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[00:00:00] Welcome back to SEO to the best. I'm your host, Michael Chang. It's my great pleasure actually to welcome my friend, Matt Gardner to the show. Matt, thanks for joining me today. Yeah, man. It's a super pleasure to be here and I'm excited to jump on, man. I've been listening for a while. Oh, thanks. I appreciate it.
As background, Matt connected with, with Liz, my wife. Gosh, I think 2015, I don't know, a long time ago. Yeah, I think 2018 timeframe, but yeah, it was, it's been a while. I've been at least five years since. Six years now. That's crazy. Yeah. Like the bigger pockets to, to now having actual real relationships. I'm really excited to, to explore this conversation with you.
And Matt, but why don't, before I start off, Matt, why don't I give you a chance to introduce yourself? Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Matt Gardner. I also go by Roar. So I was prior military. Which I'm sure we'll get into. And so half the people who know me from the military days, call me Roar. That was my call sign and other people in my life call me Matt.
So you can call me either one. It's totally fine. And beyond that, I'm a full time real estate investor. So spend all my [00:01:00] time in real estate sales as an agent and investing as, as an investor, jump in all sorts of niches, but I'm excited to jump into and. Specifically a short term rental, which is one of my passions for sure.
So that's our shared passion and how we connected. And Matt is one of the, he's being very modest. He's one of the top real estate agents here. Shout out to Matt and his hard work, which we'll dive into. But Matt, before we start, we also have to show by this. Give me a memorable. Short term rental story doesn't have to be the craziest one, but the most memorable go.
Yeah. Yeah. And every time you say this, which is always fun to listen to, I, you started a well where you were like, Hey, for this best or whatever you said. And so the first thing that always comes to mind is like my very first guest that came at my very first short term rental. Because it wasn't just like a normal guest coming in.
It was literally a group of people straight from China who were coming from China to, to my Airbnb in Destin. And it was just one of those memorable things. It's my first guest. I'm going to meet them. I'm excited. So I went out and met them, but I didn't, I guess I realized, but I didn't put two and two together that Airbnb was translating real time [00:02:00] for me.
So none of them spoke English. And so when I got there, it was just like. They were the most obvious non locals ever. It was a group of eight very tall Chinese men meeting and they were outside this pool with like girls with bikinis everywhere, but these guys all had suits on. They were just like trying to figure out where to go and what to do.
And there were so many lessons learned, but that I'll never forget that initial kind of like entrance into the Airbnb world of. Meeting this group of, and we, it was all pointy talky too. Cause we couldn't speak each other's languages. It was hilarious. It was great. It's like the classic Google translate.
Let's go. I look at you, you survived. That's funny. Everyone always had, it's always everyone's first guest for some reason. It's always the first guest, the first one or two that people remember. But you've had, you've hosted many, many guests since then, but let's, but you're not a full, I don't know. We can get into this.
I don't like STRs, like the full hosting STRs. It's not the full time gig now, but why don't you just talk a little bit about your business? Sure. Sure. So I spend about 50 percent of my time from the business perspective, like a business day, [00:03:00] focusing on sales. So supporting investors in, in growing their portfolios or disposing, whatever they're trying to get rid of in their portfolios, the other 50 percent of the time.
I spend on my own portfolio. So I have about 750 doors right now, across the range of niches, anything from flips to short term rentals to midterm rentals, long term rentals, and then syndications as well. So apartment complexes, and then I've had a couple RV and mobile home parks as well. So cover the breadth there.
And on the agent side and the sales side, I, like I said, 95 percent of my clients are investors, it's. It's primarily the focus. Okay. And that's the point I want to double click on today is working with investor clients, specifically short term, short term under clients. And that's how I originally, we got connected was we were looking for a real estate agent that had specific expertise in short term rentals.
We'd already been doing rental arbitrage, but we had a portfolio in the Northeast where rental arbitrage, again, for folks that don't know is. Where you rent a property and then you re rent it on Airbnb with the landlord's permission, and then you earned a spread between the two. So we had already, we already built a portfolio.
We knew what we were doing ish, and [00:04:00] we wanted to find someone that could speak the same language. So we need to talk a little bit about that. Why, why is it important for someone that is looking to invest in short term rentals to find a real estate agent and find an agent that is also an expert or at least knowledgeable, deeply knowledgeable about the space?
