Buying and Selling Notes with Brett Burky

Josh (00:00:02) - Good day, everybody. Welcome to the deal, Scout. On today's episode, we're going to have a conversation, a comeback king, a guy who's been on our shows many times. I've. I met him in Orlando years ago when I lived there. We've maintained relationship. And, you know, I just wanted to hear what's going on in his world with his business and maybe learn a little bit about the world of notes. So Brett, welcome the show.

Brett (00:00:25) - Hey. Nice to see you again. As always. Only an hour and a half hour and a half north. But. Yeah. So do you ever come to Orlando anymore?

Josh (00:00:35) - You know, I have family there, but it seems like even though it's only an hour and a half, it's so hard when you have. I have a ten year old, six year old and three year old getting them all in a car and driving an hour and a half. Like, I'd rather, like, pull my nails out. I don't know if you experienced that with your kids, but it's tough.

Josh (00:00:53) - But maybe, maybe once a quarter. Is that. That's a good answer, right?

Brett (00:00:58) - Yeah, that's a good answer. I mean, honestly, I haven't been I've been trying to take been wanting to take my kids up to Gainesville and I don't know why haven't I, I it's not that far, you know, like it's just one of those things I just forget the weekend comes and it's like. And I'm always like, oh, let's go to Devil's Den. I'm like, yeah, right. We're not getting in. You're not getting into that place.

Josh (00:01:15) - So yeah, well, Brett, you have a company. Tell us about your company, because someone might not have heard your initial episode that we did probably like two years ago. Like tell us what what do you do?

Brett (00:01:27) - So I run the marketing for a company called Paper Stack. Paper stacks, a place for people buy and sell debt. So it's mortgage debt. Land debt. We have some commercial debt. We've even had business loans, business debt.

Brett (00:01:40) - And now we're having private lending debt soon and wraps and so and then lease options. So but it's all it's all debt. So it's all we started in this single family mortgage debt. And then we we kind of stumbled into not stumbled in. They kind of just showed up like the land notes data showed up one day. And then I saw that they sold well. And so I went and deep on that wraps, they just showed up one day. And now we're developing. They're like doing it now. The developers are out there doing special stuff for raps, private lenders that kind of just they showed up one day and they we have to develop something. We're in the process of developing something special for them, where they don't have to pay a fee because, you know, they're private lenders, they have all their money in, so they don't want to pay a fee because it's their money, so they won't be making money. So. We developed a new fee structure for them. Where they don't, the seller doesn't pay.

Brett (00:02:33) - Buyer only pays a strip fleet throughout the life of the loan. And then so commercial. Same thing just shows up. We sold a church I didn't even know churches could sell, but the churches could sell. And then also a some kind of marijuana dispensary place, like, yeah, was right here in Orlando was like, wow. Okay. And so and that's it. And so we sort of business loan or two. But those are pretty rare. We're like business notes. And then the lease options are something that they're starting to show up a little bit more. There are some guys out there that are really pushing like that like sub two lease option type stuff. It seems to be like a hotness right now. And so they showed up. I didn't know if we could do it what we can. So all right, well there we go. There's a couple more markets. So it's expanding. It's pretty cool.

Josh (00:03:17) - So buying and selling debt right. The notes from churches to pot shops to land to business loans and raps.

Josh (00:03:28) - You guys got in this primarily focused on residential. And you guys had a big mission in vision when you when you started this. I've been, you know, seeing your team build this from from day one. And you guys have done some amazing things. So since inception you were starting there and it's evolved into different types of notes, different types of paper that you guys are buying and selling. Right for other people as a as a platform, as a marketplace doing this like give me some milestones of what you guys have accomplished. Since when was your inception like 20 1617?

Brett (00:03:58) - I mean, we kind of like really launched, you know, two of the founders, Rick and TJ, had this idea for this when they were doing just they were the new buyers and they had a, you know, kind of the inception idea came in 2014. I came on in like November 2014, and it wasn't even called Paper tag. It was called Investment Node Exchange. And I thought that name was terrible because it was note in exchange, I was like, guys, I was like, you know, we were going to get that wrong note in an exchange starts with a knee and it's 26 characters long.

