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Today's guest is TJ Kosen.
TJ has been in Real Estate since 2006, first cutting his teeth before the crash with 200+ multi-family units in Tennessee. He has done deals in Texas, California and Tennessee.
Show Description:
In this podcast episode, TJ shares his experience in the real estate industry and how he has successfully scaled his business in the distressed residential space. TJ discusses his strategies for beating the competition, which include understanding the motivations of distressed sellers and offering tailored solutions. He emphasizes the importance of treating the single-family business like a commercial operation and hiring specialized individuals. TJ also talks about the balancing act between motivation and urgency when dealing with distressed sellers and how his company focuses on understanding the seller's needs to provide the best offer. He explains how his company sets itself apart by focusing on margin rather than volume and crafting solutions that address the seller's underlying problems. TJ also discusses the challenges of systemizing projects in the real estate business and the need to build a fund for sustainability and cash flow. He predicts an increase in distressed residential inventory and shares his confidence in their competitive advantage.
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Intro [00:00:00]
Scaling a residential real estate business [00:01:53]
Negotiating with distressed sellers [00:07:32]
The offer is more than just money [00:10:53]
Outsourcing and specialization in business [00:13:01]
Challenges in systemizing property projects [00:15:38]
The forecast on distressed residential inventory [00:20:42]
Evaluation of dispo strategies [00:22:15]
Closing [00:23:39]
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Connect with TJ:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tkosen
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tjkosen/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kosentrade
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tj-kosen-a944382b/
Web: http://www.tjkosen.com/
Connect with Sam:
I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HowtoscaleCRE/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samwilsonhowtoscalecre/
Email me → [email protected]
SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE A RATING. Listen to How To Scale Commercial Real Estate Investing with Sam Wilson
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-scale-commercial-real-estate/id1539979234
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4m0NWYzSvznEIjRBFtCgEL?si=e10d8e039b99475f
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Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below:
TJ Kosen (00:00:00) - We often beat our competition by 30 to. I think our record in the past two months is $60,000 below our our competitor's offers by discussing this with the seller. And so you're not dealing with an uneducated seller, you're dealing with a seller that isn't served by a higher offer because they're not actually solving the fundamental problem. Whereas most people, you know, 80% minus repairs, we're like, well, let's let's see what the seller actually wants and let's hit it from the other direction instead.
Sam Wilson (00:00:23) - Welcome to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we'll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big. DJ has been investing in real estate since 2006, first cutting his teeth before the crash with a 200 unit plus multifamily property in Tennessee. He has done deals in Texas, California, Tennessee, TJ. Welcome to the show.
TJ Kosen (00:00:49) - Hey, thanks for having me on, Sam. I'm excited to share some insight.
Sam Wilson (00:00:52) - Absolutely. The pleasure is mine.
Sam Wilson (00:00:54) - There are three questions to ask every guest who comes on the show in 90s or less. Can you tell me, where did you start? Where are you now and how did you get there?
TJ Kosen (00:01:02) - 90s are lost. I don't know about that. I'm from San Diego. My first deal was 112 units in your hometown, Memphis, Tennessee. It was a lot of fun. 2006, Let's see where I started, where I went to and where I am now. In Dallas, Texas, we move a high volume of distressed, mostly single family direct seller residential properties in our North Texas market, also in Houston, some in Tennessee and some in Florida. Right now we're doing some marketing down there. We have a pretty good sized team and we really specialize on the direct to seller marketing and we specialize in the optimizing our exit strategy based on the fundamentals of both seller's requirements and the deals specifically.
Sam Wilson (00:01:40) - Okay. I'm excited here to dig in today. I know this show, of course, is a commercial real estate show, but I think any time you can take a business like what you're doing, you've figured out how to scale it.
Sam Wilson (00:01:53) - I would say that what you're doing is probably more complex than buying a 200 unit multifamily. You know, say a B class multifamily property in Dallas. I would rather I would think it would have fewer moving parts than what it is that you're doing. Would you agree with that or not?
TJ Kosen (00:02:08) - Oh, yeah. One of my biggest hurdles really from transitioning from multifamily in the in the crash back in the day to more single family was how much more specialized and individualized the product had to be at least on a like a 1 to 1 basis. So the way that I kind of overcame that fundamental issue with the business model is treating the single family business more like a commercial kind of operation where now we're we're hiring specialized people to do specialized tasks, same as you do in multifamily. You're going to hire, you know, a manager to do a specific thing. You're going to hire a maintenance guy to do a specific thing or whatever it is. So we did the same basically the same type of model, the same type of mindset with residential distressed stuff even down to rehab.
TJ Kosen (00:02:47) - So I said we optimize our exit strategy based on the property, but if we're doing, for example, a renovation, we try to keep the renovation very simplistic in terms of we're doing the same thing over and over and over again as a cookie cutter type model. And again, from the commercial perspective, we even looked at the loans, the loans, the debt we get is very much commercial based, you know, debt service or hard money, depending on the type of loan. So it is fundamentally a commercial mindset, I think, for a residential type of business or type of product.
Sam Wilson (00:03:17) - Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, you correct a lot of things here because I know I know I've got some flaws in my thinking. Probably more than.
TJ Kosen (00:03:26) - That. You might be smarter than me.
Sam Wilson (00:03:27) - I don't know. Probably more than we have time here for you to solve, but maybe specifically about your business. You're in the distressed residential space. Deal flow, I would imagine, has become constrained, especially in the last five or so years.
Sam Wilson (00:03:43) - True.
TJ Kosen (00:03:47) - False, but only if you're better than the competition. And fortunately, there's a lot of competition, so it's easy to be better than a lot of them. And what I mean by that is you have to treat it like a business, really, where if you're going to do a volume, you have to treat the fundamental business is the lead generation and the negotiations on the front end to generate a top of the funnel volume sufficient enough to keep the business operational. Right. From a strictly sales perspective, if you're trading a new sales guy in roofing, we have a roofing company, for example, or, you know, loan officer back in the day is where I started like way back in 2005. You're always training the sales guy, like always be originating, always be originating because you have to have the deal. I was like, Oh, I had a great month. I could coast Well, yeah, but you know, you burn through that really quick. And as you scale up in a business, it actually becomes easier after you hit probably a certain threshold of deal flow.