Yeah, it's like almost the story we were just sharing with the Chinese guests coming over to stay at my Airbnb. When you don't speak the same language, things are just so much more difficult. You know what I mean? Like you can't even try to convey what you're trying to get across to the agent. If you're, if he doesn't even know what you're saying.
If you say, Hey, I'm looking for a specific cash and cash return. And then it was like, Oh, this one should cover your mortgage. You're like, man, like there's so much more that goes into it. Like it's not just pay up, pay off your mortgage. You know what I mean? It's just that baseline level of knowledge. It, it builds so much familiarity and beyond that, you can just really convey your meaning, convey your thoughts and goals.
And without that, I feel like you're just, you can get the [00:05:00] job done, but you're, it's going to be an uphill battle. Like I said, we can use Google translate and get back and forth and try to get to the point where we're trying to find what we need to get there, but there's an easier path, right? If you just learn the language.
If I spoke Chinese, when I went there, you better believe we'd have a much better conversation with you. Yeah. And they would have checked in much easier, but we got there. So that's a big thing. You're just having that core foundational knowledge is huge in order to really just get the goal. Cause every, every investor ultimately is looking for something slightly different, especially in the short term rental space.
A lot of people come down. Thinking they want purely cashflow and maximize their cash and cash return. But when you talk to them, you'll find out that, Oh, actually I do come down to Destin three times a year. And so I really want to use it, or I'm really more concerned about depreciation than I am cashflow because of X, Y, and Z.
So once you dig down to the real objectives of what they're trying to do. Then you can craft, craft the search and try to meet their objectives from there. Yeah. No, that's a great point. Being able to really understand the client. And that's where we have, when we first got started and talking to you about work conversing in short term rentals, like it [00:06:00] just, it's like the dog barking in the background, I don't know what it's might be asking to go out.
Outside of peas or it's hungry. I don't know. I mean, you have to just figure it out. And as time is money, right? You're an investor. You really have to be able to get to an answer quickly. So before we go there, let's talk about just like, where do you cover? Like you said, 50 percent of your time. Talk a little about your, the, the geograph, the geography that you cover.
And then let's talk about your team too. Sure. Yeah. So we, we cover from Pensacola through Panama city beach on the Emerald coast of the panhandle of Florida, our bread and butter, where we spend most of our time is Destin, Santa Rosa beach, which is what we call it 30A locally or Panama city beach. It's where 80 percent of our sales probably occur.
And then we also cover the Tampa area. So the greater Tampa area. So Tampa, St. Pete, Clearwater, the greater Tampa area in general. And they're, it's surprisingly wildly different when it comes to short term rental markets, even seasonality being Gulf coast, coastal Florida, I was so surprised when I made the transition from Emerald coast, the panhandle Florida down to Tampa and the seasons are even just different.
[00:07:00] You know what I say? Like the high season in the Destin, Florida market starts at March ends in kind of August where that's the low season. Almost in the Tampa market, Tampa market really starts to hit its stride. And in the November timeframe, when the snowbirds start to come down. Which is, it was interesting to see how every market really is different when it comes to short term rentals, even just a coastal Florida market.
Yeah. And it speaks to the hyper local knowledge. And that's one point I really, I always emphasize is you really want to find an agent that really knows that specific area and an agent can be really good in. Tennessee, for example, in the Smoky Mountains, but like that agent probably is unlikely to be like that similar, have that similar level of expertise in that in a different geography, like Destin, which is like finding a broker that has like a broad team.
I think that's actually important too, because like one person can't cover. Oh yeah. Yeah. There's no way I could cover that all by myself. Yeah. I have a team of agents. We have about 16 agents on the team that cover SWATH and that, that number grows and shrinks all the time. We had 35 agents last year and now we have 16 and it's always, it's naming the game with [00:08:00] real estate agents.
Some, some try to set goals that they can't quite achieve or aren't willing to do the work to achieve sometimes in the real estate sales space. And let's talk a little bit about that. So let's talk about. Working with investors, there's two different types of investor. There's ones that are, you're just coming in like you're, you don't, you may have one short term or you don't really know, they don't really know.
So you're looking for an expert that can got handholds to do a process. And there are people probably more like me. That's Hey, look, I know exactly what I want. This is exactly what I want and go and. Find that for me, whether it's on MLS, off market, whatever it is. So maybe talk a little about that. Like, how do you, let's start with the kind of quote unquote, novice to beginner investor.
