Data and Marketing for Real Estate Investors

Mike Hambright (00:01.004)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with my friend Sean O’Toole. We’re gonna be talking about data for marketing for real estate investors. Like there’s been a huge evolution going on over the past few years. Of course, Sean has been a data guy for a long time. Sean was a data guy before it was cool. And now he’s cooler than ever because it’s in trend, I guess. So Sean, welcome to the show.

Sean OToole (00:22.687)
Thanks for having me Mike

Mike Hambright (00:24.162)
Yeah, yeah. We were talking earlier, had you on the Flip Nerd show a long time ago. I don’t remember how long ago it’s been, but I bet it’s been about 10 years.

Sean OToole (00:32.594)
Yeah, yeah, five to 10 somewhere in there.

Mike Hambright (00:35.276)
Yeah, yeah, a long time. hey, I’m excited. I know you’re a fellow data geek. You also own a data company and been doing this for a long time. Maybe just share a little bit about your background and kind of how you got into the business.

Sean OToole (00:48.68)
Yeah, so, boy, I think it’s important to start. I started off as a software programmer early. Like I got a computer when I was 10, was writing software professionally at 14, dropped out of computer science to start my first software company at 18, spent a while in Silicon Valley, did three tech venture-backed tech startups in Silicon Valley. So was really my background up until the dot-com crash.

And after that, I was a startup guy and there was no startups really happening right then. And I turned down and offered an interview at Google and that was dumb. yeah, so right there at 2000, I kind of had this crossroads and I took a year off just to kind of figure out what I wanted to do. Got my wife pregnant, you know, played incessantly and had a lot of fun, but ultimately needed to get back to work.

the guy I was hanging out with and going wakeboarding and kite surfing was in the real estate business. And unlike me, who was unemployed at the time, he was making a few million bucks a year and had all this free time. I went, boy, I’m really doing this wrong back in Silicon Valley because I have no free time when I’m working and I’m not making three million bucks a year. So that led to my…

switched to real estate, flipped 160 properties, had a 55 % annualized return on capital, so did okay. Up until the end of 05, when I said, boy, I don’t like this market at all, I don’t wanna own any real estate, got rid of everything except our house, which I could talk my wife into selling. you know, said, you know, what do I do now? Well.

Most of those flips had been foreclosures and I had a lot of foreclosure data. So I launched a company called foreclosure radar because I saw foreclosures were going through the roof and then that evolved into property radar where we had property information on all properties and then that’s really evolved again to where we’re mostly used for targeted outbound marketing today.

Mike Hambright (02:46.541)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (02:57.836)
Yeah.

property radar. great. you know, it’s interesting, we I know we’re going to get into some of these things. But, you know, I know you provide a skip tracing service. A lot of us that have data, it kind of goes hand in hand and provides skip tracing. Of course, that business has really been hammered over the past, you know, a couple of years for the most part. But I think there’s this view of there are a lot of real estate investors that for a long time were pulling pretty generic lists for mailers, let’s say just like agent equity or something. Right. And then you were one of the first on the

to say, we can get some unique data that starts to tell a different story or it tells more of the story. And so I think of like a lot of real estate investors with data are like caveman with laser gun. Like they don’t, they don’t really know what to do with it. Right. And I think they, lot of real estate investors, especially up until the last few years, we’re just like trying to check a box. Like, yeah, I pull my own data, like some broad terms. Right. And, know, of course, where they get it from and what the

Sean OToole (03:41.566)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (03:58.208)
data is and all that stuff is super important but do they even understand it right or and then the problem is is you know they’re copying and pasting stuff in Excel spreadsheets and stuff and a lot of problems are bound to happen when that is certainly eventually something bad is gonna happen but maybe just I want to ask you just a question and this is obviously I know the answer already but I want to hear your thoughts is what why is all data not the same

Sean OToole (04:00.72)
And do they understand it? Yeah.

Sean OToole (04:24.552)
Yeah, boy, that is just that’s a great question and so many ways I could go with that. So so let’s start where it is the same. Right. So most of us are relying on public records data, right, which comes from the county assessor’s office, the county recorder’s office and the county court. Right. But any of us certainly that work on a national scale need to normalize that data because we’ve got three thousand one hundred and forty two counties.

