Joe:  Hey, how would you like to learn how to buy 52 houses in 52 weeks? What are you talking about? Yes. Today is a special day on the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast. I have the one and only Dolf de Roos with us in this podcast. When I was first getting started in 2006, I read this book, I saw it. I don't remember where I'd have been Walmart, believe it or not, but I saw, I remember, I see, I saw his books and his programs later at a Walmart. But I found this book 52 homes at 52 weeks and that really piqued my interest. I got excited about. What is this all about? And then I read the book, and then I bought some of golf's programs, and it really lit a fire under me and got me excited. Well, I met Dolf a few weeks ago at an event at a mastermind and I said, hey, can I please have you on my podcast? Let's talk about what you're doing. And he is still an active real estate investor today. So we're going to talk about his story, talk about what he's doing these days. Would you please welcome Dolf de Roos, how are you Dolf?

Dolf:  I'm great. Thanks, Joe. Thank you so much for your kind words. It's my absolute pleasure to be here. I love this stuff.

Joe:  But I love listening to your accent, too. I we could just talk for hours. It's so much fun. Let me tell you guys, Dolf is genuine. Really nice guy. I've looked up to him for years and years and I got to meet him for the first time. Oh, well, what was that about? I read the book 18. Yeah, I read that book 18 years ago. And so it's just great to meet you, and I'm so glad to get to introduce you to my audience. So, Dolf, can you talk a little bit about how you got started in business? Maybe let's start there and then we can talk about how you wrote that book.

Dolf:  Sure. So I came from a family, Joe, that never had a chance to go to university. And so they encouraged my sister and I to go and get a degree because they thought that degrees equates to a secure job. And as you grow a job with, you know, the potential for future advancement, and then you've got financial security. So without thinking, when I finished high school, if I went to university and during my first week there, I looked around at the people with the degrees. I'm talking about the tutors and the lecturers and the professors, and it occurred to me that they were not uniformly wealthy. I always thought they had very modest choice. They drove around in rather small cars in the lift and very modest homes. Nothing wrong with that. But I thought, there's something wrong with this formula that degrees equates to wealth. So I took it upon myself to make a study of the rich. I wanted to know what do the rich have in common? Thinking, perhaps somewhat lively, that if I could identify 30 or 40 things that they did have in common and emulate them, then I'd have a good shot of being rich. Right? It's a good theory. But the challenge was I could hardly find anything that they had in common. It wasn't age. You know, by all accounts, Bill Gates was a young man when he made his first billion. It wasn't gender, it wasn't religious beliefs. It wasn't country of birth. It wasn't that you're an immigrant or not. Whether you were the firstborn of the family or the last born, an interim between, I could only find two things that the rich had in common, and one of them is that, almost without exception, the rich either made their money or held their wealth in real estate. And I thought, man, if that's all it is, I can do that now. I didn't know if it would work, so I thought I'd try it. I didn't give up my studies and say, forget that. I mean, I still believe that degrees were essential, I guess, but I set about buying my first property and that wasn't easy because I had no money. So I went to the Ford trading banks we had in the day to borrow the maximum student loan I could, and fortunately none of them asked whether I was going to the other banks as well, because I would have been inclined to be honest and say, well, actually, yes. So I managed to get $4,000, which back then was a lot of money.

Joe:  What year was this.

Dolf:  Oh gosh, we're talking about, you know, the late 1970s. It's a long time ago now. And I found a property that I thought would be a really good deal. It was a wooden villa divided into two rentable units, with two more rentable units on the back of motel style units. And I remember pitching it to a bank, and I gave them my spiel as to why I thought it was a good deal, and he waited patiently. So when I finished talking, he leaned forward and he said, are you done? And I thought that was an odd question. But he said, yes. And he said, this is a hoax, isn't it? It's a university prank. And I was devastated because it wasn't a prank. I was serious, but fortunately I didn't give up thinking I'm not cut out for this and try. My hand is something else. I went to bank after bank after bank and I think it went to seven banks before. Finally someone said, I'll take a chance on. I would have preferred to him and that's a good deal. I wish I'd found it. But anyway, we went ahead. I bought it within my first month. Joe. I collected more money from my four tenants than I needed to pay that month's mortgage commitments and property taxes and insurance maintenance. I'd made a profit and I had worked for. That's what I've got to do this again. So fast forward, I kept on buying, and it took four years in those days to get an almost bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, right? Not the easiest course, I guess, but the university came to me and said, Dolf, it's only one more year from my. Why didn't you do it? And I said, because. And I didn't have a reason, so I did it. And halfway through that, they came to me and said, you're doing so well, why don't you switch to doing a PhD? And I said, because and I didn't have a reason. So I did that as well. And the moral of the story is make sure you know why you do what you do. Otherwise you end up leading other people's lives. Right? So I ended up spending eight years at university. Thing back to my parents degrees equates to wealth. Here I'd gotten a PhD. They were happy. I did go to two job interviews, and at the end of the second interview, I was offered a job at 32,000 a year, which back then was a ton of money. But the week before, I completed a real estate deal that netted me 35,000. Remember thinking, why would anyone who has ever write my work for 40 hours a week, 50 weeks of the year for 32 lousy thousand? When in one week you can make 35 and take the rest of the year off? So I never took that job and to this day I've never had one. I was 35 years old, Jonas visiting my parents. They were living back in Europe then, and they picked me up from the airport and my mother said, you know, Dolf, it's not too late. And I looked at my watch thinking, not too late to have dinner with an aunt or something. I said, for what? And she said to get a job. And I said, why would I want a job? And she said, you don't have a pension plan, which is like a 401. I said, my real estate's my pension anyway. And that's sort of how I got started. I didn't know whether to believe it at first, but that thing, that study I undertook to find out what the rich said and comment, it served me very well. I think. I know other people make a lot of money and other things. Join new technologies, and Elon Musk has made more money than I ever won in five lifetimes of real estate investing. Warren Buffett's made more than I ever will in real estate, but I think that the outliers I think if you take a thousand people at random and get them one batch of a thousand fixed in stocks and one batch of a thousand Western technology and another batch of a thousand to invest in real estate, I think the 1000 investing in real estate on average do better than the others. Not because they're smarter, but real estate tends to float all boats, right? A rising tide fakes everyone and real estate goes up and you've got leverage, which you don't have and those other things. And yeah, it's a talking monologue. I'm sorry.

