, one of our Skip Genie guys, he actually recorded it. I didn't ask him to, but he recorded a call. I helped him prioritize his driving for dollars list. This was years ago. I was like, we do an experiment. I said, I told him, I said, go get a hundred addresses. And we did exactly what I just talked about. He got the hundred. I had him populate which ones had a tax delinquency. and not even just a tax delinquency, how much, how big was that problem in dollars? And then we skip trace that whole list. And then we went and prioritized his top 100. And that's one thing we haven't talked about yet. I'm real big, especially if you're a solo operator, you need to prioritize your efforts. So he took that list of 100, and then we prioritize the top 20 based off of who's deceased, The tax issue, yeah, and he had some notes on, look, some houses are vacant and they look pretty good. Others looks like a jungle, there's a tree fell over on the roof. So you factor in stuff like that, and that's kind of subjective, but how bad is the tax problem? Owner deceased, all that. And using that criteria, he built that list out, we prioritize it to the top 20. And this is no joke, his name's Tyler, he's in, He used to be outside Nashville. Okay, pretty new. I did not ask him to record but the very first person he calls, he reaches the son of the deceased owner. And the guy tells him, hey, you need to talk to the county. We don't own it anymore. We told the county to take it. We can't afford the taxes. Wow. And while I heard the, he sent me the recording while I'm listening to it, I practically did a backflip. I was like, you gotta be kidding me. And Tyler ended up getting a deal. Now look, the odds are slim that you're going to go out and get a hundred poverties prioritized, like I just said, and call the first one. And they actually answer pretty easily. And all that goes down. I think his deal was like for 18 or $20,000, but it's, That's, that's proof though. I mean, that's not, that wasn't a fluke. It's like, maybe you do that enough. Maybe it's your 11th property or But the process works like calling it down like that actually works. And that's, that's the other thing, like the guys that are sitting there, uh, dialing, Uh, Let's say you go find, you know, 100 vacant properties, just like I talked about 100 vacant properties, deceased owners, and some tax issues, you know, look and see, you know, how can I probably Don't go after all 100, try and prioritize however you can. Who's got the biggest tax issues? If you have to look at Google Street View, what's the condition of those properties? Or do you see one that's boarded up? Does the mailing address in the appraisal district, does it go to an address that's four hours away or another state? It's all those, they're little things, but they can eat, they can jump out at you and help you prioritize your efforts. I would rather contact an heir that lives in another state that has ownership in a property that's got all kinds of issues here because it's a major pain for them to try and deal. And they're not dealing with it because I'm seeing it on my list with all these distress points. So, and I mentioned that because there was a guy, I had a guy reach out to me. He found me off of BiggerPockets. Okay. Random message. And I ended up, I'm going to see if I can find this text message. Yeah, go for it. I ended up trying to hop on a call with him. And he was doing that same thing like a lot of newer investors do. And he told me, again, I'm like, dude, you're kidding. Like that hurts me just hearing it. Yeah. kind of just everything I just told you that we just discussed, he actually went out and implemented. And then like four months later, he, uh, yeah, I can't find it, but like four months later, he messaged me out of the blue and it's like, Hey man, just want to let you know. And I was curious because look, if you've heard my other podcasts, I'm pretty open about what you, this is no top But a lot of people are just like, well, you know, that's not, not my state or, you know, he got some special skillset. No. If you do this, it's just a matter of, you know, getting a little bit proficient at it. Like you'll go find these deals. And, but I don't know who's going to actually implement anything I'm talking about. He did. And, uh, he had. He'd closed one deal already for, I forgot how much, but he had another one that he hadn't closed yet, but he's working towards closing. Uh, just had a guy, uh, on our weekly call. I'd never talked to him in my life, uh, four or five months ago. His name's Sosa. He hopped on first time I ever talked to him and he's like, Hey man, I saw one of your old podcast. I was just, I was doing just dialing these big lists. Like what you said kind of made sense. And I thought, Hey, if I can make that work, that sounds better. Yeah. Right. And again, now have I seen a HUD? No, but this guy is like, look, you know, I did it for, I think 40 something days Yeah. It's, uh, it seems it's very easy to dismiss. I remember like hearing you talk about it the first time, like, okay, well, yeah, that could work, but that, yeah, I don't know. That's not me. And then I was like, well, God, Why not do that? And everyone wants to have the fancy technology and all that, but if you can just call the right people and have the ability to have a conversation with a stranger, that's doable. Yeah, and again, I've called thousands of phone numbers in my time. Now, I don't call anymore, especially personally, but I never liked it. I hated it, but it's like, hey, my mindset was there could be, especially after I popped off a couple of really good deals, My mindset was there could be an $80,000 check on the other end of this phone call. Just power through it. And I like to do things in blocks of time, like big blocks. So I might call for two or three hours. I would stand up and pace and make, it's real easy to sit here on a phone and dial and dial and dial. It drains your energy and you sound, you don't sound like somebody that's energetic and happy to talk to you. So yeah, the dialing, just thinking about that. And that's a different whole another side of the equation is great. I've gotten good at identifying the types of properties that are more likely to want to sell and more likely to be a better deal. But the execution, there's a lot of variables. And I say it like this. Joe Blow could have the same list that I have, I might go get five more deals than him. Because I'm a combination of my messaging and my persistence. I am going to contact somebody. Early on, I made some, again, you learn through experience. I'll never forget, there was a deal, a property I came across, it was screaming, This is a deal. It was a deceased owner, serious tax issues. The house was vacant and in pretty bad disrepair. And I actually looked at Zillow too real quick. It even had an expired listing at one point. So that's the other thing with expired listing. You know they wanted to sell at one point, and then if you're lucky, you know, hey, this is what