The Wisconsin Investor
Each week, we bring you interviews with some of Wisconsin's top real estate investors who share their tips, tricks, and strategies that you can implement right away. This show is dedicated to helping Wisconsin real estate investors elevate their game. Along with interviews, I'll also dive into hot topics in solo episodes and feature experts from various real estate sectors across Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin Investor
Why Your AI Assistant Might Be Better Than Your Real Estate Attorney with Mike Higgins
Mike Higgins opens up about his transformative journey from personal trainer to thriving real estate investor in Wisconsin, revealing the strategic shifts that made all the difference in his business. Far from just another "how I got started" story, this conversation delivers practical wisdom on maximizing profitability in today's market.
Want to know why some investors consistently snap up deals while others struggle? Mike and Corey break down the exact systems needed to evaluate properties in minutes rather than days - including how missing just 20-30 deals annually could mean losing $500,000 in potential profits. They share their specialized approach to selecting properties in the "sweet spot" price range that ensures consistent sales regardless of market conditions.
The tax advantages of real estate take center stage as Mike explains his favorite investment strategy: "legally not paying taxes." Learn how properties showing minimal monthly cashflow can still offset hundreds of thousands in earned income through strategic tax planning, making even seemingly break-even properties incredibly valuable to your portfolio.
Perhaps most fascinating is their deep dive into how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing their businesses. From AI-powered call bots handling seller leads to automated deal analysis and even legal document review, discover how a $20/month ChatGPT subscription might replace services you're currently paying thousands for.
This episode culminates with hard-earned wisdom about maintaining strategic focus in a field filled with distractions. As Mike candidly admits, "We could go from wholesaling real estate to opening a Mexican restaurant in Indiana because there's not a lot of them there." The ability to "stay the course" might be your most valuable skill as an investor.
Ready to take action? Visit wisconsindiscountproperties.com to join their buyers list and start receiving off-market deals or schedule a free consultation to break down how the numbers work in today's market. To connect with Mike, check him out on X @meetmikehiggins.
We are back with another episode of the Wisconsin Investor Podcast. Again, as usual, I have another amazing guest today who I've known for many, many years. I'm excited to get into it. But before I do, as I've been doing recently, I do a little commercial for Wisconsin Discount Properties, and so today I don't have a specific deal that I'm going to try to give you FOMO over, but I am going to just ascribe to you guys what kind of opportunities you're missing in general.
Speaker 1:So for the last couple of weeks, we've been putting out five or six deals every Monday morning. These are all off-market deals to the Wisconsin Discount Properties buyers list, which is much smaller than MLS. So if you're trying to buy on MLS, you're up against a ton more competition than what you're up against on our buyers list. But, with that being said, all of them are selling. So what does that mean? If you're not buying them, you're missing out on opportunities because somebody out there, somebody who you're competing against every day for deals, is snatching these deals up and they're finding a way to make the numbers work.
Speaker 1:So, that being said, what we're offering are free consultations to anybody listening to this podcast that is struggling to figure out how do people make these numbers work. Let's hop on a call. We'll deep dive it with you and try to see where maybe you're missing some opportunities that other investors are snatching up. So how to do that? You can go to wisconsindiscountpropertiescom. Go to the contact us page, put your information in and somebody from our team will get in touch with you and start having that consultation with you, get you connected to some of the right folks who can help you move your investing journey forward. And if you want to be added to the buyer's list and you're not on it go to the same website. Just put your contact information in on the front page and you'll get added to the buyer's list where you'll be able to get access to those deals every single Monday morning at 6 am as we have them All. Right With that, let's get into today's episode. Today I have Mike Higgins. Mike, what's going on, brother?
Speaker 2:Not much, man. How are you? I just screwed up my video.
Speaker 1:I see that. I see that Perfect timing. Perfect timing, dude. You put your hand over it and then boom, oh, here we are, we're live. So those of you guys watching on uh youtube, you saw that action, those you guys got my great hand.
Speaker 2:You saw my hand. Yeah, hey, I just wanted to say you on your, on your commercial. You mentioned like they are selling and they are. I'll just let anybody know. I obviously corey and I are not business partners. We are not affiliated. We are in the same market, but their team is crushing it. They're putting out like I think like six deals last week, six deals this week. So, yeah, you, you really are missing out yeah, yeah, just well we, we'll talk.
Speaker 1:We had a couple episodes before this one's gonna air. We had a couple on here also homeschoolers and uh, they brought something up interesting. They they calculated how many deals they projected. They personally missed that were like in their buy box just because they didn't have enough time to really evaluate them, or anything like that. Last year they figured probably 20 to 30 deals and we did the math on that. If you're making, say you know, conservatively, 15 to 20,000 a piece on those deals, I mean you're missing out on a half a million dollars. I mean it's just hitting your inbox every single week and you're just missing out on that because you don't have the time, you don't have the lender set up, you don't have the team set up, you don't have any of that kind of thing set up. So there's tons of opportunity out there. People always say, oh, I can't find a deal. It's like we're literally sending deals every single week.
Speaker 1:Usually 15 to 20 is a pretty good rip on something. You know it depends Every person's different right and I look at, like, how big of a project is it going to be? I really look at my profit per hour. That's more. So what I look at is so if I'm going to make 15 or $20,000, but all I have to do is make a couple of phone calls to some GCs or whatever the case is, and let them handle it.
Speaker 2:That's great. Well, that's another good ad for here is like you can listen to this podcast, you can go to the RIA, you can go to the events, and then a lot of people just go home. But go home and set those things up, set up the lender, set up the contractor, set up the buy box of exactly what you want. So then, instead of it taking five or six days, when you send out a deal on Monday and you need to have offers by Thursday, you could get a deal. I mean, I think that thing hits my phone at 8 AM and you should know by 830 if it's a good deal for you or not.
Speaker 2:Right so sorry, I didn't mean to take over.
Speaker 1:No, it was great. Actually, one of the other podcasts I laughed the hardest on probably I was crying at the end of it it was Andy Bame, so if you guys haven't listened to that episode, go back and listen to it. But I was telling him how I wanted to set this process up a few years ago so that somebody could, instead of scrolling Facebook while they're sitting on the can, they could evaluate a deal and make 20 or $30,000 in 15 minutes by putting an offer in so they can watch the video, they can look at the inspection report, they can run their numbers quick boom, submit their offer and they can have it done while they're sitting on the can.
Speaker 2:Legs might go a little numb. You should name this podcast. Deals on the Can.
Speaker 1:Deals on the.
Speaker 2:Can.
