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Show Summary
In this conversation, Andy Moon, an investor and attorney, discusses innovative strategies in the tax foreclosure space, focusing on how his company provides tax loans to property owners in distress. He emphasizes the importance of caring for clients and offers insights into current foreclosure trends and acquisition strategies for distressed properties. Additionally, he introduces his new technology, the Drone Strike app, aimed at enhancing real estate investment processes.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Andy Moon (00:00)
So basically if somebody has property taxes due, we can step in and take care of those taxes for them. And the way the law is written, it allows that borrower to give us authorization to get that lien transferred from the county to us. So we effectively step into the shoes of the government. Now,We’ve done that as a business model. I happened to be a real estate investor before. When I met my business partner, I said, what is it that you do? And he showed it to me and I said, this is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s so much security, right? Because you step in front of every lien holder that exists.
Dylan Silver (02:17)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest, Andy Moon, is an investor and attorney licensed in Texas and Oklahoma based out of San Antonio. He’s also the founder of the Drone Strike app. Andy, thanks for taking the time today.Andy Moon (02:33)
Thanks for having me, man. It’s gonna be a lot of fun.Dylan Silver (02:36)
Now, I want to dive in if we can into the ⁓ tax foreclosure space because we were talking before hopping on the show here and you’ve really got an interesting strategy that even I as a Texas realtor have not heard before.Andy Moon (02:51)
Excellent, yeah. So what we do is we do ad loan tax loans.So basically if somebody has property taxes due, we can step in and take care of those taxes for them. And the way the law is written, it allows that borrower to give us authorization to get that lien transferred from the county to us. So we effectively step into the shoes of the government. Now,
We’ve done that as a business model. I happened to be a real estate investor before. When I met my business partner, I said, what is it that you do? And he showed it to me and I said, this is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s so much security, right? Because you step in front of every lien holder that exists.
The only thing we really can’t do is if you have a list pendants, because that’s a claim towards title, we can’t really do that loan effectively. We could if we wanted to, but we’re taking the risk.
If we jump into that deal, we’re at a very low LTV. Our loan value is normally anywhere between 12 and 15%. That’s kind of our average number that we run at. We make a spread on the investment of four to five percent. And then if we have to foreclose, obviously we’ve got a really good asset, it’s very secure. The beauty of the whole thing though is what my business partner said to me, is we don’t have to cheat to win.
So many people in real estate want to try to cut corners. They want to rip people off. This is an opportunity where, hey, we are your last gas to save this property from property taxes. But also remember, you’re to get about 42 and a half percent a year in penalties if you don’t pay property taxes. Let me step in, me 12%. I can also spread out your payments over a 10 year period instead of a one year period. I save you a ton of money and we give you that opportunity to get back on your feet.
Dylan Silver (04:18)
Yeah.Andy Moon (04:45)
The beauty of it is everybody that’s investing with us, they’re not really interested in the properties. They’re more interested in the return on investment of the loans themselves and getting that spread.Dylan Silver (05:43)
Now, is there a, I I mean, I’m thinking about why would a government be willing to say, we’ll transfer the foreclosure responsibility to someone else. Is it like advantageous for the government to basically say, hey, this is less work on our plate effectively?Andy Moon (05:59)
It’s more of the idea of selling a bond. So when I say that, when you look at the 08 crash, the first places that went into recession were places where the government wasn’t receiving tax dollars. And the last places that went into recession were places where the government received their tax dollars longer. They also came out of the recession faster. Those two places were Las Vegas. And then you look at Texas, San Antonio was one of the first ones to come out of the recession.Now that’s, you if you really look at all of that and you do the empirical data on that, what is that? The government is able to act longer because they are allowing private investors to invest in the government. That’s essentially what we’re doing. But the only two states in the country that allow this type of investing are Nevada and Texas.