TJ Kosen (00:04:37) - Maybe cash flow management becomes more difficult. But in terms of like consistency of outcome, it becomes easier to actually keep a consistent pipeline of deals going because now there's so much stuff going on that, okay, if something goes south, it's not that big a deal because you got ten more things that are going like not South. And that's that's how we've been able to overcome it. We focus on lead gen, we focus on negotiation on the acquisition side and then everything else. I don't want to say it works that self out because actually that's fundamentally my problem. I'm the, I'm the I'm the problem solving department. So I actually don't generate the revenue. I make sure we cover our tail on the back end. But that's that's what we've been able to overcome that.
Sam Wilson (00:05:14) - Got it. That's really interesting. What would you say when looking at the. When looking at the distressed seller types, are there any themes to it that you're seeing right now?
TJ Kosen (00:05:27) - More or less. So there's always a there's always a balancing act between motivation of the seller itself and the stressing factors that the seller is dealing with.
TJ Kosen (00:05:38) - So I like to call it a like a scale between motivation and urgency is what we have with the seller. So for example, for years during Covid, obviously we wouldn't have foreclosures because they just weren't happening really. Right? So a foreclosure, typical traditional foreclosure is highly urgent because there's a foreclosure date where they're going to lose the property by and after. I mean, you can kick the can down the road a couple of times, but eventually it's going to happen. But that buyer profile might be very unmotivated because they tend to want to ignore their problems just from what we've noticed from dealing with them. So then we have to negotiate one way with that type of seller where I think I said buyer a second ago anyway, we have to negotiate one way with that type of seller where we stress the actual urgency of the situation and then that elevates their motivation. So that's one type of seller profile. The other type of seller profile would be a more traditional distressed seller that just has a problem with a kind of junky house that they don't want to deal with, and it's very seldom that they don't know what the property is worth or anything like that.
TJ Kosen (00:06:41) - Often we'll tell them and we'll walk through the whole process and talk about the options. But maybe they have a hoarder house and they just have three feet of stuff in the house they don't want to deal with. Maybe they inherited a house and they don't want to deal with the emotional trauma of dealing with the stuff. We like to say when negotiating money is always a motivating factor, but it's very seldom the fundamental motivating factor. As investors, we often project our expectations on the seller. So my expectation is I want to make a lot of money. Therefore, obviously the seller being a reasonable person wants to make a lot of money on their house. That's not necessarily the case. They usually have an emotional trauma or an emotional issue with the House. That's their primary motivating factor. So if we can figure out what that is and solve that problem, then we're not only in a better position to profit ourselves and our company, but we're actually in a better position to solve their problems. Um, not to not to monologue too long.
TJ Kosen (00:07:32) - But for example, we often beat our competition by 30 to I think our record in the past two months is $60,000 below our our competitor's offers by discussing this with the seller. And so you're not dealing with an uneducated seller, you're dealing with a seller that isn't served by a higher offer because they're not actually solving the fundamental problem. Whereas most people, you know, 80% minus repairs, we're like, well, let's let's see what the seller actually wants and let's hit it from the other direction instead.
Sam Wilson (00:07:56) - What how do you do that? Like that, That that sounds. Too good to be true. Like, how do you discover the the motivations for selling and then offer them $50,000 less and get them to say, Yeah, that sounds good.
TJ Kosen (00:08:14) - Um. Well, you need to make it good, don't you? So.
Sam Wilson (00:08:16) - Yes.
TJ Kosen (00:08:17) - So take a traditional cold call lead, I suppose, which a lot of our competition does. And cold calling is our, um, worst performing lead source in our company because we're not as good at the long term follow up as some of the guys are.
TJ Kosen (00:08:29) - But fundamentally, a lot of those types of lead origination mindsets deal with the property because they're burning through a lot of data, a lot of data points, a lot of lists or whatever. And then just in the nature of that lead, they're going to want to disqualify the urgency of the seller. Whereas if we have an inbound lead, if we have a PPC lead, a mailer, lead, even a bandit sign, lead, we've closed a couple of those. It's kind of weird, right? Um, then not only is the seller contacting us, but now we're not trying to disqualify the seller. We're trying to find out the actual underlying need that they contacted us. And we do that by having a long conversation with the seller about the actual situation that they're involved in. Um, again, it's going to depend a lot on the seller. So a pre foreclosure is going to be a lot more urgent and maybe even on our part, a little more aggressive negotiation technique than someone that has a hoarder house that they don't want to deal with trauma of the stuff.
TJ Kosen (00:09:27) - But we're going to find out what the trauma situation is and then we're going to find out how we can solve that problem for the for the other person. We're not going to be qualifying the property to speak of in the initial conversations. So where our competition is going to say, well, tell me about the house. We don't care about the house. Like there's a dollar amount that the house makes sense for us. I think probably for like anything like we'll do seller finance, we'll buy a house for a dollar, even if it's a complete whatever and sell it to someone. So there's always a dollar amount that overcomes whatever problem there is on the house. And we're going to verify that once we actually go on an appointment or send pictures or whatever. So we always verify the house. That's not the problem. The problem is the seller because that's the person that we're trying to solve the problem for. So the better we're able to do that, the better we're able to have long conversations. Our average talk time for qualified lead is probably 30 to 45 minutes, whereas our competition is probably 5 to 25 minutes.
TJ Kosen (00:10:19) - Um, and that's that sets us apart, maybe not in terms of volume, although we do a significant volume, but it sets us apart in terms of margin.
Sam Wilson (00:10:27) - Yeah, that's. And what are you. Obviously you're establishing rapport with the seller, things like that. But let's let's assume that you diagnose what the trauma is. I don't know. You can probably make something up, but we don't necessarily have to. But you diagnose what that is, is, is your secret sauce and then crafting a solution to that trauma. Yes. And then making them an offer kind of independent of that?