they would have taken a year ago. Especially when the market's shifting a lot, if it's going the right direction, it's like, well, if I can get them anywhere near that price now, it works. Or if I can get them down a little, whatever. That's great, extremely valuable information to have. So this deals there and it was a Hispanic family here in Houston. And it was so in highly distressed neighborhoods or houses. One thing you'll notice if you get into skip tracing is the phone numbers change a lot. A lot of people, they're going to have a lot of disconnected phone numbers. You'll get cricket burner phones or what are they? You see a lot of prepaid cricket. They just can't afford like a regular, you know, they're just highly unstable. Interesting. And a lot of these, a lot of the people I could get through, you know, nobody was answering. I would get, it'd be Spanish voicemails, which, you know, I can kind of, well, I'm not going to converse with those people. I can kind of understand something, but it was all voicemails. So it's, it's Spanish speakers. And I just, That, that lead just kind of kept going to the bottom of my stack as I, Hey, here's a new one. Here's a new one. And I'm like, I know that one's there, but I'm like, you know, you knew what you were. Yeah. You knew it was going to be a challenge. Yeah. I was like, I just, I long story short, like two months later, uh, one of the local wholesalers, uh, blasted that may have been like three or four months. blasted deal and the street name got my attention. I open it up, it's that property. I was like, I had that deal. That deal was mine. Had I just been more persistent and stuck with it, said whatever. At that time, I wasn't text messaging people. Or, hey, at times, You used to live in Houston, right? Yeah. Greater Houston area is spread out. It can take time to drive across town, but there are times in its work where I will, in the right circumstances, I will go knock on a door. Everything tells me there's a good chance of a deal and a good deal at that. I'll go knock on a door. But the easiest thing to do to save time and be efficient is to try and make the connection over the phone. that one stung, I was like, man, that was my deal. I had identified I was on it. Yeah, I just kept letting it fall. And that's, you know, you kind of learn through stuff like that. Yeah. But now I talked about messaging. Me personally. I don't like to sound like a business. I want to just sound like I'm Joe Blow that just wants to try and buy this property from you in a funny story. I'm not I always want to qualify a lot of stuff I say. I'm not saying sound like a business isn't good, can't work. If you're comfortable, you like it, go do it. Me personally, I never wanted to say I'm an investor. I'll tell you, I do everything that an investor does. I'll describe what I do. I will not use that word if I'm talking to you to a seller. So we had a cold caller, really, really nice lady. uh, did a great job. She pound that phone, man. And she knocked out those calls. And I kept telling her, I was like, Angela, don't, don't refer to us as investors. But she just, it was like turning a battleship. Once she kind of got into, uh, her pattern, it was like, what? So she gets a lead on the phone one day in the office. I happen to be buyer. She hasn't put some on speaker and I'm listening and she gets an appointment set. Now, I don't remember a lot of specifics, but I know there was a deceased owner, vacant, maybe some other stuff, but I think she was talking to the grandson of the owner. And he's like, oh yeah, my parents, my family, yeah, we want to sell this. And she just kind of kept going. And then there was an awkward pause and she can't handle that. She has to fill it immediately. There was an awkward silence. And she's like, Oh, and the appointment set. And she's like, Oh, yeah, I mean, you know, my boss, Larry, you know, he, you know, he's an investor. And he was just like, soon as he she soon as investor came out of her mouth. He's Oh, he's an investor. We're not interested. Click just like that. Yeah. And Angela, she felt terrible. I just started laughing. I'm like, I bet you don't say investor again, right, Angela? That's what it took. I mean, whatever. I wasn't freaking out, but I was like, man, in my head, I thought maybe there was a connotation to investor that some people make that, oh, you you're gonna try and milk me for everything, whatever. There's just the psychology of just that word. For sure. So and That's an example. I say messaging. Yeah, you know, did your message, whatever it is that does it maximize people calling you back or responding to you, or does it minimize, you know, is it, are you doing something there? Are you using a VA to do your calls with a heavy accent? I can, I've done that split test. Not One thing, and for anybody that's not, this listens to this, that has not used Skip Genie. One of the things I love about it is you can go in and Oh, yeah. I meant to mention that earlier when we're talking about deceased owners. So sometimes you're like, well, if it's not a probate list, how do you know? Yeah. Oh, like literally, you could if you have a list of vacant houses that talk to people about how to stack it or take that list is maybe it's even a thousand properties doesn't matter. You can call it bulk skip tracing, submit that list through Skip Genie. And I'm glad you mentioned that. Uh, cause it's not just deceased owners and their age too. Yes. So you get, you get all these and for people may be familiar with what kind of, what the data set looks like when you skip trace, whether it's a one-off and in our dashboard or a bolt skip trace. where you search, you know, 10,000 people, we have what we call the deceased indicator, which if they're in the databases and they're showing as deceased, we're going to tell you. So that's, if you run that list of a thousand, you know, let's say they're vacant tax-linked houses, properties. You run that list to skip trace it, and then you find your deceased owners. Well, in addition to that, again, something I've learned just through thousands of these and just kind of learning how the databases work and some of the laws. That death record can take a while to show up, especially in the types of data that we're allowed to use for marketing purposes. You know, if it's a credit report, that shows up pretty quick once it's recorded. But it takes two or three years, is about as fast as that death record will show up in these types of data sets. And sometimes some people, even in your highly sensitive credit report type data, where you're getting like social security information, even then some people just don't show up. It's for whatever reason, there's an issue. So the point being somebody could have died two years ago that the, but you don't know it yet. It's not showing that yet, but if you look, especially in the context of your list, if it's a highly distressed list and you see that the owner shows up, cause we'll show you the age as well. The owner shows