Mike Hambright (04:29.955)
Hahaha

Sean OToole (04:54.312)
and they each do things a little differently. Right. So there’s big differences between vendors in how that data is gathered and processed. So I kind of always look at a couple of key things, which is how fast do you get that data from the source. And when you look at somebody naturally, look at somebody like us, it could be really fast in LA County, maybe two or three days and really slow in

California County like Alpine where you there’s days where there isn’t a recorded document. We only go pick it up you know maybe once a month because there’s just no point in doing it faster and we’d have no customers there. So we still get it but you know it varies so it varies a lot. So that’s one right. Then you know like assessor’s data is digital so you actually get it in digital form it stays digital but counter recorder data

is images. So you have to take that data off of those images and enter it. And for a long time, that was the best practice was to do that in the Philippines. You’d have two people enter the data. You compare the data. You take the best data. That really hasn’t been cost effective. So now you’ve got a lot more people doing single entry. First American’s been really hard at work at doing AI-based, essentially advanced OCR to pull that data in.

So there’s big variations in not only which documents from say the county recorder are abstracted at all, then which fields are abstracted. So there’s fields you can get from CoreLogic you can’t get from First American. Almost everybody in this business, we don’t, we multi-source, but almost everybody else is a First American or Atom reseller. And there’s just fields that First American and Atom don’t have that CoreLogic does have. CoreLogic’s still the leader.

Mike Hambright (06:48.577)
Mm-hmm.

Sean OToole (06:51.048)
They’re super expensive and super hard to work with. We do buy their data as well as data from most of the other players. But, you know, there are fields I can’t get anywhere else. So, you know, and, you know, everybody says, we go collect our own data or whatever our sources, the county recorder. You know, there’s 3,142 counties.

Core logic doesn’t collect every county, you know, for the East Coast, almost everybody buys from the Warren Group. So, I mean, it’s such a big thing and there’s just so much bad information and so many people that are frankly outlight Ryan or I give them the benefit of the doubt they don’t know. know, Jerry Norton’s been pushing court data and the data he’s pushing that’s court data doesn’t come from the court. It just, it simply isn’t even available at the court. It’s not court data. It’s like.

Mike Hambright (07:33.582)
Yeah.

Sean OToole (07:44.54)
I don’t know that he knows somebody should tell him.

Mike Hambright (07:47.512)
Hmm. Yeah, I’ll him a text. Say hey, man. Watch this podcast with Sean. Hey, so yeah, and I think that’s one of the problems is a lot of people just assume that the data is is all the same for one. But to that when you buy it from somebody else, there’s so many resellers of resellers that there’s just so much junk like I get texts, I mean, at least a couple times a week, asking me about houses.

Sean OToole (07:52.936)
Ha

Mike Hambright (08:16.054)
The most common is houses I don’t own and I’ve never owned. Sometimes it’s houses that I have owned, but haven’t owned for many years. and I’m just like, where is this data coming from that says this? Right. And it’s probably, mean, you know, I get hit in the DMS all the time on Facebook and social media. Like people will pull data for me or sell me a list of probates or things. And it’s like, you know, pennies, but I’m like, I know this is crap. Like I know that this person that’s offering to sell it for me doesn’t even know what they’re selling. They’re just selling something that somebody else told him to sell.

Sean OToole (08:27.902)
Right.

Mike Hambright (08:45.968)
And it’s almost like none of us would ever go to say, hey, somebody has some bootleg fuel for your car. And they’re like, yeah, it’s in this big tub. Just squirt it into your gas tank. You’d be like, no, I don’t trust that. But we’re willing to put that fuel into our business that we don’t know where it came from or what it even is. It just supposedly has a label on it that says fuel. And you’re like, OK. But in our business, we’ll do it all day long.

Sean OToole (08:46.804)
Alright.

Sean OToole (09:00.466)
Right, trust it.

Sean OToole (09:16.724)
And it’s a really complex thing too, because, there’s, what is bad data, right? Like, so, I mean, there’s truly bad data, which is junk sources, super out of date, et cetera, right? But also in public records, there’s lots of data that’s not correct. So, okay, if the assessor says it’s a three-bedroom two-bath, but you go to the house or the listing says it’s a four-bedroom four-bath.