TJ Kosen (00:10:53) - Yeah, absolutely. The offer isn't money. The offer is money's a component, but the offer is okay. You need $100,000. But what do you need $100,000 for? Because I know I can only give you 50 grand or whatever it is, Right? Well, I need $100,000 because I want it because of X, Y and Z. Okay, well, if we can get you to X, Y, and Z, then is the offer going to be reasonable if I can get you where you need to be, is that going to be okay if I can make it so I mean, pre foreclosure, probably a good example.
TJ Kosen (00:11:22) - I need 100 grand because I need 100 grand. Okay. You're going to lose your house on Tuesday. You're screwed. It's Friday. Like we can do this. But we're pretty much the only ones that can because you're all just partial because you don't have time. So now we have to say, like, okay, if I can get you, you know this much, here's where here's where you need to be. What else can I do to help alleviate your situation? Well, I'm going to need some time to move. Okay, No problem. We'll do a lease back. We'll do a hold back for the lease back. So we're covered. But now we're competing. Now we're beating the competition on the wholesale side where the wholesalers they're going to see a lease back is something that there is cutting into their profit. For us, we close on 75% of our deals anyway, so it doesn't hurt us that much in terms of that. And we just factor in the carrying cost and the risk in like a decreased price or a lease back hold back.
TJ Kosen (00:12:10) - Oh, don't want to do all the stuff in the house. You know what? No problem. You think you need ten grand a dumpster fees? Just leave the stuff there. Don't worry about it. Automatically dropping our offer by ten grand. Right. Or whatever it is in their mind. So that's that's where we alleviate the emotional trauma for the sellers and and other people can do that. It's just they're not as good at having the conversations about how to do that.
Sam Wilson (00:12:32) - Yeah. How long is it taking you to craft that script or that kind of process? I mean, it's it's a.
TJ Kosen (00:12:38) - It's a work in progress. I'm not the best acquisitions guy. My motivating factor of building this entire monstrosity that I have is I just don't like talking to sellers. They bummed me out. They got a junky house. It smells funny. It's got stuff in it. They haven't fixed the roof for 30 years and they know what they have. I don't want to talk to that person. I've talked to that person a hundred times at the same exact house.
TJ Kosen (00:13:01) - It just happens to be in a different address. I'd rather hire someone and that's where the kind of commercial mindset comes in in terms of like building the business. I'd rather hire someone where that's their binary task and that's what they do all day long and they enjoy doing it and they're paid well to do it. And honestly, they're better at me than doing it because I'm going to be I'm going to be a nice guy. I know I can give you five K more and then you're going to think that I'm an amazing person. Whereas if I send someone else out, oh, I got to check with my boss. Like there's that psychological hurdle that they have to overcome. They know what they can pay, but they're going to know that now they have to come back and justify what they paid for. And I'm going to say, well, could you gotten cheaper? Well, no, absolutely not. I couldn't have gotten cheaper. All right. Awesome. Good job. Could you have gotten cheaper like.
TJ Kosen (00:13:44) - Yeah, probably. Well, okay. You made 80 grand. You should have made 90. You know, whatever the situation is.
Sam Wilson (00:13:51) - Right? No, I like that. I like that a lot. That's. It's always good finding people that are better at it. That the name of the game as a business? I think so. Finding finding people surround yourself with everyone who is better at everything than you is kind of one of my own mantras. Like, Oh, I can only hire you if you're better at it than me because I don't want to be the best at it.
TJ Kosen (00:14:13) - That's a big that's a big misnomer in the entrepreneurial space, right? Everyone says like, Oh, I'm never going to find someone to do X, Y, Z as good as me. Like, that's absolutely not true because first of all, you're probably not as good as you think you are. And second of all, if you're doing X, Y, Z and ABC and a bunch of stuff in the middle, too, you're not doing the critical stuff all the time as well as you can at your max capacity because you're doing all this other stuff, right? So if you hire someone that's honestly more intelligent and pay them better, they're going to have a holistic picture so they know where the thing fits in the entire holistic process of the business.
TJ Kosen (00:14:46) - But they're going to be sophisticated enough to know that their job is to do this one piece of the job, to fit it into the bigger picture. And they're going to be able to do that piece of the job better than you 100% of the time, right?
Sam Wilson (00:14:57) - Yeah. Specialization, man, that's that's that's imperative. I have a question probably more from a personal standpoint because they did a whole lot of house flipping all the way through. In wholesaling through 2018. One thing I could never overcome in this space tell me how you've done this is that every property was completely different. And so even with project managers, even with the theoretically people on the bus that knew what they were doing, it somehow seemed like we could never get projects done as quickly or as well, or because there was never. I know you mentioned cookie cutter, and we got to that to where it was like, Hey, here's the finished schedule, here's the paint schedule. It's the same bloomin color every single time on every single wall.
Sam Wilson (00:15:38) - Here's your trim type, here's your. But even with that project still vary. Oh, there's foundation issues here. Oh there's you know, there's that over there. I mean it's a constant problem solving thing. And each, each project has its own unique problems. How have you found a way to systemize that?
TJ Kosen (00:15:58) - Uh, I mean, the short answer, they haven't. The longer answer is we try to again, we try to make the product look relatively the same. We try to use consistent crews that we've used over and over and over again in a lot of times. And in this market, actually, it's kind of annoying. Flips are probably our lowest margin product, especially when you take into account turnover ratio, cash conversion cycle. My personal headache of going out and seeing these things. So that's the part that. It's a little tougher to outsource, to be honest with you. It's almost it's easier to outsource a good sales guy well in office, but it's easier to train that and have that as a thing as opposed to someone that has, you know, getting into real estate in oh six, that many years of construction experience where I can walk through a house in five minutes and know more about it than most people can in an hour, right? I still walk.
TJ Kosen (00:16:47) - I still walk construction sites. Yeah, I do. Um, fortunately, we're not doing we're only doing six rehabs now out of 30 deals. So about 20% of our deals are rehabs. So it's not that overwhelming. And we try to we try to have a good schedule of what needs to get done day one and then trust the crews to do it and then empower them to be able to do it and then touch base with them. I talked to some of our contractors twice a day even now. Um, but that means that we made. 35. Yesterday I think on a wholesale that I don't know anything about. Right. So that's that's the part of the business that yeah, I'm still very more active probably in that part than I really want to be. Um, but I'm not sure the best way to not be as active as I am in that, Right.
