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Success With TV Ads Featuring Tony Javier

Mitch Stephen|By May 27, 2021

Episode 479: Success With TV Ads Featuring Tony Javier

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REIS 479 Tony Javier | TV Ads

Have you ever heard about real estate investing that has found success with TV ads? Tony Javier, a real estate investor, joins Mitch Stephen to discuss his success with TV commercials and how he got started in the industry. According to Tony, the main reason he invested in TV commercials is that it helps you hit hundreds of thousands or millions of people. It also aids in your branding and credibility in your market. People trust brands that they know, and what better to market what you offer than to advertise on TV. Aside from these benefits, real estate commercial gives you high ROI and high-quality leads. According to Tony, while you are putting out money, you are getting 10x more than what you put out. Discover more about real estate commercials and know how you can grow your investment and find more success in your market.

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I’m here with Tony Javier. He is sitting in beautiful San Diego, California but this man does business all over the nation. We are going to be talking about how to 10X your business using TV commercials. With no further ado, how are you doing, Tony?

I’m doing fantastic. How about you, Mitch?

Life isn’t a matter of if you’re going to get kicked and pushed down. It’s how many times you get up. Share on X

I had bad weather down here in Texas. You may have been reading or watching about it. We’ve got some floods down here. I was trying to get to my studio. I’ve got cut off. I pulled in next to a Starbucks. I was going to do it from the ambiance of the place I’m at here because it was cleared up here for a second but it was too loud. I retreated to my truck. I’m adapting, overcoming and meeting my obligations. It doesn’t matter where we sit, does it, Tony? As long as we deliver some good content, that is what it is all about.

That’s right. You’ve got to adapt and overcome. That is what business is all about.

You’ve got to keep morphing. I wrote a book called My Life & 1,000 Houses: Failing Forward to Financial Freedom. It’s all about falling down and getting back up. That’s all it was about, “How many times can you get back up?”

It‘s not a matter if you are going to get kicked and pushed down. It’s how many times you get up.

Let’s give a bit about your background. How do we get to a place where you are talking to me on a show of Real Estate Investors about how to 10X their business?

Interestingly enough, you are one of the only people that I have met who has been doing this longer than I have. I have been investing in real estate for many years now. Some people say, “You must have started when you were ten.” I started when I was 21 years old at a college. I bought No Down Payment by Carleton Sheets. You have been in the business long enough. I know you know that name. I ended up buying that info product, paid $200 and got infatuated with the concept of buying properties with no money down and having other people pay for your properties. It’s probably closer to the first two years. I bought ten houses. We fixed them up. We did the BRRRR method. I think I invented BRRRR before BRRRR was a term.

We bought them, paid cash, refinanced them, put them on long-term notes and have tenants pay for them. We would have a lot of equity, be able to get our cashback and pocket some money. We still do that now if the appraisal comes back high enough. With the Tax Laws, we can expense off through depreciation most of the renovations, keep the properties and get cash out to where we can get almost as much cash out tax-free with our loans as we would if we were flipping the properties and get the tax advantages. That is a lot of what I’m doing.

We do a lot. We do fix and flip. We don’t do wholesaling. We do some wholesaling. We have done close to 1,000 flips. I have a great team in Wichita, Kansas, that runs my operation while I live in San Diego. I have been here for a few years. Luckily, I was able to get my business automated to where it runs without me. I work a few hours a week in that business while I open up and expand other ventures and opportunities. I’m in a co–working space now. I have educational companies and all that good stuff.

Rolling into the 10X TV or 10X scene is I talked about automation. I met a guy at a poker game and he was on TV for his construction business. He said, “You flip houses. I think that could be good for you, too. I’m making a couple of million bucks a year just off of TV alone.” I was like, “I’m a bottom-line kind of person. All I need to see are the numbers on the bottom line. I don’t need to see the fluff.” He had hooked me up with his media buyer. Within 30 to 45 days, I had written a commercial. My media buyer had produced it and negotiated with the stations for me. Nine years later, it’s super automated. I spent a few hours at the most per year on my TV commercials. I’m just filming new commercials and looking at ad spend.

