This is a special episode of The Norris Group Real Estate Radio Show.
With the recent Hurricane Ian that hit Florida, many of you have been asking how we did, how Bruce was doing.
The aftermath of the hurricane revealed a number of damaged homes because of the flood, strong winds and even fire. It truck as a monstrous Category 4 hurricane, one of the strongest storms ever to hit the U.S since 1935.
Joining us in this episode is the CEO of Douglas Brooke Homes, Craig Evans who’s also our build partnet in Florida and our only recommended property manager in Florida, Joanna Rinella from Empire Property Management.
Episode Notes:
Narrator  This is The Norris Group’s real estate investor radio show the award-winning show dedicated to thought leaders shaping the real estate industry and local experts revealing their insider tips to succeed in an ever -changing real estate market hosted by author, investor, and hard money lender, Bruce Norris. The Norris Group proudly presents our 15th annual award winning event I Survived Real Estate. Industry experts join Bruce Norris to discuss the evolving industry trends, real estate bubbles, inflation and opportunities emerging for real estate professionals. All proceeds from the event benefit Make-a-wish and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. See Isurvivedrealestate.com for event details information on all our generous sponsors and to connect with our speakers. We want to thank our Platinum partners, San Diego Creative Investors Association, uDirect IRA Services, White Feather investments, The Collective Genius, MVT Productions, and Realty411.
Joey Romero  Hey, everybody, welcome to The Norris Group, real estate radio show and podcast. We’ve gotten a lot of questions and emails about how we did, you know this week, with Hurricane Ian coming through the Southwest Florida area, we actually took a direct hit. And so we decided to do a special meeting with our Florida BootCamp folks. And because everybody had, you know, been wondering about how we did, how Bruce was doing, we decided to turn it into a radio show. So, this is a special show, it’s going to be Bruce, our build partner and our property manager just talking about how we fared the damage that was done and generally how we did during this, you know, Category 4, you know, /five, direct hit. And what you’re going to find is, we were surprised to see how well our homes held up. Obviously we all know Bruce, so I won’t do a proper introduction there. But Craig Evans is the president and CEO of Douglas Brooke Homes. He is our build partner in Florida. He’s a third generation contractor and he also owns Trinity Building and design in Southwest Florida. He’s been a tremendous asset for us, and you’ll hear all the things that he’s been doing to try to keep us all informed and up to date with what’s going on right now. Our other partner on the call is going to be Joanna Rinella from Empire Property Management. She handles, she’s actually the only property manager in Florida that we recommend. And as part of our Florida boot camp team, She is an investor herself. She manages our rentals in southwest Florida. Like she would do her own. So, she’s been a tremendous partner, very knowledgeable. She’s been a lifelong resident of Southwest Florida. So, without further ado, here is Bruce Norris. Take it away.
Bruce Norris  Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us. I’m going to cover a couple of things. Long time ago 1992 my, was my first experience in hurricane I didn’t live in Florida. But my friend Alex went through that. And we learned a lot. And so when you have a really bad hurricane, there’s, there’s some things that happen. First of all, it’s everybody’s going to be overloaded, the insurance world, the permit world, the contractor world. So, there’s going to be delays in a lot of things. The short term is messy the long term though, it’s very interesting, at least what happened after Hurricane Andrew. So think about the homes that were destroyed. So, when you see the news, you’re talking about Fort Myers, a lot of destruction, they’re not going to rebuild that, that house again, because the standards are different. And so literally what’s going to happen is there’s going to be a big gap between what say somebody actually wants to build a house on that lot. It’s going to have to be drawn and you’re going to have to get a permit, you’re going to have to build it. That’s a very lengthy time. So, in the meantime, what happens is they get an insurance check. And they’ve got to do something they want to live there or maybe they don’t but here’s what happened last time, the demand for existing real estate was very strong, because people got a check from their insurance company and then decided ‘I can’t build it in that timeframe, so I’m going to buy something else.’ So, the demand for existing real estate was very strong. This, the demand for rentals was extremely strong, you have a lot of unexpected construction that’s about to happen. Well, that, that necessitates the migration of a lot of workers. And those people either buy houses or they rent houses. So, there’s a short term, whether it’s going to be, it’s going to be an overload for every piece of the real estate business, the permit business, the insurance business. And by the way, sometimes that creates mistakes. So, when the insurance world gets completely slammed, you have inexperienced people looking at damage. And you have the same thing happened with building inspectors. And so they can sometimes over exaggerate what actually is wrong with the property. Back in ’92, every house that we bought was red tagged by the city of Miami. When we had it, we invited them back out after clearing the debris, they removed the red tag, because it wasn’t structural, but they didn’t know that at the time. But the insurance world wrote a check, based on the original estimate that this was going to be a teardown. So, it’s an interesting time, there’s no doubt there are struggles right now. So, the piles of properties that I have in, in Leesburg, I have most of my rentals, those probably got 40 miles an hour wind and no damage. So, that’s, that’s one, one set. Craig is building a lot of our rental properties. Now, again, big difference if you drive around and see a new build, and the damage to a new build. And you go and see existing homes, just different construction, different elevation. And so that’s why all those codes are in place and why I didn’t come here looking for bargains, unused inventory, because I didn’t want to pay the insurance bill. And I didn’t want to have the problem. So, when you have a flood, you know, come within a couple feet of your front door and a new build, it’s for it, maybe the next door house is four feet underwater. That’s a very different damage path. So, so Craig’s got dozens and dozens of these. So, I looked at half a dozen of those myself yesterday. And he’ll talk about the damage, but it was very minor and it was very repetitive. So, I’m, I’m not surprised. But of course, I’m relieved. There was some other properties that we have that we’re building to flip. Now, that’s a builder that I brought out from California. And those properties depending on the stage of construction, we had some damage two block. So, we had to wait for houses where the block fell, but it had never been supported other than just putting the block up. And when 140 mile an hour wind hits that, that can come down. So that’s, that’s the most serious damage I’ve got in we’re talking probably total 140 houses, I’m feel very happy that all the stuff that’s going on from what I saw, and the different areas that I saw, Craig will talk but he’s seen a whole different level of damage, because he literally has been boating people from areas that are trapped. We have people literally since the hurricane have no place to go. And he’s got a boat that holds like seven people. And last night for I don’t know how long, he said he took 120 people off the island and back to, back to land. And I met him in the, in the vicinity of where he was about to do that with a you know, a bunch of food. And so there’s a lot of people that are helping other people because a lot of the structural, like, where’s the where’s the Navy? Why don’t we get a Navy ship out there something? I guess there’s maybe restrictions on the depth of what the ship could be. There’s all kinds of things that restrict what can show up. So, anyway, that’s what that’s what’s going on. So, Craig, why don’t, I’m gonna turn it over for you a little bit. Tell us what your, what you saw, what you feel like the status of the condition of the homes, and maybe even compare this to other hurricanes that you have witnessed?
Craig Evans  Sure, sure. So, you know, Bruce, you’re right. A lot of people are asking and where we’ve had calls from friends and business partners are throughout the country. You know, just hey, what we see is horrific. What’s everything like? You know, as Bruce’s you and I talked early on, there’s a reason that we build in the areas that we build, especially with the price point that we’re building out and that’s because just as you mentioned, a want newer product that I know is gonna stand up but don’t want to have to deal with the insurance aspects of it. So, with the houses that we’ve got, I was talking to our team. I was corrected, we’ve got we currently have 138 open homes that we have at some phases of construction right now. We had only one of those blowdown. And again, that was the one that we had laid the block, the beam had not been poured. And you know, that block of blowdown was a 30 mile an hour wind or my 14 year old daughter can go push it down if it’s not poured, you know, we’ve done those illustrations many times on the boot camps. And I think that’s one of the things that we were very blessed about, we didn’t lose any roofs. There was no structural damage, we didn’t lose any windows, we have literally on, on the houses that we’ve got things it’s maybe what we call a square which would be about 100 square feet max of shingles that are gone here there. Some of them literally lost three or four shingles. You know, we’ve got a few I think we had two have the water treatment systems are gone you know, they blew away, got knocked over things, a few trees that were knocked over, but it is very, very minimal