Sam Wilson (00:17:28) - Yeah, that, that was a challenge that certainly I faced and say you're doing better at it than I was because I never really doing it this that you guys are.
Sam Wilson (00:17:36) - But let's let's let me ask you this. So six of the 36 of those are rehab. What are you doing the other 24.
TJ Kosen (00:17:42) - It depends. So that's where we're merging a exit strategy with the entrance strategy on the front end. Um, I don't know specifically because I don't even know all the addresses, but our, our exit strategies range from pure wholesale, so, I mean, that's awesome. Who doesn't want to make a bunch of money without any work? Correct. Um, I mean, it takes work, but that's a lot more systematized work with the acquisitions guys and the dispositions guys do the work. That's good. It's probably 20%, maybe 25%. I'm not sure. Yeah, we hold tail some, so in that we'll take it down. Like for a strictly perspective, we would, we would, we would generally call a wholesale anything that we actually close on. Um, with some things where there's a leaseback or there's some stuff in it, we'll probably, it's probably technically, mostly still a wholesale, even if we buy it for like a week.
TJ Kosen (00:18:30) - We've had, we've had hotels that we've owned for maybe 7 to 10 days and just either put it on the market or have it pre-sold, but for some reason, like a leaseback or stuff in the house, we need to own it personally for a little while. And there's risk to that. Obviously, there's transactional cost and there's transactional risk just with having the property, but we try to do that for the most part. We have a couple like that right now. I think, um, we do a lot of seller financing, so we do a lot of deals where we will buy a property for a good example really is buy a property for $100,000. Maybe it's ARV is $200,000, but we're able to offer seller financing and sell it relatively as is for 140 to 150. And then we'll either turn out the note or offer financing on a shorter term deal and we attract a different, um, probably buyer profile than that, than a full like retail type buyer. So those are the, those are the primary exit strategies we employ, I think.
Sam Wilson (00:19:25) - How do you handle on the seller finance side of things? I mean, it takes a lot of money to hold those and then create those notes and then, you know, how do you keep that cash?
TJ Kosen (00:19:37) - Yeah, well, we just got rid of guys that help us with that. Yeah. Um, we have some good note buyers. That's actually the next part of our commercial thing. We're in the process of building a fund to warehouse those notes because generally they're 20 or 30 year fully amortized. But the rates are really, really good. We're selling stuff with 12 to 13.5% interest rates right now with a 30 year product. So it's very appealing to a note buyer. It's very appealing to a cash flow owner that doesn't want the headaches of the actual ownership aspect of the property that are very low default because we collect 10 to 20% down on all those deals. The buyers are generally as well as you can relatively well qualified for the properties and they just they simply don't want to say they don't default, but they don't really default.
TJ Kosen (00:20:25) - So it's a good product. We're in the process of building a fund because obviously we're going to run out of money like we even if we have $10 million, we're going to run out of money ourselves relatively quickly doing that. So we're going to build a fund and stick a bunch of notes in there and cash flow for some investors, cash flow for us and everyone makes more money. It's going to be exciting.
Sam Wilson (00:20:42) - Absolutely. What are your forecasts on the distressed residential inventory? Do you see that going up? You see it down. What are you forecasting?
TJ Kosen (00:20:53) - I mean, so. Probably up probably up a little bit. Think it's a little bit easier now than it was when there was a lot of the i buyers just really soaking up all the inventory. I know there's still somewhat active, but they're not nearly as active as they were two years ago. Like any non conventional lending, the IE buyers all operate on short term interest rates to maximize their whatever, and as interest rates go up, they get pinched.
TJ Kosen (00:21:17) - We saw that obviously with the non space with our take out financing on rentals. You see it in the commercial space with apartments, that kind of thing. So I think the more our level of buyers are probably going to be at a competitive advantage over a lot of those people. We beat the buyers a lot just in terms of picking apart their offer and explaining differentiating our process from their process. So I think on the retail side, I think we're going to continue to see low inventory because partially because so many people are locked into a low interest rate loan, they're not going to want to quadruple their payment by doubling their house size. So they're like, you know what? I'm just I'm fine where I am. So I think that's going to artificially deflate inventory. And it's going to have an inflating aspect in terms of keeping the retail market up. And I think people that are needing to sell that have a junky house, I don't know many retail buyers that want to buy a house that needs 200 K worth of work when they're going to have to come out of pocket 200 K, even if they can conventionally finance the acquisition of that property.
TJ Kosen (00:22:15) - So I think I think overall, I think we're in a good position to be in. We reevaluate probably every quarter in terms of the. Dispo strategies that were that are most profitable and that we have to do. And we're having fun.
Sam Wilson (00:22:31) - That's fantastic. TJ, thank you for taking the time to come on the show today. This has been a blast having you on. I've learned a ton from you. I love what you're doing and how you guys have done it, how you've learned how to scale this, the systems you've put in place, the teams you've put in place. I think it's really impressive because there's very few, I think, that have figured out. I know you said maybe you haven't figured it out, but, you know, you have a lot more than a lot of other people have there in the residential space. Taking that and scaling this. This business is really cool. I love what you're doing. If our listeners want to get in touch with you and learn more about you, what is the best way to do that?
TJ Kosen (00:23:04) - Well, I'm all over the place online.
TJ Kosen (00:23:06) - I'm super easy to find. Very creative too. So TJ on Facebook and Instagram, really easy. TJ kills and I mean, again, a creative guy and our what do you call it? Oh, our kind of company like our looking marketing page is ry af real estate investing and I'm not really sure what AF stands for, but it sounded cool when I put it up there.
Sam Wilson (00:23:28) - Fantastic. TJ Coziness cozy in for those of you who are listening and want to look up TJ. Com. TJ thanks again for coming on the show today. I do appreciate it.
TJ Kosen (00:23:38) - Thanks so much Sam.
Sam Wilson (00:23:39) - Hey thanks for listening to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate podcast. If you can do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whatever platform it is you use to listen. If you can do that for us, that would be a fantastic help to the show. It helps us both attract new listeners as well as rank higher on those directories. So appreciate you listening.
