Why Most Property Managers Don’t Build Wealth - and How to Fix It | Justin Anderson

A Podcast | Justin Anderson

Pete Neubig: Welcome to another exciting episode of the NARPM podcast. I'm your host, Pete Neubig. Today, we have Justin Anderson, the founder and CEO of RentSmart, also a licensed broker in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, and the author of the book, Funny Money, Building Wealth in a System Rig to Keep You Broke.

Over his 25-year career, he's bought, sold, and managed more than 2,000 units, guiding countless investors toward building real wealth through smart, cycle-aware real estate investing. Not every week that we have an author on the pod. So Justin, thanks so much for being here today.

Justin Anderson: Thanks for having me, Pete. Looking forward to doing this.

Pete Neubig: All right, man. So for those of you who do not know Justin, he is around NARPM. He's been around NARPM for a few years and RentSmart. We'll talk a little bit about that near the end, but let's talk about what inspired you to write Funny Money. I mean, you're already on a property management firm. You're an investor. You got RentSmart going on. You got a lot of irons in the fire. Why write a book?

Justin Anderson: These are ideas that have been rattling around in my head for a while, but there were two sort of trigger points. One was, I feel like, Pete, we've moved into a space in the market where there's a disparity between price and value. And there are so many investors sitting on the sideline right now that don't understand that they should be taking action right now. Coupled with several of the times over the past two years that I've had the opportunity to speak at NARPM afterwards, folks will come up to me and say, man, I loved your talk. I saw your slides. I went back and tried to explain it to my client. It didn't land. I just, can I get a copy of your slide deck or what can I, how can I get this information to be able to deliver it to my clients? And it inspired me to finally put all this together and this spring start working on that book so that I could have it done and completed before the conference season hit. So we published it in September of this past year.

Pete Neubig: And you gave, we were at RentScale is where we met again. The last time I saw you was at RentScale back in October, November. I don't know. They all run together. We were in Nashville and the RentScale folks bought a bunch of copies for all of us that went to the conference. I took your book home and I actually read it on the plane from Nashville to Houston, which is not a long flight, about two and a half hours. And I was able to read the whole book cover to cover. And I found it super interesting. It read a lot like Rich Dad, Poor Dad. You have the mentor, it's story format, but you also give some facts and figures. So I was looking at it from a personality profile. I'm like, I would love it. S's would love it. C's would love it. D's are loving it. So I thought it was well crafted, well written. Now, when you presented at RentScale and in your book, you claim that housing is cheaper now than it's ever been. But this seems to be the opposite of what we're being told by the national media. So talk a little bit about your concept to our listeners, because they're probably hearing this like, what are you talking about? Houses are so expensive right now.

Justin Anderson: It is, right? I mean, it's so confusing because that's what we're hearing in the national media. We're hearing these ideas that we have an affordability crisis and real estate's at all time highs. And we're not seeing pricing necessarily come down that much in this quote, market downturn. The problem is most folks are looking at the wrong measuring stick. They're confusing price with value. And what is happening right now is value of real estate is at an all time low. And how do I measure that? Well, about 15 years ago, I started, I looked at this same problem at the last market downturn. How do I explain to my clients? And really at that time, it wasn't even my clients. I'm an investor first. That's how I got into this game. I own a fair number of investment properties myself. How do I really measure the value of this real estate when we're in an environment where the government is printing so much money that the value of the dollar is plummeting? And so as that dollar sags, how do we measure that? And it was about that time that I made the correlation to measure houses in something that had a more stable store of value rather than dollars. And I chose gold, not because I'm a gold bug, not because I'm an advocate of go buy gold as an investment, but gold for the last 5,000 years has been a historic store of value. It maintains its value. One ounce of gold buys the same amount of hamburgers today as it did 50 or a hundred or 5,000 years ago. Well, maybe not 5,000, because I don't know if they had hamburgers back then, but it has held its value and it's not imperfect, but it is the most perfect measure of value that we have. So instead of pricing houses in dollars, I looked at how many ounces of gold it took to buy a home. And we have that data. We can go back and look at historic median home price in dollars. The Fed has charts going back to 1965 that we can look at any given month of any year for the last 50 years and evaluate what the actual median home price was at that point. We can also look at how much an ounce of gold cost all the way back. And as we did that, as I made that chart, it turns out that over the last 60, 70 years, the median cost of a home in ounces of gold has been around 350 ounces. It is sort as high as 700 and it has dropped as low. Well, prior to today, it has dropped in the 1980s when interest rates were 17%. It dropped as low as around 115 ounces of gold. Well, fast forward to today, we've come off this market peak in 2022 where homes were trading not quite at the median value in gold. They were near 260 ounces of gold for a median home. But then the government started printing money again. And what has happened is that has caused two things. It has caused the relative price of a house where the dollar is falling so massively. It has caused the relative price to stay stable where we haven't seen a major pricing drop because there's so much more dollars in circulation. But when we take that today's median home price of $420,000, $415,000 in that range, and we divide it by the price of gold, which this morning when I looked at it was trading around $4,100 an ounce, that puts real estate at around a hundred ounces of gold today. And that value is the lowest value that real estate has been at in the last 70 years. And that's a staggering fact because what we will see happen right now, real estate's trash. Interest rates are at what people are concerned about a high level relative to-

