From Stockbroker to Mortgage Expert: Phil Hawkins’ Journey Unveiled

Dylan Silver (00:01.152)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. And today on the show, I have real estate, finance, commercial and residential expert, 17 years in the business based out of Austin, Texas, Phil Hawkins. Phil, welcome to the show.

Phil Hawkins (00:20.526)
Thanks a lot, glad to be here.

Dylan Silver (00:22.238)
It’s a pleasure to have you. I always like to start off at the top by asking folks how they got into the real estate space.

Phil Hawkins (00:29.932)
Well, believe it or not, I was…

stockbroker for Merrill Lynch.

And I hated it. It was worse than being a used car salesman. I hated every minute I was in that business, but it led me to the mortgage business. One of my customers was the mortgage executive at what was Great Western Bank in Fresno, California. And I said, how do you make money doing mortgages? He explained it to me and the rest is history.

Dylan Silver (01:05.652)
And so what time period was this that you got into mortgages?

Phil Hawkins (01:09.038)
It was 1980, I want to say 88, 87, somewhere in there.

Dylan Silver (01:14.326)
So, $88.87, I mean, today we are concerned about rates right now. What were the mortgage rates like in $88.87?

Phil Hawkins (01:20.397)
Mm-hmm.

That’s very interesting. The mortgage rates at that specific time, as I recall, I guess I should have looked this up, but as I recall, they were in the nines and eights. They had just fallen below 10. And there was a scramble, a mad scramble for refinances.

And it was relatively easy to get into the business at that time because the demand was so huge that I mean you’re writing loans with both hands at that time. Now the loans were very small so you weren’t making that much money but the activity was there and the learning curve was very very short as a result.

Dylan Silver (01:44.758)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (01:58.838)
So I want to ask about, you know, being in the mortgage game, I’ve spoken now to quite a few people who got in right around 2008 or maybe got out at 2008 and then moved into a different area. But you’ve seen the game now since the late 80s. And so I’m curious to get your perspective. Seen it from the late 80s to 90s, early 2000s when it seemed like everybody was making money hand over fist in the mortgage space.

Phil Hawkins (02:10.318)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Hawkins (02:16.462)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (02:27.728)
to 2008. Did you see a 2008 happening when you were in the in the late 80s early 90s? Did you see that there would be some type of like black swan event?

Phil Hawkins (02:39.566)
Yeah. I mean, the writing was on the wall even long before 2008, but it was, that was the most bizarre time in the industry that has never been repeated and probably never will be, it had never occurred before.

And it’s going to take me, if you’ve got the rest of the afternoon for me to explain to you why all that happened, that there is no bad guy and that it was just a perfect storm of economic confluences coming together to create, I don’t know. It was just, it came from outer space almost and all came together in 2008 and crashed. But the reason it happened,

Phil Hawkins (03:31.092)
is a long story.

Dylan Silver (03:33.172)
You know, I at least feel, because I was in high school in 2008, but what I at least feel now as an agent and I’m also a wholesaler up in Dallas, is that it’s because of Dodd-Frank and so many other things, getting a mortgage for the average person, maybe college graduate, is more difficult than it was before. You know, I’ve heard this term that if you had a pulse that you were getting mortgages pre-2007 timeframe. And so,

On that front, of course, things have been more challenging. But also, that event, 2007, 2008, created a whole other space, which is private money. There was really maybe private

Phil Hawkins (04:14.958)
Private money has been around all the time. There has never been a time when private money was not available. It may have been more prevalent. It may have played a bigger role. Obviously it did in the years subsequent to 2008, but it wasn’t a new concept.

Dylan Silver (04:22.198)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (04:30.974)
Right, right. And so you’re having more people who are raising money and raising capital to buy into deals. And you mentioned before hopping on here, know, who is calling me?

Dylan Silver (04:48.47)
I’ll to edit that out. We’ll edit that out. But let’s hop back in here. you mentioned you had all this distressed debt. And some people had to come in and purchase the property and the debt. And the banks were more than happy to offload it. And so that was coming from private money.

Phil Hawkins (04:48.526)
I guess I should check the same thing. Let me turn this off. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (05:15.476)
When I think about this space and when I think about your journey in it, going from the residential side to then commercial, what were…

Phil Hawkins (05:24.022)
No, the other way around. first started doing commercial and then got into residential. Doing commercial in those years was terrible. It was awful. You couldn’t make any money.

