Growing Wealth with Smarter Investments

John Harcar (00:01.038)
Hey guys, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, John Harkar. And today I’m here with Hawk Mikado. And what we’re going to talk about is really helping families build wealth through smarter real estate investments. Remember guys here at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, entrepreneurs, and real estate service providers, two to five X their business. And we do that by providing resources, tools, and information to help build the business you want to build and live the life you’ve always wanted to live. So Hawk, welcome

to our show.

The Hawk Mikado (00:32.418)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

John Harcar (00:34.34)
Yeah, no, it’s really great to have you on. And then we talked a little bit before we got on this. And I’m super excited to dig into the topic of smarter investments, right? Because we all want to grow wealth, but we want to make sure we do it the smart way. But before we talk about all that and get in the weeds, tell our audience about you, about your journey, how you got here, and what brought you into real estate.

The Hawk Mikado (00:57.39)
Yeah, uh, 2012, um, I was going to school up North. I lived in San Diego. I was going to school in Irvine, Orange County for like two to three weeks since. And, um, at the time my, uh, what’s that?

John Harcar (01:09.677)
UCI.

Did you have the UCI?

The Hawk Mikado (01:14.654)
No, it was like a vocation school. yeah, so at the time, my mom had actually lost her job. I was still living at home, part-time living in Airbnb, living in hotels when I was up there and I was young, so I was partying. So I was pretty much never home. But my mom was going through pre-foreclosure and

John Harcar (01:16.94)
Okay, I grew up in Orange County, so I’m just curious.

John Harcar (01:33.643)
wow.

Hahaha

The Hawk Mikado (01:43.534)
I was talking with my dad one day, I was running out of my money for schooling, and he’s like, hey, you should check out this thing, it’s called Airbnb. And I was like, I’m paying $100 something a night at the Extended Stay America, which is a great way to travel if you’re looking for a hotel. But at the time, Airbnb was just getting started.

John Harcar (02:02.416)
Mm-hmm.

The Hawk Mikado (02:12.522)
It started in 2008 and it’s been a couple years, but it was just starting to gain that popularity. And I was able to stay for $352, I believe, in my first Airbnb. And I stayed there for just over a week. And the host, she sat down and told me everything. What had worked? She’d been doing it since 2008. What worked? What didn’t? Who to attract?

John Harcar (02:14.48)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (02:35.576)
Wow, okay.

The Hawk Mikado (02:40.216)
how to attract them literally everything about it. And I went back to my mom and I was like, hey, she had a four bedroom. We had a roommate. We had one room that was basically her office and it was the small room. And then we had a bigger room, which was my room, which I was pretty much never there. So was like, why don’t we try renting out this room on Airbnb? I’ll move into the small room and.

John Harcar (02:43.536)
Priceless men.

John Harcar (03:00.784)
you

The Hawk Mikado (03:07.118)
You moved your office into the basically in the living room. And we did that. The first guest paid for half of her mortgage payment. And stayed for a week. The second guest paid for the other half. And for the next decade, she lived rent free and didn’t have to do anything. We went from in pre foreclosure to selling in 20 with 21 and through that process.

John Harcar (03:17.296)
Wow.

John Harcar (03:22.48)
That’s awesome.

John Harcar (03:26.096)
Let’s go, I love it.

The Hawk Mikado (03:35.79)
I actually moved out of the second room into the shed in the back. I converted the shed into an actual bedroom. I put up drywall and all the stuff in the insulation drywall, everything to make it semi livable. And it actually became the spot for all my friends and I to hang out because it was, you know, it was secluded, so to speak, from everything else. And it was a pretty big shed. mean, it was like it was the

John Harcar (03:49.828)
sure.

Right on.

John Harcar (04:00.162)
that.

The Hawk Mikado (04:04.494)
previous owner had it as a workshop for he did woodwork. Yeah, it was a 10 by 10 wood frame on stills the whole nine. So it was livable. It wasn’t like a little rink eating shed. But we then rented out the second room, the third and the third room eventually. And that helped pay for literally everything for her, which was really amazing.

John Harcar (04:07.76)
So maybe like a 10 by 10 something like that.

John Harcar (04:17.892)
Sure.

John Harcar (04:33.511)
That’s a great way to get out of foreclosure.

