Dive deep into the art of going direct to sellers to find off-market multifamily deals, focusing on the often overlooked aspect of ownership distress. Discover how to identify various types of distress, including inherited properties, partnership challenges, and retirement motivations, and learn how to leverage these insights to make compelling offers. Break free from preconceived notions and explore the multiple reasons why a seller might be motivated to sell below market value. Whether you’re new to multifamily investing or looking to refine your strategy, this episode will equip you with the tools to spot distress and successfully navigate direct-to-seller negotiations.
Here’s some of the topics we covered:
- Intro To Finding Owner Distress Deals
- Ridding Yourself of Preconceived Notions
- Finding Information Before Speaking To An Owner
- Tenant and Resident Rent Collection Challenges
- The Number One Source of Deals In Direct To Seller
- How The Distress Problems Compound
- Thinking Of The Seller’s Ownership and Life Situations
- Speaking With The Current PRoperty Manager
To find out more about partnering or investing in a multifamily deal: Text Partner to 72345 or email Partner@RodKhleif.com
Full Transcript Below
Axel:
In this episode, I’m going to be doing another solo training regarding a component of the acquisitions process. Specifically, going direct to seller and finding more and better off market multifamily deals. And in this episode, I’m going to be talking about distress.
Ownership distress. And this is a very broad topic that I’m going to try to dive into and actually explain in a way that’s That allows everybody out there who’s listening to actually go out there and identify owner distress and speak to it in their offers when they are making offers. And before I actually start getting into ownership, distress and the different buckets.
And I’m going to talk about three buckets of distress in this episode. I just want to quickly set the stage a little bit in recent trainings and episodes that I’ve done on, on this podcast feed on Rod’s feed. I spent a lot of time talking about how, when we go direct to seller and when we’re searching for off market deals, we’re doing marketing such as direct mail.
Okay. We’re doing prospecting, which is cold calling, cold texting, cold emailing, et cetera. Our objective is to get in front of owners. Who have a higher propensity to sell. We’re looking to sell so that we put ourselves in a position where we are their first call, or we even better actually getting in touch with them at the right time in terms of when they’re looking to sell and distress or motivation, I’m going to use those words interchangeably throughout this episode.
are what drive owners to make that ultimate decision to sell. And a skill that’s critical for multi family investors to develop is being able to spot and identify different types of motivation and different types of owner distress. And we do that throughout the process of marketing and prospecting to owners by asking good questions so that we receive information so that we uncover information that dictates whether or not an owner has high motivation, low motivation, somewhere in the middle, or whether or not there’s some distress behind the scenes.
And an easy way to actually do this Is to define what types of distress there are. Because I think that there’s a preconceived notion for many investors out there that distress comes in one form, or there’s one kind of distress. And it’s usually financial or debt distress. Uh, and this is something that’s been perpetuated over the last handful of years, because of the fact that a lot of investors have used floating rate debt to buy deals, 2021, 22 timeframe rates shot up now they can’t service their debt.
Lenders are calling loans. They’re going into foreclosure. They’re giving the keys back to the bank of the lender. So when we think of distress, we typically think of like debt, you know, and also this is coded into the OA financial crisis where people were losing their homes, home values plummeted, mortgage, you know, their balances stayed the same, they couldn’t sell, they were under water, etc.
But it’s important to note that there are multiple different types of distress and owners can be motivated to sell for a number of different reasons. And the last, uh, Topic that I want to touch on here before we actually get into discussing the different types of ownership, motivation, and distress is this is a great way to crush the limiting belief.
Owners don’t want to sell direct to seller. And I may have worded that in a bit of a convoluted fashion, but let me rephrase. I think there are a lot of multifamily investors out there that have this preconceived notion that going direct to seller to find multifamily deals is just not a viable strategy.
And I think that a lot of these owners think that because they’re putting themselves in the shoes of the owners that they are marketing or prospecting to, which is fundamentally not the right way to do that. And I’ll explain why, but they think I’m not distressed. Hey, I run my property as well. If I were to sell, I’d go and sell it through a broker.
And they fail to realize that there are other types of owners that can be motivated by different types of things. And I spent a lot of time in the recent episodes on Rod’s podcast for you talking about these different types of motivational factors. And there are all kinds of reasons why an owner would want to sell.