Dylan Silver (05:28.575)
Okay, commercially.

Dylan Silver (05:32.758)
And so you went the other way around. Was it due to that, just like you said, it was a difficult game to be in?

Phil Hawkins (05:36.398)
Yeah.

Phil Hawkins (05:43.33)
Commercial real estate was very depressed. Of course, that was right after the savings and loan debacle, where all of these savings and loans had a portfolio of commercial properties that they didn’t understand how to underwrite. And so these mortgages defaulted left and right. so, you know, money for commercial lending was very, very tight, especially in hotels. You couldn’t get a hotel loan for nothing.

in the late 80s and so I said this is never going to work in fact I was in on a deal to construct the second tower on the Rio Hotel in Vegas 100 million dollars expansion loan we had five participants in the syndicate and we were all ready to fly to Denver and do the paperwork bring the lawyers it was all ready to proceed and they called and said never mind we’ll just we’ll pay for it out of cash flow

Dylan Silver (06:42.134)
Deal falls apart at the table. That can be agonizing and I have not done a commercial deal but I’ve seen it happen many many times.

Phil Hawkins (06:44.802)
Call!

Phil Hawkins (06:49.614)
don’t even go there. It’s the worst. It’s very, very difficult.

Dylan Silver (06:54.176)
So you go from commercial to residential. A lot of people are in residential, and they’re trying to get to commercial. What was that? What was?

Phil Hawkins (07:01.618)
Mm-mm. This is the loudest piece of advice that I can impart to your viewers and listeners. Do not go from residential to commercial. You’ll kill yourself. You will. You’ll commit suicide. It is the worst. It is the most complicated, time-consuming, nitpicking thing you’ve ever engaged in.

Dylan Silver (07:25.266)
I can imagine you’re dealing with you’re dealing with a whole other beast entirely. So I’m pivoting a bit here, Phil, with with your vast experience. You mentioned, you know, commercial and residential. But I also see from the notes, you know, subprime construction loans, wholesale retail. Was there any one area where you really had the most passion for where you had kind of aha moments that really pivoted your

Phil Hawkins (07:30.061)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Hawkins (07:42.69)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (07:54.794)
business and your career.

Phil Hawkins (07:59.796)
I would have to say…

I would have to say subprime. See, people don’t understand what subprime actually was and how it was underwritten and where the risks were addressed and all of those things. And, you know, now the word subprime is one of the seven nasty words. You you’re doing subprime, well, you’re an evil person. You know, they don’t understand it.

Dylan Silver (08:31.594)
You know, I think of Subprime as a wholesaler and as an agent who works with investors, I think there’s a lot of tie in between that and what I’m doing because I’m dealing with distressed sellers and in Subprime you’re dealing with potentially non-performing, right, non-performing loans. And so how did you get into that space in Subprime and are there a lot of people and were there a lot of people in that space or was it relatively niche?

Phil Hawkins (09:01.696)
Everybody, everybody jumped in head, hands and feet. I mean, they ran down the street with their eyes closed, screaming at the ring going money, money, money, money. That’s how it all happened. Now I’m being forced to explain to you how all this happened and why subprime is not a bad thing. And I can paraphrase it for you you’d like. Since, since I’d say the 1930s,

less or so in the 20s, when the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, I think is the name of it, was established. Bannie Mae was all established. All of these regulatory agencies to govern mortgage industry came to fruition, were at that time a very good thing. So between 1935,

and let’s say 2000 when the subprime thing happened there had not been more than a 0.5 % foreclosure rate on Fannie Mae underwriting. That was the normal foreclosure rate. So it was a very safe investment. Now when you, let’s say you go down and you get a loan, that loan is a package

that’s this thick and you know that you’ve seen it. If you’ve ever bought a house, you spend three hours signing forms. Okay. That package is money. is, it is, you people talk about people talk about monetizing and they use the word incorrectly alone has monetization attached to it. It is a thing of value. It can be sold. It can be bought. It can be discounted. can be given a premium, et cetera, et cetera, depending on the marketing conditions. The point is

You are given your money and the money pays off everything, goes into escrow, and then they take that loan and they sell it into the secondary market to what they call servicers. Now, there are services that have giant, enormous billions and billions, sometimes trillions of dollars of receivables that they manage. And the average appreciation on a single family home