damage. So, we were very, very blessed. The the older construction homes that were there, were not up to current codes took some severe damage, you know, but even up in the areas of Cape Coral that we build the areas of Lehigh, the port Charlotte’s all those years that we’re building. And even with that, because we try to stay, we intentionally with what we build, try to stay out of flood areas, things like that, you know, most of the homes really fared very, very well. What you are seeing on TV is just as you mentioned, is down on Fort Myers Beach, which there was about 21 feet of flood surge there for a friend of mine is just off the beach, and his, finish floor of his house is at 20 foot 4 inches to his finished floor elevation, and he had 6 inches of water in his finished floor. So, that means that above sea level, there’s there was just shy of a 21 foot storm surge that came through that area. There were there was a mobile home park. I don’t know like 180, 190 mobile homes that were just off the beach there. It’s gone. There’s, there’s, the, it’s not that there’s a mess. It’s just they’re gone, you know, but again, we’re talking about older structures that were built, you know, 20, 30, 50 years ago, things like that, that weren’t up to code. So, honestly, very, very pleased with how the area has held up. I know there’s a lot of concern of what people see that but the reality is, you know, the product that we build, held up very, very well. I was, I was concerned because even, you know, we don’t we currently, up until you know, with the new stuff we’re permitting, we’ll be using impact windows and doors. Currently, with the stuff that we have, we use non impact windows on that. And we put shutters up well, the shutters don’t come to the end of the job. So, part of what I was looking at is we’re gonna have a whole bunch of houses that have windows but don’t have shutters on because they that’s not totally in. We actually didn’t have one single window with any damage. So, very pleased with that we’d worked hard to make sure the job sites were completely clean, no loose debris. You know, not because we didn’t want to just protect our homes, but we want to be good neighbors and protect everybody else’s home. So, we worked very diligently leading up to the storm to clean out dumpsters, to clean debris to make sure there was nothing loose and flying that could damage, because again, unless you get flooded, most of the damage is coming from wind and wind borne items that will start to tear through stuff, so.
Bruce Norris  This is, this is a text that I sent Craig, Wednesday night at 5:57pm ‘You guys doing okay? Winds 140 sustained and 178 gust at my house.’
Craig Evans  So, so about two hours after that my neighbor called me he had a digital wind reader that, that somehow made it our max sustained winds were 162 and we had wind gusts up to 198. So, that’s, that’s, that’s where we ended up out here. So, we you know, my personal house we took just a little damage but nothing to get upset about, you know.
Bruce Norris  Can you compare this hurricane to other hurricanes because you’ve you’ve been here a fair amount of time so.
Craig Evans  So, yeah, this was you know, everybody was surprised because you know, we’ve had a lot of people ‘so why didn’t people leave?’ Well, you know, if you, if you were watching this it was still category three as of that morning and scheduled to be coming into land at a category 1. Well, category 1 again is, it’s a windy afternoon for us, you know, the more than three hours before it was increased from category three to category five and was coming straight at us. So, there really it was yes because that morning, even even as early as that morning, it was still supposed to be going up above about Port Charlotte and coming your way. Because if you remember, I even texted and called you and said, ‘Hey, if you need help after this call me, you know, we’ll be there.’ So, we were thinking it was coming to you and that we were gonna be helping to help bail you out. And here we are, you know, we’re dealing with well, so it is what it is. But in relation to to storms in the past. You know, a cat five was was pretty horrendous, you know, the damage that, that creates. I don’t know if anybody has seen Irma that came across. I’m sorry, not Irma, Charlie that came across in ’05 was a really strong storm that did a lot of damage up in Port Charlotte. The entire storm of Charlie could fit inside the eye of Ian and just came through. So, the storm was just a massive storm that came through create a lot of damage. You know, I did a lot of cleanup and work after Katrina in New Orleans. You know, the thing that everybody talks about on that is you know, how devastating was the storm itself was not so bad it just they decided it was a good idea to build a city below sea level. And you know, that, that people thought they were smarter than that. So, that’s where most of the you know, all of that damage of Katrina and most of of things that happened there were from things being below sea level.
Bruce Norris  I just wanted to ask if you heard any numbers about the number of homes that have been destroyed? I have no idea.
