EPISODES
Episode 43.
Adam Chaudhary, President of FundingShield LLC
Fraud, fraud, fraud. It is a constant battle in the real estate world, especially. Why are fraud schemes some of the scariest but easiest ways to lose every penny in a transaction? But how do we combat it? Listen and find out. I’m Dalton Elliott. This is the real estate of things. You’re listening to the real estate of things podcast Adam chowdery. Thank you for joining me today. Good sir, how’s it called? Dalton, thank you so much for having me on the show. Absolutely well, I meant to ask you this beforehand. Where are you based? Out of where you located? I am in Newport Beach, California, so southern California, loving it, loving it we’ve been. We had a dry spell. We’re in Greenville, South Carolina. We want to have Lima one capital headquarters. Tripping over my words. Today I’m and we’ve had like three weeks, four weeks, maybe even a virtually no rain. It’s been over a hundred degrees most days, just insufferable, and now we have like a week of scattered thunderstorms and rain coming in. So you don’t him and hall about the weather to you because you don’t know anything other than spectacular weather out there. Yeah, we get rain out here. People get into car accidents they don’t know how to drive it instant. I want to hear no more. I want to hear no more. But yeah, you Um, you’re, you’re, you’re. You have a pretty interesting firm that you run, your president of Funding Shield. We have a relationship with you. One capital and, for the audience, very interesting firm. So, at a high level, tell me what you do. Yeah, absolutely. So we focus on kind of risk and fraud in the broader real estate and mortgage sector, but the specific area of risk and fraud that we’re focused on is surrounding wire and title fraud.
So payments, risk in terms of those payments that go out in very sizeable numbers, as well as the fact that there’s a process in terms of how you engage with title, what coverage and recourse you expect to have with with title partners, settlement partners, both from the issues of title side, the title insurance side, as well as a disbursement and kind of the settlement side. So we’re helping lenders make sure they’re working with Vali vallid parties or streamlining processes, kind of verifying data earlier on in the life cycle, pre closed into closing and also providing kind of diligence and verification services, kind of being your eyes and ears and and also figured out some pretty cool ways to do some kind of financial structure and, given our backgrounds of the principles here, to provide some warranties and additional recourse that, you know, firms like lemo one and investors and warehouse partners and funders love. Yeah, it is, uh, that’s just like the worst fear of a lender really is like a bad actor who can cause kind of total loss on something, because we do risk like our our chief job as a lender, I see is risk mitigation. Like, yes, we want to lend the money out, but that’s not that that’s secondary to mitigating risk. How do we make sure we know that whenever we put a dollar out the door, that’s gonna come back home to us? And if you’re if you’re a good actor in the lending space, you don’t want to take back properties. We’re not a property management company. We don’t want to manage projects all over the country like we genuinely want every single deal. If we could have a zero percent default rate, we would be spectacularly happy. You know, just by virtue of doing hundreds of millions of dollars a month in volume, you don’t have a zero percent default right, but whenever you do have something to fault, you have some kind of collateral to take back and do something with. But in the case of UH wire fraud, you mentioned, you could a bad actor, attorneys like all different kinds of uh as. I mentioned, I think I used this earlier, like barbarians the gate. So talk to me about like, like, like what are some of these barbarians at the gate that you’re seeing right now in the space? Yeah, so I think the you know,…
…broadly, Um, you know kind of thinking about this business was designed Um with Ike Suri, or CEO, and myself. Um, we have different backgrounds and the way we’ve built the product kind of explains the risk that we’re managing. That I can get right into kind of what what that risk is that we’re seeing today versus when we launched a company years ago. But I x background as a technologist. He’s launched companies Um from his you know that the great immigrant story coming from India, first client as technologist was, you know, Goldman sacks and candor, Frid Serald, launching training floor systems in New York and London and just an incredibly intelligent guy. Um, always thinking about data security, transmission of data, Um for a specific client use case, and so that brought him all the way up through the networking topology from routers, switches to fiber optics, et Cetera, but always thinking about how secure of the data. So industries like airline ticketing to bark surveillance, like in the area airline surveillance, satellite communication, Um for the cast networks. Right. He worked on those projects Um and brings that acumen of how to take highly regulated, highly sensitive private