HIP E1 Mike and Nate - Best of Both Worlds

Most investors think they have to choose between high cash flow or massive equity gains. What if I told you that you could have both? That's exactly what boutique hotels offer. It's the best kept secret in real estate investing. And today, we'll tell you why. Welcome to the Hotel Investor Playbook, your guide to building wealth and freedom through boutique hotel ownership, hosted by Mike and Nate. Get in the game. Welcome to the Hotel Investor Playbook, where we dive deep into real estate investing, entrepreneurship and building wealth. I'm Michael Russell, and my partner, Nathan St. Sear and I, have been investing in real estate for over two decades. Together, we've scaled a $30 million real estate portfolio, mostly focused on hospitality assets. Today, we're going to share with you why we believe boutique hotels are one of the best investments out there, and how you can benefit from the same strategy. By the end of this episode, you'll understand why boutique hotels offer the fastest path to financial freedom, both with high cash flow, like short term rentals, and significant equity gains, like commercial properties. Plus, you'll learn the strategies we've utilized to help you scale your investments faster, with less competition and fewer regulations than many other real estate asset types. But I'm sure we walk through this framework of how to get started investing in hospitality assets. Let's start with a quick story about how we got started. Nathan and I, we have a background in real estate investing. We both independently were purchasing real estate properties, mostly single family homes, and working our W2 jobs, and we wanted to do something bigger. We wanted to invest into multi-family apartment buildings. We thought that might be a way where we could gain tremendous equity and be financially free. But as the story goes, let me walk you through how personally I got started, and then I'll have Nathan pipe in and he could share his story. But what occurred with us was, like many folks, I started reading real estate books, Rich Dad Poor Dad, the millionaire real estate investor, you name it, David Lindahl's, with multi-family, millions. I was reading them all, and I knew that ultimately there was scalability in multi-family apartments, but it seemed like a big scary asset, and I wasn't sure how to get started. So I said, okay, well, let me start investing in single family homes. And shortly after the great recession, there was an opportunity. I was able to buy a couple of homes right after bat for phenomenal value with the expectation that those would continue to increase and appreciate. And so I had a goal of buying five. I was able to buy two, and then my third that I purchased, ended up going up by about 25% more than the first two, and that's kind of where I got capped out. The market continued to appreciate, and I was no longer able to buy single family homes. And I will point out that those homes from an investment perspective, they were appreciating, but there was like next to no cash flow. In fact, maybe even a little bit negative cash flow, a nominal amount. So when I moved to Maui, where both Nathan and I currently live, I saw an opportunity, while working my W2 job here, to purchase a vacation rental home. And this was back in 2015, and back then they weren't quite as well known. It was something that wasn't as well established. And so I stumbled across this asset and was like, well, oh my gosh, this might, there's potential here. Let me check into this. I purchased a vacation rental home, went through the process, got the permit, and from the time that we started operating it, I was blown away. The thing was a cash cow. And so it really excited me. I became very passionate. I started figuring out like, okay, well, how can I grow? How can I buy more of these? And in Maui, at least, there are regulations. So in order to have a permit, they limit you to only one per person, which meant I had one. So we bought the next one and put it in my wife's name. And between those two vacation rentals, I was able to walk away from my W2 job. I thought this was amazing. And I was like, okay, great. How do we do more? And at the time, prior to leaving, I was working with Nathan. And, you know, we have a lot of similar interests. So we knew that it would be great to partner up. But we'd like to do something big. And reflecting on these vacation rentals, the challenge was they weren't scalable. Right? I was able to secure two of them. Chiching, that's great. Awesome. But how else could we continue to scale this? And it just did not seem like it was possible for us to do so, especially in Hawaii. And we had a big vision. So this led us to go back to the original concept of purchasing multi-family apartments. Nathan, during this experience, I don't know if you want to, I'm, you know, pipe in here, share your insight to what was occurring during that time. But feel free. Yeah, well, I want to thank you. Yeah, good stuff, Mike. I want to just back up, though. And just talk about number one, where we were aligned. Right? So Mike and I were in sales. And I was a sales leader. He came over. And I realized very, very quickly that Mike was extremely driven. Like, he had a goal. And what his goal, what I realized very quickly, that he valued most was time. I mean, Mike had a plan to create financial freedom, where he could be his W2, because ultimately he values time more than anything, and wanted to be able to spend it, you know, how he wants, when he wants. And I was on the same path. Right? We were both on that same path looking for financial freedom. And we were both doing it through real estate. I had been investing here on Maui and funneling the money that I'd been making through sales into real estate here. But again, we both started with