Pete Neubig: A high level compared to what, pre-2020. I was buying properties in 2000, 2001 at seven and a half percent, eight percent.

Justin Anderson: I think this is actually a pretty healthy interest rate environment for the overall market.

Pete Neubig: I can see why they want to reduce it. But yeah, it's not 1980 again where, what did you say, 15, right?15%?

Justin Anderson: Yeah.

Pete Neubig: Old Carlton Sheets pushing his nobody down techniques. You know?

Justin Anderson: Exactly. And you know, so I mean, we're in this space right now where real estate is perceived as trash. I mean, that people aren't wanting to buy it. Homes are sitting longer on the market. And this for me is the absolute pinnacle time that investors should be jumping into the game. We shouldn't be trying to time the market to find the absolute bottom. On the horizon, the Fed has talked about rates coming down. And as that happens, that drop in rates is going to cause increased demand coming back into the market space. And that's going to push pricing. And I think that the best time any of my clients or me that we can get into the game is when nobody wants this stuff called real estate. And right now, when it's at these historic low values, we're in a really good space to start buying real estate again.

Pete Neubig: You still need the cash to buy it, though. You still need that 20% down if you're an investor, right? So if you have cash, it's good. Even though it's quote-unquote on sale right now as far as the value, it's still a pretty high price, though, no? I mean, with it being $400,000 and you still got to put 20% down if you're an investor.

Justin Anderson: So here's what I would say. I think that, first of all, if you're sitting on cash, certainly we need some liquidity to run our businesses. And if you're sitting on cash, we should be sitting on some level of cash to just fund our lifestyle or our business. But if you're sitting on excess cash, I feel like that's a terrible investment. Sitting in cash is a space where you're in an asset that is losing value every day with the government printing money. And talk about it in the book, but if you haven't looked up that chart, go look at how much money the government has actually printed. It's a staggering number. It's not just a little bit of inflation. It is staggering. And recently, like in the last five years. But if you're sitting in cash, the inflationary pressures are devaluing your asset every single day. So moving that into a hard asset, that's a better store of value. And in some place, you know, you might argue that gold might be that thing for some people. For me, I like cash flowing assets. So that's real estate. I like to have a return on my money coming back to me every single month. Now, having said that, I also got into this game because I didn't have any money and I wanted some. And I'm not suggesting that the new investor or a NARPM member, a professional property manager that has a client that's just getting started, they don't need to necessarily go buy that median $400,000 home. There are all kinds of other investment opportunities that exist out there. And the idea that you need money to buy real estate is actually not true. And I don't know that we want to necessarily dive into all those today. It'd be a major left turn.

Pete Neubig: That wasn't in the book, so we're not going to cover that. You'll have to write another book.

Justin Anderson: That'll be in part two.

Pete Neubig: All right. So in your book, you also talk a lot about market cycles and how investors should understand them. And if I remember, I think you had like four different cycles that you talked about.

Justin Anderson: Well, there's one cycle, but four phases.

Pete Neubig: Four phases of one cycle. So talk a little bit about that cycle. So what cycle are we in now? And what does it mean for property managers, for their business and for their investors, their mom and pop investors? Because most people listening to this are not institutional property managers.

Justin Anderson: So when you're talking market cycles, I can talk about it. It's hard to talk visual, so I'm going to do my level best to explain this. It'd be helpful if folks had the book and were able to look at the chart and then go back and listen to this, and they'll be able to see what I'm talking about. But markets are cyclical.

Pete Neubig: We'll show them where to buy the book later.