up as 88 years old or 80 years old, or I've seen them, you know, 125. Hey, something's, Uh, this person, if they're alive, let's say they're 90, they're in a nursing home. The family's taking care of them, but there's a high probability they've passed. It's just that death record is not showing up yet. So what I do. Depending on the list, I pick a cutoff age. Hey, anybody over the age of 75, I'm going to pull them in with the people that are deceased. I'm just going to make that assumption. I could be wrong, but as far as how I'm going to try and tackle this, I'm going to treat them like they're deceased. And by tackle, I mean, If they're deceased or suspected to be deceased, I know I'm probably not. I'm not going to. I'm not going to be talking to them. I need to go after all their family members to try and establish contact, Again, for anyone who hasn't seen it, you go. If I'm looking at, you know, Mary Smith. Underneath in the Skip Genie dashboard, you can see basically a list of Yeah, so we show in the data set, you'll get, you know, the let's say you're searching John Smith at Maple, you know, 123 Maple Street. You'll see John Smith if he's deceased or his age. You'll see his his address history. which when you're really getting into the weeds, that address history can help tremendously. And each of those addresses is hyperlinked. And I'll kind of get into that in a second. Then you see a list of all the likely relatives, as well as a list of likely associates. And the associates, I'll tell you, can be pretty loose. Could be neighbors, could be cousins. It gets wonky sometimes. You see a count on It doesn't give you any details, but there's a count on how many, the number of bankruptcies, liens, or judgments that person has showing up for them. And then you get their possible phone numbers. And we also have the ability, so, That's one data set. And just for execution purposes, through a separate scrub, it has nothing to do with the data we provide. But we've plugged into other services to where if you want, we can run like a caller ID on each of those phone numbers. It can tell you generally, it'll tell you if that phone is still connected or if it's disconnected. That just saved you having to call and listen to that annoying beep, hey, it's disconnected. But in a lot of cases, once connected, it'll actually show the name of the person or the business that owns that phone number. So instead of having to call eight different phone numbers, hoping you get the right person, If you run that caller ID scrub after you pull your report, you might be able to go straight to that person. Like on my report, if I pull my report, I see a list of phone numbers. So if you pull my report, you're like, I don't know which one's his. But I know I've done this. When I run the caller ID, it'll And just so people can have an idea on the data. I've got phone numbers showing up for me. One was, I think, my apartment phone while I lived in Fort Worth working on a project in like 2004. OK, it shows up. So and again, it's these databases show the historical. So your historical People need to keep that in mind. A lot of people think, oh, I just want to call one phone number. Well, it doesn't work that way. It's here's all the addresses we have. And it shows it'll show date ranges that those associations are showing up. OK, make some judgments on, hey, like my current phone number has been associated with me for years. But you can sometimes make some judgments. Other times it's like, man, just call everybody, every phone number for every person you can find until you make Well, one thing on phone numbers, if you let's say you have 12 or 15 phone numbers under one person, is there any logic to the highest one is the most recent or generally you're if But there's exceptions to every rule. And I tell people, again, as far as like execution and persistence, if you have not established contact or you don't You don't know if you've established contact on the top four numbers. I've had cases where it's that 12th phone number is the one that was at it was it was at the bottom because that person just it was so recent in there and showing up in their their history. it doesn't have time to build up to get to the top of the list. So there are times where that phone number, the right one is at the sucks. Unless you do the caller ID and maybe it tells you, but sometimes that caller ID doesn't show the names. So just don't ignore it until you know for sure. Don't assume just because that number is at the bottom, like the only good numbers will be the top one or two. Don't make that assumption. And one of the battles you'll find in cold calling is, Yeah. If it's a bad number, you know, it's, you know, it's not going to go through, but when you have working numbers, but nobody answers in the voicemails, either generic, like robot voice or voicemail, not set up, uh, or they just don't say their name, like, Hey, leave a message. And you're like, I So that's why I say, you don't know if you've got the right number, like there's an active number. Um, so you kind of keep track of that, but we mentioned the hyperlinks. So all the relatives and associates, and then all the addresses are hyperlink. So if you pull somebody's report, if let's say I pulled a report of somebody and I see that they they're deceased and then I see there are three children, uh, or. three likely relatives on their report. I can just click on one of those names and it will just take me to their report. It's almost like I entered a manual search. If I click on that name, it runs instantaneously, runs a report and it gives me the full data set on that person. Or alternatively, on the addresses. So something I recommend to people all the time, I do it all the time, is just search the address. And what we'll do is we'll pull back names of everybody that shows up being associated with that address. And if it's under 20, if it's under 25 people, you will actually get 25 full report or however many, let's say there's 12 people associated. And that just by searching the address, running one search, You will get 12 full reports on all 12 people associated with that address. If it gets to be over 25, it's compressed. You can see names, but you're not getting the actual reports. Okay. That's real helpful in cases. Again, I'm getting in the weeds, but no, it's good. It's these are where the deals are found. Yeah. Well, it's like, Hey man, I ran a report. So-and-so is deceased, man. They've got like 15 relatives. And I can't, it's like, I don't know, like who's, who's the best one to try and reach? Well, If I search the address of the deceased owner, the property address of the potential lead that the owner's deceased, if I just search that address, now I'm looking to see, well, of these 15 relatives, or 12, whatever, let's say there's 15 relatives, which ones show up the most or at all at that address? They're gonna be the closer relatives, period. And sometimes you can even tell, like, hey, they probably grew up in that house, that's