Sean O’Toole is CEO & Founder of PropertyRadar, the property data and owner information platform real estate pros have trusted since 2007 to do billions of dollars in deals.
Sean got his start with data in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom. After the dot-com bubble, Sean flipped properties for five years, and with data-informed insights, got out right before the housing bubble burst.
Sean launched ForeclosureRadar in early 2007 before anyone had heard of the foreclosure crisis.
In 2013, he relaunched ForeclosureRadar as PropertyRadar, a greatly expanded property data and owner information platform serving a broad audience of real estate professionals and property-centric businesses.
Today, PropertyRadar remains the go-to platform for data-driven real professionals intent on leveraging comprehensive property data and owner information to grow their business directly.
Episode:
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.
Bruce Norris Hi, thanks for joining us. Once again, we are joined by Sean O’Toole with PropertyRadar. So let’s get let’s get into some real estate discussion. Your client base obviously has grown a lot since trustee sale buyers.
Sean O’Toole Yeah.
Bruce Norris So, what’s the mood of some of these participants about now?
Sean O’Toole Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s tough for a lot of folks, right? I mean, sales volumes are way down. We had an unprecedented number of people lock in extremely low mortgage rates, you know, in the 2s and the 3s.
Bruce Norris Yeah.
Sean O’Toole They may really want to move. But to move right now and go into the sixes or sevens is a pretty big hit on their affordability or on their, you know what they can afford?
Bruce Norris That’s right, they would be moving down for sure, right?
Sean O’Toole Moving down, for sure. And so you don’t have very many people who want to sell. So ,we’ve got this crazy situation where we have low inventories and low sales, and not low sales, you know, solely because of low inventories, but also low sales, because the buyers, even the stuff that is on the market buyers really can’t afford. And so it’s, but there’s no reason with low inventory, right prices aren’t going to come down. So, it’s kind of a stalled market, it’s not completely stalled, they’re still going to, you know, always be stuff, you know, selling. But the volumes are way down. And so you have to be on your game. If you want to have the same number of sales as you had the last few years, you’ve got to go take those sales from your competitors, you got to put some people out of business.
Bruce Norris So, you’re just, you just brought up what you know, it’s funny, you I look at this unemployment rate at record lows. And then I think of our industry, and I think well, that’s nonsense. We’re at 50% unemployment. We literally are 50% of the revenue.
Sean O’Toole Yeah.
Bruce Norris For an entire industry, you can put it any way you want. 50% of people are making all of the money. And the other people are looking, they’re still gainfully employed, apparently but not making a dime.
Sean O’Toole But the 80/20 rule is the Pareto principle and show that real estate is the one industry that breaks the Pareto principle because 10% of the…
Bruce Norris Yeah.
Sean O’Toole …80% of the money.
Bruce Norris That’s right. And that’s so those guys are making.
Sean O’Toole Well, they’re down to…
Bruce Norris Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, the industry is making half but we still don’t, don’t people that are making nothing as a realtor still are gainfully employed apparently.
Sean O’Toole I’m going to take exception, though, that they’re making half, right? Because if we roll prices back to say 2018, 2019 pre pandemic, when they were 30, 40%, lower in some places, right?
Bruce Norris Right.
Sean O’Toole Now have a much lower volume, but you still have the much higher prices. The revenue historically, is not that down.
Bruce Norris Oh.
Sean O’Toole It’s not a lot versus 2022. But it’s not down that much versus 2018, 2019.
Bruce Norris Okay, so I was referring for last to last year.
Sean O’Toole So last year, it’s a bloodbath for sure. Last year, it’s just it’s like our governments do every time we get a bubble. They think that bubble is going to continue forever, and they keep spending it. And you know, yeah, hopefully these folks learned from 2008 They had a couple great years ’21, ’22. And they put some money aside and go spend it all on cars and houses. Because if those were from a commission standpoint, those were bubble years. They were not sustainable, though, there was no, no reasonable prediction that that kind of revenue would be generated out of real estate on an ongoing basis had never been done before. And it’s not likely to be done again, kind of like 2008 foreclosures.