Phil Hawkins (11:18.06)
was 5 % a year, very stable, very sleepy portion of the finance industry. So everybody went, we’re going back 50 years and single family residential lending in the United States is probably the safest thing we can do. Now keep in mind the normal foreclosure rate is 0.5%. So everybody went, well, heck, let’s start doing Gini Maze. Gini Maze stands for

government national mortgage association. is the way that mortgage money is generated. And so these loans are all sold into the secondary and they’re wrapped into what they call a trench as a Jenny Mae certificate, usually in hundred billion dollar portions. Those portions are divided up into different segments to make it affordable for the average investor.

So the yield on these things has to compete with treasury bonds, two very safe investments. So if the treasury is yielding 4%, then that’s what investing in a GMA certificate. So all these banks said, give me more residential loans. We want more residential, American residential loans. Deutsche Bank, Bank of Japan, Philippine Bank, all these overseas banks were just…

demanding more and more residential real estate from the US.

And we were going, we don’t have the product. The demand is enormous. So we started kind of chipping a little bit on the underwriting. And you were right as more private money came into the market. These subprime loans, the default rate only went from 0.5 to 0.75. In other words, the yields jumped four and five points, but the default rate, the actual risk only increased

Phil Hawkins (13:19.604)
Now, what would you do as an investor? You’ve got an investment vehicle with a 35-year, or actually a 50-year safety record, positive rates of return, no defaults, GMA certificates backed by the government. And so as we started loosening the underwriting standards, the yields went up, the demand increased, and we started, it was all revealed. know, a trench was 80 %

Fannie Mae loans, 10 % commercial and the rest subprime. And the yield on that trench was a point and half higher than the treasury. You with me so far? So all this money was going from treasuries into the Jenny Mae market. And so we kept putting more and more subprime in those tranches and they kept gobbling it up. We say, guys, hang on, we actually did this.

Dylan Silver (14:01.077)
Yeah.

Phil Hawkins (14:16.076)
Hang on a minute, read the disclosure, understand what this tranche is comprised of. You need to understand that there’s some subprime in there you might not want. Your investors might want. Don’t bother us with the details. Just give us what you got. How many you got? Okay, that’s your attitude. You were told. So it got more and more and more and more loose in the underwriting and the foreclosure rates did not increase.

So we’re going, we’re making four and five and six times the money on a subprime loan than we are on a Fannie Mae loan.

Dylan Silver (14:53.012)
Make more subprime loans.

Phil Hawkins (14:54.894)
There you go. Wells Fargo was into it. I was an area manager for Wells Fargo Subprime. Can you imagine Wells Fargo in subprime lending? Bank of America was into it. Chase was into it. Everybody was into Let’s see, Countrywide was into it. You name it, they were into it whole hog because the yields were so incredible and everybody wanted it. Of course,

default rates increased from 0.75 to almost 3%, which is catastrophic for the industry. And that’s when in 2008, 2009, 2010, what’s called, you don’t understand what a buyback is?

Dylan Silver (15:36.606)
I mean, I have an idea of the concept, but I’m not familiar with it in real estate.

Phil Hawkins (15:39.086)
Okay, if you’re a lender and you lend money to Mr. and Mrs. Jones and they default on their first payment, that’s almost a criminal investigation. That’s gonna be referred to, that’s gonna be referred almost. It rarely happens, but it’s an indication of fraud. Now, if it defaults after six months, you’re free. But if it defaults within that first six months, that broker,

which there are a lot of loans being made by mortgage brokers. Countrywide was a mortgage bank, but they had to buy back 3 % of what they originated. It killed them. It killed the entire industry. So the defaults increased, the buybacks increased, people couldn’t afford those buybacks, and so they got out of the industry and they closed their doors completely. The only company that I used to work for that’s still in business is

Downey Savings, think, up in the Bay Area, Palo Alto area.

Dylan Silver (16:36.416)
Yeah. I want to pivot, Phil, and ask you about what was that like going through that? Because I’ve spoken to a number of people who got in because they saw how much money was being made prior to the crash. And I’ve spoken to other people. There was a woman last week out of Atlanta, Georgia, who she took over her brother’s mortgage service company and turned it into commercial and hard money lending, from what I understand.