Speaker 1:Maybe we'll go back and change it now. Yeah, this is another episode of Deals on the Can. I kind of like the way that rolls man. Mike. Enough about that, let's get into you, buddy. Let's talk like first of all, you've been in this game for a little while, you as personal trainer. Mike, prior to real estate Mike, talk about when you got, when you made that transition, what got you into real estate and how long you've been here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think rewinding the clock uh, probably I think it was 2015, end of 2015. I actually got my real estate license. We bought our first house in 2014, year before realtor that I was with at the time I mean, rewind totally my dad's in construction. My first job was with my dad in the summer roofing houses. I was picking up shingles off the ground. I I got into uh, you know, went to college, got into an outside sales role, but always had this entrepreneurial bug, kind of like you, you know, was with a direct sales company, and then you're always like taking jobs that are kind of sales related, because your ceiling is always exponential and your floor is very limited, so there's always this entrepreneurial bug.
Speaker 2:We ended up buying our first house, primary residence, in 2014. My realtor at the time was like man, you've got to get into real estate. So, 2015, I got licensed and my first full year. I sold 31 houses while having a full time job. Then I sold 44 houses the next year and decided that I would go full time as a realtor, because I knew that buying real estate is kind of what I wanted to do and I figured being a realtor gave me a good option, an opportunity to understand my market at a high level, which I do still believe is true to this day, but it's also kind of a slippery slope because, um, like I became a realtor, which wasn't the goal. Okay, however, it was actually still a pretty good stepping stone to get to the goal, and I'm still, you know, I guess the other thing is like we're never at the goal.
Speaker 2:We always continue to change the goals, so, um but that was kind of the forte into real estate.
Speaker 2:And then, you know, sold houses as a realtor, did a couple of flips here and there, uh, with a couple of different business partners like or I guess I'd probably say joint ventures at, you know, to be more correct on the terminology and then end of 2019 kind of beginning of COVID, you know, or you know, march, april of 2020, just decided to go direct to seller, kind of had this thought of like, if I have a $100,000 house as a realtor, I could list that house and, let's say, you give up 3% commission on both sides of the project or of the transaction, you're going to make three grand.
Speaker 2:Well, I also know that I can buy a $100,000 house, I can put $25,000 to $50,000 into it and sell it for $200,000. So, same house, same project, same amount of effort really to find the deal, and you can make $3,000 in one or you can make like $25,000 to $50,000 in the other. So for me that was like, oh, let's do more of that because we have a big family, and the last thing I wanted to do was go show houses from 4 PM to 8 PM, write offers from eight to 10, and then hope to God the offer got accepted so that I can make $3,000. Right, so that's kind of the you know. In a nutshell, quick down to dirty the evolution of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, talk to me about that. Like when you said you, uh, you, you always wanted to get into real estate, was it because of, like you said, you mentioned first of all working on the roofs and stuff like that, but what was like the money bug for you, cause there had to be some kind of financial thing that triggered in you that was like, hey, real estate's a great way to go. Did you do like what all of us do and we read rich dad, poor dad, and then you're like, let me get into it that way. Or like, what was the spark? That was like, hey, I want to get into this whole buying real estate thing, before you started to see the dollars and cents of going direct to seller.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I mean Rich Dad, poor Dad, definitely had a a huge kind of impact. I think it does with a lot of people. When you grow up in small town America and don't really understand, you know everybody graduates from school, goes and gets a job at the local factory or, you know, goes off to college and doesn't come back, you don't really know what you don't know. It's not taught in school.
Speaker 2:I think the other thing that was interesting is growing up in construction around houses, renovating homes kind of it just seemed easier to me than maybe it does to most people, because I grew up roofing houses, I grew up putting siding on houses, I grew up renovating houses and it was just that's the norm. So when I look at a deal I'm like, oh, I could buy that and I could fix that up pretty good. It's like for some people they look at that and they're like, holy moly, you rip an entire roof off and you put a whole new roof on and I'm like you just go buy shingles and take the shingles off and put new shingles on. It's not hard. So perception, I think, was you know, I think we are probably a product of our upbringing a lot more than we realize. And lucky for me, lucky blessing or curse that was my upbringing, so it seemed like a pretty natural vehicle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome. So yeah, because you did personal training too before you became a realtor. Right, you were doing the nutrition stuff. Anytime fitness, that's right, yep, and I had my studio kind of real close to you guys, I think, where I was running my little studio.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's where we first met. I believe you would always come in to work out.
Speaker 1:Yep, yep, yep, before I'd go train our, our clients up. Yeah, awesome man. So now are you, are you pretty much so. You have a business partner now, right? Or how's your, how's your structure now at blue blue badger homebuyers. What does that look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're structured. We're 50, 50 partners, don't? You know? Um, we don't always flip it. There's so many different strategies and like we do everything cause we're also licensed, so we have an in-house realtor, so we've list properties. We'll know they properties we'll fix and flip, we'll hold tail. We're not very good at wholesale Like. The reason we decided to go to fix and flip model is because the um, the quantity of the leads that we have. We don't have a lot of leads, but the leads we do have are really good. So you know, like, where some people will do a hundred, 200, 300 deals a year, we'll probably only do 30, but our 30, you know, somebody will do a hundred at 10 to 15,000. We can do 30 at like 40,000. And um, so we, we just take a little bit more time. So that's probably predominantly kind of our, our main bread and butter. Um, we have two construction guys that work pretty like directly for us and then we use subcontractors for all the other projects that we do.
Speaker 1:Okay, are they on staff or are they 1099 guys?
Speaker 2:Your construction Uh, 1099. Um, everybody's 1099 here. Okay cool, and so that's an interesting conversation for another day, that about having employees, etc.
Speaker 1:so well, we can. We don't have to save that for another day. We can talk about that today if you want. Like what, what? Uh see where you go. Well, let's talk about that, because I I think at our company we have about 15 employees. Some of them are virtual assistants, but the majority of them are in-house, like in our office in Green Bay. They're all W2 employees for the most part. I have one intern right now that I think is 1099. And then the VAs are. They're VAs, so they're kind of like 1099ers, but talk to me about that. So all of the folks that you guys have helping you are all 1099. You have no in-house employees. Is that by design or is that just kind of where you guys are at currently in today's business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's a little bit of both. It was kind of by design in the beginning, just because of the nature of the business, bringing on a realtor that does all of our listings. They're with a brokerage, they're not really a W-2. So like they're kind of. That's why people get into real estate is because they don't want to be a W-2, right. So where you guys might outsource that to take action and it's not like in-house specifically, we kind of have that under our umbrella, but they're still W-9.