Bruce Norris Yeah. Well, you know, that’s, that’s interesting, because that pandemic happened about three months after I had done a report. And if you remember the end of 2019, you already had, there’s some information that one of the, one of the ports I buy 25% of the inventory that they charted by appraising the same property for the last 30 years every six months, and 1000s of them. They already had 25% losing value at the end of 2019. And so all of a sudden it’s off to the races. So, that’s what’s really really interesting. We went from, you know, basically closing in on 600 grand in 2019 is a median. And we touched 900 for a couple of months. And now we’re at 6 or 735. And that’s, you know, that’s still probably well, it is too aggressive because it’s still got a affordability number that it’s basically at the bottom 17%.
Sean O’Toole And based on incomes, you know, and current interest rates, that number should probably be 400.
Bruce Norris Yeah, that’s exactly what it should be. It’s 435. We have a thing called moodometer where we basically say, yeah, so that’s right. So but in what saving it is, there’s no urgent group of sellers that are dominating the market that would have to come from foreclosures, which I don’t think this time is going to occur for the unemployed, right? That would, but even then they probably have a positive cash flow rental. As odd as that is.
Sean O’Toole Yeah.
Bruce Norris So, it we, it’s, it’s a really weird scenario where the math seems like okay, it’s going to take a huge hit. And then you have I just, you know, I’m working on a new report. So, I’m always thinking about I don’t have that chart. So, the ratio of where all the volume comes from. So, if you take a look at all the years, there’s a progression, when things do well, new construction gets up to 21% of the marketplace, 79% existing listings, or existing homes. And it might go down to say 12%, in 2009, where you can’t afford to build anything. The normal ratio, say 17%. So, 83% of the inventory normally is coming from existing houses, and what you said, Okay, well, wait a minute, what’s my motivation for selling my existing house with a 3% mortgage, especially after there was a lot of things going on during the pandemic? Like, here’s a bunch of money. And all of a sudden, you go, I’ve always wanted an office or a fourth bedroom or whatever. And you you did that.
Sean O’Toole Yeah.
Bruce Norris And now you kind of and as a matter of fact, you know, what they call about, like, pulling the volume forward. That’s what happened, like the boat purchases and all that. If you were a boat dealer, you were like, the happiest guy in the world for a year and a half.
Sean O’Toole Bicycle. Yeah, whatever bicycle shop, sell everybody passionate.
Bruce Norris Yeah, everything. Inventory, every toy that could be owned. But now, yeah, so you’re going to have sales volume be about half. But the price hit is really going to be relying on an urgent group of sellers.
Sean O’Toole You know, a lot of people talk about, you know, the inflation and doing it being due to putting too much stimulus out there. Right. And this is a form of stimulus, but I think something I rarely hear in that calculation is all those folks something like half of people with mortgages refinanced in 2021 22. And they went from, say, four and a half percent to three, two and three quarters, something like that. You know, you’re adding 500 $1,000 A month right now. Civil income.
Bruce Norris Yeah.
Sean O’Toole Right?
Bruce Norris Yeah.
Sean O’Toole And so, at the same time, we’re putting stimulus out there, because we’re working, we were failing to recognize that these really low mortgage rates were a huge stimulus at the same time. I still hear nobody, no economist, nobody talks about this other stimulus from lowering the mortgage rates and how much that increased free cash flow way more than the stimulus dollars. And I actually think that is a much more significant source of the inflationary pressure that we got. And then the stimulus that you know, that and…
Bruce Norris I have to admit, I never even thought of it. But you’re right, every household got an extra 500 plus, to spend permanently.