The Hawk Mikado (04:35.692)
Yes, absolutely. From there, we started buying additional properties and bought a rental property, later sold that, bought a couple of other Airbnb’s and just continued to do that over the course of the years. At the same time, I was doing marketing and lead generation and I had the privilege of working with quite a few people teaching real estate training, like teaching and training how to do real estate.

investing, how to be a better realtor, all that sort of stuff. So that really got me way more inspired and get behind the scenes on both growing lists of motivated sellers, motivated buyers, as well as really just getting to see all these different strategies because each one of them taught something different. And that was really a blessing to be able to do that. Fast forward. Yeah, so Mike Baird.

John Harcar (05:05.206)
Awesome.

John Harcar (05:22.596)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (05:28.91)
Who were some of these your mentors? I’m just curious.

The Hawk Mikado (05:33.838)
from Smart Real Estate, Mike Costigan and his former partner Kevin with the REO Rockstars and then a couple others that I won’t mention because… But yeah, they both… And Jim Krautkramer as well. He’s both specifically taught motivated sellers. And then…

John Harcar (05:34.339)
Uh-huh.

John Harcar (05:50.418)
All right, I’m just curious.

John Harcar (06:00.792)
So how were you buying these properties? Were you getting private money or did you, what did you do? What was your funding source?

The Hawk Mikado (06:07.084)
Yeah, so family, family money, investments, money from our agency, money from, I did a couple of wholesale deals. did, you know, just kind of really all around started, I wouldn’t call it dabbling because, we, but it was, was a side hustle really.

John Harcar (06:16.74)
Nice.

John Harcar (06:29.398)
Right, right, you aren’t going to get full bore on it.

The Hawk Mikado (06:32.844)
Yeah, as COVID started and a couple things had happened within our marketing agency, we ended up really paring it down, changing our model. And in that process, we’d also moved to Florida. We sold one of our properties in Nevada, which is where most of our properties are today.

John Harcar (06:53.164)
Uh-huh. Okay.

The Hawk Mikado (06:57.08)
came to buy one in Florida. We sold it because it wasn’t cash flowing. We had two on the same street. And forever, we had like a 90 to 100 % occupancy. And then for like six months, we had a 50 % occupancy between the two of them. We just couldn’t keep them both filled because they were literally on the same street. So we’re like, you know what? Let’s sell one. We didn’t want to buy another one there because interest rates went from three

John Harcar (07:12.078)
Hmm.

John Harcar (07:16.781)
Yeah, right.

The Hawk Mikado (07:26.786)
6.75%, which is what we bought them at, to 7.5%, 8%. And so we’re looking at, OK, what can we do? And we were living in Airbnbs at the time here in Florida, just because I love the flexibility of that. But my daughter was going to school. We wanted to settle down, at least, for a couple of years. But we also wanted to invest in something that would both

John Harcar (07:31.254)
Yeah,

John Harcar (07:49.296)
So.

The Hawk Mikado (07:52.98)
gain equity and would be an amazing rental property. And we do something very different with our Airbnb’s. We do them as a room by room rental. So we don’t do the we don’t do whole house. It mitigates a lot of risk. I’ve got a whole program and training on that specifically. We could probably spend about six hours on a podcast just talking about it. But the the.

John Harcar (07:56.122)
Yeah.

John Harcar (08:02.286)
Okay.

John Harcar (08:14.326)
I’m sure I have questions, so yeah.

The Hawk Mikado (08:20.382)
The so we bought this place in Paris, which is just south of Tampa. In the next three years, there’s a huge hospital going in and a college going in. Right now, we could rent it if we rent through the whole house for thirty six hundred. Our mortgage is three grand. Actually, it’s less than three grand, but mortgage and utilities and things like that come to about three grand. And if we rented it by the room, we could rent it for five to six grand.

John Harcar (08:42.191)
Sure.

John Harcar (08:50.276)
Yeah.

The Hawk Mikado (08:51.416)
So, and that’s today, in three years, five years from now when the college is done and the hospital is done and people are moving, like this area is gonna blow up. we didn’t buy the property for ourselves, we have our trust purchase the property and then we rent it from our trust, which is one of the real estate hacks that allows us to, yeah, we don’t get homestead.

John Harcar (09:10.064)
Mm-hmm.