Phil Hawkins (16:48.835)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (17:04.884)
and she had a background as an executive. So was kind of, she was able to make this kind of pivot, but most people weren’t so lucky. was it like chaos for people that were involved in the space? Were people kind of denying reality that were involved in the space? What was the psychology of mortgage brokers at the time, when it was going on?

Phil Hawkins (17:25.356)
You mean when the disintegration was occurring?

Dylan Silver (17:28.075)
Yeah.

Phil Hawkins (17:30.806)
Well, it was horrible. At the time that I left the industry, was vice president of not wholesale lending, but in secondary lending. And it was getting harder and harder and harder, more and more restrictions, more and more underwriting pullbacks, you know what I mean? They’re tightening their underwriting parameters.

And then we haven’t talked about Dodd-Frank. You touched on it earlier, but Dodd-Frank was really the thing that’s sinning over the edge. And it killed the industry, killed the entire industry. So now it takes twice the work to do half the volume of business in the mortgage business. Now mortgage brokers have figured out a way to circumvent Dodd-Frank. Cause Dodd-Frank stipulates that you can only charge. I think it’s a half point or a full point up to $500 per loan, whichever comes first.

Well, boat workers brokers have figured out a way to get around that as they always do. But that was too tight of a constriction. $500 in the loan. That’s like telling a real estate agent, you can only charge 1%. So Dodd Frank came in and completely destroyed the industry. It ruined the relationships that I had with appraisers all over the country, all over California. I used to be able to call up my buddy and I’d say, Tom, I got a couple sitting here.

Dylan Silver (18:38.816)
Yeah.

Phil Hawkins (18:58.078)
And they live at the corner walk and don’t walk. What do you think? He goes, well, is that the house where the lawn needs mode or is that the one across the street with the, and he would know and he would say, yeah, it’s, it’s worth blah, blah, blah. And he was within 2 % perfect because you give him the order for the appraisal. Then we know we can do the loan. Then we tell, you know, the borrower, okay, let’s all the pieces are starting to fit, but you can’t make that phone call today.

Dylan Silver (19:05.301)
I know.

Phil Hawkins (19:25.582)
You have to assign the appraisal to an appraisal clearinghouse and they distribute them on an numerical sequence. It’s all random. So you have to force the customer to put up $500, $600 for an appraisal on the com and they won’t get that back if it doesn’t come in. And that’s what Dodd-Frank did. It was a law that was passed by people who don’t understand what they’re doing.

care. All they want is to find a bad guy. So they found Countrywide. They found the evil mortgage broker. They found a couple of bad appraisers. And they said, you’re the reason. You did it. So we’re going to stop it and we’re going to make sure it never happens again. And here’s Dodd-Frank. Well, thank you. I mean, the stupidity that these laws bring to the table is beyond description.

Dylan Silver (20:16.48)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (20:24.126)
Now, what did you do to pivot or to get through that? And were you still involved in the mortgage business afterwards? And how did the…

Phil Hawkins (20:32.27)
No, I moved on and I said, you know, I paid all my bills. The kids are out of the house. We got a divorce. I was by myself, had no debt, had a bunch of money. I said, I’m going to be a photographer. So I went into the photography industry and at the same time started investing in real estate. now in 2000, it wasn’t until 2009 and 10 where it really hit bottom.

And I went to my buddy in the mortgage business, I mean, in in the banking business, I says, just casually, said, what’s your REOs look like? He went, God, Jesus, we got to get rid of them. We got to get them off the balance sheet because the banking regulations stipulated that for, you know, if you have a hundred million dollars in bad loans, you got to put a hundred million dollars in reserves to cover it. And they were being forced to put all this money in reserves and it was just, it was killing them.

You do know that Bank of America stock went down to $5 during that time. Wells Fargo went down to 10, somewhere in there. Chase went down to those levels and they’ve all recovered now. But at that time it was putting an incredible strain on the banking industry. So now this is how BlackRock got so enormous. BlackRock went to the CEOs of Wells… BlackRock went to the CEO.

Dylan Silver (21:31.936)
blood bath.

Phil Hawkins (21:57.024)
of the real estate divisions of Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, blah, blah, you name it, every major bank in America, BlackRock went, we’ll take all your REOs. went, here, here, take them all. 10 cents on the dollar, 20 cents on the dollar, take them all. And so within a period of about six to nine months, BlackRock owned

Dylan Silver (22:13.482)
Yeah, have them.