Is the assessor data wrong? Well, it’s clearly wrong versus what was built. But it might be telling me that no permit was pulled to build that extra bedroom and extra bathroom. So is that bad data or is that data that’s actually going to save me a lot of trouble down the road? you know, so, you know, I think when you come to this data business, you just have to come with an exceptional level of curiosity. And then also like

phone numbers, people are constantly changing phone numbers, right? So what’s good or bad on a phone number? If every phone number I have isn’t perfect, is that bad data? Well, industry standards about a 70 % right party contact rate. You know, if I was looking at most everybody resells IDI data, and when we were evaluating,

Mike Hambright (10:30.03)
Hmm.

Sean OToole (10:39.752)
all the phone data sources and I looked for phone data for 10 years and then I.D.I. came out and just started selling to everybody. But before that, I identified another source, which I think is awesome. But they had a lower match rate than I.D.I. had. And I was like, I should go with I.D.I. Everybody’s going with I.D.I. I should go that direction. And I said, you know what, before I do that,

because this other folks were like, no, no, our data is better. You got to trust us. you know, trust, right? So I made 100 phone calls. I just started calling people. I said, I got to make at least 100 phone calls. And I took random samples from both. And my right party contact, even though my match rate was lower, my right party contact rate was so much higher with my data source to the point that I came up with that this other vendor was just making up phone numbers and filling them in.

Mike Hambright (11:27.853)
Hmm.

Sean OToole (11:36.372)
you know, to have a high match rate like just, you know, but you know, we still have a little lower match rate and we still only have, you know, maybe an 80 % right party contacts. You make 10 calls, two of them, three of them are going to be to the wrong person or an old phone number to their mom or to their brother or something. Right. And that’s the nature of the industry. So is that bad data? No, I think it’s better data than is available elsewhere. And I think you can make a lot of money.

Mike Hambright (11:52.407)
Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

Sean OToole (12:06.516)
you know, with calling campaigns with 70 % correct or 80 % correct data, will save you time and money using us where you get more right parties than using, you know, what everybody else is using where I know for facts, I made a hundred phone calls, you’ll get fewer right parties.

Mike Hambright (12:24.814)
Yeah. And what’s interesting too is like people that are our best possible prospects are trying to not be found. So like you said, they’re often changing their phone number because you know, they didn’t pay their bill and next thing you know, they got to get a new number or they’re trying to dodge creditors or whatever it could be. they’re, you I’ve had, mean, I have a few different phone numbers, I guess, and I’ve had some numbers that have come and gone, but my primary number I’ve had for

20 years or some long period of time, right? But I’m obviously not trying to run from, you know, well, might be running from some people, but not creditors.

Sean OToole (13:00.436)
Exactly. Well, this is where multi-channel marketing becomes, you know, so so important. And, you know, and if I if I really have a hot deal, I’m sending them a FedEx because everybody opens FedEx and it’ll cost me 40 bucks or whatever. you know, at the end of the day, like so the multi-channel, you know, try to hit them up on online with ads, email, phone, direct mail.

Mike Hambright (13:16.034)
Yeah.

Sean OToole (13:29.842)
you know, or, you know, extreme end of the FedEx envelope. But, you know, I think multi-channel, especially now with so many people competing in the space, I just think that’s, that’s real key to differentiate yourself. Cause at the end of the day, impressions build trust, right? You know, Donald Trump is president because he gets more impressions than anybody, right? And

Mike Hambright (13:47.491)
Right.

Sean OToole (13:53.512)
You know, can argue that’s for other reasons, but I would say that’s at the top of the list, right? You see his name, hear his name and why we keep, you know, we keep, you know, electing folks with or trying to elect folks with the same names, Bush’s and Clinton’s and whatever, right? Cause his name familiar already is important and multi-channel marketing helps you do that.

Mike Hambright (14:13.848)
Yeah. Yeah.