Speaker 2:And then you know, subcontractor fix and flipping it's tough because there's different subcontractors that we use but we can't. They were in business before we were in business. So to say, hey, you guys only work for us, they're never going to go for that. But on the flip side we try to keep them busy enough where we're priority. And then we have two guys that do like they only work for us. They don't have their own companies, they're just a couple of handymen, a couple of contractors that were working for somebody else and they worked on a couple of our projects and asked us.
Speaker 2:So it's a little bit by design, I think. Also the perception of W-2 seems scary because for me you don't know what you don't know. A lot of people don't know what they don't know. They, oh, you got to pay this insurance and that insurance and you got this salary and that salary, and then you got workers comp and what happens if somebody sues you, or what happens if somebody gets hurt or they have a baby and you got to pay for that person and they're not even there. And so I mean it's probably not as bad, like most things, as people think, perceive, it to be in their head.
Speaker 1:Sure, yeah Well, 1099 is definitely the ideal way to go. You get out of a lot of the just payroll tax.
Speaker 2:In general you don't have to pay payroll, but you have less, like I'll do air quotes control If you're listening not that we're in business to control people. However, you know you have a standard of business, I have a standard of business and we want people to adhere to that, and the best way to adhere to that is if you work for that business directly. Correct, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's definitely pros and cons of both for sure. Yeah, I would say you're right on the aspects of just HR laws in general. I'm not an HR guy, right. So right now in our business, I primarily wear the HR hat, which is not a good thing, like I should not be wearing an HR hat as a salesperson entrepreneurial, you know, maverick personality Like details are not in my DNA as far as wanting or liking those types of things like bookkeeping.
Speaker 2:So if what you're saying is, if you want a great work environment where rules are suggestions and not necessarily actually, you know, like Corey's your guy I buy WI is the place to go because he might, he might, things might slip through the cracks. That's right.
Speaker 1:Fine, that's right if you, if you like a little loose environment, you come hang with us and you work for their house, if you, if you want, you know you want to be buttoned up and you want everything, uh, exactly how it's supposed to go. You know, probably not, probably not the place to be, probably not the place to be, but, uh, but as far as, like my biggest fear, going into hiring our first person, I remember Caleb Hayes. For those of you guys that don't know, he owns a couple of Keller Williams brokerages. He used to have a pretty massive flipping business himself and I think, mike, you probably learned a lot from Caleb as well. But he was one of our early mentors and I remember he took us under his wing and we'd go in and meet with him once a month and one of the first things he said is like you know, if you're scared, you need to hire people first of all, or bring on, even if it's 1099, you can't do it by yourself to get to the scale you want to get to. And if you're going to make a hire, just save up three to six months of their salary and then, if they don't work out, then oh well, you know it's not like you lose out on that money. You just save it up and it's kind of sitting aside to touch it.
Speaker 1:And then we're like, well, how do we even pay someone? Like I don't know all the rules about paying anybody, like that was my big roadblock, was like, how do I actually like administer a payroll? Like do I just write? Do I write a physical check? But then how do I do the deductions for all the stuff? And then how do I submit that? And thankfully we are in the information era and there's a lot of great companies out there, like Gusto is one that we used originally. Well, probably, we're actually probably going to go back to them for our company because they're very simple, it's very easy. You just put in their salary, you can set them up on if they make the same thing every two weeks, you just click, set auto pay and boom, every two weeks they do it. They submit all of your quarterly crap and all the other stuff that I don't know about. It makes it very easy for business owners.
Speaker 2:So well, and I think one of the things that you said but without saying is, finding somebody who's done it before you is like the ultimate cheat code in you turn. What I'll say is decades into days where it took Caleb 10 years to figure out how to optimize that system. You guys learned it in an afternoon sitting with him, yeah Right. So then all of a sudden, your learning curve just went from 10 years to 10 hours, and now the next person you can show that to somebody else. You know what I mean? I he same thing for me with funding.
Speaker 2:Our first deal was, you know, like wayside green leaf Bank. I think was at the time he was doing a lot of deals with and it is wildly different for Mike Higgins to walk in there and say, hey, Caleb wanted me to come over and talk to you Cause I got this property. Here's blah, blah, blah Versus me just walking in off the street saying, hey, I did a couple of deals and here's my little brag book and uh, you know, hopefully take a flyer on me. Like a direct referral is is priceless. So same thing with setting things up is like they can. Having somebody that's willing to help you can really compress time for you, and so you know you're sitting there being able to pay people year one versus year 10, and just figuring it out yeah, that's such a great point and I think there's a couple points to that.
Speaker 1:Mike, to your point to my point is networking events are huge so, and there's tons of opportunities across Wisconsin to get involved in networking events. So there's the REI success club which we run. We meet on the fourth Tuesday of every month. Uh, in green Bay there's uh, uh Wisco Ria's that you can go to all over the state. There's caffeine and cash flows all over the state. I know down in Milwaukee there's a few other Ria groups and some other opportunities down there to uh get involved in different meetups at different times of the day. But that is so huge because you're going to meet somebody. If you go there with intentionality and you actually talk to people, you know just sit in a corner by yourself and then dip out as soon as the talks over, like the networking is the piece to do, and just meet as many people as you can. Like you said, you can take decades and turn it into days. I love that, dude. That was such a great little line. Hopefully we're going to use that for one of our YouTube shorts.
Speaker 2:There it is.
Speaker 1:That was money right there, but that is true. We do that in our company. So all of our employees that come in, most of them want to invest in real estate, which is why they come to work for us. And then, like you said, those connections, like I'll directly connect them to some of our lenders and it just speeds up their process. A lot of times the lenders will even tell us well, if they work for you, I know they're probably good for it because they got a lot of support around them right. So they want to know that people who've been there before are kind of wrapping their arms around some of these people. So that's so huge. So, finding somebody or coming to work for us, just if you'd like loose environment, you want to get connected, you just come work for us Right.
Speaker 2:Hr is a suggestion, not a policy.
Speaker 1:I'll put that up as a sign in our office and see how quickly I get sued by one of my employees after I put that up there, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:Let's not do that. Let's not do that.
Speaker 1:Talk about. So you are primarily fix and flip, right. Yes, sir, Do you buy? Do you guys buy and hold any properties, or is it all fix and flip?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we will Um, a lot of times it's they're primarily the properties that we can burr out of completely or they're going to be in a really really good like spot. You know um where we know that 10 years from now it's just a no brainer or it's a great school district. Uh, last year, you know, out of our I think, we held four properties and then you know, flipped I'll say flipped air quotes 30 deals. So yeah, it's a little bit of an inflow. The thing about holding, I mean you're not even in the environment of interest rates that we're in right now. You know it's not necessarily only we're not holding only for cash flow, because if you're holding for cash flow right now, you're going to need about 4,000 properties of cashflow with and that's to your 4,000 properties for $2,000 a month.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're going to make 4,000 a month, or 2,000. Yeah, exactly, right, yeah.