data that cannot be altered, touched, manipulated because it’s highly sensitive, and making sure it works for a workflow. All right, and that’s kind of what we’re doing in the mortgage space as it pertains to sanitizing data, cleansing data. And I kind of come from it from a different perspective. I came back, I came from the wall Wall Street structure, financide so or the companies like greenpoint credit, Goldman Sachs, grant, edge capital, rBS, and then left that to join night about eight years ago and nine years ago now, Um, to launch private investments and then Um raised my hand, Um, and with his UH guidance as an owner operator, went from being a banker or financier to really wanted to become an operator, which is a pretty big shift, um, but luckily to say we’re here today excited to be a successful company. But part of that journey was coming to companies like yourself, Um, and going to lenders and saying what are your a pain points? When you’re dealing with settlement…
…agents and closing agents and in the residential world it’s a little bit different than what is in your world. So you go to like a guaranteed rate or a quicken or a Bank of America, they may be interfacing with tens of thousands of unique relationships of settlement agents in the Europe they’re also regulated a lot differently than you are. So some of the motivations and the residential side of the business are more around I need in diligencies, third party service providers, because the cfpb tells me I have to, in the O C C, in the Fed, depending on how you’re regulated, tells me I have to beyond that. From a risk perspective, that’s where the overlap is between resie regulated and kind of the world and private lending markets you guys operated, which is, I guess the broader term is how we bucket kind of small bell, the bridge, the fixed flip Um and kind of the value add lending um proposition that you know, firms like yourself or are kind of bringing to the table. so that interception is around. How do I make sure that when I send money out it’s putting the right party, that there’s actually be title, I’m sure, backing M to make sure that I a you know, kind of coverage from a title insure and beyond that, in a world where there’s about eighty thousand parties that can provide these services across the country, between attorneys, settlement agents, title agents, escrow companies, how to make sure that they’re actually approved, verified, validated and good standing and they added. Then you kind of challenge that maybe a wholesale business, the residential sector and your business as a whole has is that many times your borrowers are sophisticated real estate participants. They have relationships with these folks that might be sourcing properties from these folks. The seller might be driving the settlement and titled Parties. Right, you really don’t have as much control of that kind of independent third party settlement party that’s supposed to sit there and say party, a party, B okay, we’re gonna disclosing. Yeah, they’re still going to have their their opportunity. You know, their responsibilities to act in a prudent in in in a manner, depending on the type of closing. Um, they have to act as a FIDUCIARIA, wherever the case may be. But, long story short, Um, you’re taking risk that the execution of your closing and…
…options are carried out and fulfilled by that closing agent. Now there is sort of like any other organization. Are they equipped to handle the file order and load that they had? That was a big issue in the refi boom hit. A lot of the lenders in your space are saying I cannot get my loans closed because everyone is so busy dealing with you know, the fifty five refi APPs that came in last night that the title file orders is getting delayed, delayed, delayed to all the way through to. Do they have the right sort of staff working on this stuff? Three challenges all organizations are dealing with. Can I hire the right people right and can I afford to hire those right people? Um. So there’s all sorts of issues that are basically more operating risks, and then we’re gonna talk a little bit about kind of the cybersecurity risk, which is a new big one, which is a business email compromise, the hacking, the fishing, the impersonations, the Um the bank accounts site of these settlement agents that are getting hacked into. We had a situation last week with an attorney. We are the party that told him and identify that his email server and communication wasn’t from him. He had no control of it. Hid a bunch of emails going everywhere as a law firm partner and the Escrow Officer confirming and verifying a bank account with their phone number. Their phone systems got taken over. Long story short, anyone who’s just doing the pickup phone call, check the phone wiring instructions and whatnot got defrauded. Our clients didn’t loses a penny, but we know that that’s gonna be a new fraud that’s gonna get reported the market or working with the FBI and other regulator regulatory agencies right now, as well as criminally just seas to pursue this, but I’m jumping around a lot. But the reason I’m kind of trying to paint the picture is at the end of the day there’s a process that lemo one has to follow, just like every other lender. They have to make sure that they’re working with bona fide, good standing parties, they’re sending one of the right place, that the documentation you’re actually using to close a loan file is accurate, and that’s so important in a business where the loan balances are very large, as well as the parties, including the broker, the borrower, the seller. They’re all sophisticated real estate parties. It’s not like the residential business, so it’s even higher risk profile in many cases…