Like how does a person, how does she work with find someone like you and work effectively with someone like you or someone or someone on your team? Yeah, it's, I would say it's definitely more time intensive for the agent. For a new investor, because most of my time is spent typically educating the client on whatever they're trying to do based on what they're telling [00:09:00] me.
Cause a lot of new investors, they don't quite speak the language yet. They know enough to get around, but when you start asking them the deeper questions, Oh, I hadn't thought about that. And the last thing I would want to do as an agent. Is what I see a lot of agents do where they say force a sale, but they'll know that their client is ignorant in a certain area and they'll still just say, Oh no, this is a great opportunity.
You should totally buy it just to try to get reps and transactions. That's the last thing I want. The one reason I work with investors and I love working with investors is because if you treat them well, they're going to be repeat clients. And they're typically friends with more investors who bring you more clients.
You know what I mean? It becomes this kind of what I like to call self licking ice cream cone. And so if you have this, if I treat you well. And you make money, it's almost a guarantee that you're going to want to put more of your money or more of your investor's money into that same area and keep growing and go back to your question of speaking with newer agents.
That's where I spend most of my time educating them because I want them to succeed. I want them to be in a position of success. How do you like your, you have one Airbnb, for example, right? And you want to grow. What are some, what are resources that you point your clients to to get [00:10:00] themselves educated?
Sure. So if they don't have an Airbnb in my area, it's first thing is going to be understanding the area in general. So we'll talk about things like insurance. Insurance in Florida right now is like a wild ride. And I'll jump 20 to 30 minutes in a conversation just about insurance. So they understand.
What they're jumping into and, and the risks and rewards of that. I'll talk about things like what we call COBRA zones along Florida, which are coastal barrier relief act zones that may have implications on insurance or may have implications on certain types of loans. We'll have a lot of investors because it's a military, heavily military area.
A lot of investors will want to, you know, use a VA loan to purchase their short term rentals and you can't do that in a COBRA zone. So I need to like, I need to convey these points that are pretty crucial to our local area. And then beyond that, it's just them understanding, let's say they have an Airbnb in, I was going to say New York city, but I know that's more and more restrictive and if it's even possible anymore, but let's say they have an Airbnb in the Smokies, they need to understand the seasonality differences and expectations.
So I've had a investor call me over after they had [00:11:00] June, July, and August, which are pretty good months. Generally in Florida, they crushed it. They call me, Hey man, made an extra 40 grand. I just bought myself a new car. I'm like, dude, that's exciting. But do you know, like. You're entering the dry spell, right?
Like it's about to get not pretty for the next six months. Are you prepared for the winter that's coming? And they're like, Oh yeah, I'll be fine. And then five months later, they call me like, Oh, I got to pay out. I got to pay out of pocket in order to make this happen. Yeah. It's interesting that just educating them on the process of seasonality and the differences of if they already have one, if they don't have one, you're starting baseline foundational information.
I'm teaching them just the basics of. How to run an operation, how to automate messaging, how to automate reviews and all that fun stuff. That's a lot of handholding. And that's what, don't worry about the background noise. That's a lot of handholding. That's anything that you really, you start, you really earn your fee, right?
That's a lot to do. All right, now let's, so I think for the, if you're a beginner investor, when I say beginner, you could own long term rentals, it's a very. Similar diligence, maybe physical diligence where you're like, okay, let's make sure the foundation isn't shot or the roof isn't shot. But operationally it's, it's a very [00:12:00] different way of looking at revenue, looking at costs, like your costs are not just your principal interest taxes and insurance or HOA fees.
Like you have, you're paying for electricity, your repairs, all cleaning. So it's a whole different thing. So really get educated. I think it's really incumbent on. The investor to get educated themselves on a baseline of knowledge before they go. And not do bad deals. Cause like the worst thing you do for your real estate career is do that.
Your first deal is a bad deal. And then it's just, it's a tough hole to climb out of. Okay. I will say one final thought on that point. I will say, I think my hardest clients are the ones who have a fairly decent portfolio of only long term rentals because they come in with that expectation of they want to, they want to have a solid understanding of exactly what number they're going to hit when it comes to revenue projections.