Justin Anderson: There we go. I like that. Markets are cyclical. That's a universal truth. We go through seller's markets into buyer's markets, and that cycle repeats over and over and over. And it never disrupts. It never goes backwards. It never doesn't follow that cycle. And it happens methodically where we have high inventory, and that high inventory causes pricing to drop. And that pricing drop causes investors or buyers to come into the market, which starts to absorb that supply, which causes the inventory to get low, which then causes pricing to rise, which then causes buyers to exit the market, which then causes inventory to start to increase, which causes pricing to start to drop, which then leads back to that full cycle in the market. And that cycle happens over and over and over. And we can look at that cycle as a closed unit, a sphere, but the reality is when we add time to it, it becomes a wave that repeats over and over and over. And that wave, as it repeats, it has some very core indicators that drive some of those movements. And it's easiest for us to think about it just as buyer's markets and seller's markets, but the reality is there's actually four phases that you're referring to. There are two buyers and two seller's markets. And as the market starts to grow, we are in a seller's market phase one, where we're near the bottom of the market, but the market is starting to grow. Job growth is happening. Rents are increasing. Prices are increasing. Inventory is starting to drop. And as we near the top of the market, we move into the next phase, a seller's market phase two. That's called the equilibrium phase. And as we hit that phase, the pricing starts to flatten. We see the inventory start to increase and we see the market start to slow. And that pushes us over the top and we move into the first buyer's phase. And that moves us into this buyer's market phase one. We're in a decline phase or a contraction phase. And as that contraction is happening, we're starting to see prices drop. We're starting to see inventory increase. We get into a space where we see some level of oversupply, where there's excess inventory on the market. And as we hit that point, we're now in a space where buyers start to reenter the market. And this moves us into my favorite phase. We call it buyer's phase two, the absorption phase or the millionaire maker phase. And it's because in this phase, people that buy real estate down in that space, when we're at the bottom of the market, they reap the greatest rewards because Mr. Market does all the heavy lifting. And as the market elevates through the next growth period, the people that bought early in the cycle, they are the ones that reap the greatest rewards. They become millionaires through these assets, this real estate they're holding. And I think, as we look at the major fundamentals that exist in most markets around the country today, we're sitting in a space of somewhat high inventory.

And again, it's hard right now, Pete, because what we have is so many people that are looking at back history and trying to compare this to the 2007-2008 collapse and watching the massive foreclosure crisis that was happening and looking at an environment where there was so much oversupply of inventory and pricing was falling pretty dramatically. And they're looking at today's market and they're not seeing the same things happen. And that's because the fundamentals are different.

But the fact is, relative to this market space, we are nearing the bottom of the market and trying to time that. I think that's a fool's errand. I think we should be looking at, if we're truly investors, not just people that are buying and flipping homes and trying to make a quick buck off of a house that we've improved and then tried to sell to somebody else.

This is the hardest time in the market cycle to be playing that game. But if we're truly long-term hold investors, does it really matter if we buy a little bit before the bottom or just a little bit after the bottom? Either one, the price point is near the same.

Pete Neubig: Still low. It's still a deal.

Justin Anderson: And being able to make those purchases now, while there's very little competition in the market space, where we're in an environment where interest rates are still relatively high, you can go in and buy these deals with less competition before the interest rates shift. And then later, when interest rates come down, if there's enough meaningful shift there, refinance those deals and restructure your debt. But when the interest rates come down, there's going to be so much more competition and it's going to be driving pricing even higher, exclusive of the inflationary pressures that we're going to see.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. What's the old saying in real estate? You marry the property and you date the rate?

Justin Anderson: I have not heard that, but I love it.

Pete Neubig: All right. Let's talk about property managers. What I find when I talk to a lot of property managers is property managers themselves do not own property or even owners of property management firms, a lot of them do not own property. Why should... If a property manager listens to this, we're just telling them there's value out there. We're just telling them that we're kind of in this buyer's market.

Why should a property manager purchase investor property?

Justin Anderson: I wear so many hats in this business. I started out as an investor and that's how I first entered this game. You talked about rich dad, poor dad. I read rich dad, poor dad. He told me to go buy a house and let somebody pay it off for you. I was so young and ignorant that I didn't know at 25 years old with no job that you shouldn't be able to do that. I just went for it. Once I realized I could do that, then, oh, buddy, the game was on. I did a lot of that. I didn't get into the property management side until years later. I invested... I bought my first investment.

Pete Neubig: By the way, not to cut you out here, but by the way, you talk a lot about that in your book, very eloquently about you bought too much, too soon, wrong properties, all the stuff that I'm like, yep, did that. Yep, did that. If you're doing what you're doing, all the things you did wrong, you can read his book as well.