probably, it Oh, that's smart, okay. I have not done that, so that's a time, could be a prioritization effort just to get the right couple names or the right one name that might be Yeah, or, you know, sometimes, which I actually like this scenario, you run a report and there's no relatives and there's one or two relatives and they're dead too. Okay, yeah, I've seen that. Yeah, it's just like, All right. Where do I go now? Yeah, you're just, you know, I'll go online looking for an obituary. I'll start looking at stuff trying to just outside of skip trace databases. Sure. But maybe I see all of a sudden, you know, two years before they died, a new address shows up on their report. It's not the property address, but it's a new address. Well, what's this here? I'll click on that. And whoever appears to be there, like live there, own that, like somehow or another they're associated. I don't know. I'm going to contact this person. And I've had that. I remember that led to a deal one time where I got the lady's name. I was like, man, who is this lady? Like, why, what happened here? I found that the owner, the deceased owner of the property I was pursuing got, you know, she's pretty elderly, got into bad health. The lady that the address that was, I think it was like two hours away. It was her cousin. A cousin is typically not going to show up as a family member, sometimes as an associate, because, you know, especially a cousin when you're in your eighties, you know, it's just, there's not a lot of strong connections for these databases to pick them up. She was a much younger cousin that was an actual nurse. Okay, hook her in to take care of her. And that's kind of stuff that always I'm like, again, just like I try and figure out how how these databases working. Why? Why? But that's the other thing. Yeah. When you see a new address pop up, if the person is deceased, hey, look and see was there a new address that pops up two or three, four years before they show up as deceased. Yeah, it's Sure, yeah, little clue. Whatever the little clues are, just because I've noticed over a few years of doing this now that just the tiniest little thread of information could could be Oh yeah, you're you're playing detective man. Again, this a lot. Most people you're going to be able to contact them just through skip tracing, but an extreme example. Uh, there was a lady, uh, again, deceased property here in Houston area. There was a son and a daughter like in Mississippi or Alabama could not read son. Just absolutely could not reach daughter. I just, I didn't know. I had some working numbers, but nobody was calling me back and nothing. And I'm like, man, I, I don't even know, but I was able to find her on Facebook. I'm like, just, I'm just like, I'm like, I have no idea, but I'm just looking like, And she didn't have much on there. But I start going through her photos on her profile. And she has one photo of it. It's a like a local newspaper article. I'm like, was it I look at it and oh, it's about her. At this point, I'm just like, I'm reading the news. Yeah. And it's about her and her battle with cancer. Oh, wow. I'm like, Oh, this poor lady, you know? And then at the very end, it says, you know, we're happy to say she's in remission and she's back and back at work at such and such engineering. Okay. I was like, all right, so I Googled that. I call and I'm like, what do I have to lose? Guess who answers? It's that lady. And I was like, oh crap, she's going to bite my head off. Hey, look, and I know calling somebody at their place of employment like that, I wouldn't recommend it, but I was at a dead end. But she was like, look, she's like, I do want to talk to you. Can I call you after work? Sure. And she actually follows up. She said, look, I got your phone calls, but I thought you were a debt collector. Because I couldn't even leave a And this was before I knew to text. Now, had I sent a text message, I probably would've gotten a response. Yeah. You said, I would like to do something. But, you know, all of her doctors, all of her medical bills, she had debt collectors coming after. Okay, look, I have to go talk to my, my brother. He like literally like lives in a van down by the river. He was like an ex con or something. Okay. No phone. He looked like two hours away. I didn't get that deal, but just as easily could have led to a deal. But right again, that's Sometimes you don't know what you're looking for, you're just looking. You're digging in real property records or... Death certificates, I've looked at a lot. Yeah, the probate records in your county parks offices. Some state, again, every state and county is a little different, but like Texas, I can go view probates. Yeah. A lot of times I know that, like the deceased owner that I'm going after that property, I know there's no probate, If I'm at a dead end trying to find a new name to go after or whatever, hey, some I've seen it, you know, where they were a part of somebody else's probate. And there's some new names in the mix. Yeah. But you're Yeah. Yeah. A little little bits of information and And I know we're getting into some very granular stuff here, but the point being, sometimes you get outside of the skip trace databases. I've used LinkedIn to help do some things. Okay. Okay. Nice. Yeah. And just in one game I do not play is like, why can't I get these people? Why won't they respond? What's going on? Like, again, like in that lady's case, she thought I was a debt collector potentially. So that's why I am big. I recommend to people, If if I'm pursuing a lead, I will I'm going to leave a voicemail every time. And I me personally, I'm comfortable texting. I'm very forth. Hey, I'm not sure if I have the right number, but my name's Larry Higgins. I was calling. I never say the full address. I just reference the house over off of, you know, What's the logic on that? Um, I don't want to get my head bitten off. So, and a funny story again, all this is through experience. Yeah. I'm calling a lady about a vacant distress property and her voicemail was just a generic voicemail. Okay. Hi, I'm not sure if I have the right number, but I was trying to call Susie. My name's Larry Higgins, and I was just interested in your property over at 123 Maple Street here in Houston, 775. I gave the full address. Okay. And she calls me back. 10, 15 minutes later, rips my freaking head off. She's like, you didn't know who you were leaving that message with. You could have just left, told a total stranger the It's like, I'll never do that again. And I said, your vacant house. I was very explicit. So yeah. Cause again, If you're talking to the right person, if you just say the street name, that's all they need to hear. You don't have to say the city, the house number, and it just sounds more casual. Hey, the house over off of Maple So I'm going to have to adjust that because I used to not leave the address at all. Then if I texted, I would put the address in there only because it was for me. It was selfishness. If they text me back, I'm like, oh my God, who is this? So how do you then sort through? I guess you probably have a CRM where you can Yeah, well, when I was, when I was really doing a bunch of this, it's funny you mentioned that cause that's something else to probably bring up. It's just in my phone. So the texting, but Hey, the address, you, you, you've got it there. Yeah. Um, the, the, what got me early on was, you know, let's say I went, I was doing calling for four hours and then I step away and I'm out driving. Somebody calls me back and they're like, oh yeah, you called me about my house. I'm like, and again, I don't want to sound like an investor. I'm like, oh, you know, I was calling on a couple over there. Can you tell me which one? And they just give me that street name. Okay, cool. I'm like, well, I'm out and about, you know, can I call you or whatever? That would give me time to go back, pull up whatever. And that was kind of how I managed that. I didn't want to say, I'm sorry. I called on, you know, 30 different properties. Yeah. Which one were you? Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. I'm glad you mentioned that on the texting. You want to know, have a way to try and keep track of. which Yeah. Cause when I started doing it, yeah, I didn't have a process yet. I just started doing it and I would text a bunch of people and then I'd get texts back on a few. I'm like, I have no idea who Catherine is. Right. Like the name was. And so I started attaching it, but that's a good point on not That's a, so the scripts we have, I've had this script. So again, I had to be careful cause I don't want to sound like, I'm bragging. I've had my script because we, we were, a lot of y'all may have heard John Martinez. And John was going to work with us on a script. And at this point I had done thousands of thousands And I'd kind of tailored it to where I want sound like low key, like an individual. Well, John, He's like, man, that's good. But he didn't really do anything. But it was like, hi, I'm not sure if I have the right number. This is kind of out of the blue, but my name is Larry Higgins. And you know, I saw your your vacant house over off 123 Maple Street, you know, just, you know, I was just curious, you know, want to see if you had any interest in selling it. It was something along those lines. Okay. And I would intentionally, I had that thing down, but I would intentionally kind of stutter, kind of pause. It wasn't polished, it was intentionally rough. If you're Joe Blow just randomly calling somebody, if you sound like a polished machine, it doesn't sound like it's conflicting. Exactly, yeah. So I gave that spill to a guy, and I'd actually seen the property, this is while I was still driving for dollars. And he he got pissed. He's like, Hey, what do you mean bacon? Why would you say it's bacon? I have I could see And I'm like, Okay, again, noted. I'm not gonna do that again. So now If I were to call somebody, it's, hey, you know, I'm not sure, I could be mistaken, but I thought maybe there was a chance it was vacant. Okay, interesting. Yeah, I qualify I've got that before, too, where they're like, it's not vacant, or I've door knocked on properties. I'm like, there is no way anyone's living here. And Oh, yeah. It's a different animal if Yeah. I've learned if somebody's like, even if I qualify it, then they're like, my house isn't vacant. Yeah, I must have. I must have gotten the address wrong. I'm sorry. If it's not vacant, you don't want to sell. I'll go negative real quick. That's a little John Martinez technique. OK. Hey, I thought it was vacant, but it's not. But yeah. So, yeah, if it's not vacant, you you obviously don't want to sell. Then I've had a couple that. Hey, well, what? Let's talk. Yeah. Well, maybe we do. Yeah. Yeah. And then just see what happens. I can't say I've closed one from that, but they stopped me and let me know. No, I didn't say I didn't want to sell. I just said it's not Yeah. So in general, if you look at the kind of categories, if I think about what we talked about, a lot of things, you've got the pre-made list that you can prioritize. You've got a driving for dollars list. like premium that I'm talking about, like, you know, high equity, absentee owner, something where you're pulling data, the driving for dollars list, you talked about it way early, but the, the mailing campaign with return mail, that could be basically just a house that's, um, that's empty and, and, you know, it's return mail. And then, you know, that you could chase it further. What other cat are those? Are there any other big categories you're like, hey, here's some places to And so there's not really not that I've found. I kind of just went looking for this recently again just to kind of see if anything had changed recently. But I really like code violations. OK. Those, I like those, but that's one where you kind of have to, more than likely, you're gonna have to get proficient at going into your county records. In Texas, we call it the county clerk, all that stuff's reported. So what you'll see is like weed abatement liens or things like that. Some of them call them orders to like board up a property. Because you might look there's vacant houses that aren't showing up on vacant house lists. They're not going to show up on a vacant house scrub because they're still getting So that kind of helps you identify some of those that aren't showing up on the list. See, so code violations. And see if you can Trying to think of some other stuff. We talked about estates versus probates. You know, let's say you're in a smaller market and you've exhausted that, the really hot, the stuff we talked about, you've exhausted your trifectas. You know, maybe I just take the entire tax-linked list. And again, start looking, you know, prioritize that. And so in Texas, I don't know how North Carolina, I don't know if you're a tax-lean state or if it's like in Texas, but- In North Carolina- Texas, your delinquent Yeah. Sorry. North Carolina. Yeah. And then South Carolina, you Okay. Okay. Well, you saw in, uh, in Texas, it's very open ended. Like some people can go to a tax auction and like two years, others, it may take them 12 years. I mean, it's, there's no rhyme or reason to how long they stay in a tax delinquent status before they go to a tax suit. and then they get a tax judgment, and just when they pull the trigger on the auction. So let's say I was in Harris County, it's like, hey, there's, and again, there's thousands of tax delinquent properties. Well, you know, can I prioritize by the number of years delinquent or a dollar amount relative to the value of the, to the value of the property? If a $200,000 property has a $2,000 tax delinquency, that doesn't do much for me. But if they have a $30,000 tax issue, hey, and then, oh yeah, their mailing address goes out of state. That's pretty good. So just taking a big list like that and then trying to sort out which ones are really the most likely to be leads. Everybody talks about tax-delinquent lists. There's a reason, like you can