And then I'll show them a property and I'll show them the top performers. I'll show them 50, 50%, 75%, 25 percent performers. And they're like, you're telling me this property can make anywhere from 150, 000 to 50, 000. I'm like, yeah, yeah, potentially, but here's what you should do [00:13:00] in order to hit the top 25%.
And here's why I would use this number in my calculations, but they have a hard time with that for long term rental. It's so easy. Everything in this area is renting from 2, 500 to 2, 700 a month. There's your 200 swing and expectations. It's not as easy. Yeah, it comes down to the operation side and you can buy the best property.
But if you're the world's worst operator, like you're not going to hit that number that you're unlikely to hit that sweet spot in the range that you want. Now, conversely, if you're a good operator and opportunity, maybe there's room for you to bring up that growth strategy to a number that other people might not be able to.
I know where I was where we shine because we can, okay, they're doing this. I could look at someone's calendar. I'd be like, okay, I know I can do this and this and I'll be able to increase my NOI to. So X, Y, and Z. Okay. So that's another point to emphasize is you as an operator, like you as an Airbnb investor, like depending on the amount of time and effort that you're going to put into that property, it's going to drive a lot of the profitability.
Oh yeah. It was like buying an investment versus buying a service industry, right? Cause it's all about service in the Airbnb world. [00:14:00] Like you got to make sure you get those reviews. So yeah, so it's a different, so I think people need to orient on that. That's it's a different game. Okay. Now let's talk about experienced investors.
And I definitely very specific instructions to buying agents that work for us or represent us or purportedly represent us. Yes. There you go. I like that. But talk about what are some of the pains from actually an agent side or working with people like the people that. I think some of the biggest struggles are the people who have succeeded incredibly well in 2020, 2021, 2022, with interest rates and prices.
And they have those same expectations in today's market. Not that we can't hit those marks, but as an example, in Destin, you could buy a five bedroom property for 450, 000, 500, 000 in 2020, and it would have brought in a hundred thousand dollars a year easily, and you're hitting 20 percent gross for these numbers that, Are fantastic.
And at the, at that time, you were also looking at a current, incredibly low interest rates. Insurance was way lower, like. It was just a, it was a soup of perfection for buying short [00:15:00] term rentals. You know what I mean? And today it's the exact opposite on almost all of those variables. Prices are up, interest rates are up and insurance rates are killing a lot of deals.
It's almost more, it's almost educating the experienced investors, but setting a more of a realistic expectation for those investors when they sent me, Hey, I've already done this five times. Here's give me another one like this. Yeah, I would love to send that to you right now, but it may not happen or.
And so anyway, that's the first thing is expectation management. I think for experienced investors who've experienced relatively recent success in the past couple of years. And beyond that, I think the most difficult part is they don't want to sift through a bunch of opportunities. So it's not time spent educating them necessarily.
It's more time spent sifting through deals to make sure I'm sending them ones that make sense. And so if someone sends me a very specific offer criteria, like you guys have sent, I may not send you anything for a month or two, or I'm just sending you the auto blast that just sending you properties in general.
And I feel bad, right? Because I'm like, I'm literally analyzing all these deals and they're just not hitting your criteria. And I'm doing a, I'll do a bunch of behind the scenes work that may not [00:16:00] be reflected into the investor. So they may think you're lazy, but I don't want to send them crap just to send them crap.
So those are the challenges with experienced investors. Yeah. That's, I think it's great to, for the experienced investor listening, when you don't, I went through that journey too. It's like, we're not sending stuff. And it's because there's something there to send you. And I, and what I don't, what I don't want is the drip of like stuff.
Doesn't. Hit my mark and because it's a waste of time, like I'm just going to, I'm just going to filter your email and I won't even look at it actually. That's better actually. Just because when I see your emails, man, I actually will open it because I know like it's a thoughtful, there's some thought process behind it.
It may or may not work, but at least someone actually looked at it. It's not just a screen from the local MLS and I'm still looking for those. Not 2020 vintage deals, but I'm still, we're still looking for things that, that work. And my challenge is, I don't know what's it. So the markets I'm looking at, typical cash on cash is a self managing.
It is the mid teens call it 15%. You see a lot of those. And I think to myself, oh man, I'm borrowing all this money. I'm doing all this work and I'm getting 15%. Now, conversely, it's actually really [00:17:00] good. If you look at. All the other options are out there and cash on cash return. As folks know, don't include the debt pay down that you're getting every single year.