Phil Hawkins (22:25.304)
just about every investor property in America. And they still are very big player in the investor market. You can find onesie twosies, but you’re not gonna walk into a bank and say, you got 20 REOs, let me pick through them. No, BlackRock’s got them. And that’s how it happened.

Dylan Silver (22:48.074)
You know, I think a lot of, I’m in DFW, you’re in Austin, but it’s getting harder and harder to do fix and flip, which is a strategy that I particularly have some experience with and I’ve worked on job sites and I’ve worked with lot of investors and I know how to swing a hammer and I also know how to underwrite these deals, but you have to now buy so right.

that even if you run into unforeseen issues and you take up the subfloor and there’s foundation issues and if there’s mold and X, and Z, that you’re still gonna be okay. And then that’s not even factoring in that things are more expensive now. So you have to budget in for more expensive materials. Well, I think about what you said about how BlackRock, other companies come in and they’re buying for pennies on the dollar. And it almost makes me think if you’re in real estate,

One of the things you have to be aware of is that the strategy that you had five years ago or right now might not work in another season. It might not work in five years, but that when these kind of black swan events do happen, that you have to then be ready to pivot. that could be when everyone else is losing money. That could be when you’re making the most money if you’re prepared. But that that same strategy, that fix and flip strategy or that buy and hold or that burst strategy.

you know might not work if materials are cost more if rates are high and so on and so forth

Phil Hawkins (24:12.972)
Well, I started out doing the flip thing and, that’s, that’s not an easy business. mean, that to succeed in that business, your relationships have to be stellar. All of your relationships, all of your subs, all of your, know, sometimes you need financing, all of your inspectors, all your impraisers, all the people, you know, at the County that you get to know them, they know you. And so it’s the relationships.

that’ll make or break any effort to become a successful real estate investor. So there’s no strategy. It’s all based on the relationship. So if I call my sub and I say, look at this house and tell me how much it’s going to cost to bring it up, he can do it within five minutes and be very close to being accurate. That’s what the relationships do for you. So I quit flipping because you’re right. You kept coming up with a

surprises and so I changed inspectors and that all leveled out so you do as much as you can ahead of time to to anticipate your problems and and go from there make your decisions but I can’t sit here and

speak to an overall strategy. It’s a one by one case by case basis. So what I do is buy and hold. That’s how you make money. Flipping is too hard. And yeah, you can make a little money, but it’s too difficult. know, buy it, hold it, rent it out, keep it two years, let it appreciate. put $150,000 in your pocket. There you go.

Dylan Silver (25:45.589)
think the…

Dylan Silver (25:54.038)
That’s right, a slow flip. I’ve heard someone say the fast money is the slow money because you end up really spending so much money trying to make fast money that when you do get a win, it’s canceled out by the losses. It’s easier to just let it appreciate it. I have yet to run into an investor that has said, man, I’m really sad that I held onto this property for 25 years. I have not heard a single person say…

Phil Hawkins (26:19.234)
Mm-mm.

Dylan Silver (26:19.838)
you know, express regret in holding a deal. But Phil, I do want to ask you about photography. We’ve had maybe a handful of real estate investors who’ve dabbled in photography, but you’re also involved in one of the nicer parks maybe in the world, Yosemite National Park. How did you get involved with Yosemite?

Phil Hawkins (26:39.639)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Hawkins (26:44.002)
Um, well, when I got out of the mortgage business, have always been a photographer. That’s a hobby. Um, I did a lot of stuff when I was in high school for political candidates. And so I had a local newspaper race to shoot for. So I almost went into journalism and then I got into radio and I said, ah, I want to do radio. And that was fun for awhile. And then I got out of that and went into being a stockbroker and hated that. And then went into the mortgage business. So.

I think I lost my train of thought on what your question was. My apologies. Well, just going up there and shooting it just had landscapes. mean, have you ever been to Yosemite?

Dylan Silver (27:16.458)
Getting involved in Yosemite. How does anyone get involved in Yosemite?