It's fascinating because you're like, yeah, I can do all this. Then next thing you know, you're going out and in your book, your mentor is like, okay, you can do that, but we'll see. Yeah.

Justin Anderson: At the time, it was really good advice just for other people because I was like, yeah, I'm not doing that. I'm definitely going to be...

Pete Neubig: Do you know who you're talking to? I can do this. I'm worth the water. You can't make them drink. You got to be ready for them all.

Justin Anderson: Going back to that, I think I got into the property management game backwards. I think some people get into this game figuring that, well, that's a way for me to generate cashflow and generate some income and build a revenue stream and have a business and then maybe eventually start investing. I came at it the other way. I was an investor first. I will tell you, my opinion is that if you are managing assets for other people, I'm going to use the word asset instead of property. If you're an asset manager, you are no different than the Merrill Lynch advisor that advises his clients on stocks and bonds. We as property managers should view ourselves that way. Otherwise, we're just basically glorified leasing agents that are out collecting rents and leasing properties, but we are not really investment advisors. I think that's a mistake.

I think that most property managers, if they aren't already, should be aiming towards becoming an investment advisor and helping their clients build portfolios that match their goals and their financial needs. If you're not doing that, then you basically have clients that are running you. I think your business improves dramatically when you start taking that attitude that you are an investment advisor and you're helping shape that portfolio.

The problem is if you aren't investing yourselves, if you don't own investments and you are not in the game yourselves, why should your clients listen to the advice you have? For me, I think the very best way to transition your business from being a glorified rent collector is to truly... And I don't mean that disrespectfully.

I think that investment vehicle does two things. One, it allows you to become that investment advisor that I think you should be anyway. But the second thing it does is this.

There's not a single property manager that I know that got into this business with the dream of working 100 hours a week and outgrinding everybody else in what they're doing. The whole goal was to build some level of cash flow and an income stream. And I'll be fair with you.

Right now, Pete, if they just went and bought just one house and let somebody else pay it off for them, like Rich Dad told me to do all those years ago, that cash flow stream that will build up over time will absolutely compete with whatever revenue they could build out of their property management portfolio. And they can do it with so many fewer moving parts. Imagine if they just did one a year for the next five years and they had five houses that somebody else paid off over this next period of time.

And they had five homes that were in their median rent level that were paid for. What life looks like for that property manager.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, I'm with you. I think it helps on both fronts. It helps on two fronts.

One is it helps you start building wealth. What I did, I came like you, I was an investor, and I thought the properties was the business. And I had it backwards.

The business is the ATM machine. So you have the business, the business makes you the money, and then you take that money and you go buy the assets. And then the assets build you wealth over time. Using the assets as an ATM machine was the wrong move for me anyway. And so it helps you build that wealth. It's wealth building. And it could be generational wealth building, but also we are in the game. So as a property manager, typically you're going to have a client wants to sell for whatever reason. They're getting beat up by the house. Life happens. You have every piece of information you need to know to determine if that house is a good deal or not. You know how long it leases for, you know how long it takes to lease up, you know what the comps are, you know how the maintenance history, you know everything.

So you can literally buy a deal, get a deal from the owner because he doesn't have to put on the market, pay all these marketing dollars. You can literally say, Hey, I'll buy it from you. Give me a four or 5% discount or whatever. Or you could even work even a better deal, which I have stories on that. And then the third piece is you get to put your feet in their shoes. If you never own a piece of property and then you want to create this fee or that fee, or you want to, you complain when they complain about maintenance costs or anything like that, but you've never lived it. It's really hard for you to relate to your investors and become that investor advisor that you were talking about, Justin.

Justin Anderson: I would agree with all that. The only part that seems to be a little bit different and I don't know, Pete, maybe it's just because of the way I went about building my business. I don't generally have clients that want to sell a piece of junk property because I'm not really willing to manage piece of junk properties. And again, I don't think you're saying piece of junk property. I think what you were saying was, you know, if a client has a house, let's beat them up. I really, again, as an investment advisor, I'm really working hard to help a client not be in that space. And I help them do that, you know, from the initial acquisition. Every now and then we take on a portfolio from a client that is getting beat up. They've had bad management, whatever it might be. And then my objective is to really, as an investment advisor, to come in and help them understand what is going on truly with that asset. You know how I do that? Because I've owned a lot of that stuff. I mean, when I got started in this game, I owned a lot of junk assets that I I definitely don't necessarily recommend taking my path. Yeah, there's a much straighter path to take that, you know. But along the way, owning those assets is what taught me how to really evaluate them, as you're saying, and be able to help guide and help that investor understand what they're really doing and why they're getting beat up. And how can we fix some of those problems? And some of those problems, you know, some of them are inherent to just the asset. And so it might be time to exit that asset and buy a little different type of asset. Some of them are inherent to the management where the manager was, you know, leaving a lot of deferred maintenance, things like that, which then also leads to some of it might be the owner problem.