The Hawk Mikado (09:21.198)
But Homestead’s only like $1,000, which most people like, they’re like, this is great. I’m getting a tax deduction. It’s like, yeah, know, $1,000 versus writing off the entirety of the interest. And the first five years, that’s huge.

John Harcar (09:28.462)
Mm-hmm. thousand bucks.

John Harcar (09:35.594)
Yeah, that’s a good nugget Yeah, good nugget guys take notes good nugget right from it from a trust. Okay. Well, that’s cool So you got these properties now? So now now what are you doing? I mean you got this one there Are you just in full buy mode? Are you what are you guys doing now?

The Hawk Mikado (09:53.932)
Yeah, so we’re focused in this process, which I guess I skipped over. My wife was like, you are so much happier when you’re doing real estate versus when you’re working on the agency stuff. I love working on the agency side of things for a lot of reasons, but there’s there’s always it’s always a constant turn turnover. There’s just some things that I just lost passion for.

And I can only make so much of an impact as my clients actually make. And they only make as much of an impact as the effort and energy they put into it, which varies from client to client. Where in real estate, I can see the direct impact because I’m helping a family buy a property that’s going to appreciate, that’s going to cash flow, that’s going to…

John Harcar (10:23.792)
Sure.

John Harcar (10:37.029)
Right.

Sure.

John Harcar (10:47.322)
Mm-hmm.

The Hawk Mikado (10:50.702)
that’s going to create wealth for themselves and as a rental property it then helps another family who otherwise may have been somewhere else that would have been less desirable. So I’m able to, I can see the tangible impact and we then take some of our money that we get on the commission side and donate that to charities that help end homelessness. So we’re able to further that cause.

John Harcar (11:03.67)
Yes, now that’s awesome.

John Harcar (11:18.264)
And we’re going to talk about that in a minute, but I have to ask this question before it leaves my brain. when you’re, you’re reading them by the room, right? So are you just, you know, letting the people know in your ads, okay, this is a rant by the room. There will be other people there, shared common space or I mean, is all that kind of, okay.

The Hawk Mikado (11:34.134)
Yeah. Yeah, we have a, it’s like a, a five page sales letter that I wrote and we use the same template. It’s fill in the blank Adlib style, or Madlib style at this point where we post it and that’s the listing. And they’re able to go and then click and schedule based on our availability.

John Harcar (11:51.277)
Okay.

John Harcar (11:58.096)
Awesome. Are you still doing Legion and all those type of things or are you?

The Hawk Mikado (12:03.468)
Yeah, we still do a little bit, but we’re very, very particular in who we will accept as a client. we’ve gotten we used to be very customized in our services. And it’s now an all or nothing because I was like a lot of the times it was like, well, I don’t want to do social media or I have somebody else doing social media. And then. It would stop or it wasn’t they weren’t doing the right kind of social media content. They’re posting quotes and shit like that, which

John Harcar (12:10.096)
Okay.

John Harcar (12:30.245)
Mm-hmm.

The Hawk Mikado (12:32.782)
that doesn’t do anything for your brand visibility. I mean, it’s great if you want to attract people who are looking for motivational quotes, but that’s not going to build your business. And so we were very intentional with the content that we put out there.

John Harcar (12:32.794)
Yeah.

John Harcar (12:37.552)
Sure.

John Harcar (12:49.326)
Okay, is it all SEO online stuff? mean, what services do you offer within the Lead Gen port?

The Hawk Mikado (12:57.39)
Sure. We do social media management, SEO, blogging. So blogging specific SEO, on page keywords. Press releases, which is really more SEO and credibility building. We do run ads on Facebook, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, LinkedIn, ex-social, all those sorts of things. We build AI bots. There’s a couple other things that are in that funnel.

John Harcar (13:02.704)
Hmm.

John Harcar (13:18.544)
Hmm.

John Harcar (13:24.12)
Okay. Okay. And are you taking on more clients at this point now or are you just very, I know you said in particular, are you just, do you work more with referrals now than?