Brett (00:04:30) - And then so when we got our fourth founder, Mike, who was our head developer, we revamped it to Paper Stacks. So that was 2015. That was like a may. And we officially launched something in 2017. And immediately at the airport, we launched it at a conference at the airport. We're like, we got to rewrite it. And so we went back to the drawing board. And still kept that one live. But it wasn't, as you know, it was kind of small. And then 2018, we launched and we've been using that same type of framework code base. It's actually going through. It's. Jeez, I'll be the third, fourth like fourth iteration. Now where they're developing the new UI and UX guys are developing like a more of an app like experience where it's going to you have the website looks like one thing you can go to something you'll notice if you're on some websites where it's like the website, the front facing thing looks completely different than the app. The app is has an app look.

Brett (00:05:26) - So that's what they're doing now. So it's it's been it's been fun. It's been it's been years now. And gosh almost I think almost 7 or 8 years. It's crazy.

Josh (00:05:34) - Yeah yeah man good job you guys. I mean just a great founding team. Really smart people. Rick's the you know Rick's the the the note buying expert like this guy Rick knows knows his jam and TJ's the the heart, you know, like he's the guy who's thinking about all the, you know, the people and such. Like, so you just have a and then your, your brain on on how to market things. It's just brilliant. I don't think I've ever met your developer, but just really good group of people. So a good job in doing that. Give me some highlights on some of the things you guys have accomplished, you know, over the past couple of years because it's been a very unique market, you know, and things are going weird. So what have you accomplished since our last interview?

Brett (00:06:15) - Uh, I mean, we're up over 15,000 users now.

Brett (00:06:21) - Um, we started a YouTube channel a number of years ago just because we started getting a lot of good questions. And I was like, you know what? Because I was like, why don't we. Why don't we just. Instead of answering this question over and over again, let's just make a YouTube channel. And so we started that and we're up to like, I don't know, like 3000 something. I mean, it's a small, smaller niche, Mr. Beast. You know, like, you know, like my daughter put out a video of her and her freaking gecko and she got 9000 views. I was like, God dang, I need a gecko. But, like, you know, it's like, so it's but, you know, it teaches people. So, you know, that's something else we've done. We've closed thousands of closings now. So which is interesting. Um, you know, all the different debt instruments, we've hired a bigger team. So I've got my team working, got design teams, UX guys, UI developers.

Brett (00:07:09) - And so just recently, this year, um. We release some features, so we have some I like, you know, some, some one called co-writer where it can actually like rewrite, you know, stuff you'd expect like, you know, some people just it's no, it's not their fault. Some people just their English, maybe their first language, but there's probably still smart and have money and know how to invest it just you know, they we we actually it wasn't because of that, but it worked really well for some of those people because we have people all around the world now. And so this guy, one of the guys we used it on, was he's from someplace over in Asia somewhere, and we understood what he was saying. But then when you hit rewrite, it actually wrote it in a way that would be okay. That's just how you would say it. He was writing it in the the syntax that he would say it in his own language, and it kind of picked up on that and it's able to translate it, say, hey, this is how we would say it in perfect English.

Brett (00:08:00) - So things like that was our first one co-writer and it can make it longer, shorter. Check the grammar, all that stuff like that, all that. The next one is a which is this next one's amazing. I can't even believe we finished it, but it's basically able to take documents because if I were to sell a note to you, it could be a kind of a pain in the butt of me writing all the transfer information, like what's the borrower's name? What was the first recording date, what was the legal description? Which can be really long sometimes if I get that wrong, you might not be able to get it recorded first off, but if something gets recorded and it's still wrong, a lawyer might be able to see that if you ever went to foreclose and they might be able to throw out the case totally saying, hey, this was wrong. They didn't transfer it, right. It's, you know, so you got to get it right. It's a very, very important thing.

Brett (00:08:41) - And it was the bottleneck of our industry still is for a lot of people. We have it now where you can just throw your collateral, file the documents at it, and it will extract it and throw it onto the new ones, like magically. Wow, cool with one. But when you're doing a 100 note trade, it's magical because you know that that would take. Days, you know, like, you know, I mean, yeah, like days. And when you're doing big trades, you're talking like weeks, and it's like we just took down what did what's taken people weeks to do. We've could have done to seconds and then now we just literally right now they're working on it and it's supposed to be out like this week or next. It's called Paper Price Predictor, which is our own note Zestimate type thing where it's basically our. His estimate for which your note will sell for.

Josh (00:09:30) - So someone has a note. So they've done some type of seller finance or hold back. Right. And you know they got this note.