Just that's another three points. Oh, for sure. Yeah. On return. Right. And you're, cause you're paying down the principal. And it paid out more and more of the principle as the loan amortizes. I don't have a specific point here, but it's more. Yeah. And I must, I get the frustration. I think, but more like voicing the frustration on the investor side too, because we're, you're borrowing, you're putting a million dollar house down.
You're putting 200 K down. You got to put another 50 to get it up to get it up and running. Plus the fees, right? You're borrowing 800. I got some million dollars of capital you're putting in. And you're like, I'm earning 15 percent on the 200. And you're like, Oh, like 35K. And I'm doing all this work. I was like, Oh man.
And I got the insurance risks. And so that's where, and that's where it's so hard on, on our side to pull the trigger. We found some more stuff more recently. I think the market's come back a little bit, but you see the buyers are a little bit, but I'm just a conversation. That's the frustrations that it worked.
Yeah, no, I'm right there with you. So I'm not just an agent who doesn't buy. So I'm an agent who's actively looking to [00:18:00] grow my portfolio as well. And you just look at the number of transactions in general from NAR from last year. It was basically half of what it was in previous years. And so it was a large correction when it comes to number of transactions.
So we had to really shift to trying to be more creative as much as we could. A vast majority of our investor deals that we're selling nowadays come from creative solutions. Seller financing has always been a thing, but even more emphasized now where, when we can do that. We just, I just got approval today for a loan assumption that we've been working for an investor.
And this loan assumption, we've been working for the past six and a half months and literally got an email this morning saying, Hey, you're approved clear to close. And so six and a half months of working with this lender to try to get an assumption approved. And then sub two closing subject to has been, it's like the newest, hottest thing that everyone wants to talk about because it's a really, it is a powerful thing, a powerful tool in today's market.
It's that is the creative tool that is just. Prime for where we sit with the interest rates and the environment where we are right now. And so we've closed a lot of deals using those creative solutions in order to make it happen and still achieve the [00:19:00] return that makes sense. So rather than getting a 15 percent cash on cash, you're now maybe looking at 25%, which is a much more exciting kind of number.
Just see, yeah. Yeah, no, shout out to Matt here. Matt, Matt spent like 45 minutes on the phone with me probably like a month ago. I was looking at something to deal with Destin and, and I think some very specific Florida things that I hadn't thought about actually, it just reinforces the point on finding a really knowledgeable agent in that specific market that you're looking for.
It really is. I've been doing this for a long time. And as Matt was like insurance part and there's two other things I was like, Oh, okay, cool. I didn't know this. And I'm glad I asked you, but I think it's going to be a really good segue. Other part of the conversation I want to have was buying, right?
You're like half your day is as an agent, running your team, working with your clients. On the half, you're the client, right? Like you're looking at buying stuff and you know, you, I, you're much smarter than me. So I'm just still doing, you have 750 doors and doing a lot of other things. Like maybe let's just start off though.
Why didn't you just focus on short term rentals? Why have you now? Graduated and done long term, [00:20:00] mid term, short term RVs, apartment syndications. Let's talk about that a little bit. One of the reasons is as an agent, I've always told my clients, if I see a deal, I'm going to pass it to you first. I can almost guarantee you if I had never said that I would have a much larger short term rental portfolio and would probably be almost exclusively focused on that.
So because of the kind of the role that I set. Early on that I would pass my deals to my client and my clients first. I think that was a little bit of a limiting factor in my portfolio growth and short term rentals. Cause that's all of my clients were basically short term rental investors. And that's where it came from.
And that's one of the, one of the for sure limiting factors. Beyond that, I'm just, I'm the type of guy who's very opportunistic. Right. So if I see something that makes sense and I understand the risk and reward, then I'm willing to jump in and accept that risk for the potential upside of the reward. One of the reasons I don't haven't invested in crypto is because I don't quite understand the risk reward profile there, but when it comes to something that's an offshoot of short term rentals, when I jumped into long term rentals or to flips or to mobile home parks or RV parks or syndications, it's [00:21:00] almost just like a derivation of the same.