Speaker 2:Um, but you know the tax, the tax purposes, like when we roll over those properties, even some of our flips and stuff. They tend to roll from last year to this year where they haven't been finished but we purchased them and we renovated a ton on them. It's like the more properties you hold, it's like you realize from tax implications and tax purposes it just makes sense. So you have to hold a handful of properties a year, otherwise you can. You can either hold your own real estate and you know pay yourself, or you can not hold any real estate and you can pay the government.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, exactly. And one of my favorite things to do in real estate is legally not pay taxes. That's my favorite, my favorite strategy. People are like what's your favorite real estate investing strategy? I'm like legally not paying taxes, that's that's it.
Speaker 2:It's a weird thing to get over, right, Because you're you're in your grow up investing for cashflow. You get started. You're like cashflow, cashflow. And then you realize that it's not necessarily cashflow in the sense of like $500 a month, but it's like, oh, this property offset $300,000 of earned income. That's still cashflow. That $300,000 was still cash flow. That three hundred thousand dollars was still cash flow to you, right?
Speaker 2:it just didn't come from that house, but in a backwards kind of backdoor way, it came to you from that house, correct, right? So the key is is you just got to continue to do that every year, right, and I don't know?
Speaker 1:yeah, it's the legal, legal way to go about not paying tax yeah, and I love that you said that, cause I I I always say this too like with um, with some of the apartments that I bought early on. I bought a couple of apartments in 2019 and 2020, I think it was and for like two years I hated them. I was like these are so lame, like every time a tenant moves out I got to spend 10 to 15 grand to redo the unit and like I don't make any cashflow, right. And then, like two years later, I refinanced one of the properties and I pulled out $240,000, which is tax-free as a loan proceed unless you sell it, but it's $240,000 at the moment tax-free and I was like, huh, well, I've owned it for two years. Divide that by 24 months. I actually made 10 grand tax-free a month of cashflow. It just didn't go into my bank account every month, but two years later, there it was because the tenants paid the debt down on the property, appreciated when there was 240,000. And I still had 20% equity in it when I refinanced that thing, so it was huge.
Speaker 1:Now, talking about the tax benefits, there's something called cost segregation studies. If you guys aren't familiar with that, I'm not an accountant disclaimer, but aren't familiar with that, I'm not an accountant disclaimer, but I will tell you it's the eighth wonder of the world and hopefully this year we get to go back to and hopefully by the time this episode drops maybe some of the tax codes will be put in place to go back to a hundred percent bonus depreciation, which is a whole nother episode. We had Jake Calwards from CLA on here a while back in one of the early episodes and we broke down cost seg studies. So if you want to go back and listen to that or we can, we can bounce that. But are you guys doing cost segs, mike, on your stuff?
Speaker 2:Uh, not, not yet, not right now. Um, but I'm very familiar with it and it makes a ton of sense. I'm just not sure you know if we're going to hold this for the next 29 years, right, so it's any of that recapture. So right now we're not at a point where the cost seg we need it, because just buying the properties and being able to write off a lot of the renovation stuff that rolls over is good enough to show that we don't make any money nice with the depreciation that we have. But it's absolutely. I mean, as the organization grows it, it makes a ton of sense yeah, oh, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you don't have to do it, that's great. But the possibility to do cost segs. What that basically means for the audience out there is if you make an active income, let's say you know you've got a, uh, uh, one of the spouses, let's say you're a married couple, one is a doctor, highly taxed, high income earner and then you've got to stay at home parent or spouse right, stay-at-home person becomes a real estate investor per the IRS law and standard and you can go look that up of what the requirements are for that. You do have to be actively managing or involved in the business, so you have to be involved in it. But then what you can do is if you buy enough real estate, you can essentially wipe out all of your active income, meaning the whole doctor's salary. You could take a loss on the whole salary and pay $0.
Speaker 1:So again, going back to Mike's cashflow, even if you're out cash flowing on the property, you're not putting a dollar in the bank account every single month, but you save whatever 40, 50% is of your doctor's salary $200,000. That's your cashflow for the year. And then again, like you're saying, mike, you just got to keep buying, which is kind of the Ponzi scheme of of doing the depreciation stuff is you got to keep buying to offset the next year stuff and the next year stuff. But it's a it's a good problem to have, I mean buying more real estate not a bad thing.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly, cause down the road. It's going to be worth significantly more than what you bought it for.
Speaker 2:So, I always say you can look like an idiot today and you overpay for something and you hold it 10, 15 years, you're going to look like a genius. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you and I've never looked back. I mean we've sold a lot of properties over the years and there's not one property where I look back and think, oh, I shouldn't have sold that property. You know like I always look back at properties and think, man, we should have kept everything. Why are we even selling? Because market appreciation can make even an idiot look smart.
Speaker 2:It's like all these guys that are guys and gals that are walking around that bought properties in 2010, 2011, and 2012. It's like, yeah, they I'm not saying they're dumb, but timing of the market and just having owned real, that equation and how smart they were. It's just the reality of this situation, right, 15 years of owning a real estate asset, especially from 2010 to 2025, probably the best 15 years that you could have ever owned real estate so far and you, just that person is just lucky to have been alive and been in a situation where they could afford that real estate in 2010. It's not like they had a crystal ball and were like, yeah, from you know, this thing's gonna. It's gonna double in price from 2010 to 2020. Oh yeah, and then it's probably going to double again from like no, they didn't have a crystal ball, they just bought it the right time. But that's not to say you couldn't buy something today and in 2040, you could look like the genius.
Speaker 1:Well, when I remember, mike, when we were both kind of getting started in this and you cut out a little bit there, your internet was out a little bit. So those you guys listening, if you heard that, that's okay. I think I think we caught what you were saying there. Mike, for the most part, got the most of the point there. But what when?
Speaker 1:When we got started back around the 2016, I remember people were like, oh, the market's too hot, it's going to crash again, it's going to crash and then 2017. And I did. Actually, I did a presentation at one of the REI success I think. Back then we were running the Wisco Rhea Green Bay group and I did a whole month presentation on you know how to crush it in a hot market and I just showed all these news clippings from every year of like 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, every year somebody was out there predicting the market was going to crash and the market was too hot and you can't make any money in this because you're overpaying for properties. And now everybody, now it's 2025. You're like, damn, I wish I would have bought more between 2016 and 2020 or up until today.