single-family homes and long-term rentals. And that's where the difference in the path really started, was when Mike veered off the path from standard investing in single-family homes, long-term rentals that were, we were both building wealth. But what we weren't doing is we weren't coming even close to capturing the amount of money that we were making in sales that would replace that W2 income. And so when he went into and found short-term rentals and had the courage to step outside of the box, because back in 2015, so isn't when everyone in their brother was, you know, investing in short-term rentals, Airbnb was just really hitting the scene and getting started. He had the foresight to recognize something. And what he recognized was that in short-term rentals, when you're in a high-demand location, tourism-based location, that the highest and best use of the asset is not long-term, that it was short-term. And he could capitalize on that short-term rental and he had the courage to do something that he'd never done before, that there weren't a lot of people doing at the time, and he went and made the investment. And that was a big moment. So Mike, I want to go into that moment where you chose to do that, because number one, that took some courage. But number two, I remember you sitting there in between our different sales calls and different things that we were doing. And I'd be sitting there with a piece of paper and you'd be like, is this accurate? Is this right? You were assessing the situation and you were finding it hard to believe that you could actually make this level of cash flow or margins above what your debt service would be. So can you just go back and walk through what you were finding as you were diving into this? Yeah, that's so funny. It reminds me of that movie, A Beautiful Mind, where the guy was just riding on the chalkboard or on papers, whatever, he's just riding over and over and over again. I felt like that character because I kept writing the numbers on the paper like, wait a second, if I'm on this home and this pencils out, are these? Is this cash flow? Is this real? Do these vacation rules really on the potential to do this? Can I actually step out potentially of my W2 job? I mean, I'm only at that time, I was 36 years old and I was like, okay, this is amazing. So yeah, it did take a bit of courage because it was relatively unproven and there was a lot of regulation in the pipeline that made things uncertain. I told my wife said, we got to hop on this. We got to get these vacation rules because sooner or later they're going to eliminate them and sure enough, that's exactly what they did. So that was my perspective in that moment. Yeah, I love it. And the fact that you number one, you did the first one, right? And then because of the regulations, you can only have one per name. So you put the second one under your wife Lauren's name and that was it. That's, it was done. And by the time I got the courage, I'm like, all right, well, I mean, okay, yes, Mike's on his way out the door. He's like, by the way, I'm done working for you. I've now created financial freedom. And I'm like, wait a minute, I want in. And it was, well, I'm sorry, you're too late to eat. It's just one of those things in life that that's the reality is is sometimes when you, when you, when you take action that you're, you're awarded for it. And when you the opposite side of that is when you don't take action, there's, there's consequences on that side too. So finally when I had the courage to do it, it was too late for me. But that didn't stop us because ultimately throughout the years, Mike and I had a, you know, we, we, we. We knew that we wanted to do something outside of our W2s. We both had a passion in wealth building. We both had a passion in real estate. And regardless of him leaving, we knew that we wanted to do something together. And we didn't want to do something small. We wanted to do something big. And that's one of the things that we've always had. We've had big visions and we've accomplished big things. And we're always striving to reach our full potential. So that really set us off into, all right. Well, look, we can't grow the short-term rentals here in Hawaii because of the challenges we're facing with regulations. So let's ultimately do what most people do when they want to scale up. And we started looking into and took a course on multifamily assets. So I'll kind of turn it over to there, do you, Mike? Yeah. So even though I have these couple of occasions rentals under my belt, I mean, I had a bigger vision. I wanted to continue growing. And personally, I find it extremely fulfilling. I think a lot of our listeners are probably going to identify that what's really great about real estate is it's tangible. It's something that you can see. You can feel it's fulfilling to go out there and purchase real estate and make improvements and recognize and realize the gains. I think there's something psychologically about that is that if you can go and do something and then there's a result that you can quantify and you can measure it, it keeps you're just wanting to work harder to do more of that. And so I wasn't just going to just be done and just hang out and be, you know, be bored. I mean, I was 30 years old and I was technically, you know, retired, but I wanted to grow. And so we went and we were so impressed with this. We went to multifamily. Well, we didn't go. It was a course that we took online. We live in Maui. So it's difficult to travel sometimes logistically. And we took this online course on the benefits of investing in multifamily apartments. And we're blown away with the potential because one of the biggest benefits of commercial real estate is the ability to force appreciation. And this is a concept that I was aware of, but I hadn't really dug into to fully understand