Joe:  No, that's really, really good. Thank you. Now, so you got started in the 70s in real estate, right. So you've been through multiple cycles. Yeah. And when you when you talk about your international real estate experience, you probably have seen three times a different number of cycles than we just in the United States have seen character. Right. So, yes. Can you talk about how has real estate changed since the 70s and how has it stayed the same?

Dolf:  Well, there's a two part answer to that because firstly, when I came across my first downturn, I thought the world was coming to an end here. Everything that in my conscious awareness of me having been alive on this planet, that I'd learned about real estate, that it incrementally goes up and rents go up. The values go up. It was shattered by the reality that interest rates were going through the roof and prices were tumbling, and I thought it was the end of the world. Probably not quite literally, but I thought it was pretty close to it. And now let's fast forward. Let's not count the decades too precisely, but four or so decades further. And now, when I see a downturn like we've experienced a little bit recently with interest rates, rates went from about 3% to 7.5%, and all other kinds of economic indicators showed that we had a bit of a crisis on our hands. I wasn't thinking, oh, the world's coming to an end. I thought, oh, I wonder how this how long this is going to last and what position can I take and how soon can I take it to benefit from everyone else's panic? Because this one thing about real estate that I've learned, and that is it always overshoots. So when the market is going up, people overshoot. They bit too much for that, that ridiculous prices for it. At that point, you've probably heard we have the great a fool theory when no matter how big a fool you are to pay too much for a property, it doesn't matter. Next year there'll be an even bigger fool to be even more rich. And then when there's a crash, interest rates, a high value sky liquidity crisis, all that sort of thing. People oversell. They think, oh, this is never going through. Let's just ditch it, ditch the ditch so it overshoots and undershoot. And if you can go against the trend, if you can be countercyclical, then I think you stand a great chance. And the second part of answering your question is it has evolved over the decades. I do believe it was easier 45, 50 years ago. I would not buy commercial real estate that didn't yield me at least 15% and preferably 20%, and they weren't there, you know, every street corner. But you could find that if you looked at for a week, you'd find yet another one. Whereas now they're harder to come by. And part of it is technology. One of the great advantages still to this day of real estate is it's not as technologically advanced, say, the stock market, not bashing the stock market. But when you think about it, when you buy or sell shares or get your agent or broker to buy or sell shares of stock on the stock market, it goes through a centralized computer system. So someone in Kuala Lumpur buying one shares of IBM pays the same price to someone in Helsinki or anywhere else on this planet. And real estate is. Coming more that way. Some properties are listed on international databases that everyone can view. But many properties are still listed without any database. We have the acronym in the United States called a fishbowl, which is short for For Sale by Owner. We have for some reason that I can't understand, but I'm happy that they do it. They don't want to trust a real estate agent. So the thing I know this property better than some 21 year old upstart that never has even lived here. I know what it's worth. And they might price it at a million above what it's worth, or half a million below what it's worth. And we can benefit from that.

Joe:  I wanted to ask you this earlier, but I'll ask you this now because it's kind of the same vein. Where do you see the real estate market? Maybe the economy in general heading in the next 12 months. How could we best position ourselves for that?