Well, some people, you know, obviously everybody resonates different with different types of ads. I mean, I’m online all day long. So if you’re, I, you know, I’m an effective, I’d be a good prospect for online advertising. just spend too much time online. I, even though I own a direct mail company, I haven’t opened my mailbox in months. I my wife handles that. Most of the stuff goes to the recycling bin and a couple other things that need to get handled. She, she generally handles, right. And so, so everybody’s a little bit different. mean, I, don’t.

answer a phone call if I don’t recognize it, but I see 100 % of my texts, you know, so everybody’s different. I know my grandma, like I can’t text her. She doesn’t have the ability to do that. Right. But she would get mail. Right. So everybody’s a little bit different. And I think, you know, there’s also something for a kind of omnipresence too, is like, sometimes people are seeing all these channels, but like, and I’m, I’m, I’m a sales guy, so I’m probably a little bit different than the average person, but I like to reward good marketing. Like I want to work with people that I’m like,

Sean OToole (14:51.027)
Right? Yeah.

Mike Hambright (15:16.516)
man, I’m seeing you guys everywhere and there’s something to this. In your mind, you start to think maybe this is fate. Like somebody’s trying to tell me something and it’s just like, the marketers are. They’re trying to tell you to use this product. But there’s some element of just like omnipresence of just like everywhere I turn, I see this company, right?

Sean OToole (15:26.708)
But we-

Sean OToole (15:35.006)
Well, because we all want to work with people who are successful and we all want to, you know, we know if lots of other people are choosing that thing, then it’s safer for us to choose. So, I mean, there’s a lot of psychology around that that says the more I see something, the more I should trust it, which is why, you know, certain names dominate the press and other things. So, I mean, that is as fundamental a law of marketing as I think you can have. Impressions equal trust.

Mike Hambright (16:01.752)
Yeah. Let’s talk about.

With with data I want to talk about data a little bit more so one of the things about data obviously the the basis for one of my companies investor machine and I know You guys do a lot of this too is is not just data. It’s the Mixture right? It’s like what is the mixture of these different things telling you like one thing is you know age and equity used to be popular when not everybody and their brother was mailing now There’s a ton of people that are over 65 that have a ton of equity that have no interest in selling and they’re gonna be alive for another 20 years on average

right? but when you start to mix in, but they filed a probate four months ago, they’re not one year, not two, but three years behind on back taxes. When you start to layer in this stuff, and it’s like, it’s like a recipe, right? It starts to tell you a better story when you pull all this together, like any of those things by themselves might not have been as important. Maybe a probate is probably the most important single data point, but you know, together, it starts to tell you a story, right? And that’s where I think

there’s a ton of data out there. People can go pull data from anywhere, but unless they’re referencing other data points that are kind of telling more of the story, I mean there’s a lot of power in that, right?

Sean OToole (17:16.518)
I couldn’t agree with you more. The whole company and the whole product is kind of built around that premise. We have nearly 300 different criteria, which is more than any other tool ever built in the real estate space. It’s more than a list source or anything that’s ever been built. And some people will say, we have 200 criteria, but they’re talking about like,

single family, multi-family, they’re counting each of those as criteria. I’m counting property type as a criteria with the 200 property types we have as one criteria, right? So like one of our competitors came out and said, hey, we have 40,000 different possible combinations and permutations that you can get by using our criteria tool. I calculated ours and it was just under a Google.

and that’s a G O O G O L Google it. And it’s a very big number. So the bottom line is that I very much believe in that. And the reason is is good marketing is about telling a story. You hit on this. You talked about the story. The data can tell you story. That’s half of it. But you need to use data to tell a story. And by if you’re just

Mike Hambright (18:17.589)
Hahaha.

Mike Hambright (18:37.123)
Right.

Sean OToole (18:41.022)
Let’s say you’re mailing absentee owners. Let me ask you, what’s an absentee owner? Right? Is it a burbro? Is it a tired landlord that’s about ready to retire? Is it, you know, a young family who owns a duplex? Is it a short-term rental? Is it a vacation home? Is it like, think about all the different things that an absentee owner could be. And you’re literally going to do the same marketing to all of them.

Mike Hambright (19:08.536)
Yeah.

Sean OToole (19:10.984)
Like it makes no sense to me at all. And this is what most people do. Even specialty lists like probates or foreclosures, treating all those the same doesn’t make any sense. A foreclosure that’s underwater, a foreclosure where the guy’s been repeated mortgage fraudster is very different than somebody who’s having…

Mike Hambright (19:13.954)
Right.