Josh (00:09:35) - Why would anybody sell this. So you know why would anybody sell a note. Like if you're holding and it's performing why would you sell it.

Brett (00:09:44) - You mean this is like capital velocity? Like, you know, your model might be like, a lot of people do this seller finance play where they find a house, where they take it back. They maybe put some some work into it. Um, you know, seller financing is kind of hot right now because, you know, the rates are higher, it's harder for people to get funding. And there's always people out there that need a seller finance deal because they're an entrepreneur and they're not bankable. You know, no matter you know, there's a lot of people that might be just maybe they don't have a Social Security number. They can't get that like traditional go down to Bank of America. And there's a lot of tightening on what's what's underwritten currently. But if you're able to take the, you know, take a, you know, a leap and say, hey, you know, I'll take this, I'll seller finance to this person.

Brett (00:10:33) - That's great. But you know, you got to remember that in this process you're putting down your whole money, your money to like, sell or like even buy the household to become the bank. Right? So, you know, if I give an example, like recently bought a house and somewhere, whatever in Florida and it was for let's just say it was like. What was it? One. One. It's been a while now. 150 but then seller financed it for. 230 with 20% down. So it was a 210 mortgage. Now you can keep that and you can get a payment. And if you wait 30 years, great, you might make $400,000. But if you want your money back now and you want to just make that spread, you can sell the note and then make $30,000, but that you make it in three months. Yeah, you're not going to get the long game, but somebody wants that long game. Someone wants to hey, I just want to put this in my my, my IRA.

Brett (00:11:31) - I want to ride this thing out for the next 30 years. I just want the cash flow. You don't want cash flow. You want money now. So that's why people would sell, is they want the velocity of their capital. Look, I got $200,000 to play with. I need to turn this over five times in a year. How do I do that? Well, seller finance these notes, put them on paper for sale, sell and make 20 off that one. Boom. Make 30 off this one. So it's just, you know, that's the kind of the the reason someone would sell a note. Yeah. You know, that's one way.

Josh (00:11:59) - Or you know, your spouse wants a new kitchen. Right. And you're sitting on a pile of notes and you're like, man, these are paying cash flow. That's great. But, you know, maybe I want to new this or new that or pay off some debt or, you know, buy, buy an asset. Right.

Josh (00:12:14) - So this is interesting because I think especially as interest rates are are going up, your notes are becoming more and more valuable, right? Just because of the competition out there. So for someone who's looking to, you know, maybe become a note buyer, like what are some of the things to maybe consider? I know that Rick's the guy who's like, I've done it a million times and you've got a few yourself. But like getting started as a note buyer. Like, what are some things to consider or some terminology that I need to know? Like what? What should I know?

Brett (00:12:47) - I mean, I would say one thing to know is if you're starting out, you probably want to start in performing notes. That's important. You know, that's basically just means that it's already paying. You know, there's, you know, buying something that's not paying and having to go for foreclosure or there's a lot of. Gotchas that you might not see around the corner. How smart is the person in the house? Are they going to fight it, or are they going to sign over the deed? Or there's all kinds of variations that could happen.

Brett (00:13:12) - So like knowing that information, buying a performing node is like going around the base, you know, just getting a base hit, just do it like, you know, like, you know, you bought my first note and it was it's nothing spectacular. It's a I think I'm getting a 12% yield. So it's in in Pennsylvania. But I wasn't playing. That's it. It's making me. $363 a month. Whoop de freakin do. But it's like I'm not going for the home run. But if I get enough of those, you know that that cash flow will build up over time. So, I mean, that's what I would look for if I was a new investor. Look for something that's performing. It's been seasoned, which means they've been paying for a long time or paying for a decent amount of time. Um, and it's, you know, they have some kind of, like, emotional equity in the house. House doesn't look like a piece of garbage, you know, like, basically, you know, it's not a neighborhood that's, like, all surrounded by houses that are boarded up.

Brett (00:14:08) - You know, it's just one of those ones. It's there's nothing spectacular about it. The person lives in the house they've been paying for years. You're just buying a cash flow stream. That's it. Yeah, that's what I would look for.