Dolf:  Okay, so I want to give a really fair and balanced answer to that. But first, a little disclaimer. You know, I always used to say that I don't have a crystal ball, but the truth is, just between you and I, I do have a crystal ball. But unfortunately for us, history has proven it to be no more accurate than anyone else's crystal ball. So I can't predict the future. But I do look at long term trends and I will say this. I wanted to give two analogies. So I'm a big fan of Japan and their culture and their society. I managed to learn the language as a kid. I spent a lot of time over there. I like how safe it is. You leave your mobile phone in a Starbucks and come back two hours later. It's still there. You know, if I travel with my daughter when she was 3 or 4, I was never worried that she'd get lost, worried that she'd wonder where I am. But I wouldn't be worried that should be taken off for some nefarious purpose or whatever. So I love that about it. But they have the second lowest birth rate now in the world. It used to be the lowest yet, so their population is in such steep decline currently hundred and 27 million. They say that by 2060 it will drop below 18 million. There is a university today that it's just last year, that it's open because I've only got two students left and no enrollments for next year. There are 16 million vacant homes on the market right now that you can buy for about $100 each, but you'd be a fool to because you can't get a tenant. And by the end of the year, it's going to be 20 million vacancies. Now, this is good for getting rid of congestion on the roads. It's good for getting rid of pollution, but it's not good for the real estate market, for the very simple reason that there's a very strong correlation between property value growth and population growth. By the way, the country has now the lowest birth rate is Korea. And they're facing a similar thing. And I read this week in the news that China currently has a population about 1.4 billion. They think that by the end of the century, it's going to be 680 million setting massive downturns. And so then plays havoc on the real estate market. What is great about the United States, and I'm a big advocate of investing in the US, is that our population is still increasing. Now, we may disagree, not you and I, but people in general in the country philosophically about the cause of why the population's increasing. We've got an increasing pressure because abortions are being more and more and counted. Then we've got a lot of illegal immigration, lots of people for and against that. And I don't think we have much surplus of births and deaths. If anything, it's oscillating about the population still growing. When I was a kid, I learned the population of the US was 212 million. And when I came to the U.S., it was about 300 million. Now it's 328 million. That puts upward pressure on real estate values. And it's not just within a country compared to another country, it's within a country. So one of the reasons why I invest a lot in Phoenix and Las Vegas, it's not because I happen to live in Phoenix. People say that you invest it because you happen to live there. No, I chose to live in Phoenix because I wanted to invest there. Because for the last 50 years, Phoenix and Las Vegas have held the number one and number two slot for growth taken by most measures, absolute growth, growth relative to existing population, all those things they've stood out. And when you've got high population growth, you have high growth in capital value of real estate. And history's borne that out to be true as well. Yeah. So we've got to take all those things into account. So looking at that, when you ask my prediction for the next 12 months, it's different for Korea, Japan than it is to the US. I'm optimistic about the US because it's a big market and despite some challenges to freedoms, we're still one of the freest markets there is. Foreigners can invest in the US, we don't even us dimensionality. But let you or I try to invest in Thailand or other countries. We just can't do it. Or there's a cap to we can only in 49%. It's complicated. Right? But here it's free. It's an open market. And the other thing I love about the US, and it's one of many features why I prefer investing in the US to elsewhere is we can fix our interest rates for the full duration of a 30 year mortgage, or even a 40 year mortgage. Other countries can't do that anyway. So when I look at the US, the fact that the population's still increasing, as long as you invest judiciously in regions that have population growth and not population decline, then I think you'll do very well. Is it tougher than it was 40 years ago? Yes. And don't think too much of interest rates there. That big deal. When I started investing, Joe, there were 21% at my highest rate that I paid willingly. I made ahead was 23%. And why was I willing to pay those rates? Well, properties were priced accordingly, right, based on affordability. And I knew that in all probability, interest rates would come down eventually, which they did. And when they did, values shot up through the roof. They're not going to stay 7% forever. I believe. I thought they were going to start coming down this year already. They haven't. But they will come down. And when they do, there's going to be another surge of property values.

Joe:  Well, if anything, even if they don't come down, rents will adjust, right values will increase. And so it's kind of I almost look at interest rates as it's obviously important, but relative to what, the growth of the economy, inflation, national debt, affordability, the markets work themselves out. And that's the great thing about investing in real estate. It's a hard asset. It's almost an indestructible asset. And there will always be. This is one of the things I look at. There will always be a demand for housing at sea. You will always need a roof over their heads.

Dolf:  Exactly. Now I love that and I fully agree. Hamden boy, be it a mantra, you're absolutely right. And there's another thing, Joe. And that's that real estate investors are the only ones who actually benefit from inflation. You think about it, you've got a million bucks invested in the stock market, and a million bucks will buy you whatever a base today, right? A million bottles of milk. Whereas in a year's time through inflation, if that price of a bottle of milk goes up, then your million dollars will only buy you a lot less number of bottles. And so even if your portfolio goes from 1 million to 1.1 million, you'll need that extra money to buy the milk or whatever else you want to buy. At that stage. With real estate, you get leverage. You borrow money from the bank, and through inflation, that mortgages easier to pay off in 30 years time than it is today. And yet they don't ask more for it. She borrows 300,000. That's all you pay off over 30 years. In 30 years time, that 300,000 is trivial. Yeah. So we benefit from inflation.

Joe:  So I guess you would say you're bullish on real estate in the United States?

Dolf:  Yes. In the right areas.

Joe:  In the right areas. And from what you see, what do you see as mistakes to avoid even in the United States? What are some of the mistakes that you see people are making today that could come back to bite them later on?

Dolf:  So there are many mistakes that people make. And almost as important, even more important than finding a great deal is avoiding a lemon because you buy a lemon, and that can financially set you back for a long time. So people tend to fall in love with a property and say, oh, it's so cute. That's at least better than saying, well, the neighbor's property is so cute, and that's better than saying, well, the neighbor is so cute that all the wrong reasons for buying a property. You should look at the numbers. You know, the beauty of a property is in the balance sheet. And so the biggest mistake is they like some feature about it where they can imagine themselves living there. When you look for a home to live in, you use a different set of criteria from what you do when you look for an investment property, the numbers have to work. So don't be seduced to fall in love with the property. Fall in love with the numbers. That's the biggest mistake.

Joe:  That's good. And you talked a lot about that in your books. And I want to talk about that real quick because this book right here, how do I get to this? Here we go. Boom. This was the work 52 weeks. I love this book. And I want to ask you some questions.

Dolf:  So interesting.

Joe:  Yeah I want to ask you some questions about that. But one of the other books that you wrote that I really loved was this one. Have you ever heard anybody compliment this book 101 Ways to Massively Increase the Value of Your Real Estate Without Spending Much Money? I devoured this book.

Dolf:  It's the longest title on Amazon, and I'll often ask people, do you think it was easy to come up with 101 ways? And they look at me and then they think, I want the answers, I was this, I said no, it was tough and it was tough. It was tough to limit it to 101 ways because there are so normal. Yeah. And some of the ideas in this book had dated by me, a dental when they were written. You know, nowadays technology has changed. And so I think I should really come up with the next 101 ways. It just updates for technology. And there are you can do now with IP cameras and HomeKit type things. It's all automated and seamless electronic locks to gain access for yourself and for for cleaning crews. Or if you've got an Airbnb or something. It's just so much easier now.

Joe:  This was a program. I think there's several CDs in this program. Correct. How many do you remember? It was, oh, there's ten, ten CDs. Dolf de Roos, real estate investors, college real estate investing for everyone. Such a great series. Okay, but this book got me excited. And I remember reading this thinking, Holy cow, if he can do it, I can do it. So talk about how did you come up with this idea to buy 52 homes in 52 weeks? And did you actually do it? Talk about the story.