Sean OToole (19:33.382)
some other life event or issue or maybe it’s a foreclosure after somebody’s died. These are very different things that require very different marketing. You need to tell a different story. And this is how as an investor, you can differentiate yourself and do better than your competitors because every especially in this business, people go, you know, we should mail fake checks and everybody mails, fix checks, right?

Mike Hambright (19:41.71)
Right.

Sean OToole (19:58.448)
we should do yellow letters and everybody does yellow letters. They all do it at the same time to the same lists using the same vendors. And I’ve been anti that from day one. And honestly, it makes our tool harder to use. Because, you know, I don’t give you the same five templates and I don’t give you, you know, those just quick lists we do now sort of we do have templates we do have if you just want to absentee owners, you can click one button.

Mike Hambright (20:04.962)
Right. Yeah.

Sean OToole (20:28.264)
get them. But I really encourage people go think about who it is you want to talk to. Come up with a unique story. Come up with a unique story nobody else is telling. Come up with a unique solution nobody else is offering. You want to do better than your competitor. That’s how you do it.

Mike Hambright (20:45.986)
Yeah, and it’s going to continue to evolve. think a lot of people end up picking something and just out of laziness or busyness, they just keep doing the same thing for ever and ever and ever as well. And sometimes they might say, well, I’m just trying to be really consistent. I mean, I’m not saying to be inconsistent with your brand, but the techniques have evolved. mean, that’s the interesting thing is mail is been around.

for a million years, but the data behind it, the sophistication with figuring out what’s working, testing colors, like testing calls to action, testing stuff like should I have my website on there or not? Should I have a picture of me or my family? Like being able to test all those things is really where the sophistication I think comes in.

Sean OToole (21:28.434)
Yeah, you know, and the tracking, you know, all of that. There’s just so much more, you know, intelligent mail barcode, you know, allowing you to track where the piece is in the stream and the rest. mean, there’s, there’s an awful lot that’s changed and a lot more that’s changed, right? And so what’s great about your service, right, is you do all that for them. With my service, we give them the tools for them to do it themselves. So it’s kind of the two ends of the

Mike Hambright (21:31.48)
tracking.

Mike Hambright (21:56.972)
Yeah, DIY are done for you. Yeah. Yeah.

Sean OToole (21:57.876)
of the spectrum. Yeah DIY or do it for me. Yep, exactly.

Mike Hambright (22:04.81)
So let’s talk a little bit about kind of privacy laws, best practices and things on that, because a lot of people hate that there’s data out there on them. I’ve kind of given up a long time ago. was like, there’s no way that I can hide from all this stuff. But there’s also best practices on how you use it, especially with skip tracing and I guess just overall data. But maybe share your thoughts on best practices with data.

Sean OToole (22:30.568)
Yeah. So I mean, I think it’s it’s because I’m a computer guy, right? I know the Q point is coming and that’s when quantum computing reaches the point where there’s no encryption, nothing safe. Everything’s visible. Like so I’m kind of with you. I don’t care. I’m an open book. You can go find my stuff. I believe in public records. I think it’s part of what makes America great and and the rest. But we’ve got a big push.

towards, you know, privacy, people don’t like feeling targeted and the rest. So, like one of the things we always tell our customers, and we actually have something we call the Good Neighbor Marketing Pledge, is, you know, targeting is what you do, but not what you say, right? You should never make someone feel targeted. And you’re like, well, how do I mail to foreclosures without making people feel like I targeted them because they’re in foreclosure?

Mike Hambright (23:24.142)
How do I deal?

Sean OToole (23:30.792)
And a lot of that just comes down to your card. Imagine door knocking, right? And saying, hey, you’re in foreclosure, right? That’s pretty confrontational. Instead, knock on that door and say, you know, hey, I’m a local landlord. I just want to let you know foreclosures are increasing in the area, right? I’m an expert in foreclosure. And I just want you to, it’s not going to be like 2008, nothing to worry about. And if you know anybody in this situation, I’m a great resource and I’d be happy to help.