The Hawk Mikado (13:35.489)
Yeah, so I mean, most of the people that I connect with are people that I have a conversation with. And then, you know, I will accept the client if I know that we can help them succeed and they’re willing to hand over the reins of their marketing to us. That’s really what it comes down to. I don’t have the patience, I guess, at this point to get nitpicked on every single little thing and to have to

In the beginning, it’s a process. But I have a client who is a good friend of mine. We talk once every four to six months. And his stuff’s just on autopilot. the team knows what to do. They do it every single day. And we do daily social content, daily emails for him, weekly press releases, weekly blog articles, the whole nine yards.

John Harcar (14:08.624)
huh.

John Harcar (14:15.032)
Okay.

John Harcar (14:29.943)
Awesome.

The Hawk Mikado (14:32.902)
And it’s easy for both of us. And it gets him clients, and he can quantify that, which is ultimately like, should never continue on with a marketing agency that’s not producing results. We don’t do contracts or anything like that. We have a setup and everything, and it’s like, hey, we recommend give this at least three months to get everything so you can see the quantifiable results.

John Harcar (14:47.268)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (14:58.159)
All right.

The Hawk Mikado (15:02.554)
but yeah, but, but we don’t have contracts. That’s literally, and we take weekly payments. You could cancel net with a week to week, basically a week time. it’s very, you know, it’s, and it’s, we got weekly deliverables. So, know, exactly what you’re getting that week and for, you know, for, for what you’re paying. So, it’s, it’s a great way to get everybody the results and say, Hey, here’s what it looks like. And.

John Harcar (15:02.574)
Well, it takes time to build and learn.

John Harcar (15:12.24)
Hmm, well cut, very cool.

John Harcar (15:24.228)
Got it.

The Hawk Mikado (15:31.468)
it makes it easier for me to fire a client too, then I’m like, either I’m not interested in working with them anymore or we’re just like, we’re not seeing the results that you want. If you want us to keep doing this because you want the visibility, that’s fine, can. But if you, personally, I don’t think this is worth the investment. And I’ve actually told a few clients that.

John Harcar (15:42.212)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (15:53.91)
Yeah, well, and sometimes it’s appreciative, right? Not many people will do that. People will just continue to take your money and it’s not working. But that comes to you and your integrity. So where do you think you’re spending more of your time now? On the agency side? On the investment side? What do you think you’re focusing on?

The Hawk Mikado (16:13.528)
real estate, I spend 99 % of my time on the real estate side. I got a couple hours blocked out every Monday for client meetings on the agency side if they need it. If they don’t, I’m working on real estate stuff. basically, Monday is the day.

John Harcar (16:28.688)
Nice, nice. What’s your goal? Yeah, what are your goals? Where are you trying to grow your company to? You’re on the investment side.

The Hawk Mikado (16:37.262)
Yeah, so ultimately over the next 10 years, we’d like to have at least $100 million under management within our portfolio.

John Harcar (16:46.192)
Are you doing property management as well are you offering any other services for investors?

The Hawk Mikado (16:50.668)
Yeah, so we have Happy Hostor, which is our Airbnb management company that does the, it’s technically a co-hosting company. It’s not property management. But yeah, we set everything up the same way we do with our properties. We have a very specific buy criteria. So I got a very clear buy box. Key point, yeah.

John Harcar (17:08.848)
Very cool.

John Harcar (17:14.672)
What is that? Tell people, tell everybody, what’s your buy box if they’re in your markets.

The Hawk Mikado (17:19.874)
So well, this is just for the multi-room, wherever you are. Within a mile of Starbucks, that’s a must. And within 10 miles of a health food store. So those are two things that are absolutely important. If it does not meet those two criteria, I will not look at it. We had one client who bought outside of that. Literally, she came to us.

John Harcar (17:30.145)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (17:35.525)
Huh.

The Hawk Mikado (17:46.4)
Before she bought, I handed her the sheet with my buy box. There’s a couple other things on there, but those are like the two main things. And I swear she bought everything that was literally the opposite of what I told her. We managed it for about eight months and we both were like, this is not, this is costing us too much money to manage because of how we do it. We take on everything, maintenance, like literally everything in our.

John Harcar (17:52.813)
huh.

John Harcar (17:58.252)
haha.

The Hawk Mikado (18:15.506)
within our percentage. And she’s like, you’re not filling it often enough. I’m like, that’s because you didn’t put it in there. You buy the right stuff. Yeah.

John Harcar (18:17.156)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (18:23.704)
You didn’t put it in the right area. Well, I can see the Starbucks part. What’s the mindset or thought process behind the health food store?