Dylan Silver (27:26.39)
have been to Yosemite. It when I was a small child. My family went kind of did a Midwest and then a west tour of the United States. And we went through a bunch of regions, different area of the country, but on a similar vacation we saw the Grand Canyon. Then we went further west and saw Yosemite. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s incredible. mean, if I’m not mistaken, is Yosemite the one where you can drive through trees? Is that Yosemite?

Phil Hawkins (27:41.965)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Hawkins (27:47.096)
So you drove through it.

Phil Hawkins (27:55.724)
Yeah. You can also drive through a rock on the Western Gate. There’s a huge overhang of a rock that you drive through. People go, whoa.

Dylan Silver (27:56.788)
Yeah, it was incredible.

Dylan Silver (28:00.937)
Yeah, I mean…

Dylan Silver (28:06.494)
No area of the country that I’ve seen that is anything like that. mean, trees, from the East Coast, so of course we’ve got trees, but trees so tall that when you’re standing underneath them, you can’t see the top of them. And then just massive.

Phil Hawkins (28:12.334)
Hmm.

Phil Hawkins (28:18.454)
and that they were there at the birth of Christ.

Dylan Silver (28:23.85)
Right, thousands of years old.

Phil Hawkins (28:25.55)
So, mean Yosemite is unbelievable. So just going up there, you get to know people. And then I started saying, I know this park, you know, there’s no shortage of photographers up here. And that was back when the photography workshop industry was really kind of in its infancy. Yes, there were workshops, but…

Dylan Silver (28:36.586)
Yeah.

Phil Hawkins (28:46.284)
The internet and online presence made it much easier to reach your customer. So I started doing workshops in Yosemite offering to the public and had to get a permit through Yosemite. then just over time, again, got to know those people, got to see the opportunities. And so now I’m probably the oldest workshop company up there.

and with more experience and so I’m kind of proud of that. You know, I got 750 customers over a 17 year time frame and it’s been fun.

Dylan Silver (29:24.554)
Now, as a photographer, I’m curious to get your perspective pivoting again on real estate photography. real estate photography is super critical. It’s always been important, but now more than ever because you have the photography, you also have staging, you have drone footage. I’ve seen deals, whole tail, which is basically you take a off market deal and you just put it on the market.

Phil Hawkins (29:31.597)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (29:47.986)
and you maybe do a couple of things, the most important thing that you do is you stage it right and you get high quality photos, which make really a world of difference. I’ve yet to come across an instance where someone’s regretted staging and getting high quality photos, paying a photographer. I’m curious to get your perspective on real estate photography.

Phil Hawkins (30:07.04)
Well, I always look at a listing and I always search for the photos where there’s a mess. Okay? Where the bedroom is a mess, the living room is cluttered, the kitchen is cluttered. People have obviously not put forth any effort to try to make this property attractive, which tells me they’re ill-informed.

which tells me I might be able to drive a better deal with a customer like that, okay? There’s some measure of distress in their lives. They’re not thinking clearly. So I might be able to take advantage of that situation. So that’s what I look for when I’m online. And then of course, driving neighborhoods and looking for grass that hasn’t mowed, that hasn’t been mowed. There’s no hose on the front porch. There’s no lawn furniture. You know what I mean? So it’s all those things that everybody knows. Everybody already understands that that’s the indicator.

Dylan Silver (30:33.376)
Yeah, the deal. Yep.

Phil Hawkins (31:01.166)
But Yosemite has just been a love of mine, a passion for the longest time. And there’s a little community up there. Let me give you a clue. There’s a little community up there called Yosemite West. And when I first started getting involved up there, was shooting the houses, the rentals that were up there for the property managers. And these were 150, $200,000 properties back in

I want to say the mid nineties when I first started going up there today, these are all million dollars and up. Okay. There’s a ton of lots. If you can buy a lot and get a house built, you’re to make $500,000 instantly. Instantly. Because the people who go up there all from the Bay area, they’re high techies and they come up with a million dollars for this. That’s a steal.

Dylan Silver (31:32.672)
Cool. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (31:37.131)
Yeah.

Phil Hawkins (31:55.832)
Cause the million dollar house in Palo Alto was a tear down as you know. So that’s kind of how it all got started was shooting real estate for property management companies in Yosemite and then knowing all those people. I’ve just spent a lot of time up there in both industries and it’s been fun.

Dylan Silver (32:00.598)
Right.