But you as a homeowner, just want to tell you, you know, there’s nothing to worry about. Now you’re demonstrating empathy, you’re demonstrating expertise, you’re not making them feel targeted. There’s ways to do this. And you know, so that’s one of them. you know, and if you show empathy and the rest in your marketing, you could probably break some of the rules. I’m not telling you to. We’re going to say contractually, you have to follow the rules if you sign up for my service.

Mike Hambright (24:11.35)
Right. Yeah, yeah.

Sean OToole (24:28.564)
but you can break some of the rules and you’re not going to get in trouble because people aren’t going to report you because they’re not going to be pissed. And you know, I think that’s, that’s another thing to keep in mind. And one of the things I always, especially with investors, I always say, okay, okay, here’s this marketing piece. Now let’s take this marketing piece and imagine that your kids playmate at schools, parents are in this situation and they got that marketing piece.

Mike Hambright (24:33.994)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Sean OToole (24:56.668)
and you’re sitting down for dinner with them and they find out that marketing piece came from you. How are they going to feel about you when they look at it?

Right? Like, start your marketing from that standpoint, because then your marketing will have empathy and thought and think about that person rather than think about you. Investors are the worst. They’re always, buy houses for cash. I do this. I close fast. You know what, investors, I got something for you. And this is for myself too as an investor. Like, nobody gives a fuck about you. Sorry, maybe I shouldn’t use that word in this podcast, but nobody cares, right? Care about them, right?

Mike Hambright (25:28.654)
You

Sean OToole (25:34.544)
and what they need and what problems they’re having, right? What is the problem somebody in foreclosure is having? They’re having problems like how do they tell their family? Where are they going to live? How are they going to rent a place when their credit’s been ruined? Right? Those are their problems. The foreclosure is not their problem, right? It’s the bigger picture problem, but the real world problem of being able to move on and do something. I mean, how many foreclosure postcards go out with, hey, I can help you find a home?

Mike Hambright (25:34.764)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (25:53.987)
Yeah.

Right.

Sean OToole (26:04.402)
You know, I have a rental available for you a place to go that keeps you in your school district. Especially for folks that have kids, right? That’s where like children present as a criteria we have. Nobody else has. That’s why that’s there.

Mike Hambright (26:13.699)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Hambright (26:22.222)
Let’s talk about with that kind of with where data is at today and kind of where it’s going. You can get so specific on your marketing now. Like everything used to be generic. Like everything was throwing spaghetti at a wall like 10 years ago.

was 15 years ago, even when I was getting started, 17 years ago, guess, gosh. But it’s getting so specific now that I think, you for a lot of real estate investors, they have a hard time competing with those that are putting in the effort to be very specific, to use the tools that are out there right now. And there’s a bunch of old school people that think that this is a fad and it’s kind of going back. We basically went from kind of, it’s still the Wild West, but it’s not as much of the Wild West as it used to be. I where do you see

for I guess kind of efficiency from an efficient market standpoint, from a real estate investor standpoint, where that’s going. Obviously you got iBuyers now, you got institutional players, you’ve got a lot of things that are different than when we were coming up, right?

Sean OToole (27:22.76)
Yeah, yeah. We’ve worked with a lot of those larger players as of you, I’m sure. And you know, they’re really good. They’re really sophisticated and they’re hiring data scientists and other stuff, you know, through that. So yeah, it’s getting tougher. I think the big thing is like with some of those bigger players, right? They’re just not truly local. And so I think being, you know,

Mike Hambright (27:28.035)
Yeah.

Sean OToole (27:51.432)
having your niche and being better at it, know, kind of the do things that don’t scale. That’s a really popular tech, you know, thing for how you get a startup off the ground is you do things that don’t scale because those big companies and those bigger players can only do things that scale. And so you get more local, right? Get more personal, you know, do door knocking. They can’t do that, right?

Mike Hambright (28:00.856)
Right.

Sean OToole (28:20.756)
Direct mail, a little more expensive, but it’s hard to do at scale, right? I always tell my realtor customers, Zillow’s never gonna send every person in your neighborhood a direct mail, you know? They have 100 million possible, you know, consumers. They’re not gonna spend $50 million on a piece of direct mail, you know? But you’ve got 1,000. You can spend 500 bucks, right? It works for you. It doesn’t work for them.