The Hawk Mikado (18:31.19)
Yeah, people who buy healthy food spend more money and pay more.

John Harcar (18:35.088)
True. Well, cause it costs more, but yeah, no, I get it. I was just kind of curious. I get the coffee part, I get the Starbucks part. It’s just a health food store, but I guess you’re right. Well, that’s some good nuggets too. So you said you want to get over a hundred million in…

The Hawk Mikado (18:46.764)
Yeah, that’s it.

The Hawk Mikado (18:54.62)
Yeah, I mean, we’d love to build over $100 million in…

John Harcar (19:02.488)
What are some of the trends you’re seeing in the Airbnb space or the room rental space?

The Hawk Mikado (19:08.078)
So the week by week, paying weekly, which is something I do now both in all my, like any service provider, I love paying, like I even contract with all my contractors. I’m like, we’re going to pay you weekly, even if they’re like a, like a, you know, if I was to hire an agency, like another agency for whatever reason that did stuff other than ours, I’d be like, I want to pay you weekly.

John Harcar (19:30.458)
Mm-hmm.

The Hawk Mikado (19:37.288)
which is really cash flow, better cash flow, right? can, it’s a lot easier to find, let’s just say you’re paying three grand a month in, well, two grand a month to make the math easy. You’re paying two grand a month for whatever service, matter. It’s a lot easier to find $500 in a week than it is to find 200 grand in a month. No matter what you’re doing, whatever your cash flow situation is, it’s a lot easier.

John Harcar (19:37.294)
Why is that?

John Harcar (20:04.432)
Yeah, it makes sense. Makes sense.

The Hawk Mikado (20:07.342)
I can go pick up a phone and I can make 500 bucks in an hour, two hours, three hours max, where a $2,000 sale is a lot more. It takes a lot more.

John Harcar (20:20.058)
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

What are some of common mistakes you’re seeing people that are trying to get into this or get into this are doing or making?

The Hawk Mikado (20:31.584)
Yeah, so at least here in the Tampa Bay area and to an extent, even in the Vegas market where we are with our Airbnbs, going into short term rentals and trying to do it with an economy. So the reason our system works so well is an economy, we’ll call it an economy class rental, right?

John Harcar (20:59.76)
Huh?

The Hawk Mikado (21:01.026)
giving that luxury experience. Airbnb’s stopped being as successful a couple years ago after kind of the transition out of COVID. They’re actually really, really successful during COVID ironically, but afterwards there’s just been a big shift in the marketplace. for, I don’t know what happened, but I find that most Airbnb’s are

John Harcar (21:17.337)
Right.

The Hawk Mikado (21:30.292)
about as expensive, if not more expensive than a hotel now. And half the time, when I’m traveling, I’m trying to decide, do I stay in an Airbnb or do I go stay in a hotel? And I’d say probably seven out of 10 of the last times that I’ve gone traveling, I’ve stayed in a hotel. Because it’s less expensive, it’s more convenient, and I don’t have to worry about

John Harcar (21:34.286)
Mmm.

The Hawk Mikado (21:57.11)
Cleaning my own clean the house that I’m paying a cleaning fee for like some of the people their rules and like their thought processes and between the increase in prices and You know all these things have culminated less people are choosing Airbnb for shorter term stays when they’re traveling for business Which is what actually a lot of people were?

John Harcar (22:04.484)
Yeah, yeah.

The Hawk Mikado (22:26.346)
using Airbnb for. There’s also the families who travel as a family, but less people are going on vacation now because costs have risen drastically. so, you know, between the fact that now the Airbnb is one and a half times what a hotel is and people are traveling less, the people who are traveling are looking for those four to eight to 12 bedroom houses.

John Harcar (22:27.728)
Mm.

John Harcar (22:34.992)
cost more than too much, yeah.

The Hawk Mikado (22:53.438)
that are luxury mansion experiences. Yeah, I’m going to spend two grand a night, but I’m getting, you know, and my whole family’s coming with me. Right. So, you know, I have people come to me all the time who are looking to buy a short term rental. And I’m like, just so you know, that’s not going to like.

John Harcar (22:56.208)
Mmm, mm-hmm.

John Harcar (23:03.832)
Right. Right.