Speaker 1:So, in investing, if you're in the financial world, financial, investing, stock market stuff. There's some called dollar cost averaging, and so the key of that is you just consistently keep buying. You're buying the good times, you buy in the bad times and overall, long-term you're going to make money. Right, it's the same thing in real estate. You just dollar cost average. If you're consistently buying every year you're going to some deals aren't going to be great, but long-term you're going to look back and your future self and your future family is going to thank you tremendously in 15, 20 years when they look back at that property and go gosh, I'm glad Mike bought that property when he did.
Speaker 2:Well and two, I think early on you look at every deal as a standalone deal. But at some point you have to look at every deal as how it fits your portfolio too of what you currently have. And now I'm speaking from you know, kind of starting maybe to look at that. And then also a lot of theory and regurgitating what smart people have said, because you know there's some going back to the cost segregation aspect or the tax implications aspect.
Speaker 2:If you look at a deal when it's your first deal and say, oh, this cash flows $35 a month, like not worth it. But when you have, say, 10, 15 or 20 properties under your belt and you look at that and you're like, oh, this cash flow is only $35 a month but it's going to actually offset a hundred grand of active income for us this year. So the $35 of cashflow I mean it's not losing us money, it's not really adding to the cashflow number. But if you're looking at the holistic portfolio view, it still makes sense to put this property in, because that a hundred thousand is now you know it's it's $8,000 a month. So not only is it $35 a month cashflow, it's actually like $8,035 a month cashflow because I just wrote off a hundred thousand dollars in my active income.
Speaker 1:For sure. Plus, you're not counting in there the tenant paying down the debt or the appreciation in the market with that either. So there's so many benefits. You know one of the other episodes I did. I did a little podcast where I showed some charts thanks to my friends at ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:With a $300,000 property and if you had no equity day one and it didn't cashflow a dollar, what's your equity in five years, 10 years, 15 years at a 7% interest rate? And it was pretty interesting, on a 20-year AM schedule, there was $106,000 of equity with a 7% interest rate. With a 5.85% interest rate. This was mind blowing to me. You only had $110,000 of equity. So the equity gain with the interest rates where people are sitting on the sidelines waiting for the interest rates to drop was nominal $4,000 after five years. You cashflow more. You cashflow 200 bucks more a month because your debt service is lower, obviously, but the actual equity gain.
Speaker 1:So if you're in this for the long haul and you're sitting on the sidelines waiting for rates to drop, you're going to run into two problems. One, when rates drop even further, you're going to have more competition in the market. So your price you're going to pay. It's consistently goes up about 4% a year in our market. You're going to pay 4% higher for the property. Plus, you're going to have more competition, which may drive that price up even higher. And now you've wasted all of this time. You could have gotten the clock ticking. You could have started that clock a little earlier to start having that debt pay down even faster.
Speaker 2:So it's pretty interesting Speaking of your friends at ChatGPT. This is a new segment I'm running on your show called Artificial Intelligence in Wisconsin, and it might be the one and only in a very short segment. But are you guys finding a way to use AI in the business right now, or is it something that you're still figuring out For us? I'll give you kind of how we're doing it. It is we have a, an ai, basically like audio chat bot type thing built into our crm so it can actually take calls for us, like, say, if we are on a call or in an appointment and we get a call, it'll automatically pick up, and it's surprising how good it is.
Speaker 2:I did a post on my twitter, my x feed, um with it interacting and we've probably had it take about 10 to 15 calls right now and only one has been hung up don't want to talk, so it'll do a live transfer and everything. It's awesome. And then also we have it just analyze data for us, just analyze our spreadsheet or analyze. But I'm just curious with know, with the rage, right with everything, are you guys seeing a use for it in your business too? Or, and what does maybe that look like?
Speaker 1:yeah, we're actually in development for our own ai call bot person as well. Um, we haven't launched yet. We're still okay, still refining it and doing, you know, mock calls to figure out where it's broke. But, dude, it was amazing. I did a couple over this last weekend and I recorded it. The same thing. I'm just amazed at the conversation it could have and it messed up a couple of things that we got to tweak, but overall, I'm like this thing is unbelievable. This can take calls.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but it's like 80% good and it can take calls and now you're not paying a call.
Speaker 1:you know what I mean yeah, 24, 7, this thing, no, 365. It's amazing so that we're working on, we use chat gpt now. I pretty much use it anytime. I have a question now I'm like, huh, I wonder about this. I run it through chat gpt and I've it's amazing, it takes 30 seconds to analyze anything, any new business, like I was looking at adding on a couple of verticals into our business and I'm like I just run it through chat. Chat tells me good, bad or ugly with it. Is it good, bad or ugly? Breaks down the pros and cons. I was looking at maybe starting new construction in apartments. It's like, hey, what if I just built some apartments? Here's the here's how much capital I have. Here's what my plan would be. Here's I'd want to burr these things after I stabilize and get it all rented and all this stuff. And basically it was like no, it's not a good idea, you're not going to be able to do it.
Speaker 2:I was like dang it, but it cost to build and all that stuff no-transcript.
Speaker 1:So if you hit the deep research button on chat, chat, GPT it's incredible. I mean, it does way more than just a regular GPT. I don't know if you have to have the upgraded version we do but it's incredible. The other thing we're using it for, too, Mike, is we uh, for our callers, our in-house callers, and for our people who go on appointments with sellers, and our, our folks that you guys talk to when you're putting offers in or whatever. We have built a training in there for each position and we can send the transcript to chat for that position and it'll it'll grade the call and it'll tell people where they missed opportunities and what they could have done differently. So that's a couple of the things that we're utilizing it for. So that's awesome, yeah, but it saves me.
Speaker 1:I mean, I used to have to be the guy to listen to all the calls and train our team all the time and do all this stuff, and now I don't have time to sit and listen to. We have five, five folks on the phone or on appointments, plus my two people in our department, seven salespeople. I don't have the time to sit and listen to all their calls and go listen to all their appointments with sellers. So it's been a huge game changer. Just to even give it's not perfect again, like it's 80% good, but it gives them some little nuggets that they can take away from reading those little breakdowns of like oh yeah, I missed that yeah.
Speaker 2:I should have said that oh, I can add that question into my next time. And in a weird way, you're not the bad guy delivering that news either. Right when it's like oh, this is an objective chat robot that's analyzing this. That's like never wrong on anything. So Corey's not the bad guy telling me how much I suck, it's actually the robot. So I hate the robot. I don't hate Corey.
Speaker 1:Well, and what's funny is they try to argue it sometimes, so we'll go pull the call up, we'll go well, let's listen to it. Then let's see this little spot that it's pointing out and see, you know cause they're like oh, I said this or I said this. Okay, let's go look at it, let's just go. Man, it's just data, it's just what the chat I actually started and this is you know.
Speaker 2:I mean I'm sure that there's husband and wives a lot that listen to this. I mean you've had some couples on like for guests, but I actually just I shared chat gpt with my wife, who we also homeschool, like you guys um and eight months ago.