Sam Wilson (00:24:01) - Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.
By Sam Wilson5
182182 ratings
Today's guest is TJ Kosen.
TJ has been in Real Estate since 2006, first cutting his teeth before the crash with 200+ multi-family units in Tennessee. He has done deals in Texas, California and Tennessee.
Show Description:
In this podcast episode, TJ shares his experience in the real estate industry and how he has successfully scaled his business in the distressed residential space. TJ discusses his strategies for beating the competition, which include understanding the motivations of distressed sellers and offering tailored solutions. He emphasizes the importance of treating the single-family business like a commercial operation and hiring specialized individuals. TJ also talks about the balancing act between motivation and urgency when dealing with distressed sellers and how his company focuses on understanding the seller's needs to provide the best offer. He explains how his company sets itself apart by focusing on margin rather than volume and crafting solutions that address the seller's underlying problems. TJ also discusses the challenges of systemizing projects in the real estate business and the need to build a fund for sustainability and cash flow. He predicts an increase in distressed residential inventory and shares his confidence in their competitive advantage.
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Intro [00:00:00]
Scaling a residential real estate business [00:01:53]
Negotiating with distressed sellers [00:07:32]
The offer is more than just money [00:10:53]
Outsourcing and specialization in business [00:13:01]
Challenges in systemizing property projects [00:15:38]
The forecast on distressed residential inventory [00:20:42]
Evaluation of dispo strategies [00:22:15]
Closing [00:23:39]
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Connect with TJ:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tkosen
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tjkosen/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kosentrade
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tj-kosen-a944382b/
Web: http://www.tjkosen.com/
Connect with Sam:
I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samwilsonhowtoscalecre/
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Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below:
TJ Kosen (00:00:00) - We often beat our competition by 30 to. I think our record in the past two months is $60,000 below our our competitor's offers by discussing this with the seller. And so you're not dealing with an uneducated seller, you're dealing with a seller that isn't served by a higher offer because they're not actually solving the fundamental problem. Whereas most people, you know, 80% minus repairs, we're like, well, let's let's see what the seller actually wants and let's hit it from the other direction instead.
Sam Wilson (00:00:23) - Welcome to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we'll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big. DJ has been investing in real estate since 2006, first cutting his teeth before the crash with a 200 unit plus multifamily property in Tennessee. He has done deals in Texas, California, Tennessee, TJ. Welcome to the show.
TJ Kosen (00:00:49) - Hey, thanks for having me on, Sam. I'm excited to share some insight.
Sam Wilson (00:00:52) - Absolutely. The pleasure is mine.
Sam Wilson (00:00:54) - There are three questions to ask every guest who comes on the show in 90s or less. Can you tell me, where did you start? Where are you now and how did you get there?
TJ Kosen (00:01:02) - 90s are lost. I don't know about that. I'm from San Diego. My first deal was 112 units in your hometown, Memphis, Tennessee. It was a lot of fun. 2006, Let's see where I started, where I went to and where I am now. In Dallas, Texas, we move a high volume of distressed, mostly single family direct seller residential properties in our North Texas market, also in Houston, some in Tennessee and some in Florida. Right now we're doing some marketing down there. We have a pretty good sized team and we really specialize on the direct to seller marketing and we specialize in the optimizing our exit strategy based on the fundamentals of both seller's requirements and the deals specifically.
Sam Wilson (00:01:40) - Okay. I'm excited here to dig in today. I know this show, of course, is a commercial real estate show, but I think any time you can take a business like what you're doing, you've figured out how to scale it.
Sam Wilson (00:01:53) - I would say that what you're doing is probably more complex than buying a 200 unit multifamily. You know, say a B class multifamily property in Dallas. I would rather I would think it would have fewer moving parts than what it is that you're doing. Would you agree with that or not?
TJ Kosen (00:02:08) - Oh, yeah. One of my biggest hurdles really from transitioning from multifamily in the in the crash back in the day to more single family was how much more specialized and individualized the product had to be at least on a like a 1 to 1 basis. So the way that I kind of overcame that fundamental issue with the business model is treating the single family business more like a commercial kind of operation where now we're we're hiring specialized people to do specialized tasks, same as you do in multifamily. You're going to hire, you know, a manager to do a specific thing. You're going to hire a maintenance guy to do a specific thing or whatever it is. So we did the same basically the same type of model, the same type of mindset with residential distressed stuff even down to rehab.
TJ Kosen (00:02:47) - So I said we optimize our exit strategy based on the property, but if we're doing, for example, a renovation, we try to keep the renovation very simplistic in terms of we're doing the same thing over and over and over again as a cookie cutter type model. And again, from the commercial perspective, we even looked at the loans, the loans, the debt we get is very much commercial based, you know, debt service or hard money, depending on the type of loan. So it is fundamentally a commercial mindset, I think, for a residential type of business or type of product.
Sam Wilson (00:03:17) - Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, you correct a lot of things here because I know I know I've got some flaws in my thinking. Probably more than.
TJ Kosen (00:03:26) - That. You might be smarter than me.
Sam Wilson (00:03:27) - I don't know. Probably more than we have time here for you to solve, but maybe specifically about your business. You're in the distressed residential space. Deal flow, I would imagine, has become constrained, especially in the last five or so years.
Sam Wilson (00:03:43) - True.
TJ Kosen (00:03:47) - False, but only if you're better than the competition. And fortunately, there's a lot of competition, so it's easy to be better than a lot of them. And what I mean by that is you have to treat it like a business, really, where if you're going to do a volume, you have to treat the fundamental business is the lead generation and the negotiations on the front end to generate a top of the funnel volume sufficient enough to keep the business operational. Right. From a strictly sales perspective, if you're trading a new sales guy in roofing, we have a roofing company, for example, or, you know, loan officer back in the day is where I started like way back in 2005. You're always training the sales guy, like always be originating, always be originating because you have to have the deal. I was like, Oh, I had a great month. I could coast Well, yeah, but you know, you burn through that really quick. And as you scale up in a business, it actually becomes easier after you hit probably a certain threshold of deal flow.