Craig Evans  No, there, right now, it is still an aspect of I mean, I can tell you there’s nothing left on Sanibel that is habitable. The entire island of Sanibel Island is, is uninhabitable. Then entire Fort Myers Beach is uninhabitable there. And again, I want to be very clear, I don’t want to create a stereotype saying this and then sensationalized it. You go into north west and northeast Cape Coral, it’s just uncomfortable. They don’t ,they don’t have power up yet. You know, we get the power up and everybody functions again, you know, but you’ve got areas like Fort Myers Beach, completely uninhabitable there. They’re not letting anybody on that island because they’re still using cadaver dogs just to try to find everybody. The Sanibel is completely uninhabitable. They’re not letting anybody stay on Pine Island, Matlacha or St. James City because they’re just uninhabitable. So, there’ll be a lot of that over the next week or two, that they’ll start to get more counts of homes that are just completely destroyed. But there are a lot, there’s a lot of homes in those areas that are completely destroyed. The employment situation down here is very interesting. A good friend of mine builds custom homes, and he has a bunch of homes that were going on Fort Myers Beach, well, they’re looking at a minimum of six to eight months before they can get back on the beach and start working. So, I just picked up 21 more employees, you know, because he’s asking me to do him a favor to at least take his employees on. So, they have a place to work and he doesn’t lose them. And of course, right now I can use them. So it’s going to be interesting, because there are a lot of businesses that, that are greatly affected. And people you know, right now, people are trying to just clean stuff up, but they physically don’t have a place to work. So, there’s a lot of people working for looking for jobs.
Bruce Norris  Hi, Joanna, I want to ask you. Hi, thanks for joining us. I guess it would be you have, you’ve had a chance to observe some of the houses for sure. And you probably have talked to a lot of the existing tenants. So, I guess maybe the feedback from any occupant tenant would be great, and then we’ll go from there.
Joanna Rinella So, at this time, we have made contact with all tenants, all tenants has been accounted for, everybody is safe. Everybody is very hot and uncomfortable because we have no electric and no water. But the feedback that I keep hearing over and over and over again is how surprised everybody is at the like the least amount of damage to happen. Like how good the homes stood up to the storm and the winds and, and everybody is terrified because a lot of the seaboard people that this was their first hurricane and they were expecting to be homeless. But they may be We lost a few shingles and the water equipment got blown over. So, honestly amazed and surprised at, at how these homes have withstood these, these winds, I personally live in a home that has impact glass. So, I don’t have shutters and I was able to see the wind and really what was going on outside. And it was scary as a 36 year Floridian myself, it was a impressive hurricane, I’ve been through Hurricane Andrew, I’ve, the only hurricane I ever left for was Irma. And this was by far, probably the scariest storm I’ve seen. But I’m very blessed honestly, that none of the homes that we manage, were affected and none of The Norris Group homes were affected, no flooding, no major damage, every tenant will be able to continue living in the property with no issue. And that’s huge for me. There’s property managers in the area that have almost 100 tenants that are displaced, with homes that were affected, that they will not be able to live in the homes and they’re all scrambling trying to find rentals for these people. And I can confidently say that our homes withstood those, those winds and our tenants are very happy about it.
Bruce Norris  For the people that are insured, can you take us kind of through the process, as the manager, you know, you’re gonna probably be involved in some of that process. And you also had mentioned that FEMA was working on a program for people that had rentals. So, can you talk a little bit about that?