the significance of having high cash flow for my vacation rentals was fantastic, right? But when I thought about selling these properties in the future, there really was not from a relative perspective, a huge amount that I could increase the value is basically, well, whatever the property is worth based on market conditions, comparable sales, so forth and so on. But this idea of being able to force appreciation with commercial real estate because commercial real estate is based on the income valuation. So you know, very, very basic here. If you're not familiar, there's something called cap rates that cap rates are a method for valuation, right? So a cap rate is the unleverage return of income divided by the price of an asset. Okay. So what does that mean? Basically, if a property produces income, then you can take whatever that income is and you can take the price point, you take the income divided by the price point and that's your cap rate. So basically the most simple terms, what a cap rate says is if using simple numbers, if you go and purchase a million dollar property and it makes $100,000 of net profit per year, the cap rate when you divide it is 10% or opposite. If it's a million dollar property and they say and it's at a 10% capitalization rate, that means that property is going to make $100,000. And this is what blew us away, right? So we're in this course, we're listening to this and they're talking about, well, look, if you go ahead and you raise the properties earning $100,000, bottom line net income and either by cutting expenses and being more efficient with the processes or raising revenue through advertising, marketing, what have you if you can increase revenue. But if you can increase the bottom line of that net income by in this example, from 100,000 to 150,000, that $50,000 increase with a 10% cap rate means that properties that worth $500,000 more. Now if I go and raise $50,000 more for a short term rental, it doesn't mean squat for the value of the property. It's based on what my neighbor's property is sell for. I could be doing $300,000 in revenue for my property and it doesn't matter, it's still going to be worth whatever the neighbor's property is, you know, the neighborhood is worth what the properties are in that neighborhood. And so this concept of forced appreciation, you can go buy these assets where you can make some improvements to the bottom line, whether you rehab them, you increase occupancy, do some subtle things and you can dramatically increase the value. We were blown away by. But the challenge we found was there weren't too many apartment buildings for us to look at purchasing here in the White Islands, the supply was very limited. So Nathan, back to you, why don't you walk them through the rest of our story? Yeah, so we were most comfortable. Yeah, hey, it was short term rentals weren't scalable, but we were pumped, we had this opportunity where we felt like, okay, we can go build wealth. It was not going to give me out of my my W2 that we we realize that there wasn't going to be enough cash flow because these multifamily assets, they don't deliver the amount of cash flow needed. But hey, we're second to that, we're going to go build wealth, it is what it is. Well, we'll just keep going. And so the first apartment building that we called on to look at as we looked up, because we wanted to look here in our backyard first. We weren't comfortable as new investors and multifamily, you know, flying it all the way to the mainland and trying to find something in Ohio or some of the different areas that they were using as examples. So in our backyard, there were a couple of apartment buildings that were for sale. And the first one that we called on, it actually went into contract. So we weren't able to look at it. But in that comments, it had made the comment that the property was part of the property was being run as a hostile. And we're like, huh? So when we started inquiring about what is this, what is this, this hostile, this can the real estate agent picked up on that that that peak or interest, the hostile part. And so he started sending us all of this information on what hostels were and Mike and I, the light bulb kind of went off and were like, well, time out. If there's an opportunity to purchase a commercial property that we could go and put in essence, transient vacation rentals or short term rental, is there, is it really possible for us to go and have the best of both worlds? Like could we go and leverage this thing where we go take it over and increase its value just like multifamily through bringing in more revenue, lowering expenses. Is this possible? And the reason that this was so important for us on Maui is, look, we could go and purchase a hotel. But I think the cheapest hotel that sold on Maui in the past 10 years is like $25 million. And so that wasn't approachable for us. So when we all of a sudden had the recognition that maybe there's an approachable way for us to go combine the best of both worlds that we could go leverage both cash flow and equity, we felt like we might be on to something and I'll turn it over to Mike. Yeah, I think that's an amazing point. We were looking for ways where we gain equity, but we were frustrated with the concept of having to wait years and years of having limited cash flow. And Nathan, you were going to be able to walk away from your W2 job. You wanted it out sooner. You saw what I had done and you said, hey, I want the same. How do we do this quickly? What is the fastest path to financial freedom? And sure, short term rentals, but it's missing the upside of the commercial real estate evaluation. So when you say best of both worlds, it's absolutely correct. Obviously here in Hawaii, the price points for hotels are significantly greater. But what we're observing now throughout the United