TJ Kosen (00:04:37) - Maybe cash flow management becomes more difficult. But in terms of like consistency of outcome, it becomes easier to actually keep a consistent pipeline of deals going because now there's so much stuff going on that, okay, if something goes south, it's not that big a deal because you got ten more things that are going like not South. And that's that's how we've been able to overcome it. We focus on lead gen, we focus on negotiation on the acquisition side and then everything else. I don't want to say it works that self out because actually that's fundamentally my problem. I'm the, I'm the I'm the problem solving department. So I actually don't generate the revenue. I make sure we cover our tail on the back end. But that's that's what we've been able to overcome that.
Sam Wilson (00:05:14) - Got it. That's really interesting. What would you say when looking at the. When looking at the distressed seller types, are there any themes to it that you're seeing right now?
TJ Kosen (00:05:27) - More or less. So there's always a there's always a balancing act between motivation of the seller itself and the stressing factors that the seller is dealing with.
TJ Kosen (00:05:38) - So I like to call it a like a scale between motivation and urgency is what we have with the seller. So for example, for years during Covid, obviously we wouldn't have foreclosures because they just weren't happening really. Right? So a foreclosure, typical traditional foreclosure is highly urgent because there's a foreclosure date where they're going to lose the property by and after. I mean, you can kick the can down the road a couple of times, but eventually it's going to happen. But that buyer profile might be very unmotivated because they tend to want to ignore their problems just from what we've noticed from dealing with them. So then we have to negotiate one way with that type of seller where I think I said buyer a second ago anyway, we have to negotiate one way with that type of seller where we stress the actual urgency of the situation and then that elevates their motivation. So that's one type of seller profile. The other type of seller profile would be a more traditional distressed seller that just has a problem with a kind of junky house that they don't want to deal with, and it's very seldom that they don't know what the property is worth or anything like that.
TJ Kosen (00:06:41) - Often we'll tell them and we'll walk through the whole process and talk about the options. But maybe they have a hoarder house and they just have three feet of stuff in the house they don't want to deal with. Maybe they inherited a house and they don't want to deal with the emotional trauma of dealing with the stuff. We like to say when negotiating money is always a motivating factor, but it's very seldom the fundamental motivating factor. As investors, we often project our expectations on the seller. So my expectation is I want to make a lot of money. Therefore, obviously the seller being a reasonable person wants to make a lot of money on their house. That's not necessarily the case. They usually have an emotional trauma or an emotional issue with the House. That's their primary motivating factor. So if we can figure out what that is and solve that problem, then we're not only in a better position to profit ourselves and our company, but we're actually in a better position to solve their problems. Um, not to not to monologue too long.
TJ Kosen (00:07:32) - But for example, we often beat our competition by 30 to I think our record in the past two months is $60,000 below our our competitor's offers by discussing this with the seller. And so you're not dealing with an uneducated seller, you're dealing with a seller that isn't served by a higher offer because they're not actually solving the fundamental problem. Whereas most people, you know, 80% minus repairs, we're like, well, let's let's see what the seller actually wants and let's hit it from the other direction instead.
Sam Wilson (00:07:56) - What how do you do that? Like that, That that sounds. Too good to be true. Like, how do you discover the the motivations for selling and then offer them $50,000 less and get them to say, Yeah, that sounds good.
TJ Kosen (00:08:14) - Um. Well, you need to make it good, don't you? So.
Sam Wilson (00:08:16) - Yes.
TJ Kosen (00:08:17) - So take a traditional cold call lead, I suppose, which a lot of our competition does. And cold calling is our, um, worst performing lead source in our company because we're not as good at the long term follow up as some of the guys are.
TJ Kosen (00:08:29) - But fundamentally, a lot of those types of lead origination mindsets deal with the property because they're burning through a lot of data, a lot of data points, a lot of lists or whatever. And then just in the nature of that lead, they're going to want to disqualify the urgency of the seller. Whereas if we have an inbound lead, if we have a PPC lead, a mailer, lead, even a bandit sign, lead, we've closed a couple of those. It's kind of weird, right? Um, then not only is the seller contacting us, but now we're not trying to disqualify the seller. We're trying to find out the actual underlying need that they contacted us. And we do that by having a long conversation with the seller about the actual situation that they're involved in. Um, again, it's going to depend a lot on the seller. So a pre foreclosure is going to be a lot more urgent and maybe even on our part, a little more aggressive negotiation technique than someone that has a hoarder house that they don't want to deal with trauma of the stuff.
TJ Kosen (00:09:27) - But we're going to find out what the trauma situation is and then we're going to find out how we can solve that problem for the for the other person. We're not going to be qualifying the property to speak of in the initial conversations. So where our competition is going to say, well, tell me about the house. We don't care about the house. Like there's a dollar amount that the house makes sense for us. I think probably for like anything like we'll do seller finance, we'll buy a house for a dollar, even if it's a complete whatever and sell it to someone. So there's always a dollar amount that overcomes whatever problem there is on the house. And we're going to verify that once we actually go on an appointment or send pictures or whatever. So we always verify the house. That's not the problem. The problem is the seller because that's the person that we're trying to solve the problem for. So the better we're able to do that, the better we're able to have long conversations. Our average talk time for qualified lead is probably 30 to 45 minutes, whereas our competition is probably 5 to 25 minutes.
TJ Kosen (00:10:19) - Um, and that's that sets us apart, maybe not in terms of volume, although we do a significant volume, but it sets us apart in terms of margin.
Sam Wilson (00:10:27) - Yeah, that's. And what are you. Obviously you're establishing rapport with the seller, things like that. But let's let's assume that you diagnose what the trauma is. I don't know. You can probably make something up, but we don't necessarily have to. But you diagnose what that is, is, is your secret sauce and then crafting a solution to that trauma. Yes. And then making them an offer kind of independent of that?
TJ Kosen (00:10:53) - Yeah, absolutely. The offer isn't money. The offer is money's a component, but the offer is okay. You need $100,000. But what do you need $100,000 for? Because I know I can only give you 50 grand or whatever it is, Right? Well, I need $100,000 because I want it because of X, Y and Z. Okay, well, if we can get you to X, Y, and Z, then is the offer going to be reasonable if I can get you where you need to be, is that going to be okay if I can make it so I mean, pre foreclosure, probably a good example.