Josh (00:14:18) - You're buying cash flow and cash flows valuable because you could. You could even create a business. And then you could borrow money off cash flow. Then you could create opportunity. And the valuation of your portfolio based on your cash flow could be great too. And you could sell the portfolio. But like, it's super awesome because, you know, right now I have a bunch of money in the bank, right? And it freaks me out every day because every day through inflation, my the value of my cash in the bank is going down. So I'm starting to invest more in businesses, invest more in gold and silver, invest more in, you know, right now I'm kind of nervous about real estate. I'm still in it, but I'm nervous about it.

Josh (00:14:57) - But this could be a good way to be in real estate without having to deal with tenants and toilets, right?

Brett (00:15:02) - That's why a lot of people do it. I mean, that's, you know, that's when you say, like, having a lot of money in the bank, like, I have basically moved all my money out of the bank. I don't have anything I don't even have, like like I think I have my kids IRAs and that's that's it. And I basically put everything into I use infinite banking system. I put everything into there, everything into there, and everything else goes into my, my line of credit. So I just pay it down and use that to borrow and then to buy assets. And so I'll, I'll take out money out of that and then I'll buy something that's cash flowing. And I'll use that cash flow with my cash flow that I have left over from the month of getting paid with paper. That compounded with the cash flow from the other assets that pay back the block and then go out and do it again and then, you know, so I just so like I've tried to make myself where if something does go wrong, you know, if it's in the IBC, the bank can't touch it really.

Brett (00:15:58) - You know, and then if it's in a lock you can't, you know, come after that. It's, it's the equity in the house. So yeah, the same idea of like making sure the money is working is important because otherwise if it's sitting in the bank, it's not working. And you know, it's I don't know. Yeah. It's, it's I've been in a lot of different mastermind groups in the last couple of years that that's what we all talk about, stuff like that. How to how to make your cash flow work your cash work to make your cash flow and not allow it to sit in a bank. And I kind of got out of stocks to a lot just because you I don't feel like a lot of times there's like an underlying asset that I can actually access. And that's one of the things with real estate. You mean you get that asset.

Josh (00:16:36) - Or the, the you could be invested heavily into a business, and then they do one bad marketing campaign based on whatever their belief system is and boom, you lose all your money and you're like, that was supposed to be my retirement.

Josh (00:16:47) - You know, like, yeah, you should be diversified and stuff like that. But that freaks me out because I have really no control. You know, I might buy their beer or might buy them or whatever, but I really no control on how that company performs in my future is tied to that. So it freaks me out.

Brett (00:17:01) - I could see that. I mean, I could see that, that's why. Yeah, like for me, it's just like I've looked at land like I was just done, you know, land, different things like that. I do buy one thing that's kind of scary, which is non secured debt, which is but of.

Josh (00:17:17) - Course not secured.

Brett (00:17:19) - Unsecured. Yeah. Unsecured is off a site called prosper. So basically I spread the risk so so vastly. It's like a I mean I basically just focus on the yield on there. Some some notes will not pay. You know those are unsecured notes. I have no recourse but. It is what it is. You know.

Josh (00:17:37) - I use prosper too, so I do. Yeah. I don't put a lot there. I like things that are a little bit more secure, but the yield is pretty. You know, the yield is pretty good there. But you know for, for paper stack, you know like. I could go to paper stack and I could start looking at notes, right? Like, give me a range on the value of notes that, you know, if I'm if I'm a first time note buyer and I'm like, listen, I'm doing this, I know that, you know, I don't want to lose my money, but I'm doing this to kind of get started in the world of note buying to get my feet wet. Like, what kind of range is there in prices?

Brett (00:18:12) - I mean, it goes all the way from a couple thousand dollars, you know, on like, small land notes to. You know, we have there's one right now for $4.3 million. It's a it's a house in California.

Brett (00:18:23) - That's gorgeous. I mean, you know, we don't people kind of I don't think people anybody's going to buy it. You know, that's just kind of a it's just a lot to put your money in. But like, you know, we have a lot of people if you come with like $10,000 tend to 10 to 20,000, you can find all kinds of stuff. There's there's all kinds of stuff nationwide. You know, there's there's, you know, um, you know, we sell stuff or, or I think our like, the average range is like anywhere from, like that 20 to like 70,000, you know. And then we'll have, we'll have stuff that sells for higher course. Um, and then it kind of we don't see big trades like that. And we have a lot of big notes that come in. We have certain buyers that we know can take them. Yeah. You know, so you.