Dylan Silver (06:45)
Now, is this primarily happening with single family homeowners or is this happening also in the commercial space and with multifamily properties as well?Andy Moon (06:53)
That’sa good question. It’s all over the boards. We’ve got right now about 60 % of our properties are primary residences and 40 % are commercial or investor properties. So when I say primary residence, that’s something they live in or one of their family members lives in. If it’s a rental house, we treat those as commercial. We’ve got, man, a guy just came in. He’s got 20 commercial properties. There are warehouses.
apartment complexes and everything in between. So those guys definitely come through. We can definitely help them when they get in trouble. But if you look at the majority of what we see, it’s gonna be a lot of single family residential homes, whether it’s an investor grade home or a primary residence.
Dylan Silver (07:38)
Now, because of your experience and because of the segment that you’re involved in, have your pulse on, you your hand on the pulse of foreclosures, right? And so are you seeing right now, right now, we’re today, February 3rd, 2026, are you seeing foreclosures tick up? Are you seeing them stabilize and go sideways? Are there less foreclosures right now than say there were three months ago?Andy Moon (08:02)
Man, that’s a great question. Everything that I do because I’m so inside of it, I don’t spend a lot of time stepping back and looking at the empirical data. But what I will say is I feel like there’s less right now. And the reason why is I think there’s more investors stepping in and trying to get properties ahead of those foreclosures. I think more people are getting loans. I’ve seen a lot of refinance opportunities come up.with the rates dropping recently. I think more people are able to restructure their debts. They’re able to sell their properties. So legitimately in the last two months, I would say we’ve seen a small downturn. Now the county in 2020 during COVID, you you had counties that would not hold the foreclosure sales and that led to a couple of new markets, right? There were some, there were some auction houses that come on, that came online. They would
get the contract for the county, now they do the online sales. I believe Cameron County, think Hidalgo County do online sales. There’s a couple other counties that do online sales. And can you imagine if Harris County did online sales? I had to be insane, right? But I had a foreclosure going on in McCallan. The house was not worth 30 grand. There’s no way. And it sold to some investor for 60 grand online. It would have sold for 15 at the auction if somebody had to be physically there.
Dylan Silver (09:18)
That’sAndy Moon (09:23)
Excuse me and have to have the cash in hand right because I want to say it’s a Harris County if you don’t handle the cash They don’t go to under the next auction. They keep they make you look like an idiot while you’re standing there trying to pay out ⁓ I’ve got I’ve gone to jail by the way for worth not me personally but one of my guys Because he showed up too late to make the payment because we had to go over to Chase Bank in Dallas drive back to Fort Worth and the sheriff wanted to make an example of us soDylan Silver (09:37)
wanna ask you.Andy Moon (09:52)
He put him in custody and I get the phone call. I was like, man, what are you doing? Like we told you we had to go to the bank and come back. Like, that’s crazy.Dylan Silver (10:35)
guess that’s a very so they’re wanting you to pay like cash on this spot like a cashier’s check basically yeah wellAndy Moon (10:41)
cashier’s check, yeah. Yeah,think, don’t even know, honestly don’t even know what the rule is. Every county’s different. So, you know, if I go into a county that I’m not familiar with, I’ll just talk to the constable or sheriff and say, what’s the rules? When do need to pay you? A lot of them just, if you get back here within three hours after the last auction, they’re fine. I’ll be honest with you, I think a lot of the smaller counties, they want to protect their local guys. So the outsiders, they’re not as lenient with, but.
Dylan Silver (11:06)
Mm.Andy Moon (11:09)
I was going back to answer your question, because I of got attracted a little bit. We saw where the county did not do any foreclosures in 2020. I mean, it was virtually none. And then in 2021, everything started lightening up a little bit. And we went from like, I cannot remember the exact numbers, was like 50 total foreclosures and lawsuits by the county in about an eight month period to where they filed 600 in one.Dylan Silver (11:10)
Thanks a lot.Andy Moon (11:39)
So once they knew they could kind of get over the hump of the COVID scare, they turned everything back on. Now what that meant was they’re filing those foreclosures. It takes a year, two years, three years sometimes to do a tax foreclosure, because you’ve got to go through the judicial system. So we are starting to see a lot of those finally get to that judgment phase. And so I think that’s where we saw a lot of foreclosures and nobody was shy last year.Dylan Silver (11:55)
Yeah.Andy Moon (12:06)
I will say last February when we ran our numbers, we had five times more delinquent people that matched our criteria than the year before. So, yeah.Dylan Silver (12:16)
That’s huge increase.I would like to pivot a bit here, Andy, and ask you specifically about acquisition strategies for single family investors. If they’re looking at getting distressed properties from sellers who may be into foreclosure or pre-foreclosure. There’s so many ways people do this in Texas. You’ve got the Roddy Report. You’ve got, know, knocking doors. You’ve got, you know, seeing probate lists and such and death and divorce. Do you have a
preferred method or something that at least has piqued your interest recently.