TJ Kosen (00:11:22) - I need 100 grand because I need 100 grand. Okay. You're going to lose your house on Tuesday. You're screwed. It's Friday. Like we can do this. But we're pretty much the only ones that can because you're all just partial because you don't have time. So now we have to say, like, okay, if I can get you, you know this much, here's where here's where you need to be. What else can I do to help alleviate your situation? Well, I'm going to need some time to move. Okay, No problem. We'll do a lease back. We'll do a hold back for the lease back. So we're covered. But now we're competing. Now we're beating the competition on the wholesale side where the wholesalers they're going to see a lease back is something that there is cutting into their profit. For us, we close on 75% of our deals anyway, so it doesn't hurt us that much in terms of that. And we just factor in the carrying cost and the risk in like a decreased price or a lease back hold back.
TJ Kosen (00:12:10) - Oh, don't want to do all the stuff in the house. You know what? No problem. You think you need ten grand a dumpster fees? Just leave the stuff there. Don't worry about it. Automatically dropping our offer by ten grand. Right. Or whatever it is in their mind. So that's that's where we alleviate the emotional trauma for the sellers and and other people can do that. It's just they're not as good at having the conversations about how to do that.
Sam Wilson (00:12:32) - Yeah. How long is it taking you to craft that script or that kind of process? I mean, it's it's a.
TJ Kosen (00:12:38) - It's a work in progress. I'm not the best acquisitions guy. My motivating factor of building this entire monstrosity that I have is I just don't like talking to sellers. They bummed me out. They got a junky house. It smells funny. It's got stuff in it. They haven't fixed the roof for 30 years and they know what they have. I don't want to talk to that person. I've talked to that person a hundred times at the same exact house.
TJ Kosen (00:13:01) - It just happens to be in a different address. I'd rather hire someone and that's where the kind of commercial mindset comes in in terms of like building the business. I'd rather hire someone where that's their binary task and that's what they do all day long and they enjoy doing it and they're paid well to do it. And honestly, they're better at me than doing it because I'm going to be I'm going to be a nice guy. I know I can give you five K more and then you're going to think that I'm an amazing person. Whereas if I send someone else out, oh, I got to check with my boss. Like there's that psychological hurdle that they have to overcome. They know what they can pay, but they're going to know that now they have to come back and justify what they paid for. And I'm going to say, well, could you gotten cheaper? Well, no, absolutely not. I couldn't have gotten cheaper. All right. Awesome. Good job. Could you have gotten cheaper like.
TJ Kosen (00:13:44) - Yeah, probably. Well, okay. You made 80 grand. You should have made 90. You know, whatever the situation is.
Sam Wilson (00:13:51) - Right? No, I like that. I like that a lot. That's. It's always good finding people that are better at it. That the name of the game as a business? I think so. Finding finding people surround yourself with everyone who is better at everything than you is kind of one of my own mantras. Like, Oh, I can only hire you if you're better at it than me because I don't want to be the best at it.
TJ Kosen (00:14:13) - That's a big that's a big misnomer in the entrepreneurial space, right? Everyone says like, Oh, I'm never going to find someone to do X, Y, Z as good as me. Like, that's absolutely not true because first of all, you're probably not as good as you think you are. And second of all, if you're doing X, Y, Z and ABC and a bunch of stuff in the middle, too, you're not doing the critical stuff all the time as well as you can at your max capacity because you're doing all this other stuff, right? So if you hire someone that's honestly more intelligent and pay them better, they're going to have a holistic picture so they know where the thing fits in the entire holistic process of the business.
TJ Kosen (00:14:46) - But they're going to be sophisticated enough to know that their job is to do this one piece of the job, to fit it into the bigger picture. And they're going to be able to do that piece of the job better than you 100% of the time, right?
Sam Wilson (00:14:57) - Yeah. Specialization, man, that's that's that's imperative. I have a question probably more from a personal standpoint because they did a whole lot of house flipping all the way through. In wholesaling through 2018. One thing I could never overcome in this space tell me how you've done this is that every property was completely different. And so even with project managers, even with the theoretically people on the bus that knew what they were doing, it somehow seemed like we could never get projects done as quickly or as well, or because there was never. I know you mentioned cookie cutter, and we got to that to where it was like, Hey, here's the finished schedule, here's the paint schedule. It's the same bloomin color every single time on every single wall.
Sam Wilson (00:15:38) - Here's your trim type, here's your. But even with that project still vary. Oh, there's foundation issues here. Oh there's you know, there's that over there. I mean it's a constant problem solving thing. And each, each project has its own unique problems. How have you found a way to systemize that?
TJ Kosen (00:15:58) - Uh, I mean, the short answer, they haven't. The longer answer is we try to again, we try to make the product look relatively the same. We try to use consistent crews that we've used over and over and over again in a lot of times. And in this market, actually, it's kind of annoying. Flips are probably our lowest margin product, especially when you take into account turnover ratio, cash conversion cycle. My personal headache of going out and seeing these things. So that's the part that. It's a little tougher to outsource, to be honest with you. It's almost it's easier to outsource a good sales guy well in office, but it's easier to train that and have that as a thing as opposed to someone that has, you know, getting into real estate in oh six, that many years of construction experience where I can walk through a house in five minutes and know more about it than most people can in an hour, right? I still walk.
TJ Kosen (00:16:47) - I still walk construction sites. Yeah, I do. Um, fortunately, we're not doing we're only doing six rehabs now out of 30 deals. So about 20% of our deals are rehabs. So it's not that overwhelming. And we try to we try to have a good schedule of what needs to get done day one and then trust the crews to do it and then empower them to be able to do it and then touch base with them. I talked to some of our contractors twice a day even now. Um, but that means that we made. 35. Yesterday I think on a wholesale that I don't know anything about. Right. So that's that's the part of the business that yeah, I'm still very more active probably in that part than I really want to be. Um, but I'm not sure the best way to not be as active as I am in that, Right.