And there’s all kinds of reasons why an owner would want to be motivated to sell. They don’t necessarily have to be what you think of. And it’s very, very important if you want to have success going direct to sell to find multifamily deals that you rid yourself of all the preconceived notions over what people want to do or what investors want to do or should do when they sell a property.
Just because you do a great job as it relates to operating your properties well, asset managing them well, and then maximizing the sales price by hiring a broker, et cetera, does not mean that that’s what other owners are doing. And so many investors have a hard time getting outside of their own head as it relates to putting themselves in the shoes of an owner that might be motivated by different things.
And that’s another purpose of this episode. When I’m talking about the three buckets or the three types of motivation or distress is to define all of the different reasons that a seller might be motivated, And to actually unlock your mindset a little bit so that you can conceive of why a seller might be willing to sell.
And most importantly, to sell at a price that’s below market value, which is why we’re doing all of this in the first place. So let’s get into it. The first bucket of distress, the first type of ownership distress that I’m going to talk about. is ownership distress. And what I mean by ownership distress is some kind of distress or motivation as relates to the ownership of the asset.
We’re not talking about the debt. We’re not talking about any of the financial components of the deal or anything like that. We’re just talking about the ownership. And that can come in many different forms. First being, let’s say that this is an inherited property, right? There was a death in the family and somebody inherited this asset.
Let’s say that this could be a partnership challenges. And let’s say that two partners bought a property 10 years ago and things have been going well over the, over the last 10 years, but now one owner wants to sell. One owner wants to keep it. There’s some disagreement behind the scenes. And ultimately they just say, Hey, screw it.
It’s time to sell it. Let’s just sell the property because that’s just an easier decision to make. Than trying to buy one partner out or trying to litigate behind the scenes. Retirement of the owner, maybe the owner is getting up to that retirement age, right? There’s no debt distress, there’s no operational distress, which I’ll get to.
But they’re just getting old, right? They’re in their 70s, they’re just moving to a different stage of their life. Maybe they self manage and now they want to go move to Florida or wherever, right? There’s also oftentimes a situation where owners are changing their strategy. Let’s say an owner is changing markets and they still own a portfolio or a property in a specific market, but they’ve since started buying in another market.
And now they’re selling this one to go redeploy those proceeds in another market, or they’re changing asset classes. We’ve bought all kinds of properties from owners who own a multifamily property, but they primarily own commercial assets, retail, office, industrial, something like that. And multifamily is a little bit too management intensive and they just got that motivation builds over time.
And they just elect to sell it. When you think about the first bucket of motivation, you have to think about the actual owners in their life situations or the ownership situation. There are a handful of questions that you can ask to kind of arrive at, is this a bucket of distress that maybe we can pull on here, such as why are you thinking about selling?
What are your alternatives to selling? Are you guys on the same page? If there’s partners, if there’s a partnership group together, If there’s, if it’s owned by an individual, maybe they have LPs, you can ask a different variation of that same question is, which is, is everybody aligned on the decision to sell?
Is there kind of competing motivations behind the scenes? How did you arrive at selling a lot of open ended questions? And you will start to generate some level of information around the ownership situation of the actual asset itself. Second type of distress that I’m going to talk about is debt distress.
Basically the financial capital structure of the deal, capital stack distress, however you want to define it. I’ll use debt distress because I think that’s. The most easily understood component of this. And again, we’re, this is what we’re most familiar with. And this is what I mentioned kind of in the lead into this episode.
This is what’s top of mind. And people think of distress or motivation. Maybe this owner has an upcoming balloon payment. Maybe they violated some loan covenants. Maybe they’re not meeting their DSCR requirements. requirements, or maybe they’re not eating some other components of their loan documents in terms of the covenants, they’re violating them.
There’s some kind of distress behind the scenes from a lender standpoint. Maybe they’re dealing with interest rate challenges because they had a floating rate loan. Like we talked about, they took out a floating rate loan when rates were in the threes or fours. Now they’re in the sixes or sevens. They can’t meet their debt service obligations.
Again, compounds into debt service distress. Maybe they need to refinance because of some other reason, you know, maybe their lenders calling the loan for another reason, maybe they have, you know, it’s just similar to kind of an upcoming balloon payment challenge here. But maybe there’s some other reason that they have to refinance.