Joanna Rinella  Yep, so for any of the properties that were affected, I’ve made calls to most of the owners that had damage at their properties. And they’re aware. They’re, like I, like I mentioned, there’s no major damage at any of the properties. The worst damage that we had was, again, just the water systems blown over and shingles, nobody lost, lost roofs, nothing like that. But with the insurance claims, how it would work is you as the homeowner would call the insurance company and initiate the claim. Once the claim is initiated, they’re going to ask you for a contact person, and who they can reach out to to schedule for them to get into the property. Because once you make that claim, the insurance is going to send an adjuster, one of their adjusters out to the property so they can take a look at the property and walk the property. One of the things that’s really important when you are filing an insurance claim is to not do any work or begin any repairs prior to the insurance company walking that property. Time and time again, people start cleaning up, because you know, it’s uncomfortable to see this disaster outside your house, I understand. But it is important to leave everything as it is until the insurance company comes by so they don’t deny your claim. So, once they send the adjuster out, and typically once you make that initial call, what I have been seeing is within 48 to 72 hours, I’m starting to hear from the adjusters, and we’re just scheduling them to get into the property and take a look. And that’s kind of where we’re at right now. We haven’t progressed past that step. But in past cases, just so everybody kind of knows what the process is after that is, once the adjuster goes to the property, they’ll determine the amount of damage at the property. And usually they set $1 amount on what they are willing to pay for those said damages. And then at that time, if it’s a good dollar amount that we can take care of those repairs and make the property whole again, then we go ahead and we settle with the insurance and we move forward with closing the claim. And if it’s not, then we can always look into hiring a public adjuster, which is no cost to the owner. And that’s an added benefit because it’s like a third party person that’s going to come in and tell us really what the cost is of these repairs. And they fight together. Whatever money we need to make these repairs. One of the programs that I had,…
Joey Romero  Sorry, I thought you were just going to finish your thought.
Joanna Rinella  One of the programs because I know a lot of people are worried you know, with the hurricane, you have your insurance deductible through the insurance. So, one of the things that I will be sending more information out through your owner portal once I have the finalized information with not having power, or internet yet it’s very hard to publish this stuff to the portal. I’m trying to do everything I can via phone. But I’m going to be publishing some information to the portal where you guys as owners can apply for FEMA assistance. And so FEMA does offer I believe it’s up to $20,000 for primary residence or maybe 25,000 even and then up to $15,000 for investment property after that. So, that’s something that I urge you guys to apply for definitely, because that will help to cover your deductible, or, you know, any, any repairs, even if we don’t have to go through insurance that should cover the repairs as well. So, once I have that information concrete, I’ll definitely post that to the owner portal and I’ll send that to you as well, Joey, so you’re able to send it out.
Joey Romero  Now, Joanna, when you’re explaining this process, and you’re saying, you as the owner, you file a claim, that’s something that Empire is doing, though, right, just to be clear for our investors.
Joanna Rinella  So, I’m, on some of the policies, we are able to call and start that claim because the amount of calls that they’re getting right now, they’re kind of pushing back a little bit in saying that they want the owners to call in some cases. So, it depends on, on what kind of damage was at the property at that point, I’m telling the owner, you know, I’ll take care of it, whether I’m able to or not, or whether they should be calling.
Joey Romero  Perfect, thank you.
Joanna Rinella  One of the things too, I want to add is, so for any of our current tenants, all the tenants have renter’s insurance. And if you guys remember, that’s one of the things that I talked about at the bootcamp is that all the tenants are required to have renter’s insurance, the tenants have never been happier to have renter’s insurance, because they’re able to, yeah, regardless of if they had damage or not, because, you know, they may have not, had not, have, not have had any physical damages inside the home but they may be out of work, they definitely lost power, and they lost the food that they had in their fridge. You know, they may have left their furniture outside and or you know, their patio furniture outside and it may have blown away. So, all the tenants are really happy that they have this renter’s insurance that they can fall back on. And they all are working with the renter’s insurance policy to file claims.
Joey Romero  You’re also directing them to the, to the Red Cross also for further assistance too right?
Joanna Rinella  Correct. So, that’s also there, through FEMA, as well, through FEMA, and through our Florida and also throughout the next week or so there’s going to be more and more agencies that are going to be offering assistance and we are in contact with the agencies, we do know about the programs. And any programs that, or grants that get given that, gives the abilities, the ability to tenants to be able to collect for like lost income, or you know, tenants who are going to be out of work for an extended period of time, we will be able to provide that information to the tenants and help them to apply for that as well. I will say though, that most of the tenants have already paid their rent. Honestly, it’s mind blowing to me. I have tenants that I mean, most of the tenants don’t have water or electric right now. And they are finding ways to log in and make their rental payments. And if they can’t, they’re texting me freaking out. Oh, my God, it’s the third I haven’t been able to pay my rent, I can’t get online, what do I do? So, they understand that, you know, they’re still responsible for paying rent that’s still coming in. There is no law or anything in place that says that we don’t have to collect rent or that the tenant doesn’t have to pay rent this month, everybody understands and has been paying.