So it was easy enough to translate and learn that language and understand the risk reward and I jumped into that. So. It was just testing the waters from there. So let me ask you, what makes the most sense now? Right? Like short term rentals, like you said, or overall real estate transactions down 50 percent and then we've talked about some of the limitations on short term rentals right now.
What else gets you excited and compare that with a series? I will. So I generally invest along the, like the Sunbelt. So like coastal Gulf coast region, plus or minus a hundred miles or so. What gets me excited right now are the things that mitigate my two biggest crypto units right now, which are interest rates and insurance.
I found that the RV park, mobile home park world really mitigate both of those. In the RV park space, you generally just pay for liability insurance. So I'm not worried about property insurance and liability still is relatively reasonable on rates. And then typically it's very common to see seller financing or creative financing in the space.
We're mitigating with lower interest rates and typically higher cap rates. And that, that space gets me really excited right now is the RV park, mobile home park space. Do the kind of macro factors, macro economic [00:22:00] factors, is that is a tailwind? Or maybe just translate that as we're having slower job growth, higher interest rates, consumer spending slowing down.
Is that pushing homeowners to, I don't want to say non traditional housing, but. Affordable housing. We like to say affordable housing. Yeah. It becomes, can you get any lower, right? What's a lower class of living than a mobile home or RV park? Now that'll be, that'll then. Dictate what type of RV or mobile home park you're buying.
Cause there are some beautiful class A RV parks or where people are paying. There's some, we were looking at the other day, people were paying 250, 000 to buy a 1200 square foot pad for an RV because it's like prime location. Everyone loves it. It's all on the coast. That's not the type that I like to purchase at the same time.
I don't like to be the other end of the spectrum of, of a slumlord. That's the last thing I want to be associated with is slumlord living where I like the. Kind of C plus B minus class space of the RV mobile home park world where you can do something easy to upgrade it and improve the quality of the life of the tenants.
And it's, I just, I like the change aspect. I like improving people's lives as much [00:23:00] as I can. I'm not at the point where I can just easily infuse 10 million and make some great park that makes some big changes, but a couple hundred grand we can throw in there and maybe upgrade from a dirt road to a gravel road.
Or a gravel road to up nice paved road, which makes a big difference for these type of parks and, and these people, they really appreciate it. Okay, cool. No, that's in RV Park. I wanted to talk to you offline on that. 'cause RV parks, I know from other folks it's a good way to, it's a lot of depreciation there too.
Yeah. My, so my first short-term rental that I've told you about, the, that I met the, the group from China and China at, it was awesome. But that one we bought, prices were cheap. Price is appreciated and we want to take advantage of the equity. So we ended up selling it and did a 1031 exchange to buy my second RV park.
So we exchanged into it, bought the RV park for 2 million. And we did a cost segregation study on my first, on that second RV park. And I was massively surprised for a 2 million purchase. We depreciated like 1. 285 million. Yeah. So it's like 35%. It's like crazy. Yeah. 30. Yeah. Shorter round's. Like 30% [00:24:00] less to land.
I know it's, I know I gotta, we gotta talk 'cause I gotta do this gotta, I gotta invest with you and get some dep appreciation benefits. Yeah. Because I can't, the insurance in Florida is crazy, but let's, and then up Florida, because of your other name, roar, right? Yes. Talk about. Before you were identifying real estate, you were identifying hostile targets from heads up display.
Sure. Sure. Yes. I had the awesome opportunity of flying fighter jets in the air force for 11 years. I, I loved it. It was as awesome as every little boy expects it to be. Flying fighter jets, a lot of long, hard days, a lot of difficulty to get to that point. But once you achieve that status of being a fighter pilot in the air force, it's a pretty amazing ride.
So I did that for 11 years. I flew all over there, all over the world and deployments, all that fun stuff. And, and then one day I got accepted to the Top Gun program for the Air Force for the F 35, which is the newest joint stealth fighter we have. So I think the newest, nicest fighter jet we have in the military, basically.
And I was accepted to the very first [00:25:00] Top Gun program there. So I was like, literally like the tip of the spear, like you got accepted. I'm like, Holy crap. This is like amazing. And as I was preparing to go to this Top Gun school. I just randomly felt ill, got out of breath really is what it was one day when I was in a hotel and I went to my flight doc, they did a scan on my chest and all of a sudden we found that there was nine large tumors in my chest.