Maybe they had a fixed rate period in their loan and it’s about to adjust. And when it does adjust, it’s going to significantly increase. They’re motivated to either sell or refinance before that happens. This is what we all kind of commonly understand. And you can discover a lot of this information by doing some level of research behind the scenes before you even speak with an owner.
If you have a platform like a CoStar, Reonomy, oftentimes you can pull this information. You can pull information around the first position mortgage from those platforms. You can look at high level information about the term or the loan amount. You can start to develop some level of insight around the situation.
If it’s a local bank that issued the loan a year ago, well, they’re probably going to have some period left on that term. If it was a bridge lender or some kind of debt fund or a private lender and they issued it 18 months ago, well, they’re probably getting towards the end of that term because usually those are two or three year terms.
If it’s an agency, that also tells you something, right? And this starts to help you piece together the puzzle as it relates to where there may be ownership distress or motivation from a debt standpoint. Asking questions can help you understand this as well. You know, again, what are your alternatives to selling is one that I really love to ask because that can take you in a whole number of different directions, right?
Well, you know, our loans come and do it. I mean, sometimes sellers will just volunteer this information and that’s something that obviously you can use in a negotiation or in terms of putting out that first offer and starting the negotiation process. But this also helps to do some research behind the scenes before you actually go out there and engage in a dialogue with an owner themselves.
Other things that are really important to mention as it relates to debt distress. Length of ownership is going to be important here. You know, if you have an owner who’s owned a property for 10 years, they’ve renovated all the units, the property’s performing really well, the rents are close to market and they have a loan balance come and do, or a balloon come and do, I should say, where they need to pay off their loan, well, they’re probably going to be in a good position to refinance, right?
They probably have quality NOI. They probably have. A relatively safe LTV on that first position loan, right? I’m just making broad based assumptions here, but that debt distress may not be as significant as somebody who bought a deal two years ago that has a three year term on their loan and they’re coming up on, on their loan term, because they probably haven’t had the time to work through as much of their business plan, or they probably paid a price that was a little higher because they bought it in that 21 timeframe.
So just because there are different components of that, of what I just mentioned, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all treated equal. And I think that’s really important to mention as it relates to how heavily you weight the different components of the information that you’re discovering when you do this research as it relates to actually going out there and having these conversations with owners.
The third bucket of distress or motivation that I want to talk about is operational distress, right? To recap, we had ownership distress, we had debt distress, and now we have operational distress. An operational distress is actually what’s going on on a day to day basis at the property. This is property management related challenges.
This would be construction related challenges. Maybe some other kind of vendor challenges. But this is, we’re waking up, we’re trying to operate the property and we’re having a hard time doing so. First and foremost, this is really the most obvious one. Tenant challenges, resident challenges, eviction challenges.
People not paying rents. Maybe the management company placed the wrong residents. We’re just not collecting rent. You know, we have high delinquency, our rents are low, and we’re just fundamentally having a hard time collecting revenue, right? I mean, that’s going to be number one that we actually look out for.
Number two, let’s say there’s mismanagement in some other capacity, right? I just mentioned maybe poor tenant screening or something like that. Maybe the management company is not doing a very good job of mitigating expenses. It takes them 10 hours to fix a leaky toilet or something like that. Owner is getting a little bit fed up with their management company, and there’s some kind of distress that’s mounting there.
Maybe they had an A class management company managing a C class property. And there’s all kinds of challenges that arise from that. Or the inverse. They got a C class management company managing an A class property. And there’s fundamentally just misalignment. Oftentimes, when sellers are dealing with management company challenges, you know, oftentimes it’s vague.
And I, I shouldn’t say oftentimes, I should say it’s very frequent. When an owner is dealing with management company challenges, they’ll just elect to sell the property instead of finding a new management company. That’s what we’ve seen a lot in the past. We’ve bought a lot of properties from owners that are just having challenges with their PM.
And instead of going out there and vetting a new PM, they’re just like, I’d rather just sell because they can sell and make money. Oftentimes we have an owner that’s owned a property for call it five, seven years. Maybe they manage it themselves for a while. And then they hired a management company.
Management company is not doing so well. Do we want to go out there and vet and find a new one? Or do we just decide, Hey, we can sell, we have all this equity. Let’s just cash out, move on to the next deal. That’s oftentimes the situation. And it’s actually a great place to find yourself as a buyer, because you can really leverage that in terms of having a conversation with an owner.