Speaker 2:Maybe I was like april this is wild, like this is so cool, and we know where ai was eight months ago. Maybe I was like April this is wild, like this is so cool, and we know where AI was eight months ago versus today. Well, like two weeks ago I just took my phone out and started talking to it, because it has basically like conversational instead of just typing ahead on my phone or just talking back and forth. And April, my wife, was just like whoa, this is wild. So for the last two weeks she's been like an evangelist for ChatGPT to her mom, her grandma, her sisters. I'm looking at, I'm looking on my screen right now.
Speaker 2:It's like home cleaning routine, all things, homestead, chicken care verbs. In a sense, she does that too. So, like during the homeschool, hey, how would you give an example of using a verb in a sentence? It's like OK, great, here's boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Meal planning is huge. So there's moms out there that are like hey, I, I, you know, we know, stay at home, mom, is you know 47 jobs under one umbrella, if you want, kind of your own assistant, where I mean I wish I was getting paid from Chad GPT as an affiliate fee for giving this commercial right now, but it is so helpful because we can April, can meal plan in like 15 minutes versus an hour and a half now, right.
Speaker 2:And you could also be like oh, can you make me the grocery list but set it up in order of the like, categorize the groceries by specific areas in the grocery store that I can be the most efficient in my run. It's like okay, great, here's the produce section, here's the dairy section, here's the meat section.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, that's awesome. Yeah, cause, I'm going to use it, dude. I'm using that now If my wife ever gives me a list to go to the store cause I end up just aimlessly Like it takes me an hour, she's like I'll just do. She always is like I'll just go because it takes you, dude.
Speaker 2:It's the best. It is. Yeah, start out using it as Google, like you said, and then it'll morph from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, health wise too. So health is a big thing, right? If you don't have your health, you got nothing. None of this business stuff matters, right? So for me, I've been working with a trainer the last year virtually you know they're setting went into chat. I was like, hey, chat, I'm 40 years old, this is my goal, this is what I like to do. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Can you make me a workout plan? That's going to be under an hour for you know, four or five days a week. That's going to help me achieve my goal. Spits out a workout plan, but you still need your trainers. You still need somebody to kick your butt and make you do it. But for this purpose, if you're just looking for a workout plan, nutrition plan, meal plan, it's so easy to do.
Speaker 2:Well, that's the reason, that's. That's what holds a lot of people back, you know, is like having that plan and I did the same thing. You know having some health issues last year and whatnot. It like I will oftentimes have kind of these post symptom, kind of like symptoms. I will freak out about it and then I'll just literally go to chat gpt. I have it on my screen right here is I've had numerous half-hour conversations with chat gpt. Yeah, acting kind of like as a medical professional or a practitioner, I'll say, yeah, where it's like well, you're not a doctor. However, it's pretty dang smart and so far, everything that, like my doctor has said, or the specialist for the heart or the neuro or anything Chet GPT is like those are the things you should do. So then I report back and I'm like man, this is pretty wild.
Speaker 1:It is pretty cool. I did actually this is going to be kind of gross for some of you folks, but I did a little stool test recently, uploaded my PDF of the stool test Cause I had no idea what the heck it was mean Hit the deep research button and then about 15 minutes later, boom, everything you could possibly want to know is in there. And then I met with the functional medicine doctor who reviewed everything, exactly what chat told me. It was awesome, awesome. Now the functional medicine doctor did give me a couple other cool recommendations.
Speaker 1:That chat chat just was kind of analog. I probably could have got from chat if I would have prompted it more afterwards and had to break it down further, but it was pretty incredible. I know like, uh, I had zach morgan on here recently. He's using chat. He built his own um deal analyzer in there, so he just uploads the details and it breaks down the deal for him. And that's something I want to start doing as well, for our team is just come up with a standard. Here's our deal analyzer and chat boom, they just use it like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's like anything else it takes time to build it on the front end, right. But then it actually saves you a ton of time. I mean, because how many deals do you guys analyze a week, would you say? I have probably 30. 30 deals a week, right? So if you could build something that maybe takes two hours to build and the average, the average deal to analyze takes a half hour, you know, it's like 30 times 30. That's 900 minutes. If you could have that same thing do in nine minutes, it's like you just saved yourself a ton of time. And it runs through the same buy box, the same calculations, all the stuff. You could do it on excel, but this is just going to do it for you. It's. It's kind of crazy.
Speaker 1:So yeah, and you could do it in excel. Upload your excel and ask chat to build you a formula that it would do it for you in chat and then you save that as one of your gpt's. So when you log in and you're up right, I think you have to have the paid version for it. But then you can go to my chats and you just create a chat in there. That then it's just that you just name it deal analyzer and then every time you go in you click that little deal analyzer to run and then you run it through and boom bada, boom bada bing. But you can upload. We've used it for legal documents we were trying to find.
Speaker 1:We recently wholesaled a condo in Oshkosh and one of the big question marks when we were locking it up with the seller was are you able to rent this right with a condo? Some condo associations will not allow you to rent it or airbnb it right, it was on the water in oshkosh. So I mean great exit strategy for somebody's. Airbnb it if you can. We just uploaded the condo docs in the chat and had it look for anything in there that talked about renting, your short-term renting. Boom pulled it right up, said, said uh, doesn't. It does allow what you know short-term rental or rental online blue, blah, blah blah and the kind of thing which normally we'd have to sit there and just like try to scan it might miss. It just uploaded the pdf and it read it for us. It's incredible. Legal documents formats like joint ventures. I put together a joint venture with chat. I don't know if I recommend that legally, but I read it over and I compared it to other ones that we've had legally done.
Speaker 2:And it, yeah, but even if you don't recommend it legally, here's the deal like, get started with it, because if you go to your lawyer, they charge by the millisecond, right, and they always round up.
Speaker 2:So you, they do one second of work, it's one hour charge, and they always round up. So you, they do one second of work, it's one hour charge, and like it can at least get you in a place where you're way, you're really close to having this thing finished and it might take them 15 minutes to actually look it over, versus an hour and 15 minutes. So the other thing that I love about it is just, even if it gives you a bad idea, a lot of times it's like we've all sat and stared at a blank page, like what, like, what do we do? Well, even if it gives you a really crappy idea, it's a really crappy idea, sparks you to be able to come up with the good idea that you were thinking of that was already inside of you, and it's way easier to do that than it is to just look at a complete blank page.
Speaker 1:So 100, or go to google and you got to try to sort through a million different like not great results, right, yeah, and it's you, know you don't it's.