The Hawk Mikado (23:18.068)
Air DNA is not going to give you the right data. Like I get that’s what it says. It’s going to come, you know, you have this. But the reality is you’re not going to really get that, at least in our experience and in the experience of all the people in my networking groups around here that like I got Airbnbs. I want to liquidate these things as fast as possible unless they are those luxury million dollar plus houses. And so I guess the biggest mistake is don’t buy those

John Harcar (23:23.32)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Harcar (23:31.952)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (23:39.952)
Yeah.

The Hawk Mikado (23:46.414)
200 to $500,000 houses for your Airbnb, they’re not going to convert as well as they used to. Now, if you’re gonna do a midterm multi-tenant like we do, that’s a very different conversation. So it’s just knowing what to use your properties for. And if you have a property, if it’s not working, you wanna make sure that you’re transitioning. Change your strategy.

John Harcar (23:54.298)
Got it.

John Harcar (24:10.672)
Yeah.

The Hawk Mikado (24:15.277)
2008, the majority of investors who lost their property were because they were so rigid in how they were managing those properties. it’s like, oh, like I knew, I knew a guy had literally hundreds of apartments and he was, I talked to him after, this was 2000, probably 2011, 2012. He’s like, yeah, I lost my entire portfolio.

John Harcar (24:24.367)
Yep.

John Harcar (24:42.224)
All

The Hawk Mikado (24:43.638)
And I was like, damn, that’s like what happened? He’s like, well, the only thing I could think of was find renters, find renters, find renters, find renters. And I was like, and I couldn’t sell it because obviously time nobody, you if he sold it liquidation. It was like, so what could you have done differently? How could you have monetized those in a different way? Room by room rentals have been around long before your B &B was around.

John Harcar (24:56.568)
Right. Right.

John Harcar (25:06.682)
Right.

John Harcar (25:11.237)
Sure.

The Hawk Mikado (25:12.682)
and they are far more profitable. Plus you have, for instance, we have a five bedroom, one of our properties a five bedroom. It requires two and a half bedrooms to be full, so three bedrooms to be full to make a profit.

John Harcar (25:29.594)
That’s nice.

The Hawk Mikado (25:31.776)
And the rest of it is pure profit. Two and a half bedrooms, pure profit.

John Harcar (25:34.096)
Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s the way to do it.

John Harcar (25:43.312)
That’s the way to do it. We’re running out of time here, so I wanted to make sure I touch on this because I like what you talked about that you’re donating to try to end homelessness, right? So let’s talk a little bit about what you’re doing with that because I think that’s huge. I mean, that’s awesome.

The Hawk Mikado (26:05.902)
I cut out on my end for a second if you ask the question.

John Harcar (26:10.282)
yeah, no, just kind of talk about, know, what we talked about before we jumped on here about, know, how you donate, you know, each dealer to help end homelessness. I think that’s awesome.

The Hawk Mikado (26:19.534)
Yeah, so a little backstory to this. 2019, my former business partner and I split with our agency. That was an expensive learning lesson. And a very, very expensive learning lesson. In that process, my wife and I were having a conversation because we went from traveling, flying private and

John Harcar (26:34.0)
Hmm

The Hawk Mikado (26:49.676)
literally traveling the world, being, you know, all the time to not being able to do that. And that hurt, that hurt a lot. And we’re like, okay, once we rebuilt, once we’ve re-accumulated some of our wealth, and by the way, our investments, real estate investments, and I had a couple of other things that had been producing consistent cashflow for us. It was the only reason we didn’t

John Harcar (26:54.756)
Hmm, yeah.

The Hawk Mikado (27:19.178)
end up homeless, ultimately. And so we’re like, like, this is, this is like, had I not had the experiences and opportunities that I took advantage over over the last decade plus, we would have ended up on the street. And, you know, maybe my parents and her parents, you know, they could have helped out a little bit. But that wouldn’t have been a long term solution. And

John Harcar (27:21.016)
Mm-hmm. Right, yeah.

John Harcar (27:37.423)
Yeah.

John Harcar (27:47.557)
Right.

The Hawk Mikado (27:49.118)
we discussed and we’re like, okay, so once we get back on our feet, what could we do that would really help change people’s lives? And we started discussing and talking about it. like, you know, one of the biggest problems that is pervasive everywhere in the world is homelessness. You have obviously hunger, hunger and thirst. And there’s a couple of others that are pretty brutal, but.