Dolf:  Well, what happened is I had an office. I still have it in Phoenix, and at one stage I had 11 staff there, and I had a meeting cancel on me in the afternoon. So I jumped on a plane and went to Las Vegas. Now that sounds outrageous, but ascend is 37 minutes of air time from Phoenix to Las Vegas. So I went up there and I came back to Phoenix and returned back to the office just in time for closing at about 5:00. So as I was coming back in, the staff were getting ready to leave and they said, where did you go for the afternoon? And I said, actually, I went up to Vegas and they said, what to gamble? And I said, no, I don't gamble. I said, actually, I managed to buy a property using none of my own cash and it's cash flow positive. So I mentioned that to my staff. Now you've got to understand my company does two things. One is we invest in real estate. And secondly, we teach people how to do it. And my staff stood there almost with their arms folded, saying, but you can't do that. That's impossible. And I thought if my staff and companies that invest and teach investing in real estate, if they think it's impossible, I bet the rest of the world does too. So I somewhat foolishly made a public announcement that I would do this over and over again. I'd buy one house a week for an entire year, using none of my own money and all cash flow positive. And within 2 or 3 months, I totally regretted it because I'd managed to buy a total of two properties, and I didn't think I'd just have egg on my face for an entire omelet. But I was learning the ropes. I guess because it's a whole. As you may read in the book, there's a whole sequence of things you can do to make this easy. And you asked whether I managed to achieve it in 52 weeks? No, I ended up doing it in nine months, which, just as a measure of interest, is completely irrelevant as assuming gestation period. I mean, at the time it takes to make a baby, you can buy 52 homes. And I think one of the reasons why most people don't do it is they just don't think they can like my stuff. And the funny thing is, now people read the book and they said, that's amazing, but I don't think I could do that. And there's nothing in that book that makes it special to me. It's just following a certain sequence of things.

Joe:  All right, let's talk about what you did in the book. And how did you do it?

Dolf:  Well, it all came about because, a lot of people go to Vegas because it's their city of last resort, right? They, you know, they had a failed marriage in Minneapolis, and they lost a job in Portland, Or whatever. Said the go to Vegas land of a place of opportunity. So they buy a house there because houses are being built quite prolifically there. They were back in and that time and they buy them. But then a whole series of things happen. They might lose their job, and then boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife leaves them and they're now $5,000 behind in their mortgage. They missed three mortgage payments. And what happens in the US, unlike any other countries, before a bank can take you into foreclosure. They have to put a notice in a publicly notifiable publication somewhere, like a newspaper, to say that in 90 days, unless the client, the home buyer association, they will put their house in foreclosure. So I would read a newspaper called the Las Vegas Legal Daily News that has births, deaths, marriages, company formations, company solution and the notice the notices of default. So every day you'd get to see a long list of houses that, if nothing else happens in 90 days, they'll go into foreclosure. So the thing you do is you go to these properties and you knock on the door and we're Frances, you don't say to them, hey, I'm sorry, buddy, you lose them, I buy them. That's or that doesn't go down well and that you wouldn't get it over the line anyway. But what I would say is something along the lines of, hey, I hear your properties in trouble. Not you're in charge of your property. And sometimes they'd say, no, it's not, and they'd slam the door in your face. But then 90 days later, you see them go through foreclosure. But more often than not, they'd say, yeah, my girlfriend left me and I've lost my job, and now I owe the bank $5,000 and I don't know what to do. And I would say, well, I don't know if I can help you, but if I could help you, what would that look like? And they'd say, well, well, if you pay off the debt I owe the bank, I'm, I'm willing to quitclaim deed you the property. Now, the quitclaim deed is not a quick claim. Deed is quitclaim. It's a one page document where you could any claim you have to a property and assign it to someone else. It doesn't even have to be recorded on the title. If you're in possession of such a quick claim deed signed by the current owner, then you effectively own the property. Ironically, the person signing it, giving it away basically still carries the debt in his name. So they would say if you pay off the $5,000 debt to the bank, I'll quitclaim deed you the property. And I'd say, okay, well, I'll have a crack at doing that. But in the meantime, would you mind staying on the mortgage for a year or two? And their answer would be stay on the mortgage. I can't afford the mortgage. No, that's why I'm in trouble. No, I can't stand that. I say no, I'll pay the mortgage for you. Because if you leave now, you've got a big black X by your name because you're in default and you won't be able to buy a house for another ten years. But if you stay on the mortgage and let me pay it for you, then your credit will go through the roof. Well, how do I know you will pay it? I said, well, I'm going to give the bank $5,000. If I don't pay the mortgage, then I'm going to lose my 5000, let alone what others. So I've got a financial incentive. And they. Think about it and they'd say, okay, I'll give that a go. Now, full disclosure, Joe, I have another challenge to overcome. And that is most mortgage documents have a clause called the due on sale clause. That means if a property sells the mortgages due. So I'd go to the bank and I'd say, Mr. Bank manager, I understand you have a client, John and Mary Smith, or if they already divorced, John Smith and he's like, oh, yes, he owes us $5,000. And I'd say, yeah, well, he's kind of a friend of mine, and I'm thinking of paying his $5,000 off. And the bank manager would say, really? Do you feel like a cup of tea or coffee? And I'd said, no, I was just as this is. It was before I talked to that. But anyway, I said, I want to make sure that you don't invoke the due on sale clause, because to cover my 5000, I'm going to get him to give me a quick claim. Did. And it's oh no, we won't invoke the due on sale clause. And Joe, you've got to understand, the following week or two weeks later, I'd be back there again and I'd say, hey, Mr. Bank manager, I've got a couple more friends, Samantha and Tony Hendrickson, and he took them up and. Oh, yeah, they owe a 6000. Yeah, I'm thinking of paying that off, too. And he'd look at me and he said, I think I know what you're doing, and you know what he'd do the following weekend? He would call me and say, hey, I think I've got some more friends for you, because the last thing a bank wants to do is take a house into foreclosure, cost them money. And here I was, a seemingly benevolent guy that paid off everyone else's mortgage debt. I mean, how nice is that from a bank's perspective? And the people who were losing their homes love me too, because I saved their credit. And what did I do? I just took over the property I rented out, and the rent was enough to cover up the mortgage payments and the all done. It was still on the mortgage as mortgage paid. Two years later, the house would have gone up in value. I'd refinance and I'd paid the mortgage off. They'd say, thank you so much, this was a miracle. Everyone wins. And by the way, the main reason why I want the outgoing owner to stay on the mortgage is if I apply for a new mortgage. Firstly, there's a $500 application fee. That's not the end of the world. There's a three week waiting period after wait three weeks for us with the quitclaim deed. I can do the deal that day. But thirdly, and most importantly, as an investor, banks would only lend 80%, whereas when he stays on the mortgage, I just take the whole thing over. I don't have to apply for anything. No fee, no three weeks and I own the property outright. It's kind of.