…in the residential business. Yeah, to me, the I like how you bifurcate at the operator side of the fans versus cybersecurity. I think that’s a really good way to bifurcate it. And the I’m yeah, both of them have that total loss potential Um. The operator one is has always been a little in a way. I guess I get a little more of a stomach turn when I hear that, although the cyber one is broader and bigger. I guess there’s a more personal flair to the operator one, like you’ve been communicating back and forth with these people and then you find out at some point that you have the Oh no moment of like something’s not right here and UH yeah, I’ve been party to some of those transactions and it is just the absolute worst. And you know that. you know everybody, every lender of any size is ensured right for things like this, but that, like getting acclaim approved for something like that, takes of very long time if it ever happens. And sometimes, like you said, that the sums of money are large. The average long amount in this space for most lenders a few hundred thousand just nationwide broadly. You know you go to California or other markets and it’s gonna be higher, but you’re talking into the six figures for the average transaction size. So it’s it’s horribly scary. So which which road do we want to go down right now? Do you want to talk about the cyber side of the fence a little bit? I think let’s talk about the operating side, because I think a lot of times, Um Um, the biggest challenges for for kind of things that we expect to see and maybe go there, and then we can give the cyber, cyber route, because I think I talked about the broader digitization of the overall real estate market right. But on the on the kind of on the piece of kind of the non cyber related risks, it’s really about execution of order. It’s about following through and making sure things are registered and filed properly Um and beyond that it’s also making sure that the transaction data lines up. And I know this sounds crazy,…
…it when I was in Wall Street and I was buying whole loans and we were having to figure out how to price these loans. I would ask some basic questions, right and everyone said, oh, don’t worry, there’s a TPR third party review on these loans. It’s great. And I would say, how are these loans? How is the title on these loans? Who did the title policies? They’re like, why do you care? First Americans on it. I said, I love first American. They’re a great company, but all these individual agents procure these title policies and some of them were still yet to kind of record. So I’m taking a tremendous amount of risk on the recording risk, on the execution risk of that closing instruction by that closing agent, and so I think that’s where I think that this space has gotten it right. The residential side kind of says, oh, I have some documentation in a file, I’m fine, I have a closing protection letter, it’s in the file, I’m covered. We asked, because I looked at it. No. Then we check to see if the typical altar forms of coverage, which alter does a great job of making sure that there’s some best practices around what should be in place in terms of coverage, but there is no policing that Alta is doing of its agents in terms of are they the right agent? Are they even approved to issue that policy? Is Somebody crossing state lines or jurisdictions or issue your paper that’s really not backed by title end share? And then whose risk is ultimately is that? And at the end of the day, living the world we live in, postwo thousand and eight, it’s the lenders risk, no one. There’s not a court in the world that’s gonna say you, as an is a sophisticated lender who has knowledge as to what is required to commit, you know, conduct a close should understand their requirements of title because it’s so important as it’s part your underwriting, and unfortunately that’s where the gap exists. A lot of times lenders are very good at lending. They may have a few underwriters understand title because they’ve been around the block enough. But you can’t always put this onus, on your underwriters, especially for a group like lemo one or others that are growing, scaling and trying to basically find the most optimal process to get the right skills in terms of skill sets from your F T S, combination of technology…