I call it my 10X TV program because you can reach ten times as many people ten times faster. The goal is to get a 10X on your money on TV. Even if you get a 5X, it’s still good. A lot of people that I’ve gotten on TV throughout the country are getting a 10X return on their money and spending ten times, if not more or less time on that marketing medium than they are in the other. That is a quick backstory of where I came from, how I’ve got into TV, why I love talking about TV and getting on people on TV throughout the country.

Many years in the business and 1,000 flips, you are obviously very sophisticated. You had a lot of things go wrong and right. You had a lot of experiences. You can’t buy that. When anyone says to me, they have been in the business for 15, 20 or 25 years and they are still in the business, then they are a wealth of knowledge. I want to point out to the audience, we’ve got the right guy sitting here for sure because you just don’t hang out in this business for 10 years, 20 years or more. There are a lot of ups and downs. You have been through some cycles. You have seen how things are morphing and how you have to keep changing to keep things going. A lot of people would think TV is too expensive. I would think that is a limiting belief right off the bat.

That’s the beautiful thing about TV. When I talk to investors around the country, even the most experienced investors like yourself who are 10 to 20 years in the business, they are like, “I have never heard of anybody going on TV and trying to find motivated sellers with TV.” There are many different reasons that the barrier of entry is high. One, they think it is way too expensive. Two is, they have no idea where to start. Like if I said, “Mitch, go get on TV,” you would be like, “I don’t know what stations to call. I don’t know what shows to be on. I don’t know what scripts I would need to use. I don’t know who would shoot and produce the commercial.” That stuff you could figure out but it would take a lot of time and energy that most investors don’t want to put into something.

TV Ads: Texting is easy and something people do a lot because they can go online tomorrow, go buy a list and set up a campaign that takes one to three days.

Texting is easy and something people do a lot because they can go online tomorrow, go buy a list and set up a text campaign that takes 1 to 3 days. In less than a week, they can be texting people and getting potential results. The barrier of entry to that is very low, whereas TV is very high because of all the things that I have mentioned. From the standpoint of cost, the great thing is that we have tested a lot of things in our market. We have tested a lot of things around the country with other investors. The same thing that it works in our market has worked in other markets and the fact that we are targeting a lower demographic. We are also targeting an older demographic. We have tried the expensive and cheap stuff on TV. We realized that the cheap stuff works the best.

I have talked with maybe a handful of investors who said, “I heard TV was great because one other person I heard of was doing it. They would go and talk to stations. The stations would quote them these crazy amounts to get on TV because they are trying to sell them the most expensive stuff.” For instance, there is a market that someone said, “Someone told me I was going to have to spend $15,000 on one station.” I went to my media guy and said, “Let’s go look at the rates in that area.” We were able to do $10,000 ad spend for four stations because the commercials that we aired were a fraction of the cost to do.

What it comes down to is I feel like we have created a good formula where we can make it less expensive and then take the process of at least 3 to 6 months for other investors. Those investors I told you about didn’t get on TV because it was way too much work and they thought it was too expensive. We ended up getting them on the air within 30 to 45 days because we were able to streamline the process. We do the ad buying and production of the commercials. We have the scripting. We have it all down to where we can streamline the process and get someone on the air with them in a very short amount of time.

How much does someone need to budget for something like this? Is that across the board or different in every market?

It depends on the market. We have people in big markets like San Francisco. New York has a huge market. That is something that someone who’s very sophisticated would have spent a lot of money there because you are going to hit 15 million to 20 million people but in most markets, it’s going to be between probably 500,000 and 1 million, maybe up to 2 million people. That is what I call small to mid–size markets. Now, we have a minimum. We used to go in and say, “We could spend $3,000 in some markets just because the work to do at $3,000 ad spend is the same as $5,000.”

We started doing a $5,000 minimum ad spend. In most markets, you can get in with a $5,000 a month ad spends. If you do the numbers on that, let’s say most guys are making a minimum of $20,000 on wholesale deals. In this crazy market, it’s not super untypical to do $30,000 to $50,000 wholesale deals. Let’s call it $20,000. You only need to do one deal per month off of TV to make those numbers work. The great thing is that, with your TV commercials, you are hitting hundreds of thousands or millions of people. It’s also helping your branding.