Speaker 2:it's a. It's a really cool tool, and I guess I'll get off the soapbox Cause I don't know if it's actually helping anybody. I know that there's a lot of people that listen to this, that are kind of newer, that probably want me to tell them, like, how to make a million dollars. Um, that's so seriously.
Speaker 1:That can be the thing, though that's what I think is so powerful about AI, mike, and that's why I'm staying here on the AI thing with you, because, just using ChatGPT alone, just think of anything that's holding you back right now. If you're listening to this, what's keeping me from getting started in real estate? Oh, I'm struggling to find lenders. Go to ChatGPT, hey, chatgpt. I'm struggling to find lenders to get into real estate investing. I want to be able to use the BRRRR strategy, which GPT knows. The BRRRR strategy. Trust me, I want them to be BRRRR friendly, or whatever you want to put in there for your prompt. Hit the deep research button if you want. It's going to pull up people and at least, again, it might not be perfect, but it's going to get you started right, yep.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's actually a good point. I mean, what holds a lot of new people back? Like deal flow, lending help, right, because it's like, oh, I need help to do this. This is where I'm going to talk about the AI is like I need help with something, but I don't have enough profitability in my business to go hire somebody. It's like, well, chatgpt Pro is $20 a month. You could pay $200 also't. You don't need that yet, but you could have 20 a month and literally have an assistant for every aspect of your business and a tool that you could build once and complete and reuse over and over and over again. And like it's only limited by your imagination. Truly, yep, yep, for sure, for sure. Um, did I cut out again?
Speaker 1:A little bit. Yeah, it's only limited by your imagination. That's what I heard. It was a little perfect, it was a little internetty, but we got it. Uh, mike, let's shift gears quick as we start to wrap here. What, what, mike? Let's shift gears quick as we start to wrap here. What do you see? So you're in the Northeast Wisconsin market, correct? Yes, sir, yes, what do you see? I mean, if you have your crystal ball right, what does this next year look like for you and your partner at Blue Badger, and what are you guys predicting, as far as you know? Is there anything you guys are seeing strategically that you're going to be shifting gears in? Anything? Are you staying the course? Is there anything our listeners out there should be maybe keeping their eye on as this year progresses as far as what they're going to be doing in real estate? What are you seeing out there as you're pounding the pavement every day and in the game every single day?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean right now, like you and I talked last week, largely the short answer is stay the course, because I do believe Midwest Wisconsin investing is lower, lower, uh, appreciation might be less, but you're also, it's also way less volatile, right? So, um, I think it's the place to send your money. So if you're in California, you're in New York, you're in Florida or wherever, like, send your money up here. I'll gladly take it. Corey will gladly take it, yeah for sure. But you know, our strategy has been and will continue to be to stick within the median, to lower, like low median price point of our market. And what I mean by that is like, say, if the average home sells for $250,000, we want to be selling homes at $200,000 to $250,000 when they're all said and done. Right, because that is for us, it's always going to be a market that's going to sell, because in a bad market, buyers at the $350,000 level are going to come down to the $250,000 level and then also people who own $100,000 houses are going to try to work up into the $250,000 house. So for us to work in that market makes sense. It might be less risky, we might be leaving some money on the table with other opportunities, but it's worked for us.
Speaker 2:We just got to continue to deal, to to nail down deal flow, because that's been a struggle for us lately. So we're trying to, you know, work on optimizing all of our paid marketing advertising just so that we can get the at bats, because we can. Once we get the at bats, we know what to do, like to make a house look pretty, make it look good and give somebody a really good product. Our goal is always to be if we're selling a $250,000 house, we want to be the best $250,000 product in that market, because when you're looking at our houses, we want you to be like oh, that's a no brainer, I'm going to buy that house because for $250,000, I'm getting an extra bedroom, a bathroom and way nicer finishes, you know. So that's that's kind of stay the course, and then, of course, picking things up along the way, um, really trying to focus on that. You guys did a really good job of this, uh, five years ago. So I mean, I don't remember exactly when, but when you went away from the, we're going to try to do everything with deals versus like we're a wholesale company. That's it, and I think that was one of the best decisions.
Speaker 2:You guys I mean outside, looking in. I don't know the end workings of your business. I know we're in the same market. We do this. You know a lot of the same, like we're nuanced different. We have a different exit strategy primarily. Same like we're nuanced different, we have a different exit strategy primarily.
Speaker 2:But when you guys made that focus, I think that was probably one of the best things that you did for your business. And that's what we're trying to do is just focus, like last year, we were going to keep this Airbnb for the draft, cause we have the draft coming up next month. It's like, well, we actually suck at Airbnb, we're not good at it, so let's just sell the Airbnb, take the profits and go buy the next flip, right? So, yeah, it's little decisions like that, uh, and I say that to say like, oh, we got this figured out, we know exactly what we're gonna do. It's a battle every day because it's like, oh, what about this three unit? Like, let's you know, let's uh separate each unit, and it's like, no, just freaking, do the thing, do the thing that is dude for us entrepreneurs and our personality types.
Speaker 1:That is the hardest thing about real estate, I think, is staying the course. Like, as you're saying this, I'm like Mike's preaching to me right now because I'm doing the same thing in my head. I'm like, oh, should I go build apartments? Thanks, chat, for telling me no, thanks for telling me that, no, because otherwise I probably would have started the process years ago and then I'd be like wasting all this time.
Speaker 1:And in general and in reality, we just need to be the best wholesale company in Wisconsin, maybe in the country, and just be. You know. That's needs to be the focus and the goal, right, and there's other things that are going to come along and we're going to take a little piece of this and a little piece of finance deals, but it is not our focus, right? We're, we're, we're decent at it. We know we and we know good attorneys that can help us with a lot of that stuff. Now we have chat GPT who can help us with that. But I'm telling you what, like if you're out there and you are listening to this and you are trying to make a deal of every single deal that comes across your plate, you're going to waste a lot of time and you're not gonna be able to find a deal. So you need to be deal finders, not deal makers, right, yeah.
Speaker 2:And going back to your apartment example like, just because you're not going to build ground up apartments doesn't mean you can't get in the apartment game. Like, if you focus a hundred percent on your wholesale business and you become great at wholesaling and your profitability goes from, let's say, a million a year to a million two, well, now you have $200,000 that you can put into an apartment, let somebody else build it from the ground up and you invest in that apartment complex. Just be passive, right, yeah, and be passive, you know, cause? It's like every little micro decision you make is going to add up completely. You know it's going to stack and stack and stack. I mean brandon turner talks about the stack, right, it's a little bit different, where he's talking about by one, than two, than four, but every little investment you make stacks on top of the other one. So, um, yeah, I.