…that comes on top of that to augment that, to fulfill and fill those skills gaps so that you can really get that loan through the process as fast as possible. Because why are you doing this at the close? We want to keep that window as short as possible and give as much certainty to our clients that, a, we’re going to give them a good product, be, we’re going to protect them from theirselves in many cases and, three, we’re gonna protect us, as well as our investors and our partners, to make sure that we have the right reputation as an industry. So these, these you know, events don’t cause issues, are ripple effects in terms of reputation. Yeah, it’s always gonna hear like a partners space focus on kind of an aligned interest, which is speed, certainty of execution and just quality deals. Like you and I were chatting I think a little bit before this, and you know, we you that’s at the forefront. If we could have no foreclosure or nothing like that, solid let’s just just lend on good projects and, like you said, save the client right in a lot of cases. Uh, that’s a tough thing to accept. All right, but at the end of the day it’s like we only do deals that we believe are going to pay off. Just circular back to, you know, where we’re not a we’re not looking to aggregate a bunch of real estate here, but on the so so would you say that, you know, has there been in the last few years of materials swinging away from the operating bad actors side over to the cyber side, or is it kind of a continuing the same balance? Yeah, I think that the biggest trend that we see the title spaces Um. There’s a lot of consolidation taking place within the organizations right. So a lot of these larger national title platforms are coming in. There’s also a move for some of the more tech driven, uh you know, kind of underwriters and kind of tech place players, and there’s also some great new providers out there like spruce and and others. I’m sure you guys use our senior clothings that I’ve really done a good job of kind of balance sinking…
…technology, building really good processes to help execute files better. But I think the last couple of years it’s still a pretty good mix of when the big frauds happen. Um, it’s a lot of times there’s there’s a collusion amongst the fraud scheme. There’s elements of cyber based fraud in that Um, but a lot of times it’s really insurance fraud. Um, I think a lot of US forget title is nothing without the insurance that backs it right. It’s kind of what greases the wheels and makes us feel comfortable, because a typical title agent or Law Firm isn’t gonna have millions of dollars of capital lyning around there. Mostly LLCs are distributing like any other LLC is two partners at the end of the year. So from effective capital perspective, all they really have to fall back on is really the you know, insurance policies and then whatever other personal assets that, you know, an operator may have. They want to save their reputation and name. Now in a fraud event, they’re clearly not looking to save their reputation and name. They’re looking to defraud somebody. Or they’ve borrowed against client funds. That’s another one that we see a lot, as the AISLETA accout and like the big ones that you guys read about or hear about every couple, a couple of five or six years. It’s basically the Alta account or escrow account is being used as a Ponzi scheme. Right they’re borrowing against it. It could have started out as hey, I’m covering payroll, that, it’s I’m covering my car payment, that I’m covering my x Y Z, you know extra girlfriend’s car payment or whatever the hell it is, and then it gets out of hand and then what they start doing is they start delaying closing, issuing more title follow orders, sitting on more funds to cover that short balance and the hopes that they can earn back with their income to pay up and cover that short balance and unfortunately, like most ponzi schemes, by the time you figure out that, hey, there’s a problem, you can’t really fix it, and so that’s where a lot of those risks reside, is that they’re borrowing against their client funds, which would they should never be doing. Um. But I do want to reiterate something. The vast majority, I have to say, of the title companies that we deal with, at the end of the day, once we come in and kind of find out that there might be some data inconsistencies, like…
…stancing problems, data and accuracy, they want to do the right thing, Um, and they want to get it corrected. That being said, there’s still that one percent net out there that is kind of trying to bend the rules, do what they need to do, move funds where they need to to get things through the door, either because it’s a client facilitation thing or it’s an income issue or it’s a squeeze unstaffing, Um. And there’s things that we do to help them avoid that, as well as help work with the title ensurers. To say it like look, this closing agent in Texas is doing a ton of business, is originally a ton of Business Oklahoma first American. You might want to consider, you know, granting them a license if they qualify in the state of Oklahoma, they meet all the other qualifications that we see. Right. So why don’t you do it? All right, and so that’s a sort of kind of dialogue we’re having, because about thirty percent of the transactions we touch, and we published this data with housing wire, Reuters Bloomberg was about thirty six percent in the last quarter, have at least one element of data and accuracy, the wrong bank account, of bank account for an unaffiliated party to the closing being used all the way through to transactions. Five percent of transactions