Josh (00:19:03) - Ping up your, your, your, the guys who are like, hey, I bought thousands of these, you know, like, hey, here's a note.

Josh (00:19:07) - It's on paper stack. Go take a look at it. Probably take it down or maybe take it down. Who knows. Right.

Brett (00:19:13) - That's exactly. So we just had a I forget how many units, uh, apartment building just come in. And so I have that. That one's usually more like, hey, you know, let me have you sign an NDA, and then we already have NDAs with all our buyers and say, hey, look, you know, I'm going to I'm going to shop this out to our buyers. But that's like, you know, hey, I'm going to we're going to make a private listing and they're going to, you know, we don't want just anybody bidding on those because some people might just they're we don't want them wasting their time. You know, we just want somebody like, hey, you know, it's like I'm trying to buy it. And they might be trying to do something like, oh, I'm going to flip this or brokerage like it. Just we're going to let the people that we know, they have the funds, they have the big like funds, you know, actually with, you know, they can take it down.

Brett (00:19:54) - So we'll we'll let them look at it and see if they like it. If they do, you know, just let them roll and, you know, trusted everything works out. You know, everything goes as smooth.

Josh (00:20:02) - Do you have to be an accredited investor to buy notes?

Brett (00:20:06) - No.

Josh (00:20:06) - That's good. That's so cool.

Brett (00:20:09) - Yeah. It is. It's weird. It's it's weird how it falls into some range that, um, I think it's just because it's so such an esoteric investment, it doesn't really hit a lot of the the radars and stuff like that. It's one of those things where for the longest time it was really like a who knows who, like, it's kind of an old boys club, like, because you got to remember, there's a lot of trust if I'm buying a note from you and I've never met you, and I'm supposed to send you $200,000 and you're supposed to send me something that says that you transferred it to me like a whole lot of trust, you know? Like, you know, there can actually.

Brett (00:20:40) - That's exactly how Paper Stack even became about, was that it was around that where Rick and TJ sent out hundreds of thousands of dollars of friends and family money, and the guy just, like, disappeared. And they were freaking out. Guy went on vacation for like three weeks, but he he had said he he said he put it in box. Rick and TJ only know Dropbox. And so they're like, you never put it in Dropbox. He's like, put it in box. What the hell is box? And so box is some other thing like around. Yeah it was, it was around if it's still around. But then they're like you know, they eventually got stuff and it was all copies. So they had to get all this know like what a pain in the butt. And so they had to recreate things there. Like there was just like a, a system for, you know, where I can keep my money in escrow and there's not it. And that was kind of the inception.

Brett (00:21:28) - It was from that really crappy trade. So that was kind of like the idea of what happened. And so that's that's really where it came from was, was just that, that trade itself in a. But that's why I think there's not a lot of people before in this space, because you really had to know the people. I mean, actually, so much so that I forgot that we even have a we have another product called Note Closings for that. If you're if the deal is on our previous tech. We have a system, a product underneath paper set called note closing, which is like a it's basically like a white label, no name of paper stack on it because people are saying the exact exactly what I'm talking about. They will find their buyer that maybe maybe they send out letters to people who have seller finance notes. They find the seller and they're the buyer, and they're like, look, I want to I want to use your software, I want to use the escrow, and I want to audit.

Brett (00:22:18) - And I want, you know, like some checks and balances. You know, I want to make sure I can see the documents that they're signing, but I don't want them to see the word. I don't want them to see paper stack, because I don't want them to see the marketplace, because I'm buying this thing at $0.50 on a dollar. I don't want to see that they can sell it for like actually like 85, $0.90 on the dollar. I want to I want to buy it at $0.50, and I want to turn around and sell it for $0.85. And it's like, oh, okay. So we heard that enough times that we created note closings where it's basically paper stacks closing process. Without marketplace. So yeah. Because people want the technology. Yeah.

Josh (00:22:51) - So that's super interesting because you, you heard from your the note buyers and the investors multiple times enough to where you go. We should have a way that protects their business model. Right. So now you're serving them. So you do have your marketplace where people can put, you know put their no.

Josh (00:23:09) - 80 to $0.90 on the dollar. Right. They people are going to get a discount because, you know, they want to buy something good. But then you have a way where for for the dealers out there, the people who do this as a living, they can you can handle the details of it for them. That's pretty cool, man. Good job. You listened to your the people that you serve and you created something for them. Nice work.