get deals. But again, especially I kind of gear towards talking to like a lot of solo independent or small shops. Hey, you've only got so many hours in a day, you need to prioritize to maximize your results there as far as don't go chase all 5000. Go pick your top 500, maybe 100 or whatever. How Yeah, there was a company. Can't remember the name of this service. They were out of like Dallas. I don't even know if they're still around. They were the only ones I found that actually provided a list for my area. I don't know of any nationwide eviction providers. I think generally most people are gonna have to figure out how to go into their county, the But yeah, the only time I've ever tried it and it was not, I did not do a great job of it. I went into the, yeah, to the actual courthouse to ask for the, you could actually have like a pile of hundreds of envelopes. So there were, there were the stacks sitting there. It did not go well. I tried to, I tried to call, I don't know, it was less than a hundred, but it It's funny, like I said, and the problem with it, the reason why there is typically, to my knowledge, there's not a nationwide evictions because it's so, it varies so much from county to county. There's no national database. So it's really tough for a nationwide lead data provider to, you know, they can do tax liens, IRS liens, they can do pre foreclosures all day. Those, everybody can do those all day, but code violations and evictions, You have to get into at the county level, county by county. Yeah. But that, like I said, that one service. Or do you remember Real Acquisitions? Did you ever see or? Yeah, I never used it, but I've heard of that, yeah. Yeah, they were really good in Texas because they were so plugged in, but that was also why they couldn't scale nationwide is because they were, to do what they were doing, they had to be, go county by county to get plugged into the county clerk's records and the tax collector, So I had that company in Dallas, they actually, It wasn't even in Texas wide, it was just certain counties. They were doing the legwork to go get those evictions. And I did have a lead, it was like in the Beaumont area. And I had really good conversations. It was a landlord that had like eight or 10 properties. He was willing to sell, he was willing to owner financing. That was the first thing I, hey, well, he, cause he's a landlord, he likes cashflow. He was just kind of, he's tired of being a landlord. And ultimately it was really close. I came very close to doing that deal, but I just, I couldn't get comfortable. I'm not a landlord or, you know, I'm not, that would have been a lot. I was actually going to take them over as rentals if I did it. I just wasn't comfortable. The age and condition of some of those properties, they're a little over two hours away from me. Ultimately, I passed. But had those properties been in my backyard, that might've been just enough to push me over the edge to go close that deal. That would've been eight houses, a guy would've owner financed the package to I'll have to try that. It's funny, some of the courthouses around here, I don't know if it's similar there, you can bring your phone into some of them and then some, depending on who the judge is, will not let you bring it in. And it's like the harder it is to get the data, I'm like, all right, I'm going to go after that one because most people can't get it. You got to be there in person and you can't get these nationwide. you know, online lists and stuff. That's such an important point. Most people don't wanna do, if they have to go, like, expend energy and time to go get that lead or build that list, they're not doing it. Right. They want stuff that you can go to, you know, a prop stream or, Go pull a list at ease of access, go pull their list and go run it. Yep. If you're, you know, again, where is the least saturation? And I've never kind of talked about why, but when we talk about why these you're able to do these deals on, you know, what I call the trifectas or deceased owners. Well, because look, this property is showing up on a ton of investors, mail campaigns, whatever they're doing. It's there, but it's flying under the radar. They don't know that that owner's deceased. They don't know that they need to be going after the relatives or whoever. And just by virtue of that alone, that's why it helps Yeah, I always think of it as like the path of most resistance, where everyone wants to go the easy route, but if you go the hard path, you Well, exactly. It's like even guys that kind of understand this at some level and, but they, they want, Hey, I hit a dead end, you know, kind of like I did on that one house. Right. Yeah. You know, now I've, you know, one of the deals I did with one of our guys, uh, One Yeah, I saw some of his content on his deal. Greg was a broke college kid and he's trying to do deals in New York, but there it's like $1,000. There's no $100 earnest money or anything like in Texas. Oh, you got to put down, okay. Yeah, it's like $1,000 to lock up a deal. I told him, I was like, look, man, you're a college kid. He was still in college. You need to look at doing some virtual stuff in states where you can tie properties up for a lot less. And he's, he, he got really good at implementing everything we're talking about. Greg went out, implemented. And, uh, I knew, I pretty well knew he was, but, uh, it's funny. I was, I just recently gone through some leads and, uh, identified some, some leads in Austin and here in Texas, fast forward. One of them, I took a deep dive in it had, everything was telling me should be a deal could be a very good deal, but there was a lot of errors involved, which I don't, I'm like, all it takes is one. All it takes is one to kill the deal. And I was kind of getting, and I like just kind of figure out what was going on. And I noticed there was an air, there was one of them that was in Maryland and I kind of digging around. It was the deceased owner's sister was a Maryland judge and she had died too, but her son still lived there. That was just a random factoid that stuck in my head for that lead. Fast forward two or three weeks later, we're doing our weekly call and Greg's on there. He was like, oh, yeah. So, you know, I'm trying to do this virtual stuff. He's like, man, because I found I think it's a pretty good lead. It's looking really interesting. And I was like, well, tell me about it. He's like, well, it's in Austin. And, you know, and anyway, I found one of the airs in Maryland. I'm like, wait a second. I was like, I said, hey, was his mom a judge? And Greg's like, whoa, how did you know? I was like, look, man, because I'm never going to be acute. We do these calls. And I help people, whatever. Yeah. I'm never going to be accused of stealing because back in the day, a lot of people are really paranoid about, Hey, are you going to steal my leads? Right. Funny. Not nobody really thinks about it now, but I'm never going to be accused of stealing one of my customers leads. And, uh, I was