Pete Neubig: And each investor has a different level of what they can handle as far as like challenges. Right. Like I can tell you, when I was a new investor, you call me on any maintenance problem and I was like, oh, my God, the world was going to end. As I matured as an investor. You can call me over to five thousand dollar AC problem. Like, yeah, go ahead. Knock it out. Do it. Right. So you have like these different levels.

And I think some of these guys, especially newer investors, it's again, if we don't if we're not becoming that investor, you know, asset manager, the advisor, we don't talk them off the off the ledge. And then they sell, you know, potentially good deals. So but my point was that by you owning a piece of property, it really does get you closer to the investor because you're dealing with the same stuff the investors dealing with.

Justin Anderson: Absolutely.

Pete Neubig: Because if you never own the property, you're like, I don't understand, it should be forty dollars a square foot to paint your house. Like, no, you know what I mean?

Justin Anderson: I do. I understand. Yeah. And I think that, you know, that really I just want to drive it home one more time. What you said is spot on. I think that number one, own investment properties so that you can build wealth. That really is key. It's the greatest wealth creation vehicle that average investors like you and me can attain. And then also it helps you become a better advisor to your clients.

Pete Neubig: Can we're we got a few minutes left here, but in the book, you talked about kind of like, you know, you have you have your buyers and sellers kind of market cycle, but you also talked a little bit about like a neighborhood market cycle. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I find like that's really where as property managers, we can know our market a little bit better than somebody else. And we might be able to find a kind of a neighborhood market, you know, like the rights, the right market in a sub. Well, I guess when you call them like a sub market or something like that.

Justin Anderson: Absolutely. Here is what I love about, you know, my what I wrote, why I'm so passionate about what I wrote. And I've had people give me this feedback. You said it reminds you of Rich Dad from the context of it being sort of mentor driven and story oriented. Rich Dad was really inspiring on telling me why I should invest in real estate. What I've really worked to accomplish in this book is telling you when to take action and then what to take action in from the from the investment advisory perspective. So the when is that market cycle that we already talked about. But what you should be buying is that neighborhood and property cycle, because in each neighborhood, they also go through cycles. And in the book, I go into reasonable detail about understanding that cycle and where the very specific buy points in a neighborhood's life cycle are, but also where the risky points are. And what's crazy is in the neighborhood life cycle, especially new investors, when I'm watching them get started or new property managers that are leading clients into deals that haven't been investing themselves, they're chasing cheap as if cheap equals good deal. And the problem with cheap is it often falls in the absolute worst point of a neighborhood or property's life cycle. And when that happens, the investor, the one that gets beat up, they get beat up because they didn't have the capital or weren't prepared for the what is about to happen with that property and what they should have been buying, what would have been better for them to either dig a little deeper to find a deal that cost a little more in dollars or, you know, they were buying it a little different time in the life cycle so that later they didn't have long term capital expenditures or they weren't buying it cheap at a time where the neighborhood was about to fall off a cliff and go into disrepair. And, you know, landlords abandoning properties, leaving them boarded up, you know, getting solicited by ladies of the night walking down the street.

Which is in your book, by the way, oddly specific example.

Pete Neubig: You know, when I read about the you know, I guess you kind of innately understand neighborhoods like this is a good neighborhood is a bad neighborhood. But when you when I was reading that piece of your book, I was actually thinking of like specific examples of like, man, I missed out. Like if I actually knew and I'm going to I'm going to tell you a quick story. I bought one house in an area in Houston called Oak Forest. The houses were sold for about one hundred thousand. I was always looking for equity and I found one for eighty thousand dollars and it rented about it was eight hundred square feet and rented for about eight hundred bucks. Right. So one percent rule, all that good stuff. But the cash flow was like one hundred bucks.

It was like nothing. Right. But if I would have watched the tea leaves and understood the neighborhood life cycle, I knew enough that I was going to live in that house one day.