I know we could end homelessness. Like this seemed like it was like we literally we have in every house we have like long whiteboard walls like we literally turn our kitchen walls into whiteboard or like dining room walls into whiteboards. So we were mapping this whole thing out and there was these Ted talks that we had watched and we started combining some of these concepts together and we realized that

John Harcar (28:24.324)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (28:29.274)
Cool.

The Hawk Mikado (28:41.998)
between those and there’s the 5X rule or rule of one fifth in mortgage where a mortgage company will lend you one fifth of your current debt to income ratio. So if you have effectively $5,000 in cash flow every single month, they will without question, you can get somebody to lend you $1,000 a month.

John Harcar (28:58.167)
The Hawk Mikado (29:12.014)
equivalent or funds that then you’d pay back $1,000 a month. And so we looked at that and we’re like, okay, if we are able to find a way to pay for housing for homeless, get them off the street, get them a job, help them become contributing members of society, and then paying for the places that they’re staying in.

John Harcar (29:12.24)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (29:37.413)
Huh.

The Hawk Mikado (29:37.89)
at least temporarily until they then go move into their own property because into their own place because they’ve they’ve reintegrated back into society. How could we make that happen? And so we started looking at it like, OK, if we bought a property or built a property where we are or we’re able to take that and get the profits from that, go buy local businesses, plumbing, electricians, roofing companies, lawn care, etc.

Cleaning companies those kind of things and then buy or build a second building Where we then with much smaller studios only right like super small Take people off the streets house them in You know that maybe even two people per room or whatever the case may be house them in that but say like You have a sponsor of that will cover your rent for three months. You don’t have like normal shelters. You got four days

maybe a week. And then you got to go out and you got to reapply and go through the whole process again. And it’s this kind of churn in churn out thing, which is impossible for people to create stability. And so we came up with this model that then, you know, with that, we’re then able to employ them at all these companies that we’ve purchased.

John Harcar (30:43.619)
Yeah

John Harcar (30:59.374)
that you purchased. Yeah, that’s awesome,

The Hawk Mikado (31:01.726)
And now we’re making a profit from the companies that allows us to extend this out. And they’re paying rent, which then allows us to go buy or build a second, a third building, technically, and then a fourth and then a fifth and then so on and so forth. And it’s infinitely sustainable. And so that was the concept. Two years ago, we went to Arizona. We literally left Florida, went to Arizona and started this process with two partners.

John Harcar (31:15.984)
I love it. I love it. That’s awesome.

The Hawk Mikado (31:31.598)
The whole process, we got the blueprints, we were literally about to start raising funds. And at the end of the day, one of the partners didn’t agree with the sustainability part. They just wanted to do charitable work, which is, great. He wants that, his heart was in it for that reason. But to me, I was like, this has to be sustainable.

John Harcar (31:47.92)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (31:56.174)
Yeah.

The Hawk Mikado (31:56.814)
HUD housing, which is what he was working on, that’s he’s like, I’m gonna go work on this HUD housing project. It’s like, that’s great. That provides housing for people and it does a little bit, HUD housing, I forget what the number is currently, but I think it was like four million houses short today.

John Harcar (32:14.384)
I love your plan. I mean, I love how you set your thing up and I hate to cut this off because we’re running short on time here. I appreciate you being on here and sharing all this. How do people get a hold of you if they want to reach out to you and talk to little bit more about it or maybe even someone want to donate into your cause?

The Hawk Mikado (32:32.47)
Yeah, so the best way to connect with me is Facebook, Facebook Messenger. Send me a DM, just say, hey, I heard you on the podcast. And that way I’ll know where you’re coming from. If you just say hi, I will never respond. So please, tell me who you are or how you heard it. Yeah. Hawk Mikado, I’m the guy in the yellow suit on Facebook.

John Harcar (32:49.303)
So have some have some context and yeah, I have some contacts in there

John Harcar (32:58.8)
Well everyone, I mean, I hope you guys enjoyed the show. A lot of great nuggets in there. I hope you guys took some good notes and you know, we’ll look forward to seeing you guys on the next one. Cheers.

The Hawk Mikado (33:08.344)
Thanks for having me.