One of them was the size of a softball between my heart and my spine out of the blue, completely out of the blue, no cancer history in my family or anything like that. And yeah, so from there, like from being on top of the world, like tip of the spear, going to this very first Top Gun school to literally about two weeks later.
Getting ready to start chemotherapy with when they finally identified what type of cancer it was. And I also went to the doctor and they found some heart issues where I went to the doctor, some heart pain. And he said, Hey Matt, your, your heart's probably going to stop working in the next 48 hours. So you need surgery like now.
And so you had to get heart surgery the very next day. And so it was a matter of this massive life changing event in two weeks from being on [00:26:00] top of the world and being like. Completely humbled in a matter of two weeks. Okay, I get it. I get it. I am not all that in a bag of chips, right? Like I get it. It was a big transition moment.
And from there, the air force eventually, after successfully going through chemo and overcoming the cancer and the heart stuff, the air force decided they, I am no longer fit for service because I had some internal lung damage and I was given the boot. I got an email from the air force one day as I was waiting for the results for my, this medical board that I was going through.
And the email just said, Hey, thank you for your service. You have 10 days to vacate the air force. And my commander got the email at the same time. So I had a 10 day warning to leave this most secure job that I could think of being a military pilot. And I was out after 10 days. And luckily during my chemotherapy time.
I, the writing was on the roll that I might be getting the boot. And so that's when I started looking into real estate, starting to gain in sales, really educating myself. And I spent prior to the cancer stuff, I would spend 10 to 12 hour days in a top secret vault, studying our enemies tactics on how we can do these things in top secret [00:27:00] situations, where then I was in a hospital and I would just study real estate tactics for 10 to 12 hours.
They were just, I would just like fully immersed, man. And I just, it was a very trans transformative. First off, thanks for sharing your story and thank you for the service. I think we all appreciate the ones that are out there in the front lines, protecting the country. And yeah, no, it's obviously we've talked about this before.
I don't think you ever went into this much detail with me. Yeah. It's tough coupling when you were married in time, children. Yeah. Four kids. Yeah. So I would say that the toughest thing was. Realizing for those of you who have read rich dad, poor dad was realizing that I truly had that poor dad mentality because the moment I realized I looked at my savings account, I only had 2, 000 in my savings account.
I just money came in, money came out, but it was guaranteed money. I think I was getting a salary. I didn't realize how, how much of a mistake it was the way I was living. You know what I mean? I was truly living paycheck to paycheck, but not realizing it. So the moment that paycheck was threatened, I was like, holy crap, something's got to change.
Yeah. It just speaks to the fragile [00:28:00] nature of a job, right? You had a very great job in the airport. So you're doing. Like something where a few people are qualified to do. And I think the last thing you probably thought was like, someone can just yank yank the carpet from under you and 10 days later you're out.
And that speaks to, for myself, the insecurity that I felt went through finance and had a great job that was like. Difficult to get into and well compensated that I just saw. And people above me. Yeah. They just, sometimes it's just going to knock on the door and be like, look, you're, thank you for spending 30 years here and give me up time with your wife and your family.
And there's this nice severance package for you, but you're done. And I saw that a lot. And it just, man, that those people that slaved away there for 18, 20 hours, gave a vacation time with their kids. Never went to go see. Your kids play sports and go back and see their family work whenever, even when they travel and they work.
I just, I was like, man, I just, I can't do that. That's just not for me. I don't care. Like how much money you're paying me? Because fundamentally I knew like they could always take that away. And we were lucky enough to find short term rentals and been lucky [00:29:00] enough to be able to grow that business. But yeah, like I think that's a big thing I want to share with everyone too.
It's just like, it could be your situation, my situation where I like, or you feel so secure and. You're not controlling your own destiny. And that's the nice thing about business. And it's hard. I come out, there's every business isn't easy. Being a real estate agent is like super competitive. It's not easy.
But the one thing is like you control your own outcome, right? Matt controls his own outcome. Michael controls his own. No one can take this away from me. And. I, and that is a source of strength, personal strength for me is, man, no matter how hard this is, at least like I own this and no one can build here.
No one can take it away from me. It's not like working at a bank where, oh man, I'm slaving for this client. And like, you know what? The person above you can be like, no, actually we're gonna move you to a different group and you're gonna be doing this. You're gonna be doing this now. Please transition X client over to Matt because Matt's taking over your role.