Mike Hambright (28:20.973)
Right.

Mike Hambright (28:42.798)
right.

Mike Hambright (28:47.118)
Yeah

Sean OToole (28:49.714)
So I think that’s the big thing. Focus on the things that work for you. It’s really hard to win in SEO and some of those things. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it, but to get to be top three is tough. It’s real work unless you’re in a real niche market. The more niche you are, the better chances you have at that.

Mike Hambright (29:11.052)
Yeah, focus on what you can control, right? can’t control everything. Yeah. So let’s talk about the current market. Like, what are your thoughts on, you nobody knows what is going on. There’s all sorts of, you know, by the time the show comes out, maybe this will all be.

Sean OToole (29:14.546)
Right, absolutely.

Mike Hambright (29:27.992)
figured out, but there’s a lot of concern with all the tariff stuff. There’s, you know, all these, I kind of made a meme today. I was like, the people that can’t afford to pay off their college loans are all of sudden tariff experts, you know, but anyway, who knows where all that’s going to go. There’s a lot more going on than just that, but there, there is a, probably a fairly significant reset going on in the economy as a whole. Like, where do you see this playing out? Let’s just say this year, by the end of this year, what do you see going on with the real estate market? And I know it’s different from market to market as well, obviously.

Sean OToole (29:57.724)
Yeah, it is tough. know, Charlie Munger of a number of years ago, I think, during the COVID crisis says that anybody that who predicts what’s going to happen from here is a charlatan or an idiot because, you know, it’s too unprecedented to predict, right. And so I’m a Buffett Munger fan, like, you know, so, you know, that’s kind of how I feel about a big picture. But

Mike Hambright (30:14.328)
Hahaha.

Sean OToole (30:27.986)
You know, think there are a couple of things that, you know, kind of, you know, I think about in this moment, right? So, look, what we did here for a long time, and my grandfather and probably your grandfather fought in World War II to establish globalism. Like, I mean, that’s what World War II, that was the outcome of World War II, right?

all these European countries were fighting each other. You know, the French were stealing the British’s boats, that, you know, it’s just all a mess, right? And in World War II, we all unified against Germany, and then ultimately against Russia, right? So NATO and all the rest exists to keep Russia at bay. And then we went to China and said, Hey, China,

There’s another path for you here. If you’ll just align against Russia, we’ll buy your goods. Right. So that’s kind of the big picture history. Like that’s what we fought World War II to do. We unified Europe, you know, and we created globalism and we said, you know what, you can move your stuff around on the seas because we’re going to protect the seas. like that is that was that was what we won out of World War II.

Right? It is a global society. And in that, we screwed, you know, the rust belt in the South. And we didn’t come up with another plan for them. And we’re paying for that now, right? Because globalism has lots of benefits. I have more computing power in my pocket than the entire world had in 1960. And I had it for 1100 bucks.

Mike Hambright (32:05.078)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Mike Hambright (32:18.168)
Yeah.

Sean OToole (32:18.514)
With tariffs, that’s now going to be $1,700 for the same phone, or at least the proposed tariffs. But it worked great pretty much for the world. The whole world has done very, well under that regime. And certainly, we’ve been the leaders of that regime. we get to have the world’s reserve currency as part of it. But yes, there’s a huge imbalance. And is it sustainable forever?

you know, maybe not. And there’s some experts that say because of demographics collapse, globalism is going to end regardless of whether we end it through, you know, a trade war or just because of its own weight. So, you know, probably some change is necessary. But we have to realize is what trade deficits mean is we export goods, right? Sorry, we import goods more. We import good more goods than we export, which means we export dollars.

When we export dollars, those dollars get reinvested back here because there’s nothing else for those countries to do with them. It’s just a fiat currency. It’s paper. It’s no good to them. So they invest it back and they buy our treasuries and they buy our mortgage-backed securities and the rest. And that keeps our interest rates low. And that’s been the basic trade, right? We get cheap goods and we get cheap debt and they get a whole bunch of jobs and they get to bring their economies up and try to catch up with the U.S., which nobody’s close to.