Joe:  Cool, nice. And so how long? I got a couple questions. How long would you typically stay in that transaction? And was it a couple years? Did you have, like a balloon that you gave to that seller?

Dolf:  Well, after two years, I'd buy them out. But here's the thing they had often I'd sell them on the basis of a lease option. A lease option. Because remember I said, Joe, that I'd buy these properties for that any of my own cash? And the two examples I gave you, I had to pay $5,000 to pay the first guy's mortgage off and 6000 for the second person. So how can I, you know, say that no cash when I had to pay 11,000 so far in total. And here's the thing. Instead of just renting them out, I'd rent them on what's called a lease option. Sometimes it's called rent to own, but a lease option is they pay a fee to buy an option, and that option gives them the right, but not the obligation to buy the property at a fixed price in the future. Sometimes the date is predetermined and three is time. Exactly. Or it might be within the next two years or something like that. And I'd charge in the first case $5,000 for that option fee. And that's what went to the bank. And the second case, 6000, so genuinely was none of my own money in the deal. The idea for me and one of my golden rules, I've got eight golden rules of real estate. One of them is never sell. Or I had to modify it because sometimes they're extenuating. Circumstances seldom sell, so try not to sell. But 33 of these 52 homes was rented out on a lease option basis. And the market went up so much that year that even those people who couldn't afford to buy the property from me, they knew they could sell it on the open market for more than their option price, usually at least 100,000 more. So they would exercise their option and sell it. So I lost most of them through the option process. I still did well, of course.

Joe:  Yes, for sure. You still made very good money. If you were to do that challenge again today. Yes. Would you do the same thing? Yeah.

Dolf:  You have to wait for the right circumstances. I think we're getting close. People are hurting a bit now. We're seeing the numbers of foreclosures rising ominously. I don't think it's as bad as the 2008 GFC, but circumstances could present themselves where people will just walk away and say, oh, quitclaim dated if you just pay off my debt.

Joe:  So there's definitely more people doing that. I just got off the phone on my way to my office to chat with you. I just got off the phone with a guru and I won't mention his name haha, but I so you were one of the first ones to really opened my eyes to creative financing and especially lease options. I got really excited about lease options after reading your book and because I had been a landlord by accident. You know, it's a long story and it was a horrible experience. A tenant would call me every two weeks to fix something, you know, and. Right. And then when I heard somebody talk about, lease options. I got really excited and that's. And then you wrote that book about creative finance and got super excited. So I've done a lot of lease options, but one of the guys I learned how to do subject twos. Now, one of the things you were kind of talking about was kind of like buying a house subject to the existing mortgage. He was a very well known guru at the time when the market crashed in oh eight. He literally lost everything. His marriage, all of his real estate. Really? It's a horrible story. I just talked to him yesterday, so he's been out of the business for the last 14 years, and he's thinking about making a comeback and wanting to get on my podcast. And, you know, he's old. He's totally open and honest with the story. But I was talking to himand he said that he's seeing a lot of the same things happening now in the market that they that he was warning people about in 2006 and seven. So, you know, we're all always up and down in these cycles. But so I bought a bunch of subject twos in oh nine, I mean, sorry, 2008 and nine. And I had about 12 of them. I think it's time and I lost them all to I thought I needed them all back. I never missed a seller's mortgage payment. I'll say that number one never missed a seller's mortgage payment. But I had to rob Peter to pay Paul to make those mortgage payments like it was day 29 hour 23 minute 59. And I was making that mortgage payment right before it would hit that seller's credit report is a 30 day late, which is a big, big deal, right? So subsequently I, I got behind a my own personal residence, my own mortgage, on my own house because I was making these other payments. What happened to me back then was the equity that I had. I thought I had just vanished and vacancies were killing me. I had, you know, at any one time I would have 3 or 4 vacancies. And so each property at the beginning, when I did it, I thought the numbers were good. I had 15% equity in the deal. I was cash flowing a couple hundred bucks, quote unquote, cash flowing, but I had no reserves, and I did not have any money set aside for a rainy day to cover mortgage payments on a vacant house. So are you. Here's my question for you. How can people who are doing a lot of these creative financing deals today? How can they stay out of trouble in case worst case scenario happens again? That make sense?