Well, do you want to take the risk of going out there and finding a new management company and vetting them? Do you want to have to go through all of the work associated with onboarding with this new management company? Getting all of the residents on boarded. getting onto their portal, working out the communication cadences, getting to know everybody within that organization, et cetera.
Or would you rather just sell and take a check and walk away and buy another property and start over or go do something else? So know this, my friend, we are headed into some serious economic challenges and it honestly doesn’t matter who wins the election. And I’ll tell you, smarter people than me have predicted this.
You know, Elon Musk says it’s going to be a big crash. You know, the head of J. C. Morgan Chase, arguably, arguably the largest bank of the world, says we’re at an economic cliff, you know, even Donald Trump, love him or hate him, says it could be as bad as a Great Depression, and we’re going to see some pain in this country soon, but here’s the thing with that also will definitely have incredible opportunity, even if the crash is minor, they’re going to be incredible opportunities coming in the multifamily space just because of the bad adjustable rate debt.
A lot of operators use these last few years. But here’s what’s important to remember in times of uncertainty, average people are hiding in fear, whereby successful people are using that opportunity to grow and evolve and become more, you know, they commit to taking action to improving their lives. And by learning this business, you’re going to be positioned to capitalize on these amazing, possibly once in a lifetime opportunities.
So how do you learn multifamily? Get your butt to my boot camp. I’ve got a three day live in person boot camp in Orlando. It’s November 10th. It’s the only live event I do each year because they pretty much kill me, but there’ll be upwards of a thousand people there and you’ll have the time of your life.
You know, when you leave, you’ll know how to pick an area. How to evaluate that area, how to build a team, how to find deals, how to evaluate those deals and do due diligence, how to raise all the money you need for your deals, how to syndicate, joint venture, and just a ton more. And of course, I spend time on mindset and psychology.
You’ll leave so juicy, you’ll be coming out of your skin. You’ll learn what you need to learn to take massive action to capitalize on the amazing opportunities that are definitely coming. Now, I’m also going to have hugely successful panelists every day. Several times a day, answer your questions about the topics that I’ll be training, probably somewhere between three and 4 billion in assets represented by the panelists alone.
Go to rod in Orlando. com or text the word bootcamp to 7, 2, 3, 4, 5, and register right now because every event we’ve ever done is sold out and it’s ridiculous.
It’s really, really easy to lean on that when you’re having a conversation with a seller as well. Number four, or number three, I should say, underneath operational distress is construction challenges. This happens all the time, specifically in the Class C and Class B worlds, where I mean, we bought a lot of properties from owners who go out there and they just over renovate an asset for the class of tenant that they’re actually going to be renting to.
They go in there and they do a stainless granite backsplash finish, tile shower finish for C class residents, thinking that they’re going to be rewarded on the back end for doing all of that work, and they just aren’t because that sub market doesn’t value that level of finish, and they’re more price conscious.
Very, very common with out of state owners, uh, who are buying properties in a different market than what they’re familiar with, and being very, you know, overambitious as it relates to the finishes that they’re implementing at the property. This typically compounds into some kind of financial or debt distress where overspending, maybe they’ve drained their reserves, maybe they’ve exhausted their capex budget before they were able to actually finish the business plan and operational distress on a day to day basis because they’re having a hard time managing cash and because they’re carrying longer periods of vacancy because they’re really shooting for these high rents to feel like they’re getting that they’ll be rewarded for doing the construction that they did.
Next thing you know, we have long vacancy periods. We may be skimping on our tenant screenings to find a less credit worthy tenant that’s going to pay a higher rent. And then typically that’s going to compound into, into some kind of financial challenges as well. That’s something that we see all the time.
Lastly, the one that I want to mention as it relates to operational distress is just becoming burnt out from a management standpoint. I would say the number one source of deals for us are owners, long term owners who have self managed for a long period of time and they’ve just become burnt out. And as a result, they take their eye off the ball and just problems start to arise at the property.
Let’s say you have an owner that bought a property back in, I don’t know, 2010, right? They bought it 14 years ago. They rode it through all the depths of the financial crisis. They, they, they have all the equity in the world. They bought a dirt cheap. Right. And they, they have a ton of equity, but over the years, they’ve just gotten tired, you know, maybe they’re at their, they’re in their mid, late 60s, 70s.