Sean O’Toole It’s huge, permanently, right. And so everything and then all these people are like, Oh, we’re gonna inflation we’re gonna have a recession. It’s gonna be terrible. And I’m like, have you looked at how much and then, you know, wages are going up at the same time, their expenses just went their most their biggest expense, their house expense went way down, right? That two things that nobody’s talking about it like, oh my god, right? And then look at the amount of equity at the it was $9 trillion of equity. That’s something like four times where we were at the bottom in 2008, more than double the last peak, I think was $12 trillion of equity at the last peak 29 trillion. It’s back down a little now, because prices have come back down. But what is it 25 now? it’s still when people start, and I guarantee you in America, the Americans love debt, right? And they are going to tap that $25 trillion somehow, before they stop going out to eat, before they stopped going on vacation. Right? Yeah, all these folks worried about a recession pullback. It’s possible. It’s possible. You know, we do something dumb, and we drive the thing off the cliff. But boy, there’s a pretty big, you know, stimulus there just in the 65% of the folks that own real estate that nobody’s talking about?
Bruce Norris Yeah. Yeah, no one, no one had just said, no one has a, an adjustable mortgage on their house. So, you know, not from the last few years anyway. So, that’s really a permanent gain on their budget.
Sean O’Toole 30 years, or two and a half to three and a half percent when they were at four and a half to five and a half. I mean, it’s just a tremendous amount of disposable income.
Bruce Norris Yeah.
Joey Romero The opposite end of that is it’s killed two things. The the, the older generation downsizing, because they can’t. And then the people who got in, let’s say, in the last 5, 10 years, their second and third homes aren’t happening either.
Sean O’Toole Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That’s a lot. There’s a lot of moving pieces. It’s the reason economics is an art, not a science. There are so many pieces every time somebody says, I know what’s going to happen in the future, like, you know, because of this, and this, and this, it’s like, those are three variables out of a million variables, you don’t know shit.
Bruce Norris That’s what’s, you know, that’s what’s scary, you know, you and I had an email exchange in 2017. And I was going to put the cover, I was going to put what I was going to put on the cover anyway, but I you’re about the most sane person I know and really connected to the same kind of data. I said, I’m about to put 2% mortgage in our future on the undercover. And you texted me back pretty quickly and said, I think you’re right.
Sean O’Toole So, I still think, you know, it’s because we’re not learning any lessons, right? If you look at the powers that be, you know, both on the fiscal side, you know, Congress, Presidents, etc, be both parties. And on the monetary side, right. We only know one playbook. I think that if we do drive things off the cliff, we could see mortgage rates in the ones next time.
Bruce Norris The cover the title that we just created is ‘what’s next, either last decade or 1% mortgage rate’
Sean O’Toole Yeah.
Bruce Norris Because you’re but you’re right, that’s the that’s the pattern that we have followed. Now, Joey just found a report for me that I’ll be reading today. And it has to do with Japan’s lost decade.
Sean O’Toole Yeah.
Bruce Norris So you’re gonna …
Sean O’Toole …have 1% mortgage rates?
Bruce Norris That well, they I’m surprised. I don’t even know if it was one person. It’s crazy. Yeah, I think I think it might be less. So, but they must have had a choice at that point, right? All of that stuff was happening. Well, do you just get the reset button and you go through all this stuff that….
Sean O’Toole …three decades now for them? That’s right.
Bruce Norris Yeah. There’s they haven’t still gone back to their real estate values. And that’s, that happened in the late 80s, right, when that started to crack.
Sean O’Toole Yep, yep. For sure.
Bruce Norris Wow. So that’s, see, that’s one of the things that in the history, you can look at and go okay, that that decision that they made to go to an interest rate at that point, they didn’t make the other decision. And that’s, you know, I’m working on that right now thinking, Okay, what is the price to be paid? If we say, we’re not doing that? We’re going to have, we’re going to normalize interest rates for the people in our future that have money, they’ll have yield and all that stuff. Okay. Well, you’re going to attach that to what $33 trillion worth of debt. That’s the interest alone on that is a trillion and a half. So, how does that play out?