Andy Moon (12:48)
So we created an app called Boots on the Ground and this kind of came out of my business partner and I sitting looking at our list of leads. We had over 2 million leads that fit our criteria for lending. And you know we’re limited. We can’t send out mail to all these people. So we mail out $100,000 a month, $200,000 a month, whatever it was that we had the budget for at the time. And he’s like, man, out of $200,000 we sent out, we got150 calls. Great. And out of those 150 calls, it turned into 70 loans. How do we get to those other, know, virtually two million people still untouched, right? And so what we want to do is we wanted to get to those people. And so essentially, when you have property taxes that are delinquent, you’re really drowning, right? You may have a mortgage. That’s not real public data, but the tax data is very public. You can see it.
Dylan Silver (13:40)
Right.Andy Moon (13:47)
You can see how much these people are sliding. You can see their historical pattern over the last five years. And you can watch people start slowly drowning if you look at the historical patterns, which is what we’ve built into our algorithms. And we know when you’re going to be delinquent. I can tell you, we say we can predict a tornado. We know where it’s going to hit. No one else can do that. So that’s our strategy is to get to those tax delinquencies before they become a lawsuit, before they become a foreclosure, before they become a problem, right?So we created Boots on the Ground was a door-to-door app where we would give it to investors 100 % free of charge. You go in and you pick out the areas you want, pick out your criteria, and it just gives you one house at a time to go knock on the door, talk to the person, and see what they want to do. In our app, you could actually put the property under contract because we have the contract built into the app. You just turn your phone to them. They sign it right there on their phone, right?
But here’s where we help investors right now. If you are an investor and you go out and you knock on the door and the person says, man, I’m not selling my house. I’m gonna save it. How many of these guys are like, you know, the kind of guys that are gonna stay there and they’re gonna say, you’re gonna have to pry me off this porch. I’m not leaving. Those people exist. We give you that solution because what we’ll do, you refer that person to me. I’ll take care of their taxes for them.
Dylan Silver (15:04)
Yeah.Andy Moon (15:52)
And what we do is we then put that person in your portfolio in terms of if that person falls behind with us, you’re going to get a notice through our app. It’s like, hey, these guys are behind again. You need to go talk to them because they need to do something. That now is not public data. That’s only shared amongst the people that are in our network. And we’re getting to that person and they’re not having four million people knock on their door and make them agitated. But, you know,What my advice, because I think that’s the question you asked is, my advice is to care, right? So many people are focused on the dollars and not the love of the game, right? I’ve heard that a lot lately, I don’t know why. But if you care, if you go knock on that person’s door and you genuinely care, like what’s going on? Our first question we ask, and I think it’s the best question I ask is, do you wanna stay here or are willing to move?
Dylan Silver (16:25)
Yeah.It’s true, it’s true.
Andy Moon (16:50)
If they’re not willing to move, there’s no real reason to talk to them about selling their house right now, because then they’re feeling pressure, right? Our goal is to not make them feel pressure. ⁓ Our goal is to give them hope. That’s actually our tagline. Hope is here. So we’re going to go in and we’re going to give them hope that they can do something. And I think that’s the same thing as a real estate investor. Hey, let me give you some help. me talk to you about how we can help you get out of this thing. The other thing, this is probably the best advice.through this time of year. I don’t know when this airs by the way, but you know, this time of year, springtime, a lot of people are just trying to hang on so their kids can finish school in their school district. If you’d go in and say, hey, I’ll buy your house, let you stay here through the school year. If you do enough caring to ask why is it that they don’t wanna move and you find that out, you can buy that house, let them either rent it for 10 bucks a month or you can give them.
to them at market, whatever it is that you wanna negotiate, a lot of times I’ll just buy it let them live there for two months or three months free and then I’ll have them move out after that. you’re gonna get a deal, you’re gonna sit on it. If you’ve got carrying costs that you gotta worry about, maybe not the right exact strategy, but you can get rent out of them so you don’t have to worry about that carrying cost. But now you care, right? And that’s the difference.