Dolf:  Yeah. Makes sense. And you always have to have a buffer. And you know, people always talk about the need for diversification. And you know you have a little bit in the stock market, a little bit in bonds, a little bit in crypto, a little bit on this, a little bit on that. And you might as well just take a futures contract on the economy or something. So I believe in diversification but within real estate and my version is a little bit of residential, a little bit of commercial, a little bit of industrial, a little bit of hospitality and was interesting to, you know, have a little bit of single family homes, maybe a duplex or two, maybe 1 or 2 small apartment buildings, not too many big ones. I, I'm not a big fan of large scale apartment buildings and spread it out that way. So all this, you know, being too much subject to and lease options, you're dependent on certain conditions. But if we just look as we spoke at the beginning of the call here, you know, compared with 40 years ago, the population has gone up by 60% in the United States. That means there are a lot more homes, a lot more podiatrists, a lot more car tire puncture repair shops, a lot more hairdressers, a lot more podiatrists, anything that comes to mind. And we cater to it and they live in homes and many of them work from premises. I know commercial is not doing so well. It's going to come back again. There is and a big difference between 2000 and 8 Joe, and today too is that in 2008, when that went belly up, there was a surplus of homes on the market and mortgage money was easy to get. You know, we had no docs loans. You didn't need documents or and what was the other kind of loan you had? It was just it was too.

Joe:  Easy to go. Liar, they're called Liar loans?

Dolf:  Liar loans? Yes. State income loans. You just state your income and we accept it because, you know, at the rate the income from the property will covered. Well, now it's a different situation because even though some conditions are not good for real estate, we've got a chronic shortage. There's still a chronic shortage of 4.1 million housing units in the US. So a lot of homes have to be built before that's shored up. And the costs of lumber and steel and electrical wiring and everything else that goes into making up, it's gone up. So there's upward pressure on prices. So I don't think we're going to see a major downturn in values of real estate. Now who knows what might happen. We've got multiple wars going on around the world. They could escalate all of a sudden go out of control, and then no one can know what's going to happen. But barring anything else, the population's increasing. We are all better off in terms of normalized dollars, normalized for a year. And so take inflation out of it. We're better off in spending power today than we were five years ago and ten years ago and 50 years ago. We have more cars for this and more clothes, more. More Starbucks coffee, everything. We're better off. So I don't think there's going to be a massive collapse.

Joe:  You talked about the eight golden rules of real estate and you. Oh, my. Just my lights went out. Can you talk about that? What were you mentioned? One of those rules. Seldom sell. But what were the rest of the rules? Because this ties in really perfect.

Dolf:  Gosh, you are really putting me to the test. It's a good test and I'm sure I can look them up there in the book. Real estate riches, right? Delineated them, but I can go over some that come to mind. How one is that you makes your money when you buy. You know, people think that, it's not a very good property, but if I sit on it long enough, it'll go, no, you make your money when you buy. So when you find something that is undervalued, oh my gosh, jump on it. Because I have a favorite saying it's sort of my signature saying John, that's that. The deal of the decade comes along about once a week.

Joe:  Are you the one that coined that?

Dolf:  Absolutely. Yeah.

Joe:  I love that. Say that again.

Dolf:  The deal of the decade comes along about once a week. And here's the thing. If you're a purist and you think, no, that's ridiculous. By definition, the deal of the decade comes along exactly every ten years. Then, when one of your listeners hears that you and I have just found a great deal, the deal of the decade, they will stop looking for 9.9 years, because they already know that this decades deal has been taken by you and I.

Joe:  I can't believe it was you that said that, because I've said that quote a hundred times, and I've always said, I don't remember who I heard this from or who said it.

Dolf:  So all over my branding, where is it that the deal of the decade really does come along? About once a week? Then you don't care how many other great deals here, but you're still looking for one, and your belief that it does come along once a week will be validated. Just as the guy who doesn't believe that has his beliefs validate it. That's his whole thing. What you believe ends up being true.

Joe:  That's so good. And that's really helped me a lot when I was first getting started, because I was worried about missing out on a deal, when I would get discouraged, when somebody else, one of my competition would get a deal that I was looking at. You know, I would get buried in kind of this, discouragement. But when you said that, when I first heard that, I thought, oh my gosh, that gives me a lot of hope. There is another deal right around the corner. So I'm not going to quit, and I'm not going to give up.

Dolf:  Exactly. And you've just got to keep looking. And most people don't. And here's the challenge we face these days. More so than ten years ago, little and 30 or 40 years ago, we have lost the ability to think. And when you think about it, you know, 20 years ago, we had 46,500 book stores in this country. They were all over airports. You'd go to the airport and kill the hour before boarding time by going to a bookstore and finding a great book to read on the flight. And now people don't read books. We're down to 6000 bookstores because we're all scrolling social media, disinformation, true information, but we don't know the difference anymore. We're absorbing information. People go and binge watch on Netflix, and I'm not knocking it. There are some good things on there, but if that's all you do, watch social media and binge. You never thinking and you never think about what's happening to the market and when the population growth thing should I go out and look? People spend all their free time. Time. They're not sleeping, getting dressed or undressed or showering or eating or cleaning their teeth and all those things we have to do just to keep the machine going. They spend any spare time scrolling on this silly devices, and it doesn't create anything. You're absorbing information, not creating it. And the trick is to go out and find something you can do. Be creative. How can you put a creative deal together? How can you get creative financing? You know, I think one of the rules is always ask the seller. Not usually, always whether they'll consider leaving any money in. And more often than not they'll think, do you think I'm crazy? Of course I'm not leaving money, and I'm setting up because I need the money or whatever they say, but they're not going to hit you over the head with an umbrella, let alone shoot you, because you ask. And yet every now and then, Joe one inch ten, one and 15, you say, would you consider leaving some money in the next? Sure. Yeah. And would be okay. We're going to put it in the bank and we're getting 0.2% interest. Then I once asked a couple if they'd leave $300,000 in an $800,000 deal. They were in their 80s and they said, well, we'll have to think about it overnight type thing. And I thought, well, that's not going to happen. And they came back the next morning and I won't do it so painfully slowly. But the basically said, listen, we've thought about it. Would you consider letting us leave 500,000 in the deal? So if you never ask, you never know, right. Something good. Yeah.