Some of the biggest brands became big brands because of TV. Share on X

People who already have a lot of branding out there with their postcards and all the other stuff they are doing, it’s a no–brainer because not only are you getting deals and making money off the TV but people all the time will call us and say, “We saw your postcard and ten others. We only called you because we don’t know these other guys and we have seen you on your commercial for years.” I have even had someone say that in their market within three weeks, get a deal from their postcards that they said, “I called you and nobody else because we saw you on TV.” It’s great for branding. It’s not as expensive as you would think. There are so many other different benefits of TV that go along with it that I will hopefully get into here a little bit.

I learned through radio and stuff like the idea was, “If you are going to do it, you need to do it for an extended time.” I’m going to guess it’s the same for TV, “You can’t just try it for a week and say whether it worked or not. You’ve got to have repetition.” Am I right or wrong about that?

When I launched the program, showing other investors how to do it and implementing it for them, I kept saying, “Give it at least 3 to 6 months.” The beautiful thing is I thought 3 to 6 months would be 80% of the people would start getting good results and then only 20% of the people would get killer results in the first two months. When I started TV, I only spent $3,000 in my first month at a $35,000 deal and it paid for my whole year of ad spend. I didn’t know what the data was going to be. Fast forward to now, it’s the opposite is that 80% of our people are getting a multiple on their money within 30 to 60 days and about 20% are taking three months or potentially more to start getting a multiple on their money.

Even though that number is the case, I still prep people when I talk to them. I’m like, “Give it 3 to 6 months. Three months is the very minimum. It’s a month–to–month program. You can cancel at any time. Mentally commit to six months but it could be three months before you start seeing results that you start making multiples on your money. Again, within 30 to 60 days because it’s so low competition. When people’s commercials go on air, they are getting a lot of leads very quickly and doing several deals in their first month.“

Why when your friend called the market said it was $15,000 to be on one station? What was the difference? You were able to get a lot less money for four stations. How was that? Why did you get two different numbers?

I will give you some general numbers. There is prime-time TV. Primetime is way more expensive. You do have more people watching but the cost per reach per person is a lot higher. It‘s a lot of news stuff so 5:00 to 6:00 news. Those kinds of things are way more expensive. The general numbers on that like for me and my market, it’s $150 per spot for some of those prime–time spots. Whereas the cheaper stuff that we do that works better is only about $10 to $25 or maybe $30 a spot. We are getting it for a fraction of the amounts we can do potentially 5 to 7 times more commercials per ad spend.

When someone says, “I’ve got a $15,000 budget and that’s one station,” I’m like, “They are probably most likely quoting you the prime–time stuff. You are maybe getting 100 to 200 commercials for that $15,000. Whereas we can get 4 to 7 times, whatever that number is, more commercials so we could spread it out with more stations.” You can look at TV from the standpoint of frequency. Reach is how many stations you are on. Frequency is how many times you are on per station.

If you only have a limited budget, then you may only be on one station to make sure you get the frequency. If you have a larger budget, we can get you on more stations. That is a great thing about TV. It is cheap. If you have a lower budget, we can start you on 1 or 2 stations and get you a lower ad spend. If it starts working after that and you want to increase to 3 to 4 stations, then we can do that and get you up to even five stations. It’s typically the number of stations that we like to hit in a certain area based on what has worked for us.

We were talking about a list of ten benefits. Give us some of the benefits of TV versus other mediums.

I have ten or more benefits that I can talk to someone about. For the sake of time, when I talk about it on a show, I narrow it down to five. I will go through those quickly. Number one is credibility. If you look at some of the biggest brands, they became big brands because of TV. Think about Tony the Tiger in Frosted Flakes. You would have no idea who they were if it weren’t for TV. Cleaning companies, Mr. Clean, all these big companies and brands have a lot of credibility.

When you go to the store and look at all these brands, if you are looking at cereal and you want something fruity, Fruity Pebbles, for instance, is probably the brand you are going to pick. Whereas there’s a cheaper and probably healthier version on the bottom shelf that is half the price. You are probably going to buy Fruity Pebbles because you have seen them on TV throughout the years. Credibility is the biggest thing. It helps you with so many things in your market. Two, I mentioned little to no competition. If you look at your market, do you know anybody in your market, Mitch, that is doing TV?

I‘m in San Antonio, I know of three that I have seen regularly but both of them just came in the market. There was not anybody. Now, we’ve got Jeremy, the guy with the Australian accent. He has been around in this part for a long time. I don’t know how many markets he is in. He has been mostly radio.