Now they want to retire. There’s some level of ownership distress there as it relates to a desire to get out of the business. And unfortunately that’s compounded into operational distress where I’ve gotten a little lax with tenant screening. They’re just, you know, working on leasing as hard. So their vacancy rate is just a little bit higher and they’re carrying longer vacancy.
They’re just doing more half assed unit turns. They’re not really turning units as well as they could, and therefore they’re renting at a lower price. All of these things can compound over time, and then create significantly more operational distress. And this owner’s like, well now I’m at an inflection point in my life where I don’t really want to put in the energy to turn this thing around.
I’m working through a couple of evictions, the building’s got some deferred maintenance, and I just want to retire. Oftentimes these sellers have a lot of equity, and because they have a lot of equity, they are able to sell at a price That makes a lot of sense for you as a buyer because it might be slightly below market, but it still makes a lot of sense for them as an owner too.
And you’re kind of the closing thought here as it relates to all of these different buckets and types of ownership, motivation, and distress is that a lot of them are tied together and a lot of them compounds, you just heard me talk about how life situation, distress. Can typically create a situation in which there’s operational distress.
You also heard me compare overspending on renovations and there being some, some CapEx related, uh, missteps compounding into debt distress. That’s always common. Oftentimes these things are all intertwined. If you have partnership related distress and from an ownership standpoint, one partner wants to do one thing.
Another partner wants to do another thing that can oftentimes compound into asset management challenges, right? Where. They’re infighting between the two partners. They may be have a misalignment around how to actually operate the property. One might want to go invest in the new roof, the new siding, and invest in another five years of ownership while the other one wants to sell.
It doesn’t get done. And that compounds into just deferred maintenance challenges. Oftentimes you’ll spot a few of these different things, but what’s important to do when you’re speaking with owners. And even if you’re speaking with brokers, right, this is still relevant. Even if you’re speaking with a broker.
Because you want to ask all these questions. You want to understand what’s going on with the seller that they’re representing, you should literally be taking note of different types of distress, older seller, probably looking to retire rents are pretty low. They’re probably not collecting a lot of income.
I looked up, uh, when their debts come and do on co star reonomy on the, on their, on whatever the state’s registry of deeds site is called. It looks like they took a mortgage out five years ago. It was with a local bank. I kind of have some level of familiarity with that local bank. They typically offer five year terms.
Well, all right. So they’re probably either in their adjustable period or they’re coming up on their term. And you can actually start to actually write all of these things down. And then what that allows you to do is craft offers with terms that speak to these different pain points. This is going to be another episode that I do on the podcast.
If it is, it relates to crafting offers and delivering offers that address seller pain points. So not going to be doing that in this episode, because it would just become a really long episode, but a bit of a teaser for the next one. But in general, what you want to do is. List all of these things down and then you can start to list all the terms in your offer That actually address these and then that’s how you present the offer And that’s how you really stand out as a buyer from other people that they may be chatting with and the last thing again Really the last thing I want to leave you with is you have to really prioritize Discovering this information through asking the right questions And I’m just gonna run through some questions that we literally have jotted down And when we’re speaking with sellers, we try to work through as many of these as we possibly can, and that we organically can in a conversation.
And I’ve mentioned a couple, but I’ll kind of tear off some other ones. Why are you thinking about selling? What are you looking to do with the proceeds? That oftentimes is going to dictate what their plans are. That often oftentimes opens the door to have a seller financing conversation as well. It also gets you thinking as it relates to the seller’s ownership situation, life situation.
If they’re like, Oh, we want to do a 10 30 when we want to buy something else versus, uh, we just want to cash out and move on. Well, those are very, two different types of sellers. And that tells you two different things. How is the property performing right now? One of my favorite questions. It’s so broad for a seller to answer that at any level of thoroughness, they have to get pretty granular with what’s going on.
If you were to keep the building, what would you do next? It’s probably going to tell you a lot more about the, the physical condition of the property, as well as the tenant situation. Ah, we’d probably, you know, we’d probably do the driveway and we’d probably push the rents a little bit because a lot of the tenants are long term.
They’ve been there for a while. Again, that’s telling you a lot about what’s going on. How would a bank or a lender look at this deal? Another one of my favorite questions to lead into seller financing specifically, which isn’t the topic of this episode, as we’re aware, but this will tell you a lot about what’s going on at the property and what the seller perceives the situation at the property to be if one seller is like, Oh, they’re going to, you know, extremely lendable.