Sean O’Toole Right, you’d have to have some sort of debt jubilee and not make good on the debt which we’ve never done right as a country, we’ve always paid our our debts. It’s actually a current topic right now, with the, you know, debt limit renegotiation, you know, happening. At the end of the day, we have these problems, you know, the 2%, because we’re the world’s reserve currency, right. And what we should be doing as a country is doing everything we can to come together to protect that, because it gives us such huge advantages. If you want to keep America great, right? You protect being the world’s reserve currency at all costs, means you pay your debts, right, which means you probably get a little smarter about, you know, deficit spending. And for those that want to point to the Democrats. You know, if you look at the actual data, the I don’t like either party, so let me just put that right on there. But if you look at the actual data, our debts go up fat faster under Republican regimes, and they do under Democrat regime, so just spend it differently.
Bruce Norris You know, at the end of each of the events we’ve had I Survived Real Estate, I say the same thing I would love for every Democrat, Republican to act like an American first. You know, I you know what, I was so naive when I started saying that I actually thought that would occur.
Sean O’Toole And it’s what has to happen, though, because if, you know, Ray Dalio is a good read. And you know, one of the things he looked at the fall of empires, right, yeah, going way back. And, you know, one of the key signs of fall of Empire is internal discord. Right? It is, if you want to seal our future. And you know, because if we lose world reserve currency, then this this playbook that we’ve seen where it got us to 2% rates, and were you and I think it could get us to 1% rates happens if we’re the world’s reserve currency, and we continue down the same playbooks and we get that benefit. If we lose that, if we have a fall of empire, then we don’t get that benefit anymore, and rates are not going to be out of our control, right. So this is where things then get really bad for the United States for an extended period of time. And it’s not a gift, I want to leave my kids. And the number one thing we need to do to stop that is to come together as a country and stop being divisive. And we want to blame politicians for that. But it’s us, right? We want to blame the other. And if we each individually, understand that both these things are bad. We need to find more ground in the middle, this country’s great, because we found middle ground because of compromise, right? Our Constitution is a product of compromise. And until we start electing officials that are compromised minded, that want to find middle ground that want to find solutions, right? We don’t deserve to be great again, and we won’t be great again, and neither side can make us great again, because it’s compromised and middle that will keep us great.
Bruce Norris I don’t know how it’ll happen. But I hope at some point, we have term limits, because I think that would end up with a very different group of people wanting to take their eight year term, as opposed to spend 40 years in that seat, you know?
Sean O’Toole Yeah. Well, I think most of those folks that you know, are 40 years not see 40 years ago, they were about compromised and the rest. And they’ve been radicalized, and they haven’t been radicalized by themselves. They’ve been radicalized by us the public going and clickbaiting and going one direction or the other and buying into tribalism.
Bruce Norris Right. Yeah.
Sean O’Toole So I actually don’t blame the politicians, it’s us. We’re the ones causing this.
Bruce Norris Well, we the people can say, okay, we’re only going to let the next group in for eight years, and I think we’d have a whole different attitude amongst them, you know, so.
Sean O’Toole for folks that are, you know, want to believe in compromise, find solutions, work on stuff, make improvements did not jump around on sound bites on social media.
Bruce Norris So, we’ve talked a little bit about residential real estate, do you see any major problems coming up for like the office stuff?
Sean O’Toole Yeah, so that one’s you know, the big difference between residential and commercial is most of the commercial stuffs, you know, five years, right? So it might be a 30 year 20 year amortization, but, you know, it gets reset every five years. And so you start looking at that and, you know, the initial take is going to be Wow, it’s going to be a bloodbath, because you bought this thing at a 4% rate and it’s going to go to an 8% rate. Because the rates are higher on the commercial side, right? And suddenly this thing that looks okay is very underwater and then add some vacancy to that or some other turmoil in the economy, right, and you get a lot of commercial, it looks really pretty darn ugly right now.