States, that there's lots of opportunity in the boutique hotel space, whether that is hotels or in our case, hostels or experiential lodging, the principle is applied to all three of these similar asset types. They're all within the boutique hospitality asset class and we're just so bullish on this opportunity because the concept of being able to walk away from your W2 job quickly and gain financial freedom and have the tremendous upside down the road. Like you said, it is the best of both worlds. And in our case, what that means is, look, we took a property that was at a lot of different maintenance, was distressed. We bought the thing and only put down around $400,000 and we've got now about $4 million of equity that we have created within, I don't know, three years, right? So this is just an example, whether it's here in Hawaii or somewhere in the mainland, but what we're seeing is in our group, people in our network, people that we're networking with, that this is very common. This is not unheard of. And so when I look at multifamily and I look at church and rentals, I just feel like, oh my ass, this is it. This is the best of both worlds. This is the way to go. Yeah. Well, and if we even look at, because I kind of think of this sometimes, like people will say, well, why, why hostile or why not boutique hotel or why boutique hotel or why whatever hospitality asset it is. But what I've recognized in this journey is that what we're really about is we're looking at a specific asset and we're saying, what's its highest and best use. And I think for a lot of the listeners, that that have either invested in short term rentals, have considered a short term rental, that's why are they not looking at a single family long term rental? Why are they attracted to the short term rental? And I think the answer to that is because when they look at that asset that's sitting there and they're like, yeah, I could rent this long term, or I could rent this as a short term rental because ultimately, the longer that you rent something for, it's like you get the bulk discount, right? The longer that that rental is, the less per night it costs. - That's so good. - Yeah, right? But on the opposite side of it, the shortest amount of time that you rent something for the highest amount you can get for it. And so with a single family home, if you look at, well, what's the highest and best use for a single family home? Well, if it's in a high demand travel area, obviously the highest and best use for that is, man, if I can rent this thing by the night, day, that's gonna be the highest and best use. And then all of a sudden you have regulations because people start to recognize this, right? And everybody recognizes, I'm in a high demand area, I'm in a travel destination, and the single family home, I can buy it, and then the highest and best use I can get out of it is short term rental. And that's what we've seen occur. Is that as people have recognized this, that we've seen regulations, 'cause then it impacts communities and long-term rentals go away and it creates housing shortages and all of those things. So the government has to respond, they create regulations, and then now you're sitting there with an asset that maybe you purchased for a specific reason and you no longer can. But what we recognize is that that's another very attractive piece to scaling through boutique hotels, hostels, experiential lodging, is that what we look for is, hey, we can go and do this in properties, where it doesn't have that impact, it doesn't have that risk. So not only do we get the benefit, not only can we scale, but when people ask that, well, why the hospitality part, why did you go with hostile? When we looked at the buildings that we looked at, those buildings didn't have bathrooms, kitchenettes in every single room, right? The structure of that building had shared bathrooms, it had shared kitchens, it was already set up to be community-centric. And so when we look at that, we go, okay, well, what's the highest and best use of this building, right? It's currently zoned for hotel, but to turn it into a boutique hotel, there'd be a massive amount of cost in putting bathrooms in every room. You know, you have a boutique hotel, and people aren't really interested in sharing bathrooms, and but that this hostile model, all of a sudden we started going, wait a minute, when there are these building structures out there that are already set up for more of a community setting, the very highest and best use of that space, it's not to turn it into offices, it's not to go and turn it into some sort of long-term rental, the bottom line is if we can go in a high demand destination with this building asset type and turn it into short-term rental or transient vacation rental, we're gonna be able to lever the very highest and best use of that asset. And that's what we've found. And in doing that, obviously, we'll go into the operation side more as time goes on, but learning to say, hey, there's a ton of levers that we can go and hit here to do two things, bring in more revenue, optimize, and all of our efficiencies, what we've done is not only have we been able to increase cash flow very significantly, I left a position then shortly after we got started because of all the sudden the cash started rolling in, right? Now all of a sudden we have an asset, unlike a apartment building that never would have afforded me the ability to do that to receive extremely high cash flow. And as we're receiving that high cash flow, we're leveraging also enforcing the equity of the property as well. - Can we take into that a little bit? 