Dylan Silver (32:14.47)
What do you think, you know, I think without diving too much into this, but there’s a competition between California and Texas. I’m in Texas, right? I’ve visited California. But as someone who you’re in Austinite, but you also have deep ties to Yosemite. What do you make of, you know, the competition or the idea that there’s a lot of maybe friendly competition between Texas and California?

Phil Hawkins (32:44.43)
Well, keep in mind I spent 35 years in California and I witnessed it every day. Things getting more and more complicated. Roads, there was a point in time where the 510 going into the Bay Area.

was almost impassable you had to slow down to 35 miles an hour on a 70 mile an hour freeway that that’s how bad the roads were then you got high speed rail that has absorbed north of a hundred billion dollars over a 25 year time span and they have yet to carry one passenger you want me to keep going i mean you can’t buy a lawnmower in in california my buddy wanted to buy a brand new riding lawnmower he was not allowed

And if you go out of state and bring one back, you go through the Ag inspection station, they’ll confiscate it. Yeah. I mean, you can’t buy a lawnmower in the state of California. Are you kidding me? And it’s just stuff like that over and, know, and then it catches on fire. It’s in a state of lunacy right now.

Dylan Silver (33:36.768)
Need a license or something.

Phil Hawkins (33:55.232)
And you wonder why all the people are moving to Texas and Florida and Tennessee and all these other places, Idaho and Wyoming and you name it, Nevada.

The reason the real estate industry in California is still hot, the real estate market in California is still hot because California won’t let anybody build any new houses. Try to get a permit for a subdivision in anywhere in the state of California and you’ll spend two years just getting permission.

Dylan Silver (34:18.89)
Mmm, supply.

Phil Hawkins (34:28.654)
Then you buy the land and you’ve got to do environmental impact studies one after another to the tune of $50,000 a piece. It goes on and on. The average builder in the state of California starts with an idea that has $30,000 per house attached to it. Then you go from there and add up what it’s going to take to build a house. So every house in California that’s brand new.

has $30,000 of regulatory expenses built into it. That’s how come because nobody can build. You can’t get permission to build, you know, subdivision. Now, 1Z2Z, yeah, you can do that, but not subdivision. Also, so that’s how come. So, so there’s just nowhere to live. So the prices keep going up even though, even though California has lost, what is it? What’s the number now? 5 million people, something like that. So,

Dylan Silver (35:00.214)
It’s expensive.

Dylan Silver (35:09.504)
whole Saturday.

Dylan Silver (35:15.572)
Yeah, keep going up.

Dylan Silver (35:22.858)
yet.

Phil Hawkins (35:25.646)
You know, you come to Texas, Texas has some of the most bizarre, or at least used to, has some of the most bizarre real estate laws in the world. It is, it is a, it is, is Alice in Wonderland sometimes.

Dylan Silver (35:33.364)
We do. We do.

Dylan Silver (35:39.028)
I just took the test in April, Phil. can tell you, I’ve had brokers on this show from New York, from Arizona, other states where they’re like, yeah, that Texas exam is no joke because it’s totally different from my home state. So you’re learning a whole different rule book. And by the way, you’re not an attorney. So they tell you, you’re not an attorney. So here’s all the rules. Just don’t break them, but also don’t ever use them. You’re not an attorney. So good luck on your real estate journey.

Phil Hawkins (36:02.934)
Yeah

Well, I used to think, this came to me too late in life, but a man can make a very good living for himself. State of Texas, as a real estate attorney, if you do nothing else, but go to signings, just manage signings, because all the signings are done through attorneys, not title companies like they do in California. You’d be very rich putting your practice on automatic pilot.

Dylan Silver (36:33.3)
That’s right. Every title company in Texas has to have an attorney who is a co-owner. Phil, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go maybe to learn more about the photography or maybe just to get in touch with you?

Phil Hawkins (36:37.038)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Phil Hawkins (36:46.636)
Well, PhilHawkinsPhoto.com and then my workshop. actually it’s my workshop that I mean it’s my website that sells the workshops. YosemitePhotoWorkshops.com

Dylan Silver (37:05.408)
Phil, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Phil Hawkins (37:07.786)
Well, we have only scratched the surface of everything we could talk about. So if you want to do another one, I’m in. This is fun. I enjoyed this. All right. Take care. Thanks so much.

Dylan Silver (37:17.686)
pleasure having you Phil.