were not in the system of a title insure at the time of close. That is not acceptable. That should never be happening. That means that title commitment, you receive the CPL the wire, any of those other title dockens are not authorized, registered and in the system of a title insured at the time of clothes. That is in some states insurance fraud. It’s a criminal offense. In other states it’s like, okay, this isn’t good, but we’re not gonna, you know, kind of dig any charges against anyone. What we do here at funding shields. We say, guys, this has to be in the system of the title ensured. We have to be able to independently verified validate that that transaction exists Um in terms of the actual title follower. So we’re taking kind of meat and potatoes, kind of credit style review processes, putting our automation on them, as well as using our ai to help kind of figure out where are the compared to our existing data, which is based on about fifty and ninety…
…billion of transactions per month that are going through US every month. So we’ve got a very, very rich amount of data, probably the largest data seting in the industry pertaining to Selimin agents out there today. Yeah, you’ve you’ve sufficiently horrified me with your statistics here, sort of starting to start to get a little hot and here. You don’t have to worry about this. We’re here to partner with ye all as well. Who I was stressed for a second, but now all is well in the world. So now that you’ve horrified me from the operating side of the fence, let’s go into the cyber side. With a few minutes left and uh yeah, just unpack that Pandora’s box for me. We’ve, we’ve yeah, I mean that’s a constant battle for us. We run into Um, I don’t know, I don’t know what the the proper technical term is, but it was like attempted attacks, attacks like that’s that is a or frequent occurrence. Uh, then I would have guessed if I, you know, wasn’t at of financial firm. Uh. So. So, yeah, well, how do you how in the world you go about combating that, other than, you know, just trying to lock down everything as much as you can, like. Yeah, so there’s got a couple of buckets of of why cyber criminals do what they do, right, Um, and then we can talk about the industries they hit. So one is they kind of want to cause disruption, right, for political reasons or to make a message or to show that there’s, you know, create lack of trust in a system, company or a service. And typically those are going after like the industrial sector, the food sector, the Um, the network, right, like the actual like grid, power, grid, right, they’re trying to attack those sort of things to kind of show that, you know, you know, country x is trying to show that country wise regime is not capable of providing basic infrastructure and services. Right and have a political message associated to it, or they’re just trying to rehab it. And then, beyond that, you’ve got folks that are trying to extract data, right, and they’re trying to extract the data because they can…
…take that data and package it Um for financial gain. And that’s still a bad cybercriminal, but they’re kind of a step remove. They’re kind of like packaging bunch bunch of data, and a lot of times a lot of data that people are opting to share. Um. So they’re taking data that people are opting to share to then use that data that they’ve evaluated to thou have a better digital persona, to be able to get the information that’s private that you may have out in cyberspace, like your credit card information and other sorts of data and social security, tax transcans, right. They’re trying to get all that. So they’re they’re they’re bad, but they’re not as bad as a last bucket, which is a guy that are going right for the money, trying to steal your money, because they’re just there to to steal a dollar. Now, if I’m the US government, I’m scared about this, this guy over here that’s trying to steal money, but I’m a much more scared about the guy that’s trying to hack into our nuclear defense system, of course, for obvious reasons. So a lot of those sort of complaints go to the FBI. The reason the FBI deals with it is because they have field office is to at the country. They deal with financial crimes. It’s part of their workforce. They have set up a an entity called the Internet Crime Center. I see three, so you guys should, everyone should look at the I C three we can put in the notes after this. It’s something everyone should bookmark. And just you know my parents, I tell them about it right, God bless her soulder. They’re older, they’re retired. I tell them like look, go on there once a month to see what what are the sort of attacks they’re taking place, because a lot of attacks elder there’s elder abuse, there’s stuff that attacks the real estate sector and the biggest part of what’s going on in kind of the real estate settlement sector. Why is it’s so attractive a the number of recurring transactions and to the size and quantum of the dollars that are going through those transactions. So if I’m a criminal and I can steal a bunch of credit card data. We’ve all dealt with this. The first charge is ten cents, the second charge is a dollar, the third charge is fifty dollars and if you don’t catch it, they try to take a thousand. And then you want, and they’re doing this across hundreds, if not thousands of accounts, of compromise data to figure out who they can get to and they buy that data on the dark web and Yada, Yada, Yada. The cyber criminal that’s attacking a real estate transaction is watching, monitoring, hacking into email communications systems, getting past…