And it's what the heck. It's an interesting kind of dichotomy. Cause when I got out of the military and then we started to go from like a guaranteed salary job to. 100 percent performance based job, basically is what we are. [00:30:00] I went to the extreme and I told my wife and my kids, I told them, Hey guys, we only make money if I succeed here.
So I'm going to be working. I know I worked a lot in military, but I'm going to be working even harder now, temporarily. So I had the whole, what I call the temporary imbalancing of my life for a year or two to where it was full throttle, man, like. Morning, afternoons, late nights, no, no relaxing time. It was all, it was a strain for the family, but it was an intentional strain.
And I found it was difficult to throttle back a little bit, to be honest with you. As it was like, no, I'm making seven figures. We're, this is awesome. Like never my wildest dreams would ever thought to be making a million dollars a year. And then to be able to be like, ah, but I'm also crushing my relationships right now.
And then just slowly pull back. Once we hit that kind of that financial altitude, if you will, that we were happy with, we were like, okay, like now we need to concentrate more of a balanced life and trying to figure out how do you still succeed as an entrepreneur, but also have a good quality of life, which I think you guys.
Do a great job of that. I think you're a great example of, of working hard, but also playing hard as a family. Thanks man. I appreciate it. It's, it's, it's truly [00:31:00] a point of emphasis for us. Like we, we could probably could have made more money and we'd done other things. But I think having the benefit of 10 years in investment banking and seeing all that, I was like money and that stuff, it's great.
And it provides optionality, but I think fundamentally and. Definitely having kids now and as you get older, it's like that point is reinforced. Like in the end, it's like your family that did really close people in your life. It's your family that really matters. The people that are going to be there for you when you have, sorry to borrow the example, when you have nine tumors in your chest, yeah, other people around are going to be sympathetic, but ultimately like.
It's your family that's going to be there for you in the hospital room and be like, Hey man, like UK, I can get you some water, let's figure out a way together versus, and that's, those are the, those relationships that, that I personally want to really invest in and make sure that I'm giving that my, they're just work, we've got to make money, we've got to support the kids, we've got all that, but there is a balance and that balance changes from time to time, but having just, or for me, just like making sure that goal [00:32:00] is like, that's present for me every single day.
I really, I care about that. Yeah, I think it's having moments like that. And you know, my life with the cold cancer thing, it forces you to reevaluate what's important in life. And I'm sure you had moments, especially as you were thinking about leaving the financial industry. Oh man, is this important? Like how important is this to me?
But my family is more important. I have this opportunity to be successful for my family and also be there for them more often. It's yeah, it's a good to have that kind of introspective thought process every once in a while and just pull it all together and be like. What am I doing here? Why am I doing this?
What's the why? Yeah. Hey man, I really, this is a, I'm glad we did this. We've been trying to do this for a long time. I'm really glad we were able to find time together. And let's definitely do this again. I'm sure the market will be different and we can see, we can talk about it. Oh yeah. We'll see what happens with the election, with all the Fed and all the funds.
Stuff and the market in general, man, I'm anxious. I'm really hopeful for 2024, as I know, this is the beginning of the year. And if you would ask me the same question, 2023, going to be a rough year because all the writing was on the roll, 2023 was going to be a rough year for real estate, but yeah, I think we're going to see a [00:33:00] pretty hard recovery.
I know the sales are down, but it's actually a pretty good SDR on an SDR side. It was like, it was actually really good. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you don't arbitrage. Arbitrage is one of those things I typically pooh poohed to be honest with you as a, you're making yourself another job. Because I never thought about it as building systems and making it more of a passive thing.
And yeah, there's, I'm excited. This year is going to be awesome. Matt, if folks want to reach out to you, what's the best way to get ahold of you? Sure. Roargardner. com is the website. I actually have a book coming out, hopefully at end of, my goal is to have it published by end of quarter one. My original publisher went bankrupt.
So that's an entirely different story. So roargardner. com, you can find me there or any of the social medias. I'm at R O A R. Gardner, G A R D N E R. We'll put your website on the show notes. Folks, if you're looking to invest in that part in the panhandle Tampa market, you should definitely reach out to Matt and talk to him and his team.
Thank you so much for your time today. Thanks brother. Appreciate it.