Bruce Norris  I’m just curious, Craig, your experience on insurance adjusters, opinion of the cost of repairs? Is it accurate? High or low?
Craig Evans  So, we actually use, so we have started with the fun that I’ve got Bruce, you and I’ve talked about that a little bit in the past. We use third party adjusters for the stuff that we do. Because they’re there to fight for us. Typically, because with that we have a remodel division through Douglas Brooke Homes that we’ve started now a couple months ago, and we’re pushing in pretty heavy with this stuff now. So, with that we’re working with insurance companies finding through that, doing a lot of roofs, things like that, you know, what we’re finding and what we’re just talking to people in the last few days even is that, you know, we prefer to use the third party adjuster because let’s face it, the adjuster’s job in an insurance job is to pay out as little as possible. That’s just, that’s that’s their business. So, the third party adjuster, and outside adjuster is just, it’s been the one that gets realistic about what the numbers are, again, not trying to, our our job is not to try to gouge in the system and that, and that’s a that’s a big burden that you and I were talking a little bit about yesterday even is that that’s been a frustration of mine right now is that there’s so many people coming down wanting to take gross advantage of what’s going on right now. And just trying to milk insurance companies. So, in that that’s where we like to use that third party to do two things, hold the insurance companies accountable. But also make sure there’s just a real number of what needs to happen for for the home, that, that things are actually getting taken care of. So, we personally use third third party adjusters and every in every case that we do when it’s involved with insurance.
Bruce Norris  Okay.
Joey Romero  Bruce can I ask the question.
Bruce Norris  Yeah, sure.
Joey Romero  So, so, Craig, we’ve had, you know, we’ve got quite a few of these in the process. And we’ve had quite a few that we’re just about to get to the finish line. Can you talk about, what, what you’re hearing, what you’re talking about, and who you’re talking to about getting some of these to the CEO? And how quickly can we do that, and, you know, talk about maybe the City of Cape Coral, and the permitting department, things like that.
Craig Evans  We’re fighting, just trying to get things over the hurdle there at the end, just from the paperwork, and getting back to the city, they’re shooting to have people back into the city by the end of this week. You know, getting making sure computers are back up and running, and everything is safe. From that aspect and getting people back into work. I hope that their goal from what we talked yesterday, is their goal is to be able to start putting out permits, COs, things like that, early to middle of next week. So, that, that’s, that’s, that’s what I know, as of right now. You know, I guess that would be the safest way to say that without providing too much false hope.
Joey Romero  Sure. Can you talk about, as I’ve already got a couple of questions about, you know, going forward, you know, homes that are going to get started. And is this going to create even further backlogs? Or, you know, is this something where it’ll be maybe a couple of weeks to get back on? And then it’ll be, you know, closer to business as usual?
Craig Evans  Oh, that’s probably hard to say right now. You know, I think especially on stuff that we’re starting, I will say this on stuff that we’re starting, I think by the end of this week, we’re going to be ready to start getting things moving again. You know, we’ve still got a lot of cleanup. But, you know, our teams this morning, we’re seeing some of the crews will probably be ready to go by Thursday, as far as really moving, and then jumping through stuff. But you know, like I said, there’s still some cleanup. But my, our goal is, you know, that we need to be moving production by the first of next week. Again, that is the goal that we’ve set for ourselves as a company is to make sure that production wise by Monday of next week, we’re starting to move things. I think, as Bruce said, in the short, in the front end of this in the short term, there will be some delays. But do I see this massively changing what happens in our in our community within 30 days from now? No.
Joey Romero  Bruce, maybe I’ll ask you this question. As, as an investor in, you know, let’s say I’m newer, or even 10 years into the business does anything that you’ve heard on this call today, or anything that you’ve seen? Would any of this change your opinion about continuing and moving forward? Or would you pivot?