Brett (00:23:30) - Yeah, it's pretty neat. Like the it's funny. Like we still even have people that are both buyers and sellers on paper. And they, they maybe were in Facebook groups and like, it's weird how like that one, that one's going to fool revamp right now. Um, mostly because it has so like it's, it's basically like paper stack without the training wheels, you know, paper stacks very like follow this to do list and like you're just going to go down the, you know, like very like, you know, just go down the process.

Brett (00:23:57) - That one is very much like, all right, well you're setting up your closing and you're closing at the same time. I mean, so you're basically doing everything like listing it and closing it and doing everything and and it's flexible. That's the problem. Like people wanted to be able to like, why don't want to pay the fees? I want the buyer to pay all the fees because they're the one who wants this closing thing. You know, it's like, oh, okay. So we have a way of you can negotiate everything. And so it's.

Josh (00:24:20) - It.

Brett (00:24:21) - In theory, it's really good because you're able to build whatever type of clothing you want. But then what we're finding is that it's so flexible. Some people, they don't know what to do. You're like, oh, this is too much. I need some training wheels, you know, put the bumpers back on. It was like, it's like, okay, how do we how do we get a nice balance where they're able to do a lot of this stuff at the same time? And then also to thinking, you know.

Brett (00:24:45) - For the future. We have competitors that want it. They want. They want our kind of software or something, but they don't. Again, they don't want the name paper stack on it. They don't want us to, you know, take their list. You know, they're running their business through this, our software. And it's like, well, you just took my whole list. You know, it's like, no. So we have to have this, like white white label products. So it's getting a new look. It's kind of getting re evaluated for more like simplicity just because there's a lot of a lot of moving parts when you're closing you know, a note you know like especially if you're doing all the parts all at once I mean yeah. And then that we can with that one, you can invite people to it and you can kind of dictate, are they a guest or are they a signer, you know, what roles do they have. And so it starts be. In theory, like you're thinking about, oh, you kind of started developing it, but when you get to the end, you're like, wow, we made something really complex.

Brett (00:25:37) - And so they're kind of scaling it and kind of kind of I've seen what it's doing now and the way it's being structured and it's it's looking it's really sexy. Like I'll just say like like our, our our our head UX UI guy. Um, he came I mean, he's worked on Facebook's products. Um, he's, he's he's a pro. I mean, he's, he's noticed very much so like when he, he even redid he just just the stuff he puts out, I was like, oh my God, that's gorgeous. Just it's just gorgeous. And I'm like, and you know, I would my mind doesn't work like that. You know, like he could just pump. He pumped out like ten new logo designs for no closings. Like and just the things, the little things he's doing and and I'm like, that is so creative. And it's just it's nice to actually have that going inside our system. So it's yeah it's there. No. So so yeah.

Josh (00:26:32) - So for for people out there who are interested in note buying, buying and selling debt, essentially ranging from churches to pot shops to land and houses and even some commercial stuff.

Josh (00:26:43) - Where can people go to connect with you, start learning with you and maybe do a deal with you?

Brett (00:26:48) - I mean, they just can go to the side paper. I mean, on paper, seccom we, you know, you can sign up. It's free to sign up for free to sign up, you know, free to browse. You know, it's even free to list as a seller. I mean, we just make money. We make money at the closing. So when you actually think of it's like the online title company, like it's, you know, we're basically helping you through the process, you know, making checking out, you know, making sure there's an escrow and making sure the titles are title, making sure the the documents are what they say they are providing shipping label, doing the dock prep. All of it's done by the code, which is pretty cool. So it's not like we're all, you know, not a lot of things are getting touched. I'm sorry. One thing not being done by the code is the audit.

Brett (00:27:24) - That's still one of our partners that actually will look through and say, hey, this is what it is. You know, take it or leave it. So I mean, they can, you know, that's that. And I forgot, we even we even have a full on academy now. So we have like a whole like paper stack academy where you can it's it's really cool. Josh, we have this thing now like that. Um, like, well, we have the academy is a whole bunch of videos, all the calculators, all the, you know, discounts from from partners and everything which conference to attend, glossaries, quizzes, tests. And then this year, I ever had those shower thoughts like we were like, you know, like, man, you know, we always wanted it to have a simulator. He always wanted a simulator. I can never figure out how to do a simulator. And then I saw interactive video, like where it's like, you know, hey, you want this? Click here, click exactly.