'Cause I think I'm assuming that some of our listeners are probably going, okay, this all sounds well and good, but gosh, hotels are so expensive. I mean, I can just buy a home for relatively normal amount of money I can start running it out. And then I don't have this big overhead and this big upfront cost. And I just, I wanna explain that in our situation, we use our situation as an example. We bought this hotel, essentially what it is, for 800 grand, just over 800 grand, right? These deals are out there. This 800,000 dollar asset, we had to make some improvements to bring it to where it's at now and that cost some additional funds, but it wasn't an extraordinary amount of money. I mean, there's homes right now in California, there are probably averages over a million dollars just for a single family home there. And if you can go buy an income-producing asset, whether it's in Hawaii where we're very fortunate to live or somewhere in your own local area, it's happening all the time. It's not unfathomable to go out and buy something at a reasonable price. And in our situation, we bought this thing for 800 grand and it was a year and a half later, it was appraised for $5.1 million. And of course, that didn't happen by accident. It's not like we just turned them the lights, all of a sudden it was worth that much. We had to go and put strategy and technique and all these things that were happy to share with you in the subsequent podcast episodes. We're gonna get into all the nitty-gritty details of exactly how we did this. But an 800,000 dollar asset is really obtainable for a lot of people and it is, again, that my opinion the fastest way to financial freedom is through immediate cash flow which we obtained. You know, we're generating $40 to $50,000 a month in cash flow and then ultimately, the payoff down the road, whether that's five, 10, 15 years is that big equity. But right now, $5.1 million, this formula is replicable. It can be done and that's what works out about because of the scalability. We talked about this earlier with the short term rental, one of the challenges, it isn't as scalable. It's much more hard to operate at scale, independent individual rental homes. But once you figure out the formula, which again, we're gonna walk through and subsequent episodes to show you exactly how to do this, then you can just drop, you just method and this plan and these operations into, you know, multi-wastets throughout the country and operate them, even remotely. So from my observation, there is no better asset class than hospitality at this point in time. - Well, Mike, and you just ended that sentence with at this point in time. And I really want to highlight that. There's a time frame here that none of us had experienced before that's occurring. So some people will say, "Oh, well, you just got lucky." But the reality is, you know, they call it the silver tsunami. We have the baby boomers that are retiring. And so if we really look at these assets 'cause people are, are there any of these opportunities out there? Well, the reality is, yes, there are families that have been operating, you know, for the past 20 years, 25 years, 30 years, whatever it is, and now they're approaching the time and life for they're like, "Okay, look, it's getting extremely difficult "to keep up with technology and social media." And all of the things that exist in today's world that when they went and purchased their hospitality asset and started running it, that they never experienced before. The challenges that might be out there with different things, just that they didn't base, whether it's marketing, whether it's clientele, just, and they're done, they're ready. They're ready to enjoy life. And so there's these opportunities out there to create these win-win scenarios where these sellers that are done and ready to move on, and at the same time, they still want some income. They still want to have some, you know, some guaranteed cash flow that there's these opportunities where you can go out there and secure an asset for an unbelievable value, and don't even have to go to a bank to finance. And we'll go into the specific strategies of how we've done this and what others can do to duplicate it. But I think it's really important for people to understand the mindset of the abundant mindset, of really how much is out there, that there, this is a timing situation that's never occurred before where this transfer of wealth is occurring, and also not just transfer of wealth, but transfer of assets, and all of these assets that have gotten tired and have been operated in a very different way than you can operate them today, that there's just some abundant amount of opportunity out there. If you're willing to learn and to dig in, there's a path for freedom here that's pretty special. Yeah, I really liked the fact that you brought up to dollar financing is an opportunity specific to this asset class where there's a lot of opportunity, because if you look at a regular, single family at home, most people, you buy it from someone that's living in it, and maybe you convert it into a short-term rental or whatever, or it's just been a long-term buy and hold, but a hotel is a business. It's a business and a piece of real estate. And more often than not, someone that owns that business, they want to continue to have the steady cash flow, which means there's more likely an opportunity to purchase a hotel from a seller and utilize seller financing, which makes it a hell of a lot easier to go and secure than trying to go through a bank. Not to say that can't be done, but man, if this is your first or second or third deal and you're like, "Okay, I just need to get in the game and I need to build some credibility. It's a lot easier to secure financing from a seller than it would be going to a bank without that experience." But it seems like there's a lot of opportunity there, and our experience with about two properties, two hotels so far, in this case, Hostels and both of them were seller financed. And like Nathan said, it was a win-win. So there