Bruce Norris 20:19
Well, you know, the commercial, the commercial building that I bought in Riverside, when it was built, and I’m going to, you know, I’m gonna guess it the year, you know, probably towards the peak of 2006, or something, was a million dollars, somebody bought it for a million, I bought it for 319. When we came in REO , I just sold it last year for a million dollars. So, it just got back to its stage. Now, what’s interesting about an industry of real estate, when you’re doing half of the volume, and the mortgage industry, if you have at least to renew, you’re not going to take all this face.
Sean O’Toole Right.
Bruce Norris There’s no no way.
Sean O’Toole So this is this is where I think the commercial. And there’s more to this, but I’m gonna keep it simple for right now. Right? So we just saw Silicon Valley Bank fail, fail, because they took people’s deposits, they made long term investments and mortgage backed securities in Treasuries and other things that are very rare. And then people stopped funding venture companies, right, and the venture companies were using their cash, and they needed those deposits back. And they were in these long dated securities, and Silicon Valley Bank going, Wait a second, we ran out of short, dated stuff to sell, we’re gonna go sell the long dated stuff. And to do that with higher rates. We’ve got to take a loss today.
Bruce Norris Right.
Sean O’Toole They’ve been able to hold those long dated securities to the end, there’s no loss, right? But they have to sell them today to give people their cash. So, they take a loss causes a run on the bank. Very bad, right? So this has a lot to do with the commercial side, too, right? So we’re gonna have these loans come up for renewal, and the banks gonna say, Well, hey, you’re gonna go refinance, right? Maybe we don’t want that loan anymore. You gotta go refinance somewhere else are we willing to refinance, but your rates now double? Right. And if banks do that in mass, we’re gonna see, you know, and force the sale of those assets and the rest, we’re gonna see carnage.
Bruce Norris Right.
Sean O’Toole I think if they paid any attention in 2008, they’ve learned the lesson to go. You know, what, we’re a healthy bank today getting that 4% rate.
Bruce Norris Right.
Sean O’Toole Yeah, healthy bank tomorrow, if we keep taking that payment, that commercial mortgage, you know, the person who owns that commercial mortgage is making that payment today, they can make it tomorrow, all you have to do is let cooler heads prevail and go, you know, what, we can’t adjust these rates right now. And you have no crisis.
Bruce Norris I agree with you.
Sean O’Toole And that’s what should have happened in 2008. With housing as well, we could have just completely avoided the crisis by saying, you know, make the payment you’re gonna make, and we’re gonna clean this up over time. Yeah, instead of forcing all this inventory on the market, and in crashing the market. Now, where this gets complicated, and I’m not enough of an expert here, but this would be a good place for you certainly, as you’re talking to your experts, is back in ’08, the banks didn’t hold this debt, right, they went and packaged it up and put it in tranches of all these securities. And so then their hands are kind of tight. And not only that, but these banks are now servicing that debt, and they get a higher servicing fee when it’s in default, than when it’s getting paid.
Bruce Norris So, there was some motivation for that.
Sean O’Toole Yeah. So they don’t motivation to try to work it all out with all these different parties and all these different tranches. And all these instruments where you can’t even you know, these instruments, there’s not even a way to like talk to the members to have it vote on something different just a contract, you have to meet the contract or you don’t, right, like so I don’t know what that all looks like on the commercial mortgage backed security side, the CMBS role and whether or not you know, some of those things are going to force some defaults through versus banks just going you know, make the payment you can make. So, that’s going to be interesting to watch how it plays out. I haven’t completely figured it out yet, but I hope we find the right solution there. You know, keep these properties, you know, well, part of me does hope right? Like obviously we have a bunch of commercial foreclosures and all the rest I’m gonna get I’m gonna make money, but I don’t think it’s the right thing for the economy. So, it’d be a great thing for me personally in the business I’m in to have the whole thing go to shit. A lot of the venture capitalists that told their their companies to pull their money out of SVB did it because they wanted to see the thing go to shit because there’s more opportunity to make money in that. And interesting. We have enough we have too much creativeness you know, in our society, we start need to start. We want to make Keep America Great, right? We need to be a little less greedy. Think about everyone as a whole. I hope we work it out.