You are o1 of only 2 or 3 markets that I have heard of that have more than one person on TV. If you look at your market, are you hitting a couple of million? Is 1 million to 2 million your market area?

It’s a little over two million probably. The population is growing so fast here. It might be 2.5 million.

TV Ads: When people’s commercials go on air, they’re getting a lot of deals very quickly and doing several deals in their first month.

Imagine you only have three people on TV, if they are doing it right, doing TV and doing well, you probably have room for six people at least in that market before you saturate it. If there are three people in that market, there is still room for growth because if you look at texting and cold calling, people are making a lot of money doing that. What do you think the number is? You probably have at least 100 people, if not hundreds of people, who are pulling the same list, cold calling and texting. If you look at it from that perspective, there are so much room to grow. It’s little to no competition. Even though you have three in the market, there is still not that much competition because there is still room to grow. In most markets, we don’t have anybody else besides our clients doing TV.

The third one is high ROI. I mentioned the 10X, 11X is what I’ve got on my money in 2020 with TV, just spending a few hours on producing a couple of new commercials and looking at my ad spend. It has got a very high ROI. Number four, the biggest thing to me and I mentioned it already a couple of times, is a high return on time. If you look at a lot of other marketing mediums, cold calling and texting, you have to manage the most. Even if you have someone doing it, you still have to check their numbers, make sure they are saying the right things and texting the right people and stay compliant.

Even postcards, which is probably the next most popular marketing medium after those two, you still have to pull the right list, create the copy, make sure the postcards are being sent out and skip trace the ones that come back. There are a lot of management to it. For me, TV, I love automation. Spending a few hours, a year on TV is gold to me. Number five, something that maybe you guys didn’t think about listing in is high-quality leads. I try not to pick too much on texting and cold calling but think about those leads you are getting. Someone picks up their phone and, “I have a house to sell.” They will either mess with you and say, “Give me a full price or a high offer and I will sell it,” or they will say, “I’m looking to potentially sell to see what their houses were.”

There are a lot of tire kickers with those kinds of leads. Whereas with TV, if someone is sitting there and watching TV, they are fully engaged with TV. They are seeing you visually. That is credibility. If they are calling you, it’s most likely because they are serious. They were not tire kickers. Don’t get me wrong. We get some tire kickers every once in a while. The lead quality is so much higher with TV leads because for them, having to pick up their phone and call as opposed to someone texting them and they are already on their phone and replying and saying, “I would look at an offer.“

The competition with those leads. If someone is getting a text, postcard or cold call, chances are there are 1,500 or maybe 200 people who are hitting those same lists. They probably have been hit by somebody at some point. Whereas with TV, you have a few other competitors, it sounds like in your market but it’s not like you have someone hitting the same marketing medium over and over. Those are the five top benefits. There are other benefits like raising private money and contractors treating you differently when you are on TV. There are so many other things. Those are the main things that I feel are the big benefits of being on TV, creating a good brand and having longevity with it.

If you guys are interested in furthering this conversation with Tony, I want you to go to 1000Houses.com/10xtv. There you can get all the contact information. You will be able to link up with Tony and his organization. When someone contacts you, how does the conversation go?

We have this set up a franchise–like system. We don’t call it a franchise, charge huge signup fees or take a percentage of your deals. The reason I say the franchise–like system is for a few reasons. One is, you are buying your markets. We only have so many people per market. When you commit to that market, we are not going to sell ten people in the same market. Chances are, it is going to be 2 or 3 people, depending on the size of the market in each market.

Two is we have proven it not only in our market. We have proven it in many other markets. When you apply for a franchise, you have to put your results for your market and disclose your results for other markets. You have done this with other people. We can say that if we went and applied for a franchise, I’m sure we would get approved because of the results we have gotten. When someone applies, we look at, “Do we have room in your market?” We have sold out quite a few markets but we still have quite a few markets available as well. If your market is taken, a lot of people have started virtual marketing in other markets. If San Antonio, Texas, for instance, was taken and you wanted to go into Waco and Waco was available, then you could do that. We have had a lot of people do that.