Joe:  And do you remember any of the other rules? I'm sorry for putting you on the spot. Do you do you remember any of the other rules?

Dolf:  Oh, gosh. What have we said? You make your money when you buy or never be the first to name a figure. That's a crucial one. So, you know, I run a lot of events, Joe. And we have a lot of fun where I set up a hypothetical case and I'll say, I'll split the room into two groups, buyers and sellers. And to the buyers, I take them a path out of earshot of the sellers. And I say, listen, guys, you really want this property and you want to do whatever it takes to get it, and you can go up to a million bucks. And then I go to the sellers and I say to the sellers, listen, guys, you are desperate to sell this property and you're willing to go as low as 200,000 to just get it off your hands. And then I make them pair up one buyer and one seller and they've got five. Minutes to negotiate. We will be stunned how many pairs don't end up with a price because they can't agree that I agree. And you can hear the rules loud and rest. And then, you know, you get that the rest of them who have come to an agreed upon price, and then we chart it on a blackboard or a chart or whatever. And it's so funny to see how many couples end up doing a deal at 970, 980,000, and others do the deal at 220 and 230. And it's all largely depended on who is the first to name a figure like those desperate to sell and say, well, you know, I'd want at least 300 for it, and then they'd drop it further or whatever. So yeah, never be the first to name a figure. I remember I was leasing a commercial space once. It was to an oddball industry, was a funeral parlor, and we were negotiating the lease. And I remember thinking, well, I want at least five years out of this guy. But instead of saying, you know, will you sign up for lease? I said, well, how long would you want? And he said, well, I'd only do it if you give me ten years with a right of renewal for another ten years. That's effectively a 20 year lease. Wow. So yeah, that was another road.

Joe:  And so this was a tenant that was leasing a property from you.

Dolf:  Correct. A commercial tenant. Commercial space. And, you know, I made sure not to be the first because if I'd said five years, he might have said, well, we should consider seven or something. Whereas I laid out first and he came up with 20. Yeah.

Joe:  I love it. Yeah. Okay. Can you talk about what you're doing these days? You travel a lot and I'm curious how you do it. Is it something that you just love doing or you feel like you and why do you travel so much.

Dolf:  And. Well, there are two reasons. And firstly, I think people who have curiosity tend to experience a wider range of things than those who are happy to stay living in the same town that they were born in. They never go know. I live in Phoenix, and I'm stunned by the number of Phoenicians in the South, the fifth largest city in the United States, by the way. So often I just say I put fifth largest number of aircraft movements. Yet I'm stunned by the number of people from Phoenix who've never been to the Grand Canyon or the. I know I've been there. I said, well, when did you last go? I think I was in seventh grade when I was a kid with my school, and it's a 3.5 hour drive away, and people come from all over the world to go there. So I just have my curiosity on for them. I love it, I love languages, I love different foods and all that. But there's another reason, and I think part of my success, possibly a big chunk of my success, if I've had any in real estate, is that I have traveled and I've seen things that people do in other countries, and I can't help but wonder, oh my gosh, why don't they do that anywhere else? And I'll give you two silly, trivial, literal examples that have no consequence for anyone, for anything. But in the United States, you'll be very familiar with it. You come to a red light, and theoretically, once you've stopped, if you're just going around the corner, which in America when you drive on the right means you're making a right hand turn, you can go against the red light if you've come to a stop and it's red, but you've looked and there's no traffic, you can go no other country other than Canada, I believe does that. So when you first see that, oh my God, they're all going through a red light. You think? I bet that causes a lot of accidents. I have personally not seen a single accident caused by someone going through a red light turning a corner, and I wonder why the rest of the world doesn't adopt it. Because it helps clear up intersections. All right, then, just to come in sort of thing, if you want to talk about cars completely off the topic of real estate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In America the tail lights are red and your brake lights are red, but you're allowed to double up your brake lights with your tail lights so the brakes come on to red lights. And then if one of them is indicator, I've got to put my hands here. One of them's indicating it starts flashing. No big deal anywhere else in the world. Your turn. Signal lights have to be orange or amber. And does it make a big difference? No, but let's say it's raining. The view of the car in front is blocked by a truck. And then there are leaves of a tree and you see an orange, like come on overseas. You instantly know they're turning red. Light comes on instantly. You know that breaking. And here you don't know. Sowe better to make it uniform. And by the way, cars would be cheaper if they all had the same wiring. Because BMW makes cars in Germany for export to American, they make them in America, exported elsewhere. And they've now got four different sets of wiring has set in it. And that's a trivial example. But I've seen parking garage systems in Japan, which is basically like a Patronus elevated, but like a squashed structure as well. The car goes inside, people come out and it goes up in this Ferris wheel type thing. You get a card to know where your car is, and when you come back, you put the card in, the card comes out. It uses much less space than a conventional car park with driveways and parking ways and all that sort of thing. There are no thefts or assaults or rapes or anything of the car park building because no one's inside, no theft of property from the cars. It's extraordinarily efficient. Would it work in Phoenix, where land is cheap? No. Does it work in New York? Absolutely. So we've introduced technologies like that from one part of the world, where they're so normal people that think about them to a part of the world where they've never thought about it. I've done that over and over again, and I think it's given me a big edge because I've just experienced different things. And many people say, when I get that by watching TV and the answer is no, you don't. If you can't smell it and stub your toe and you kick it and all that, it's not the same experience. So I enjoy that aspect. Things you can bring back from another country to enhance what we do back home in the US. Or take ideas from the US and deploy them overseas. Nothing wrong with it.