are some additional benefits. I think that's a good segue into pointing out that Nathan walked through like less regulation, but scalability, we talked about. Also, there's a heck of a less competition right now. So there is an abundance of opportunity in this time period right now. But if you look at some of the other asset classes, like multi-family, it's so cutthroat. There's so many people that are trying to fight over the same little scrap, seeing deal, particularly out of those lower priced assets that, to try to secure seller financing and try to find the right deal, you're just competing against so many other people while currently in this moment right now, at this time, this is, I won't say it's unknown, but it's relatively untapped and there's so much potential in this moment for Bucci-Coatels in that capacity. Yeah, I think it's an exciting time. I mean, I know that we're walking through our experience of, we've grown a portfolio valued at close to $30 million and we've had success. We've been awarded with some pretty cool hospitality awards. But in our journey, we're excited to learn. We're excited to go. Now, there's starting to be education out there. There's people that are starting to say, "Hey, I can see this opportunity and I want to go and capitalize on it." So for us, I think it's really exciting in this journey to be like, "Okay, well, we know, well, we know, but man, is it excited to go and look at those that are further along in their path, further along in their journey, that may have expertise in asset categories in hospitality that are outside of arms, that we can bring on the show, and that we can sit up here." Hey, T-Jess, this is what we want to know, and I'm sure the things that we want to know and that we want to learn along the way are going to be common threats with what others are going to want to learn as well. So we got a ton to share, but we also have a lot to learn, and that makes this moment so exciting to really start this journey where we're like, "All right, let's go and do this. We've got our vision, right? We've had the vision from the beginning. Hey, let's take a $400,000 down payment. Let's turn it into a $400 million company." So that vision has, we've never altered that vision has been there. We're on the path, but we're a long way from that $400 million, but we're excited to get there and to show the journey along the way. I know one more thing. It came to mind as we're sitting here talking, I'm thinking about this. We've been talking a lot about the financial benefits, this being the fastest path, the financial freedom, the potential long-term equity game, but I think it's worth also pointing out that there's a lot of, from an artistic perspective, there's a lot of creativity here in this asset class, whether it's hotels, hostels, landscape hotels or experiential lodging. There's just so much creativity that can be applied, where in other assets, it's pretty cut and dry. You have an apartment building, you have a long-term rental, you make it decent, you move along, you paint the fence every once in a while, and people living in it. That's great. But with hotels you get to do, you get to create an experience. You get to create these wow moments that people look forward to. They might not travel every day of the year, so it's a special moment. It could be a once a year trip that they get to enjoy. They come, and they stay at your place, and they enjoy this magical experience that you curated, that you created. I mean, from a passion perspective, there is something incredibly fulfilling about being able to take a space that otherwise doesn't serve its full potential. It doesn't utilize a space to its full capacity. You go in there and like an artist, you get to paint that picture however you want it to be, and enjoy it, and it's tangible, it's visual, and it's something that you can share with others that you can show people. It's just, in my opinion, it's a undervalued advantage that it's hard to quantify. It's not quantifiable from a financial perspective necessarily, but it is from personal fulfillment perspective. It's incredible. Yeah, I mean, just frankly, in the beginning, when I would go on to our Instagram page, the How's the Oscars Instagram page, I mean, I literally I literally would get tears because it was like seeing that experience that we were providing and the impact that we were having on the lives of our guests was like, it's almost difficult. It's number one, it's difficult to describe, but it's just it's tough to put into words how fulfilling it is to provide these experiences. Yes, this is an asset and it's a building and we're talking about getting its highest and best used financially, but on the other side of that, it's what it's delivering and why someone's willing to pay that because what we're really doing is we're serving the most important time in their life that it really is. It's their time away from the monotony of what they do and their experiences that they're gaining out in the world are the most valuable things to them and and we get to take that and we get to shape that and we get to go dig in and provide that. Sometimes it's overwhelming to me how freaking cool this journey is and that our path has ended up investing in hospitality is it's really fulfilling. Cool. Anything else before we wrap this up? No, let's go. All right, so listen, in closing, if you're tired of choosing between cash flow or equity gains, it's, you know, think differently. Boutique hotels give you the best of both worlds. I encourage you to explore this investment strategy further. It's worked for us. It can work for you too. So if you found this episode helpful, subscribe to our show. Continue to follow along with us for more insights like this and please share it with someone who needs to hear it. Aloha. (dramatic music)