Credibility is the biggest thing. It helps you with so many things in your market. Share on X

I do screen the people because we can get the phone ringing. We have a very high success rate. It’s because we have very high-quality people in the program. It’s also because we do a lot of the implementation. We want to keep those numbers the same and make sure that whoever is in our program is either set up to take the leads or we feel like can figure out how to get their system set up for the volume of leads that are going to come in. If you want to go to the link that Mitch had mentioned, you can go, apply and book a call with me. I can talk to you through that and see how I can add value to you and tell you about the program.

I think that’s a great place to start. Maybe I will be one of the first callers from this show. Who knows? You already have commercials pre–done. Does it cost extra to make the commercials in addition to the ad spend? Do you have it figured out in some other way?

My media buyer, who I’ve mentioned, got me on TV. He has been doing this for many years. He negotiates all the ad spend with the stations. He knows who to call, what questions to ask and how to negotiate the best rates. He also does the production of the commercial. We recommend whoever is buying into it to be on the commercial. I would say 80% to 90% of the people are on the commercial because they are doing deals in the market. They are raising private money. They are the brand and the face. I do have people who say, “I don’t want to be on the commercial for whatever reason, so we can shoot the commercial and plug those in.”

All you need to do is give us the phone number, domain and brand. We can shoot the commercial or set it up for you to shoot the commercial in your area. It’s not very expensive for us to produce the commercial for you. If you were to go to somebody else and say, “I need all of this data. I need commercials produced. I need you to negotiate. I need all of these things,” it would be at least $25,000 probably to get this done in most franchises. That is one of the reasons we don’t call it a franchise is because most franchises charge a $50,000 upfront minimum and a lot of them are hundreds of thousands of dollars potentially. Ours is a fraction of the cost. I typically don’t talk about costs on shows because we do change based on supply and demand. I can tell you about the results that we are getting, people keep telling us we are not charging enough and that gives you an idea.

When people go to do the ad spend, you are not taking part in their deals or you are just charging on ad spend in the upfront course or consults?

We do have an upfront fee to buy your market, which is very reasonable. After a few months, we charge a low monthly fee to keep you as part of the program. The great thing is we don’t do just TV. I plug you into all the other stuff that I have with my mastermind groups and high–level investors that are doing deals and sharing what they are doing throughout the country. I have an EOS component, Entrepreneurial Operating System, that we plug you into as well. There is a signup fee to get you onboarded, which is way lower than we probably should be charging. We are ramping this up and trying to get in all the markets throughout the country by the end of 2022, which we will do at a low monthly maintenance fee.

We don’t take any of the portions of the deals. I do have a program that if someone is a newer investor and I feel like they could work the program where they will, I am willing to participate in the ad spend and partner with them in that market. I don’t want to go too deep into that because I don’t have all the details. I’m only doing that in a few markets. If that is something someone is interested in and doesn’t want to necessarily invest upfront, I know the TV commercials work. I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is in other markets and partner with other people if that is something that they want to.

If you are interested in that conversation, partnering with Tony Javier and his team, then go to 1000Houses.com/10xtv. I haven’t heard you say anything about the radio. My mind says, “If TV is good, plus radio will be better?” What is your comment?

It is the guy who teaches radio who talked to me into doing TV. He launched a program and his guys are doing super well with radio. He approached me and said, “My people are asking about TV. They want to know if they can get on TV, too. You are the only guy that I know who is doing TV around the country. Why don’t you create a program around it?” I brushed him off for many months and finally, I was like, “Let me test it.” I went to some high–level investors that I know we are doing a lot of volumes.

He started sending me some of his radio people. His radio people signed up like that because they are getting great results on the radio. Once you amplify it with TV, then those mediums work together and you can dominate your market. Now that we have gotten results with a lot of people and people are getting amazing results, anybody who is on the radio who knows about our program and I have talked to, I think pretty much everybody has signed up because they know mass media works for what we do. After all, there is not a lot of competition. If you are already doing radio, TV is a great thing to do. I don’t know how many people on TV are also doing radio but I imagine that is something they will probably start doing as well.