like, look, Greg, I was like, here's the deal. I was sitting, I do my call from this desk and I had the stack of leads right here. I was like, look, I'm, I literally pulled it out. I was like, I'm, I'm holding this lead in my hand, but I was like, look, You, you found you did good, like go knock it out. Like I'm, I'm not pursuing it. Yeah. And I wasn't being that generous to be honest with you, because I was cringing, looking at all the errors. I stopped counting like 20 something. I'm like, maybe, but well, sure enough, he, uh, he, he got the, the guy in Maryland was a good one to do, but, uh, he agreed to it, got all the family on board. This was a rare case where. the family, we're talking multiple generations from Maryland to Texas, but they all communicated, all got on board. It went really smooth, all things considered, but we had to bring in a genealogist to help us retrieve like one of the siblings of the deceased owner died back in like 1934 from typhoid fever. Well, for all the probate or Affidavit of Heirship related stuff, we needed a copy of her death certificate. It was just all kinds of stuff like that. That's not my expertise, but I have a genealogist I work with. We ended up spending almost$1,000 with her and it took us maybe eight or nine months from start to finish to get, because Greg ended up bringing me in to help get, because it got to be so complicated. Cool. If you handle the sales part and you keep all these family members in line, I can do the rest. That's no big deal. So we ended up partnering on it and it took about nine months, but that was a, I want to say it was like a $75,000 deal, something like that. But, uh, uh, I could easily could have walked away from it just because I, we did, we had to do, I think 20, 21 affidavits of heirship something Even getting one can be a struggle sometimes to get one. Oh yeah. It was a paperwork nightmare. And I get it, but you know, I'd rather do be able to do affidavits of heirship than have to go through probate. If I, if I Oh yeah. For sure. For sure. Now some of them can get pretty cool though. If you, it can, it can be overwhelming with, I've done some with many airs, but I now look at like, I don't know if I could do that again. It's because it's exhausting. But you go through, you look at, you know, wills from the 70s and, you know, all kinds of crazy, crazy documents that, you know, courthouse data. And it's it's boring, but they can, like you Oh, yeah. I mean, I've at one point I use Apple stuff at one point. I don't know. Some of y'all may be familiar with Microsoft Visio. but it allows you, you can build out like flow chart. And this was years ago. Now there's probably an app for it. I went and got just a regular laptop because they didn't make a Mac compatible version of Microsoft Visio. Just so I could build out family trees and just Oh, no, I have a huge like a several feet wide construction paper that I'll draw on now. Yeah. And it's It's a you almost feel like that guy in the memes about the conspiracy theorist and you're like, you know, the detective putting all these little pieces together. I Yeah. But then if I send that to a closing attorney, they're like, oh, thank you so much. Because they don't want to do the work. And if you can bring That's a great point just on dealing with title companies. So in Texas, we use title companies. And in talking about the affidavits of heirship, look, nobody has the urgency you do. They'll do it. They'll get around to it. Every day longer it takes to close a deal. is a chance, maybe one of those airs dies. It's like, get that sucker closed as fast as possible. Do as much leg work as you can. It's your priority, treat it as such. Anything that they'll let you do, do it. The like affidavits of heirship, the title companies we use, they'll coordinate that all day and they'll do everything. Nope. I'll do it faster. I promise you. Exactly. Because it's my priority. They don't, they don't have potentially a hundred thousand dollars on the other end of that transaction. I Yeah, for sure. Well, I, uh, I love, I love this topic. It's, uh, for some people they may gloss over it. It's like, well, you know, where's the, where's the speed and where's the excitement. But it's, uh, I feel, I really feel like it's working smarter in a lot of ways, uh, instead of just blasting through a list of people that don't want to talk So, oh, it's funny when you say, where's the excitement. I literally to this day, cause I was kind of working on some stuff recently. I get excited when I start seeing a deal that has all these indicators. And then I'm like, oh man, hey. It's like I'm going hunting. And I hate the sales negotiation. If I never talked to a seller again in my life, I'm cool with that. But the lead gen as far as going in and doing this process and go find a property where the owner's dead and there's a ton of distress. and it's in disrepair, the relatives are in a bind. It really is like hunting. It can be frustrating to get to a dead end, but now knowing what this is, when you get to a dead end, you're like, oh, okay, perfect. This is where we need to That's all mine. I've talked about this in some other points. hey, that dead end for you, most people, you just gotta understand this, most people are stopping. They're not going past that. It's not really a dead end nine times out of 10, it's just a little obstacle. But that's just more resistance to keep more people away. And if you can establish contact, you're the only person that those people are talking to. You're not, again, I'm not good at sales. If they're talking to other investors, I'm Yeah, but yeah, you can be the only one. That's great. Not to totally switch gears, but I know, and I don't know if this helps you with your hunting and your targeted approach, but you're a pretty accomplished fisherman, Oh, yeah. I don't know how accomplished I am, but I love, love to fish. And again, it's funny you're bringing that up because internally we've had discussions about, uh, some analogies between fishing and the way we do deals. I can imagine there's some similarities. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so like, so I like the saltwater fish, trout, redfish. tarpon when the season's right, whatever, in short. Are you going down to Galveston or where do you go? Yeah, so I live just not far from Galveston, but I travel up and down the coast. I may go down south. We just had a big tournament out of Port Isabel, And then I have a couple of other fishing related businesses that, you know, we need content. So for me, I have to go fishing on Wednesday so we can get some content. But But it's funny because for years now we've said like the way I like to do these deals, instead of just going out, let's say you throw a cast net out there and you pull in a bunch of little fish. There's hundreds of them, but they're all little. Okay. Or I can be patient. And what we call what we like to do a style of fishing site casting, we kind of get elevated. We don't do anything till we see that the right fish, a big, Hey, it's a big 30 inch red fish. Yeah. I'm not just sitting there casting all day blindly. It's I've found my target. Now I'm going to cast at it. Some of them are going to come off. Some of them may not eat that lure. But generally I'm going to get the bite. I'm going to hook it up. I've got my fish. Yeah. It's just, that's kind of how I look at these deals. Like the guys out there calling for just those broad, really no distress, just a big long list, you know, thousands of calls a day. You're throwing a cast net out there, hopefully something that's worth keeping. Exactly. And then versus what we do, It's very targeted. You're not you're not doing anything till you see exactly What do you call it? Yeah, it's it's very, very similar. What do you call that where you're doing the elevated looking for the right side I cast. Yeah. So you don't. Generally, like I like, I love to weight fish in the water and I do a lot of blind casting. That's a different animal. I love to just be surprised, but a lot of people love to sight cast where you're, you may not cast, you know, 50 times in a day. You might be out there for hours, but you don't cast until you see something to actually, you know, We got, so we have, you know, I, I don't want to get off in the boats too much, but like I have what we call a burn bar just over my console that I can get on. But when we're really serious or if it's like a tournament situation, we have a tower that will strap down to the front of the boat that elevates us up like eight feet for every field, every foot of elevation, you get so much more visibility. So, and you can start seeing fish at a little greater distances and you might see a little puff of mud where they moved or see the movement or just That's cool. Maybe I'll title this episode site casting for real estate deals or something like that. Yeah, that'd be pretty cool. I had seen something where I think you either won a tournament or did something. I I've never done this before. I don't know if you can see that. Yeah. That's a big old redfish. That was one that was That wasn't an accident. I wasn't just throwing a cast net out there. I was elevated. I saw that that's a 40, 45 inch redfish. How do you do that with taxidermists or how do you get that? Yeah, that one's actually, I didn't kill that fish. We let it go. It was got measurements There's a really, I used a company out of Florida, New Wave Taxidermy. They create real lifelike looking replicas. If you give them the dimensions and pictures. Yeah, send them some pictures. Some of these fish have really unique markings or spot, like a redfish typically has one big spot on each side. Yeah. But sometimes they'll It's not common, but he'll go in, look at those pictures. He's That's really cool. So you didn't know I was gonna be showing you fish mouth. No, no, that's awesome. So what I, I don't know much about fishing, but why did you not, can Well, you, so, uh, with our bag limits, like what the state allows you to keep, if you, if you want to keep a redfish over 28 inches, you have to put a tag on it and you get one of those a year. Gotcha. Okay. But generally speaking, a fish that big, it can get worms that you, you like the smaller, what we call the slots between 20 and 25 inches, or it's probably the best tasting redfish. What's the, what's right behind you on your right shoulder. That's the largest flounder I've ever caught. It's like a eight. eight and Yeah, those are the ones that will kind of lay on the bottom. They lay flat They have don't they have like two eyes on one side or is Yeah. So, well, when they're born, there's an eye on each side. And then as they mature, one of those eyes literally like. So here's the body. There's an eye here, eye here. As they mature, this eye comes over this, so when they lay flat, both their eyes are on top. It's a Well, I don't want to keep you out. You've been so generous with your time. I really appreciate you digging into the details and how these things are actually done. If anybody hasn't gotten into it, there's so much to sort of like, you've got to make so many decisions on how to pursue these. So I appreciate you giving some clarity Yeah, no, not, you know, hopefully, we cover some ground and kind of went all over the place and some different things. Hopefully, it wasn't too confusing for people. But it's really, it's not that difficult. You know, just if you're if you have any Any thought of maybe taking a look at it, man, do it. Just take a look. See what's available in your area. How easy are some of these lists to get? Yeah. And just kind of peruse it. And hey, you know, just. Yeah. And I'll plug it for you, but if there's any detail, just put it on there. I don't have many things in my life that have had a higher return on investment than investing in Skip Genie. I don't even know what subscription it is, but I pay for it just so I can access anytime I need to do a search. And the amount of money that has come from those searches has been It's I appreciate that. Look, it was built by investors for investors. I know because that's how I used it. I knew the functionality and just the data that was needed. It's 100% intended to help you get to the finish line on deals, get deals and get to the finish line. I will say, even if you're not a member, if you have questions about anything, I've talked to plenty of people. Ultimately, yes, I would love it for you to sign up. And if you're going to be successful at this, you need good data, period. Absolutely. Don't come and tell me this doesn't work if you're using Intelius or White Pages, because that's just no. I'm not going to say we're the only good data out there. but make sure you're comparing apples to apples. If anybody wants to reach out, Sometimes it That's awesome. What's the best way, I guess, if somebody wants to sign up for Skip Genie and or contact you, whatever information you Yeah. So if they want to take a look at us at skipgenie.com, there's some information there. You can obviously sign up there. If you have any questions about Skip Genie or about what Avi and I have been talking about, just larry at skipgenie.com is my email. And, um, Yeah, well, you know, well, I used to man when we obviously getting started, I used to spend hours on the phone just talking to people because. Again, it was so new. I really don't talk to as many people anymore, but I enjoy, it helps me kind of keep a pulse of what people are doing. It's Well, thank you for putting that out there and thank you for doing this whole conversation. I know it's going to help a lot of people and you've helped me a ton, so thank you so much. Oh, no, man. Hey, I really did enjoy this. I appreciate you having me on and getting to talk to you. Absolutely. All Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of The Deal Pen. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you consume podcasts. This way we'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. And remember, there's always more deals to be had in The Deal Pen. Until