Like I was going to knock it down and build. So that should have been my first understanding, like this is a great piece of property and that house values are going to go up over time. By the way, here we are 15 years later and that same piece of property is for is four hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Right. Just to tear down a house. What I did instead is I bought a whole bunch of properties in an area called Martin Luther King area, MLK, which if you know any big city, if MLK Boulevard is probably not a great area of town, but I was getting it for like thirty five thousand dollars instead of the eighty thousand, which, you know, I'm like, oh, the cash flow.

And of course, those properties, 10 years, 15 years later, barely, you know, increasing value than I have now because of 2020 and, you know, and all that good stuff. But up until then, they weren't they were supposed to cash flow because the spreadsheet said their cash flow. But there's thing called people and people don't take care of the property. You know, the ladies at a night, I had gang bangers. We could do one day and go over all those stories.

Justin Anderson: So it's true. And that's it. Understanding those understanding what to buy based on those cycles is so valuable. I wish my mentor would have. I wish I would have had the wherewithal to listen when my mentor tried to share that with me.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. Yeah. And also that's called fathers and sons. Right. I mean, I wish I would.

Justin Anderson: Yeah.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. Dad, you know, when I was 15. All right. If now speaking of listening and, you know, if listeners take away one message from Funny Money, what should it be?

Justin Anderson: Now is the time to buy. Go buy real estate. It's on sale. Absolutely on sale right now.

Pete Neubig: Well, you heard the man. It's only like a hundred. Go get your gold. Go get your gold change from back in the day in the 80s. If you knew back then, like those run DMC change, melt them down and go 100, 100 grams. Go buy, go buy a house with your gold chains.

Justin Anderson: Yeah.

Pete Neubig: Justin, I appreciate you being here, man. I look, I'm a huge fan of the book. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I read in a couple of hours. There's lots of notes. I need to reread it again. It's one of those books that I'm like, OK, it's not really just a book. It's also like a like a guide. Like it's a kind of like traction. I read traction, you know, not from cover to cover anymore. And I and I go back to it and I'm looking stuff up. This is a book that I will go back to and look at and look stuff up as well. Thank you. Yeah. Also, I'm sad to say that I'm actually in the process of selling two of my properties. And I'm like, golly, I don't really want Justin on here talking about you should be buying real estate. I'm sorry.

Justin Anderson: So we talked about that in Nashville.

Pete Neubig: We did, but I'm selling to paying off a note. And I have two others that are in that note that'll be paid for.

Justin Anderson: So beautiful.

Pete Neubig: I'll have seven paid for. And then, of course, I can leverage those properties if I wanted to. Anyway, that's a whole other whole other deal there. Justin, if somebody wants to buy the book or they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way?

Justin Anderson: They can find it on Amazon. It's available on Amazon. If you just Google Funny Money, Justin Anderson or go to Amazon and do that, or they can go to RentSmart.com/Funny Money. And it will take you straight to the link.

Pete Neubig: And give us a quick 30 second on what RentSmart does.

Justin Anderson: We're a tenant matching service. So we run the front end leasing operation for anywhere from large brokerages. We have some clients that run 600, 700 doors down to, you know, somebody with just one singular property. And we we take care of the listing, the property, the showing coordination of the property and the tenant screening. And our only fee is exclusively just the application fee we earn from the residents. So all of the services we provide to the to the owner or broker are free. There's no cost for them.

Pete Neubig: And I'll put you on the spot now because I honestly don't remember. But are you still managing properties? Do you still have your manager company?

Justin Anderson: I do. Yeah, I run a small boutique brokerage in Augusta that we manage, you know, mostly upper middle, upper class properties.

Pete Neubig: The man with many hats. All right. And if they want to reach out, if somebody's like, hey, I'd love to just pick your brain, what's the what's the best way to contact you?

Justin Anderson: Shoot me an email. Justin@RentSmart.com. Super complicated. But shoot me an email. I'd love to chat and get to know people in our community and just reach out that way and we can schedule a time to talk.

Pete Neubig: And he's also at all the NARPM conferences. So if you go to Broker Owner, Justin will be there. We'll see you in New Orleans. And if you're listening to this, you're like, what is NARPM? Or I didn't know there was a broker owner. Shame on you. NARPM.org NARPM.org. Give him a call. 800-782-3452 or go to NARPM.org. And if you are looking for remote team members, VPMSolutions.com or email me Pete@VPMSolutions.com. We just hit 45,000 people on the platform looking for work. We have free training. They are certified in all sorts of property management skills and software that supports them. Justin, thanks so much for being here. See everybody.

Justin Anderson: Pete, thank you.