Joe:  And where are you today? Where are you right now?

Dolf:  Today I'm in a tiny island called Malta. It's an independent nation. It's tiny. It's about 13 miles wide, 19 miles long. It's closer to gosh, to Tunis, in Tunisia and to. What is it? Libya than it is to Rome? You know, Tripoli and Libya, but it's an EU member. And here's the interesting thing. I made the I don't make many predictions because, as I say, they're not always right. But when Malta joined the EU, right, the former EEC, when they joined it, I predicted that real estate that is would double in three years. And I was wrong. They trebled in two years. And it's a trend that whenever a nation joins the EU, their economy gets a kick because all of a sudden, instead of just the residents of Malta, which number about 500,000 people, half a million, instead of those having free and unfettered access to the real estate market. Suddenly it was opened up to 330 million EU members. And by the same token, I made the prediction that when Brexit came through, there would be a commensurate downturn and a lot of indicators, the value of the pound as opposed to the euro, why they never joined the euro is another story that we can talk about another time, and their economy hasn't been doing that well. So, you know, keep an eye on global things like that. Because if there's going to be another nation that joins the EU, maybe it's time to get on a plane. Get your passport if you haven't got one. Americans have a ridiculously low uptake of passports relative to other Western nations. Get on a plane and go to some of these countries. At worst, you'll stay in a hotel where, as most Americans say, well, it's not as good as my whatever hotel back home, but you might find a bargain that's better than the bag, and you could find back home, and you'll have an experience that's worth talking.

Joe:  Yeah, so I know. So, are you buying real estate there right now? Or do you also, when you travel, do you do seminars while you're traveling as well?

Dolf:  Yes. It's a mixture, like I had three weeks ago. I was in Korea. I spoke at a conference there and talked about the merits of investing in America. You know, Korea, as I mentioned, it's got the lowest birth rate in the world. So they've got a massive problem of a shrinking population. But that doesn't mean to say that they have to invest in Korea. They can invest in the US and spend the profits in Korea if they want. Most end up spending it in the U.S. anyway. That's why the U.S. is so strong. We encourage investors to go there. That's why most technologies are developed in the US. And often it's not always by Americans, it's by Indians or South Africans or wherever they're from. But if they've got a brilliant idea, they all want to come to the US. And that's because we've got the infrastructure and the funding for these tech, not, you know, technological upstarts and things like that. So it fuels itself. So the US is just a great place to be. But let's not lose sight of other opportunities like when a nation joins the EU. I want to be there and see if I can participate in some way advising locals or doing something myself, or having a the fun that that gets involved, you know, here in Malta, just as an example, there are many cars, way too many cars for the number of roads, and there's a chronic shortage of parking spaces. And they have these garages or garages, as we call them in America, that they're ridiculously priced. And the value of those has been going up exponentially. As you know, they're introducing 50 cars a day, which is nothing in U.S. ten. So for a population of half a million, that means every year there are a lot more cars on the road. And so it's just a matter of seeing where are the opportunities. Yeah, I think that gas stations are going to go defunct as the world inevitably would adopt, EVs. Then what are we going to do about EV charging stations? People are complaining that there aren't enough of them, and those that there are don't always work. I see that as a massive opportunity for someone to buy strategically located real estate and put them in place.

Joe:  Yeah, well, man, that's fantastic. I wish we could talk more. We're running out of time. I don't have my glasses. I lost my glasses. But I think we have a couple of minutes left. Okay, so how can people get a hold of you?

Dolf:  Don't you know one of the easiest ways? Because I off, often off of courses and things. So if they just go to the website DolfLive.com, they can see whatever we've got going there. And it's such a rare and unique name. I think if you go on Amazon and look at all my stuff can come up with both tourists and Amazon and, and all the other local sites that's of their DolfLive.com and then they can see what the latest offering is, where we can offer to share more or teach more or whatever. We do all kinds of things, Joe. We do excursion trips. I do fly outs for clients. I just did one of the UK where a client wanted me to come and look at his commercial real estate portfolio to see what we might do to increase its value.

Joe:  Nice. Yeah. Cool. So do you update social media much? Are you on a certain platform more?

Dolf:  Yes, I'm on Instagram and TikTok and TikTok and Facebook and all that. And look up the name Dolf de Roos and usually at REI real estate investor Dolf de Roos? There are a few fake accounts that they're trying to benefit from our momentum, but you're seeing figure out which is the real one and which isn't. And so yes, I tend to post a lock on the social media despite my comments about it. I think, well, these things have a place Netflix does too, TV has a place. Just be judicious about what you consume. You know, that's my advice.

Joe:  Yeah. Good. Thank you, Mr. Dolf de Roos, for your time. It's such an honor and a privilege to. I'm glad to, to finally get you on my show. Maybe see you at one of the next masterminds coming up. And are you going to be in Tampa in September, by any chance?

Dolf:  I'm intending to. I'm trying to clear my schedule, but I hope to be there. Yes, I've been talking with the powers that be there.

Joe:  Nice. Okay, guys, go to his website right now. DolfLive.com. If you're watching this on YouTube, just look at that. There'll be a link in the description down below. But I appreciate you Dolf. Thanks for being on the show. Thank you everybody.

Dolf:  Hey, thank you very much for me. I thank you for your kind words. It's been a real pleasure. I'm happy to do this again. I love this game, and I love the fact that we're hearing stories of people who have had some success because I might have pushed them in a direction. So any time.

Joe:  Yes. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you later. Bye bye.