Bruce Norris I hope we do too. Joey?
Joey Romero Yeah, I was I deal with investors all the time with, you know, in the clubs. So what is what is the best use of PropertyRadar for investors, especially new ones? How are they going to get the biggest benefit out of PropertyRadar?
Sean O’Toole Yeah, you know, so we started off in the foreclosure information business and the property information business. And what I really realized is that, pretty much all of our customers use us to go find new deals. So, I actually think of us more as a marketing app than a property information app. And the amazing thing about public records in the real estate business is you can know every owner of every property by name, and then pull in phone numbers and email addresses, you can contact them directly. Like it’s an amazing thing about our industry is that there is public records is this white pages of every single possible customer. And not only that, but there’s 250, we have over 250 different criteria, to pick the right ones for you to spend your time on talking to so you know, if you’re putting out bandit signs or something like that, just for everybody driving by all those things, work Billboards, radio, TV, they’ll work, that’ll work well, you can go find exactly the right people to go knock on their door, send them an email, send them a postcard, call them text, message them, whatever, right, and reach exactly the right people. And if you’re good at doing that, you’re going to beat the competition to those deals. The other piece to that is almost nobody in this business is very good at it. And you know, you get all these yellow letters and the rest and it’s like you’re in foreclosure you need to sell and they have no empathy. And I Bruce, I think this is why you are such a, you know, so great at going when you are door knocking and buying houses, because you had empathy for the people in that situation. And they saw that empathy. And if you can convey that in your marketing and the rest, which you can do better in direct marketing, then a billboard ad, you know, so that’s, that’s how people are using us. They’re using it for marketing and the guys that are doing really well with empathy, do it consistently do it across multiple channels, they’re doing direct mail, and, you know, email and online ads. And, and they’re doing, they’re doing well, and they’re taking business from others and our customers are doing great.
Joey Romero Essentially, finding a way to make it a win for the seller as well as you as the real estate investor.
Sean O’Toole Yeah, I mean, it’s Bruce, you’ve sat across the table for more people than I have. I bought most of my properties at trustee sale. But you know, I think half the time it’s just listening. It’s just listening and really understanding what their core issue is. And finding the right solution for that issue.
Bruce Norris Yeah. And I think, I think, well, I had that experience. It’s funny, I just bought a signed book, by Og Mandino know, the Greatest Miracle in the World. You’re familiar with that story, right?
Sean O’Toole Yeah.