The property is in great condition. The tenants are great, et cetera. If you have a seller that says, all right, well, the rents are a little bit low. We haven’t really raised them in like five, six years. And we have a lot of month to month tenants, you know, maybe that might be a challenge or whatever that tells you one more about the actual current day to day at the property, but it also tells you more about the seller’s motivation to sell and their acceptance of the reality of their situation, which also highlights their motivation.
If they are accepting the reality and they’re Answering that question and somewhat of a, you know, kind of negative lights, or they’re acknowledging the negatives of the property that to us, to me indicates more motivation because it indicates that they’re accepting the reality of their property being less than ideal, which means that there’s a little bit more of an openness to actually selling or being, or receiving an offer fundamentally.
You’re dealing with any tenant challenges at the property? How is the management company doing? Do you enjoy working with that management company? Are they doing a good job? Everything around management and the tenant situation is really, really helpful. Do you have any chronic late payers? Do you have anyone that’s not paying?
Different sellers may be lying to you and telling you what you want to hear. But some, again, if they answer these questions truthfully and honestly, that is going to be a very significant indication that there really is a problem. They’re probably more motivation than you’d actually think because of the fact that they’re answering them truthfully.
Something else that I just want to mention as a way to round this out. Oftentimes when we’re walking larger properties, larger assets, we may be doing so with the property manager. It may be not with the owner themselves. They’re like, I’m a property manager. We’ll get you through, go meet them. One of my favorite questions to ask property managers is if you had an unlimited budget, what would you do?
What would you do with this property? Okay. Well, some things might be, ah, we would do the lot over. We do the roof. We do the siding. Some of it may not be reasonable, but it’s going to tell you a lot about their relationship with the owner, assuming that it’s a third party relationship. But even if you’re working with a property manager, who’s an in house employee of the owner’s organization.
They’re probably still going to tell you what they think, right? And they’re going to know the property pretty, pretty intimately because obviously they’re, they’re managing it. And if they’re like, well, we’ve been trying to do this for a while, but you know, the owner really hasn’t been on board with it.
We’ve been trying to paint the trim or do this or do that. And it’s something minor and the seller hasn’t really been willing to do it. And you also agree that that’s a pretty clear value ad that might be indicative of a financial distress behind the scenes, or just an ownership style that hints at some type of motivation outside of just, Financial, maybe it’s ownership.
Maybe it’s operational. Well, you know, one owner really wants to do this, but you know, his partner isn’t really a fan of that. Well, maybe there’s some level of partnership distress around the behind the scenes, and maybe that’s why they’re actually looking to sell or entertain the idea of selling. Love asking PMs, how’s the tenant class?
Who is the average resident here? What do you typically see when tenants apply from a credit score standpoint? Get them talking about who the folks are that are living at the property. What are your primary pain points from a management standpoint on a day to day basis? That’s going to tell you a ton.
And PMs are much more open about what’s going on because they don’t own the property. They don’t, they don’t care, right? They’re just gonna, it’s just easier to have a conversation with a PM than it is to have a conversation with an owner. So, I’ll round out the whole question components of this episode there, but, but get in the habit of asking some, if not all of those questions when having conversations with sellers, obviously you want to do it organically and not seem like you’re just interrogating them and it needs to come up organically as it relates to just within the flow of the conversation, but very open ended broad questions, get a seller talking in such a way that’s going to reveal a lot of their hands, so to speak.
And again, to recap, we have three types of ownership distress in terms of how we define it in our business. We have ownership distress, which is related to the owners and the situation is Behind the scenes in terms of who actually owns the property and what’s going on in their lives. We have debt distress Which can also include capital distress equity investors preferred equity if we’re talking larger deals But debt distress being an easy way to think about it What’s going on with the loan on the property are these sellers going to be forced to do something soon?
And then we have operational distress Are they generating enough NOI to pay their debt? Are they having tenant challenges, construction challenges, management challenges, vendor challenges, etc. And to round it out, ask questions to uncover this information, take notes as you speak with sellers so that you can craft offers that specifically speak to all of these pain points.
And if you do so, you’re going to find yourself having much more productive conversations with sellers. Probably making better offers and ultimately, which is our objective, buying better deals.