Sam Wilson (00:17:28) - Yeah, that, that was a challenge that certainly I faced and say you're doing better at it than I was because I never really doing it this that you guys are.
Sam Wilson (00:17:36) - But let's let's let me ask you this. So six of the 36 of those are rehab. What are you doing the other 24.
TJ Kosen (00:17:42) - It depends. So that's where we're merging a exit strategy with the entrance strategy on the front end. Um, I don't know specifically because I don't even know all the addresses, but our, our exit strategies range from pure wholesale, so, I mean, that's awesome. Who doesn't want to make a bunch of money without any work? Correct. Um, I mean, it takes work, but that's a lot more systematized work with the acquisitions guys and the dispositions guys do the work. That's good. It's probably 20%, maybe 25%. I'm not sure. Yeah, we hold tail some, so in that we'll take it down. Like for a strictly perspective, we would, we would, we would generally call a wholesale anything that we actually close on. Um, with some things where there's a leaseback or there's some stuff in it, we'll probably, it's probably technically, mostly still a wholesale, even if we buy it for like a week.
TJ Kosen (00:18:30) - We've had, we've had hotels that we've owned for maybe 7 to 10 days and just either put it on the market or have it pre-sold, but for some reason, like a leaseback or stuff in the house, we need to own it personally for a little while. And there's risk to that. Obviously, there's transactional cost and there's transactional risk just with having the property, but we try to do that for the most part. We have a couple like that right now. I think, um, we do a lot of seller financing, so we do a lot of deals where we will buy a property for a good example really is buy a property for $100,000. Maybe it's ARV is $200,000, but we're able to offer seller financing and sell it relatively as is for 140 to 150. And then we'll either turn out the note or offer financing on a shorter term deal and we attract a different, um, probably buyer profile than that, than a full like retail type buyer. So those are the, those are the primary exit strategies we employ, I think.
Sam Wilson (00:19:25) - How do you handle on the seller finance side of things? I mean, it takes a lot of money to hold those and then create those notes and then, you know, how do you keep that cash?
TJ Kosen (00:19:37) - Yeah, well, we just got rid of guys that help us with that. Yeah. Um, we have some good note buyers. That's actually the next part of our commercial thing. We're in the process of building a fund to warehouse those notes because generally they're 20 or 30 year fully amortized. But the rates are really, really good. We're selling stuff with 12 to 13.5% interest rates right now with a 30 year product. So it's very appealing to a note buyer. It's very appealing to a cash flow owner that doesn't want the headaches of the actual ownership aspect of the property that are very low default because we collect 10 to 20% down on all those deals. The buyers are generally as well as you can relatively well qualified for the properties and they just they simply don't want to say they don't default, but they don't really default.
TJ Kosen (00:20:25) - So it's a good product. We're in the process of building a fund because obviously we're going to run out of money like we even if we have $10 million, we're going to run out of money ourselves relatively quickly doing that. So we're going to build a fund and stick a bunch of notes in there and cash flow for some investors, cash flow for us and everyone makes more money. It's going to be exciting.
Sam Wilson (00:20:42) - Absolutely. What are your forecasts on the distressed residential inventory? Do you see that going up? You see it down. What are you forecasting?
TJ Kosen (00:20:53) - I mean, so. Probably up probably up a little bit. Think it's a little bit easier now than it was when there was a lot of the i buyers just really soaking up all the inventory. I know there's still somewhat active, but they're not nearly as active as they were two years ago. Like any non conventional lending, the IE buyers all operate on short term interest rates to maximize their whatever, and as interest rates go up, they get pinched.
TJ Kosen (00:21:17) - We saw that obviously with the non space with our take out financing on rentals. You see it in the commercial space with apartments, that kind of thing. So I think the more our level of buyers are probably going to be at a competitive advantage over a lot of those people. We beat the buyers a lot just in terms of picking apart their offer and explaining differentiating our process from their process. So I think on the retail side, I think we're going to continue to see low inventory because partially because so many people are locked into a low interest rate loan, they're not going to want to quadruple their payment by doubling their house size. So they're like, you know what? I'm just I'm fine where I am. So I think that's going to artificially deflate inventory. And it's going to have an inflating aspect in terms of keeping the retail market up. And I think people that are needing to sell that have a junky house, I don't know many retail buyers that want to buy a house that needs 200 K worth of work when they're going to have to come out of pocket 200 K, even if they can conventionally finance the acquisition of that property.
TJ Kosen (00:22:15) - So I think I think overall, I think we're in a good position to be in. We reevaluate probably every quarter in terms of the. Dispo strategies that were that are most profitable and that we have to do. And we're having fun.
Sam Wilson (00:22:31) - That's fantastic. TJ, thank you for taking the time to come on the show today. This has been a blast having you on. I've learned a ton from you. I love what you're doing and how you guys have done it, how you've learned how to scale this, the systems you've put in place, the teams you've put in place. I think it's really impressive because there's very few, I think, that have figured out. I know you said maybe you haven't figured it out, but, you know, you have a lot more than a lot of other people have there in the residential space. Taking that and scaling this. This business is really cool. I love what you're doing. If our listeners want to get in touch with you and learn more about you, what is the best way to do that?
TJ Kosen (00:23:04) - Well, I'm all over the place online.
TJ Kosen (00:23:06) - I'm super easy to find. Very creative too. So TJ on Facebook and Instagram, really easy. TJ kills and I mean, again, a creative guy and our what do you call it? Oh, our kind of company like our looking marketing page is ry af real estate investing and I'm not really sure what AF stands for, but it sounded cool when I put it up there.
Sam Wilson (00:23:28) - Fantastic. TJ Coziness cozy in for those of you who are listening and want to look up TJ. Com. TJ thanks again for coming on the show today. I do appreciate it.
TJ Kosen (00:23:38) - Thanks so much Sam.
Sam Wilson (00:23:39) - Hey thanks for listening to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate podcast. If you can do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whatever platform it is you use to listen. If you can do that for us, that would be a fantastic help to the show. It helps us both attract new listeners as well as rank higher on those directories. So appreciate you listening.
Sam Wilson (00:24:01) - Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.

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