…your firewalls and sitting patiently. And a lot of times at point of entry is usually the borrower, an attorney or a settlement agent who’s on like a Google or Yeaho mail. Still, about thirty percent of the ones you see out there still don’t have a proper enterprise email solution. I don’t, you know, I just don’t get it. Don’t start me on that one UM. And then beyond that the other week, point of entry is this thing right here, as well as a guy that logs into his work account at a starbucks on a public wifi without a VPN, where all financial services by now get your technology team to give you the right credentials to securely access anything sensitive. You’re touching any applications, the yellows, your bank account, logging into your banking portal, you should be going through certain levels of data security. This is like a little bit away from our subject, so I’ll leave that for another guest or another session where we can bring in someone to talk about kind of how to secure your devices and your your your traffic. But that’s a point of entry. Once they know that the transaction is taking place, they then trying to figure out what are the weak points I can attack in this transaction? Is My best bet going after the bar because there’s a down payment going into residential transaction or, you know, in my best bet trying to intercept communication between a lender and a settlement company by hacking into the settlement company and setting out artificial documentation and data. And I may not even have to hack into the settlement company. I can impersonate them, set up a fake website, send wire instructions and a phone number for a phone call back. That’s the big one that we see right now is that the impersonation, which is a combination of fishing, kind of digital kind of critic and digital persona Um and kind of identity fraud. And then, on top of that it’s also business email compromise, right, because a lot of times they’re also hacking into the legitimate email system. So there’s it’s not just one type of cyber attack that’s taking place, it’s numerous and it’s very coordinated around specific transactions and that’s what we see and we see it all the time. Our clients see it all the time, but uckly for for them and for us,…
…we have workflows that we go through and procedures that we go through, including requirement around source data. We don’t take self attested data from anyone, and that’s kind of not the zero trust principle, which is another topic that’s kind of big out there. It’s very hard to operate that zero trust environment. But it’s around who is providing these representations and who can back them, and ultimately we’ve been able to be a party that because of our workflow, our independent nature of our data, we can provide warranties to our clients to back what we do, and that’s why clients likely but one like us, because we are truly party pursue in this risk. It’s a specific risk, but we back it right up to five million dollars per transaction. Yeah, that’s uh, yeah, all the more horrified at them. But again, we’re good because we got you every day. Is Good. I think you know, the world has tons of risks, right, like you know, like I remember one of my first jobs was working in insurance banking and I like met some these insurance and writers and they can walk down the street and they’re like, they’re like look, oh, don’t walk here, right. You know your New York City. Don’t walk over the medal grade, right, like you fall it. I like, at some point you gotta live your life. But I think there’s certain prudent actions when you’re running a financial operation you have to take, and most lenders today have pretty sophisticated Um enterprise risk frameworks and I think a lot of the emerging players in your space. We work with a lot of the investors too in the space that are buying an aggregate in the loans and they often have some of the smaller originators come to us or guys that are starting out that sell to them, because they may be for formulating some of those best practices. This is one of those underbelly risks that’s kind of hard to find the right skill sets in the right processes to manage. So we tend to have clients in this space that are just starting out, you know, doing their first loan, all the way through folks like yourself for, you know, seven, eight years into, you know, to this business, which kind of makes you one of the more mature players. Um as well as guys can securities and and have a shelf and we’re written into the circuitization guideline. So we’re we think about this…