Bruce Norris  Okay, it’s a good question. I pick Florida for really good reasons to have a look for long term. So, I’m not selling anything. I’m happy. I’m here, I understood the hurricane risk. And I do see hurricanes is more opportunity to the risk. When I’m dealing with Craig, and he’s dealing with people that he’s pulling out of the water, it hits you and go, Wow. This isn’t really thinking about opportunity, all of a sudden, your go. There’s a lot of people hurting for real, you know, so that changed, certainly changed my, my brain, but I have, I have a lot of opportunity to sell properties. I don’t want to sell them. I’m right where I want to be, and I know why I’m here. Okay, and it’s over, it’s over a long period of time. Florida is definitely going to be a winner in the next 20 years to me, then then California, and that’s where I was. So, that’s why I made that decision. And of all the states I looked at, Florida has some of the things that other places don’t have and so yep, I’m happy, I’m here and I’m happy I suggested it. And hurricanes, you know, hurricanes are were always a factor. We just gone through and that’s why I asked Craig what ones you know, when did you have one like this? Well, it was 1992. That’s 30 years ago. So, this doesn’t happen every day. And we’re talking about okay, what’s our, what’s our problem? We’ve got tipped over or water systems, and we got some roof tiles missing. I mean, that’s like, we should hug somebody. Honest to goodness, you know, because it’s because we did this with the right inventory. If I just said, let’s go find a bunch of 1960 houses to buy in bulk, we wouldn’t be having a different conversation, we would really be having a different conversation. So, we bought the right inventory at the right elevation, made of the right material built by the right builder. So, I wouldn’t change a thing, and I am looking forward to doing more of it, to be honest with you.
Craig Evans  So, I think that’s a key thing to note is once things are built and built correctly, they actually hold up very, very well.
Bruce Norris  Yeah, that’s why you know, the local, the local people that live here for a long time, when you say a hurricane, you know, and it’s number two or number three, it’s sort of like, it’s, it’s, you know, the bigger numbers are darn downright scary. And we haven’t, we don’t have very many of those.
Joey Romero  You know, before we get to, before we get to the q&a, Craig, and Bruce, I want to just take a minute to just thank, you know, Craig, Joanna, all their, all their employees, all the people they work with, for, for even caring about all the stuff that we’re doing. I mean, you could have easily said, ‘Hey, we’re dealing with this, and we’ll let you know.’ But guys, Craig and Joanna have been texting or calling me every day, since the hurricane every day with some sort of an update. So I want to say thank you, because, you know, they have families, they have emotions, they, you know, I know that at the bootcamp, we we’ve kind of we were, we’re a little nonchalant about when we talk about hurricanes, oh, we don’t get out of bed, unless it’s a three or higher wind. You know, this was a serious, serious storm. And the anxiety level that this brought to our partners was through the roof and for them to, to do everything they’re doing for us. And talk about even just getting us back back on the horse and, and get it going. Again, I just want to say thank you and I and I’m hearing that from a lot of Craig, you need to hear that people are emailing me as I communicate them. And they’re thanking you also, you know, and thanking Joanna and thanking Bruce for all the guys that are out there, you know, hustling for us.
Bruce Norris  Craig, I noticed the emotion I want to say something. You know, for the last week this guy’s been heading down to where he was he was just dealing with if people had survived and literally had to deal with pulling people that had passed away into his boat and things like that is just crazy. So, he’s had a plate that’s been full a lot more than just construction, but he’s been there every step of the way for that as well. So, we definitely have a special human being with Craig.
Narrator  We’d also like to thank our gold sponsors, Chase Leland Photography, Inland Valley Association of Realtors, Keystone CPA, Inc, LA South REIA, Leivas Tax Wealth Management, NorCal REIA, NSDREI, Pasadena FIBI, Tony Alvarez, White House Catering, Wilson Investments, Windermere Tower Realty. See Isurvivedrealestate.com for event details, information on all our generous supporters and to connect with our speakers.For more information on hard money, loans and upcoming events with The Norris Group, check out thenorrisgroup.com. For information on passive investing with trust deeds, visit tngtrustdeeds.com.
Aaron Norris  The Norris Group originates and services loans in California and Florida under California DRE License 01219911, Florida Mortgage Lender License 1577, and NMLS License 1623669. For more information on hard money lending, go www.thenorrisgroup.com and click the Hard Money tab.