Bruce Norris Yeah. So I just, I wanted to buy a signed book, because I’m gonna give it to somebody that I that I like, but that was, that was an aha moment for me when I was dealing with a guy that I could tell was hurting. And he was going to sell me his property. And I decided to put that aside and do something that I thought might help him. And then, you know, later in the conversation, the next morning, he tells me, I was going to sell you my house and kill myself. I never forgot that. So, when I looked across the table, I looked at the person and not just their equity, you know, and it wasn’t a technique, it was who I decided to be member, we you and I talked about some time the distasteful way the seminar business can be conducted. Or it can be conducted in a much different way. Well, that’s the house buying business, you know, you can be ruthless, or you can sit across from somebody and in your mind, say, if this is going to benefit both people, let’s do it. But in the meantime, when I quit working for the guy that I didn’t like working for, I worked there for three months, and he called me out of the blue about six months after that. And he said, I’m going to start up again. I said you want me to work with He says, Yeah, you’re the only guy I can trust and I said, Well, trouble is we’ll do this and so differently. He said why? How do you do it? And I said, I actually go over all the options with the person, even if they don’t included me and include me buying it. He goes, Well, you can’t buy houses that way. I said, Well, oddly enough, I’m buying my share. And I enjoy every conversation because I don’t have something up my sleeve. I enjoy when the phone rings. And I think they pick that up. It’s like, oh, you know, I’ve even had people fight me on that. I remember a house I bought in Corona. The guy says that he said it was worth 150 grand, or he owed whatever it was 80 grand. I thought, of course, it’s not worth 150. So I go there. Sure enough, it was, and I’m trying to talk this guy out of it. Why don’t you rent it? Why don’t you do this? He finally said to me, you run an ad that you buy properties, and I’m wanting to sell you the property and give it to you today. And you won’t take it. I said, Are you telling me you’re going to deed this property to somebody today? I said yes. I said, Okay. I’ll do the deal. But I want you to explain to me why you want to do that. He says, I have never owed any debt in my life. I have $10,000 A month coming from the New York apartment. And I have a mortgage that I don’t want. Even though it’ll rent for positive cash flow. That’s right. I’ve said okay. But at least I got to the bottom.
Sean O’Toole Yeah.
Bruce Norris So it’s it’s funny, but I think because you’re honest and open. I love when somebody says this to me, and I knew I’d be buying the house. He says, You know, I’ve not I’ve not told anybody else this but and then whatever’s next is the most key thing.
Sean O’Toole Yes.
Bruce Norris And then you go, Okay, now I can tell you
Sean O’Toole You don’t get that key thing. Unless you build trust and empathy and understanding and the rest. They never share it with you.
Bruce Norris Right. And you have to be the genuine article. So it’s not a…
Sean O’Toole You can’t take advantage of that moment. If you take advantage of that moment, yeah. I just don’t think you can live with yourself, or you shouldn’t live with yourself.
Bruce Norris No, that’s, that’s why I had to leave the company that I work for him. It was he was treating people terribly. And I just, I hated to be the messenger man. That’s just like, Nah, I’m out of here.
Sean O’Toole Totally. 100%. So, yeah, targeted direct marketing works continues to work. You know, we’ve got to work with a one covenant since 450,000 pieces of direct mail a month, meaning a month. So like, you know, they buy a lot of houses. So, yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s two and a quarter million dollars monthly spend just on direct mail. And that’s only one marketing tool. There are big there are folks out there, still crushing it right now, you know.
Bruce Norris I had a really cool experience. I’ll share this with you. Joey, the group I spoke to last year that does lots of deals. What are they called?
Joey Romero The..
Bruce Norris Collective Genius? You know them? Yeah. Okay. Well, I’ll tell you the story because it meant a lot to me to watch for me to watch them do this. So, I’m, I’m the keynote speaker. They have a three day event. So I get there a few hours early, just so I could observe them, you know, and there was a guy that gets up there. And he, he just got involved in helping kids that were being trafficked, trafficked. And, and so he’s the guy that owns collective genius gets it gets up there with him. He said, let’s, let’s raise some money for him. And so by by show of hands, each finger was $1,000. In about eight minutes. They raised 340 grand for the guy. And I just, yeah, I was dumbfounded. I sat there. And it changed my whole opening of the presentation. I said, you know, when I got up, I said, I realized what this meeting is about. You guys aren’t about creating real estate geniuses, you guys are creating heroes, for your family. That’s what you’re teaching each other to be. And it was an emotional thing for me to see that type of training, if you will. In other words, that’s who we are. That’s who we are. You got to be part of our group. That’s what we do. It was one of the most awesome moments for me ever. All right, Sean. Well, I guess we will see you later in the year then, right.
Joey Romero Yes.
Sean O’Toole Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Today, appreciate it.
Bruce Norris Okay. All right, Sean, thanks so much.
Joey Romero Thanks. Sure. Bye.
Bruce Norris Bye bye.
Narrator 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.