Go to 1000Houses.com/10xtv. If you want to learn more, there will be all the contact information over there. You can talk to him about getting set up to be your guy, start running your own commercials and doing your deals. If you are a new investor and think you have what it takes, you can talk to him about maybe him fronting some of the expense or a lot of the expense and you sharing your deals with him. You are going to have to impress him that you can get these leads and close them because that is where the rubber is going to meet the road. Is there anything else you would like to say to the readers before we wrap it up, Tony?

Before I launched this TV program, I used to talk a lot about automation. For those of you who are doing deals, I encourage you to figure out how to build a team that can help you do this business and do it very efficiently. If you are getting into the business, find a mentor and hire good people who are good at what they do. For me, I have been here for many years now and it took me about ten years to get that mentality of, “I need to get good people on board to do the stuff that I don’t like to do that someone else could do more efficiently.” That is something that when people are in my TV program, I expose them to the mastermind group where we talk about a lot of that stuff. It’s all about building a great team and doing things efficiently by having a great team.

If someone gets in the business and they don’t build a great team, they pick the wrong contractors, mentors and people. They are going to be doing a lot of work themselves. Whereas if they get the right people in their business, mentors, employees, sub-contractors, it can completely blow your mind how much you can do with very little time. I work a few hours a week on my real estate investing business. It allows me to help other investors with TV, funding and all the other things that I do. That is my last bit of words of wisdom.

I want to echo that, Tony. It took me 12 or 13 years. It’s way too long. I was the crimp in the funnel that was slowing everything down because I couldn’t do everything. I’ve got some people who were always like, “Where is the flow of stopping? Where are we getting bogged down?” You figure out where that place is and then figure out how to solve that. You keep your flow open and moving consistently and smoothly. It took me a long time. I finally decided, “I couldn’t do it anymore by myself.“ I was either going to quit or learn how to get myself out of business. I have not seen the last 400 houses I have bought. I have not seen the last 400 people who bought my houses. I don’t even have a desk at my office. Apparently, Tony doesn’t have a desk at his because his office is in Kansas somewhere and he is sitting over in San Diego.

There is always another level to go to. It doesn’t matter. We all started as a one–man show wearing all the hats but you can’t do that forever. You will burn up and burn out. There is no way around it. You are either going to figure out how to delegate and build a team or you are going to run your course. Maybe you have to take a sabbatical for 1 or 2 years and then try to come back after you have lost all your momentum. It’s daunting. That was the one reason I never would quit. I wanted to quit but I said, “I can’t quit. It’s worth too much money. I spent too much time. I spent all these years and decades building this reputation, these private lenders and this whole thing. If I go away, you will come back and start again. It’s a long, hard road to start over again after you have all that going for you.”

TV Ads: You can look at TV from the standpoint of frequency. Reach is how many stations you are on. Frequency is how many times you are on per station.

The only other choice was, “If I can’t walk away or I’m not willing to walk away, I’ve got to figure out how to get myself out of this business but keep the business running.“ I thought I would take a cut in pay because I would have to give a lot of the money that I made to the people who made it run. It turned out to be exactly the opposite. I make more now than I ever did and do way less. It’s obvious. I don’t believe things until they happen to me firsthand. What happened was, I was a good salesman but I couldn’t focus on sales. That is all he had to do was sell my houses. He was way better than me. I’m a better salesman than him nine ways to Sunday, not with the fraction of time that I had to do it in because I had everything else to do. Every chair was outperforming me because that is all that chair had to do. The numbers and profits went up.

Tony is right. Find a mentor, someone who you want to be on and off the field and someone who is doing it now and can shortcut you. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It’s foolish to do it. It took me a lot longer to get that through my thick head than it should have. We are here now. I finally figured it out. You don’t have to take that long. I would like to thank everybody for stopping by to get you some Tony Javier. If you are interested in 10X–ing your business and using a TV for all those five benefits we heard plus more, then go to 1000Houses.com/10xtv and check it out. Tony, thank you so much for being on. I appreciate you very much.

Thank you, Mitch. I appreciate you.

I would like to thank LiveComm.com for being the sponsor. It’s a lead generation plus mass texting equals success and it might be a good thing to team up with your radio ads. Who knows?

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About Tony Javier

Tony has been an entrepreneur since he was able to start a lawnmower. He has always found ways to give the public a service that is needed. Today, he adds value to sellers by giving them an option to get their house sold in days and helps buyers with our Rent to Own a home program. Let’s see what he comes up with next.