…stuff the way you guys think about it, which is how do I demonstrate a controls taking place? How do I clean up the data? How do I make my operations and back office team more efficient, because that’s the only reason Lima one uses us is because we help lower your operating cost and then how do I make better quality data go to the closing? So I’m not dealing with, you know, messed up documentation post clothes, because that’s another piece of what we do too, is we’re getting things right earlier. You’re not dealing with these trailing Docs because that’s expensive for all parties. And Yeah, very, very true I have one, uh, if I could switch gears for a second, one completely off topic question. You have some baseball caps behind you. It’s very confusing. It’s so confusing. I’m a Yankees fans, so you know, no harm, no foult, but you have you have Boston Red Sox. You know the angels. What’s what’s going on back there? So I’m a Boston I’m a Boston guy and through the cheapest way to watch the Boston red boxes. That the healthy no, I have a lot of respect for it. Tony, I think he’s great. Um, he’s right down the street and you know I technically go watch the series when the red sox coming to town, UM, every year. But you have a Boston guy, so you know. For All you New Yorkers, please don’t hate on me. Um, I did live in New York about ten years. York in London for about ten years. So I know I missed the old Yankee Stadium. Um, I’m sure you do too, Um, but you know, it’s always fun to go to the home run Derby Stadium, the new Yankee stadium for the west of the park. So yeah, nothing better than away. Frank Man, I’m gonna tell you that this is, this is, this is going all the rails quickly. You know, I was I was a wee boy, but I went to my first Yankees game was Roger Clemens is win and it was also the last year at the old Yankee Stadium. Uh, and been to the new one a few times and I love everything about the new one at stuff, the fact that…
…they like quadrupled prices whenever they they built a new one. And like you, I’m in Greenville, South Carolina, the braves, or two and a half hours away. Uh. So that’s the that’s the close highly economical major league baseball viewing, as opposed to UH plopping down a g for UH solid seat, Legend seats at Yankee State. Absolutely, plus the new price of tickets to fly up there. It’s just gutting crazy. Yes, flights that are insane. I went down to so we go to I am in east every year, which SR conference, and you know, I’ve been going every year I’ve been here. I think where First Conference was in twenty sixteen. First Time we did it made and like clockwork, like four or four fifty Um to get out and back and it was close to double that just going from South Carolina to South Beach and yeah, flight prices are insane across the board. Some Um, had a friend who went out to Irvine, California and it was four figures for a main cabin ticket. Yeah, that’s what is. That’s the world we live in. So I think it’s gonna Cause more people to attend these conferences because it’s just harder to rationalize one off sales trips. You know, of course we’re pretty key accounts and whatnot. It’s different, but yeah, we we see the same thing. We’re kind of like going through budgets and forecasting and how do we want to travel and our sales to work? So we’ll be at the IBAN and we’ll be at the western secondary we’re sponsors here for on the Rezzy side and then, Um, the sea reft, the C Abcraf Vegas is still relatively cheap. They I think they’ve factored in the cost to fly there. Um, so they’re trying to make the rooms cheaper. So I think Vegas is going to see a lot more conferences pick up. So we’ll be at the California the C NBA c Ref Conference as well for their commercial lending side too. Yeah, alright, my friend, I can’t thank you enough for carving out some time you. You horrified me and then reminded me that we’re completely safe. So, uh, you know, I’m a roller coaster of emotions during this podcast,…
…but I learned a ton about Um kind of barbarians at gate and how we beat them back, and thank you for all that you and your firm are doing to combat the bad actors out there. Thank you and, of course, thanks for Your Business and taking the time with me here and uh, look forward to chatting with you again and having the future absolutely. Thanks again, Adam, and thanks to everybody for listening. Take care. Are you a real estate investor looking for the right lender that can finance all your deals and help you scale? Lima one capital has the best suite of loan products in the industry, Barnet. Whether that’s fix and flips, fix and holds, building new construction or buying rental properties, they have incredible financing solutions for it all. A reliable, comment sense lender is one of the most important parts of your investment team, and that’s exactly what you get with Lima one. Let Lima one capital show you how they’ve helped thousands of real estate investor scale and increase their wealth. CHECK OUT LIMA ONE DOT COM or call eight hundred to five nine zero, five nine five to speak with a consultant and preparation for your next project. Thank you for joining us today on the real estate of things podcast. Subscribe and tune in weekly for new content from the industry’s best while we continue to unpack the nuances of this dynamic market. Follow US across social media for additional insights and analysis on the topics covered in each episode, and remember to rate, review and share the show.
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