Speaker 2:I think that that is the, that is the focus of this year and needs to continue to be, and I would encourage the. You have to get to a specific point for that, though, like in the beginning, I think you and I's personality actually lends favorable to us, because we're we're willing to try everything and you kind of have to try everything to figure out what the thing is, but then over time, as you're like, oh, this is, this is the thing, then you have to stop trying and you have to go all in and then you can only go on to the next thing. Once you have this thing, like if you had I buy going, and you're spending four minutes a week on it and not in the business every single day, I think that's a different story 100 while you're still actively in it, trying to get it to that point.
Speaker 1:it's probably let's not, let's just keep the blinders on for sure here yeah, and that was last year, that was my main focus like we need to get, we were starting to go the wrong direction.
Speaker 1:We had to step in. So I stepped back into the business full-time and took it back over, started getting the plate spinning again full speed, putting now some leadership in place and some layers of leadership. So I can not not that I love our business, that's not that I never want to be involved in the business, but I want to be able to be creative and innovative and be able to go out and look for either other verticals that are easy to implement or, um, how can I make our team even better? So, being in it every day, I'm getting caught in the minutiae and the details. If I can be above it a little bit and outside of the day-to-day stuff, I I can start to see some of the bigger opportunities that may, may be out there, but I can't let it get shiny object. And now we're doing a new development somewhere else. You know, like that's I want to. I want to, but again, just look at like, not not necessary, stay the course.
Speaker 2:And I think we're. We go from wholesaling real estate to like we're going to open a Mexican restaurant in Indianaiana. It's like, oh wait, this is because there's not a lot of them there and there's a ton of upside. It's like we only see the good and everything this is such a huge opportunity. You don't know, there's like no mexican restaurants in indiana. We have to get in dude that's so funny.
Speaker 1:We just got down to florida, to our place down here, we road tripped it down and as we're driving, like my wife is doing her chat, gpt stuff and she's working on her own little business over there that she's creating. Kids are all doing their thing in the back, so it's just me and my thoughts for 10 hours, and every town we drive through, I was like, oh, we could open some franchise here of this. Like I wonder if there's a franchise that I could go buy the franchise and start here. I'm like no, no, wholesale, wholesale real estate. But look over there, dude, it's so funny, you nailed it. That's exactly what it is. It's a struggle, man. The struggle is real every day, for sure. Yeah Well, mike, we're going to wrap here.
Speaker 1:Buddy, I know we've been on here for a while. I know you, though we always like to end with a little fun question. So what is your favorite Wisconsin tradition or place to visit? And the reason we ask this for the you guys out there is, if you're not from Wisconsin, as Mike said, you got the California money, the New York money, whatever it is, and you're like gosh, where can I put this cash Right? Well, I have a beer and a brat out there that's funny.
Speaker 2:Well, I told you my secret earlier and this will be letting it out to the world two of the most like wisconsin things, and I'm going to talk a little bit quieter in case anybody's here yeah, and they hear me, because I don't want anybody in real life to know this we won't.
Speaker 1:We'll cut this part out.
Speaker 2:We'll cut this, yeah episode yeah, uh, two of the most wisconsin things is playing cribbage and drinking in old fashioned to. I'm 37 years old and I've never done either, and so you're talking. Remember we went back to the focus conversation of business, my, my personal focus for the year. My goal is to have an old fashioned and like not just not like an old fashioned at this, like uppity bar type thing, like I want to go to dive bar Northern Wisconsin and have somebody make me the best old fashioned. So if you know where the best old fashioned is like, let me know, cause that'd be great. And then also how to play cribbage, because I feel like such a fraud. I do feel like a fraud without having done those two things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that's a first of all. I want to commend you. That's a pretty worthy thing to come on here and that's a pretty big man of you to you know be vulnerable here with everybody and and really let that secret out. So I appreciate you sharing that live here again. We will try to edit my editor's little little spotty, so I don't know if he'll be able to get to it before it's like my internet like mike's internet? Uh, no, that's.
Speaker 2:That's uh very, very honorable of you to admit that, mike and those are arguably the top two of the top five things ever in wisconsin too, maybe top ten for sure do you know how you could figure out how to do those things and where to go?
Speaker 1:chat gpt 100? Yeah, when in doubt, use chat gpt mike. If somebody wants to get a hold of you, besides going on chat gpt and asking how to get a hold of you, besides going on ChatGPT and asking how to get a hold of Mike Higgins, what's the best way for them to reach out to you if they want to talk? Flips, wisconsin real estate, your journey. There's a lot more we didn't even get into today with your health stuff. I wanted to get into that, but we're kind of past time here, so anything-.
Speaker 2:Yeah, honestly, the best like on the socials. I spend a lot of time on X, so if you go at meet Mike Higgins M-E-E-T, my name Mike Higgins H-I-G-G-I-N-S that's probably the word that's where I spend the most time tweeting about all things real estate I think I still call it tweets posting about all things real estate, and so I'm very, very, very active there. Obviously, you can reach out to Blue Badger homebuyers, but you're probably going to get an AI agent trying to buy your house from you, so it's probably not the best place, unless you want to sell me your house. That'd be great, could be fun.
Speaker 1:Could be fun just to have the conversation, though. Just mess with AI. Yeah, it'd be fun. Yeah, awesome Mike. I appreciate it. Man, it's dialed in and your camera's good and all the tech stuff is good. Normally you're spot on with that, so don't judge Mike for that today. Okay, guys, he did his best, all right, and he's vulnerable today, so give him a little break, right you guys? Thanks for tuning into another episode. This has been awesome, mike. This one, I think, is going to be a big hit for a lot of people, especially that AI section. I geek on AI all day, every day, so that's always fun.
Speaker 1:If you're out there and you're like, hey, chat GPT, where's the best place to buy off-market real estate? If it doesn't say Wisconsin discount properties, you need to train it and correct it. Okay, otherwise, go to wisconsindiscountpropertiescom and just skip chat GPT. Put your information in there and you'll get added to our buyers list and you'll get off market deals every single week. And, like I said earlier, if you're sitting there going, hey, I don't know where to start and ChatGPT doesn't really help you. Beyond that, go to the page, just fill out a contact us piece If you're not ready to start getting deals flowing to you and you just want to have a conversation first and see if this whole real estate investing thing in Wisconsin is the right thing for you, and we'll we'll hop on a with you and have a little conversation.
Speaker 1:If you got some value out of this. Guys, this is the ripple effect A couple episodes ago really hit me when we were talking about how this can really change people's lives. So if you got value out of this, you could be the one conversation somebody needed to create generational wealth for them and their families. By sharing this episode, you're helping out those people in your network. So please share this, put it on your socials, help us out, help us get the word out and tune into the next episode.