Dylan Silver (18:04)
No, no.You know, I think a lot of this gets lost in, you know, people trying to make a quick buck or trying to get into real estate. But the more you do deals, especially in the distress space, the more you realize like you’re wearing many hats. You’re an investor. You’re someone who’s a rehab estimator. You’re someone who is potentially like a crisis coordinator.
You know, there could be issues in the family. Now you’re bringing people together. People haven’t spoken in years. They’re coming together. There could be distress in the property as well. Right. And all of this comes into play. And so if you’re going with like one tool, it’s going to be very challenging. And so being able to not just do multiple things, but also bridge that human connection is important. It does require some more work, but it is very important.
Andy Moon (18:55)
Oh yeah, yeah, one of my favorite stories is a guy was going out knocking on doors and what a lot of people don’t know is when you’re over 65 or if you’re disabled in Texas, you can defer your property taxes and you’re not subject to foreclosure. So if I go out and knock on somebody’s door and I find out they’re 65, like, hey, you’re getting foreclosed on, let me help you file your paperwork, it’s free. I’ll file a form, I’ll run it through my law office, we’ll take care of them, no big deal. Because it’s more important to save your property, that’s ridiculous, to let the county win.Dylan Silver (19:24)
Yeah.Andy Moon (19:24)
you shouldbe taking care of property. So this guy that went and knocked on doors for us, he had no experience in real estate. He was homeless and he was cutting grass for a guy and he saw us talking to him about our app. And he goes, can I do that? And I said, yeah, you can do that. Guy in real estate experience? And he said, no, I said, perfect. So we showed him exactly how to do it. What he heard was us talking to this guy about being over 65. His uncle was over 65 and disabled and lost his house to tax foreclosure.
And he said, had he had that knowledge, he could have helped him. So what we didn’t know is this guy was doing the best out of anybody in our system. He made $18,000 his first six weeks out. I was killing it. And I was like, what is your secret? I want to know what your secret is, because we feel like we’re the experts, but I can learn from you. What did you do? And he goes, I wake up every morning, he sleeps in his car. He goes to the YMCA, a shower. Then he goes drives and knocks on doors. He said he stops.
Once he finds that person that’s over 65 or disabled and helps him get their exemption, then he goes on about his day. So everybody he talked to, his goal was not to buy their house, his goal was not to get them taxed off, his goal was to help them save their house. And he ended up being extremely successful. He’s now a realtor himself, moved out to California, he’s killing it, doing great. And so it was just a mindset that a lot of guys don’t have. But when you talk to people that are truly successful in this business, it’s a different mindset than making
Dylan Silver (20:51)
We are coming up on time here though, Andy, any new projects that you’re working on and then also what’s the best way for folks to get in contact with your team?Andy Moon (20:59)
Excellent. We are about to launch a beta version of Drone Strike. Drone Strike is basically just a desktop version of our handheld app. So Boots on the Ground is converting over to Drone Strike. Boots on the Ground was basically door to door, one person at a time. Drone Strike’s gonna allow you to skip trace, get emails, phone numbers. can mass text and mass email. You can do drip campaigns, so it’s a full CRM. So we’re launching that. We’re actually gonna launch Friday.go out with a beta group, but we’d like to start connecting with people that would be interested in using that. Our website is dronstrikeapp.com. You can go there. It’s a big, huge logo. Scroll down to the bottom, fill out your information, and we’ll keep everybody up to date on what we’re doing. If you need help with anything, title curative or anything like that, feel free to reach out to us, talanlegal.com, and we’ll be glad to help you out on any title curative issues you may have as well.
So great being here with you and hopefully, maybe we have to be back on because I got a lot of other stuff to say.
Dylan Silver (22:00)
Yeah.Thank you for your time today, Andy. Thanks for coming on.
Andy Moon (22:06)
Yes, sir. Thank you.