So that’s been the world order and now we’re trying to change it and you know, I think it’s a you know, it’s not the way I would go about trying to change it. I think there’s some reasons to try to change it. But a lot of people right now are saying that they think what’s going to come out of this is lower interest rates and

that may be a flight to safety move lower interest rates. But ultimately, if we’re not exporting dollars, we’re going to have higher interest rates. So if we move to a protectionist, make stuff here in the US, TVs go from $300 to $3,000. And interest rates probably, you know, are in the high single digits to low double digits, right? I think that’s where we’re headed.

Sean OToole (34:46.164)
long term if we stay down this path.

Mike Hambright (34:46.402)
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Thanks for sharing your insights on that. what I guess for real estate investors, the significance there is, you know,

We can’t predict what’s gonna happen here. However, you know, the average American family has like less than $1,000 in savings or something like that. there’s a lot of people that are living paycheck to paycheck, not that we wish that for them, not that we did that to them either. I mean, they got themselves in that situation one way or another from the decisions they made in their life, right? So what it essentially means is they may not be able to afford that house for long and they might need some relief from folks like us ultimately.

Sean OToole (35:24.466)
Yeah, and I think there will be likely more opportunity and more movement. Right. So the one thing we’ve had is we’ve had a pretty stagnant, relatively stagnant real estate market. People have been locked into their house due to low interest rates. And the economy’s been booming for quite a while, all things considered. And so

there hasn’t been much impetus to move. And so we’ve seen a lot fewer transactions in the market. And we’re likely to see whenever you get periods of change, you’re going to see more transactions and more transactions as more opportunity for people who want to do transactions. Yes, I agree with you on that.

Mike Hambright (35:56.247)
Right.

Mike Hambright (36:01.164)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (36:05.23)
One of the negatives of the market doing well and those cheap interest rates is people got in and they could afford that interest rate. They can’t afford the next one, which is why they’re not selling. There’s not as many transactions, right? But also their taxes and insurance have just shot up and that’s putting the squeeze on the cost of home ownership now these days, right? Yeah.

Sean OToole (36:27.784)
Yeah, for sure. you know, the insurance is especially problematic. We definitely have seen people forced out of, you know, I live in the mountains and in the forests and we’ve seen people literally have to move because of the increases in insurance costs.

Mike Hambright (36:43.788)
Yeah, yeah, it’s an interesting time for sure. If nothing else, we can say we live in interesting times.

Sean OToole (36:50.388)
I mean, I would honestly say I got forced out of my last house, you know, partially because I got divorced, but my insurance when I moved into that house with $3,000 a year, my last quote on insurance was $60,000 a year.

Mike Hambright (37:04.639)
wow. Wow wow wow, it’s crazy. Yeah.

Sean OToole (37:05.874)
before I sold. So that yeah, that’s that’s a pretty big, pretty big increase.

Mike Hambright (37:11.916)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, Sean, thanks for sharing some insights with us today. We appreciate it.

Sean OToole (37:17.682)
Yeah, happy to be here.

Mike Hambright (37:19.022)
If folks want to learn more about you or about PropertyRadar, where can they go?

Sean OToole (37:23.572)
Sean at Property Radar is just my email address. Propertyradar.com is our website and we’re on, I’m on and the company’s on all the usual channels. Facebook, X, you know, I’m not super active socially but I definitely respond to direct outreach. LinkedIn.

Mike Hambright (37:43.638)
Awesome, we’ll add some links. We’ll add some links down here in the show notes. So Sean, thanks again for spending some time with us today.

Sean OToole (37:51.26)
No, thank you. Awesome to be here. Okay.

Mike Hambright (37:51.672)
Great to see you. Yeah, great to see you again. And everybody, hope you have a great day. Hope you got some good insights from the show today. I mean, if nothing else, it’s an interesting time and it is going to create opportunities for us. whenever, not that we wish this, but kind of like a trader in the market, we, volatility is a good thing for real estate investors. Ultimately, it causes a little bit of chaos and we can be the solution that maybe that seller needs. So not that we want those things. That’s just the reality of the world we live in. So appreciate you guys a bunch. We’ll see you on the next show.

Sean OToole (38:21.524)
Take care.