Brett (00:28:14) - Click here to go.

Josh (00:28:16) - Choose your own journey.

Brett (00:28:17) - Exactly your own journey. So I started like imagining journeys where it's like like the first couple we have out now is like, here's how to use it to buy a calculator. All right. So this is this. Okay. Now here's yours. And I actually have demo paper where I actually uploaded a bunch of fake data. Fake fake houses is real notes. But like, you know, it's real addresses, but like, um, and basically said, all right, here's one I want you to offer. I want you to make an offer on this one with a 12% yield. And then they, they, you know, using the calculator, they have to go through and then basically and then they click forward. Did you get blah, blah, blah, blah number. No. Did you, did you forget to do this this and this. Yes. Okay. If you forgot to do this, did it go. It's like kind of walks them through it.

Brett (00:29:01) - Oh here's a listing. Go look on this one. It looks good on the website. Right. Okay. Now what else do you do for due diligence I don't know, it's good on, you know, checklist. Oh, let's go drive the neighborhood. Drive the neighborhood. They drive the neighbor and they start seeing, like the houses are all boarded up around them. This one's burnt down. They're like, what do you do? Are you going to move forward or not? I'm going to back out. So they back out. I just go to the end. Hey, I'm going to move forward, okay? Moving forward. This is how we're going to adjust our bid, blah blah blah, blah, blah blah. And they're going through all these things. And so we're building on all these scenarios. And then we're also the whole goal is to have like like I have like 10 or 15 scenarios. Um, I need to I need to I need to make sure that they are though, because I had Rick do a whole scenario and put it live and and he's like, he's looking at it and he's like, he's like running the numbers and he's he looks and he's like, bro, this isn't even correct.

Brett (00:29:45) - I was like, what? He's like, your numbers are awful. I was like, I was like, what the heck? I was like, he's like, I was like, you didn't. You didn't catch it. He's like, I'm just reading your scripts. I'm just reading. I'm going through what you told me to do. Like, I figured you had it right. So we put a whole one, and it takes a long time to do. Yeah, I was like, crap. I was like, well, now we know that every single thing that we put out because, yeah, don't want that to happen again. And so for sure. But it's cool. So we have a bunch of like a bunch of scenarios that are coming out. So hopefully by, you know.

Josh (00:30:18) - This is this is brilliant. Yeah. Cool.

Brett (00:30:21) - Yeah. It's really smart because it's fun.

Josh (00:30:25) - I would teach that because it's a game.

Brett (00:30:28) - It is. Yeah, it's a game.

Josh (00:30:30) - And you can learn how to be a known investor through a game scenario.

Josh (00:30:35) - Don't even play with real money. Play with fake money. It's like it's like Robert Kiyosaki cash flow game like play the game but learn the skills.

Brett (00:30:43) - That's exactly what it is. That's so that's that's what we've launched three of the scenarios and there's probably like another 15 to 20. And then ideally we'll be rolling out two different like case studies a month. And so that's part of the stuff that's in there. It's it's I mean it's a you know it's funny. We we launched it, um. Yeah, over a year or two ago. And it's been a decent amount of money, you know. We didn't know we were going to do that. It just it sells, you know, just sells it, you know. But it's now I think with this new thing we're doing, I think it's going to be even that much better because it's it's given me a new, fresh breath of excitement for it because it's like, wow, there's all these scenarios and it's such a unique thing to do, you know, of.

Brett (00:31:23) - There's not anybody else out there doing interactive video scenarios, off investment strategies. And so I'm like, really cool. And so yeah, I forget all this stuff we have going, yeah, we have that academy, but where could I find that?

Josh (00:31:36) - Where can I find that that that thing is that on the Academy? Where could I find that scenario?

Brett (00:31:42) - It's Academy paper Seccom. It's behind the paywall. It's in scenarios. Um, so we we're going to put what we're going to do as well is we're going to put one of them forward facing. So that's more of like a, like a, you know, here's what you get. Here's a scenario you can run through. And once people understand oh wow, this is pretty cool. Hopefully they'll end up going and joining the academy and going through it. And so it's yeah it's in there. It's there's one on I think there's three blight. Running the calculations and. Where'd the house go? Like, it's about, you know, the house is burnt down.

Brett (00:32:20) - And so, like, you know, like, you know, little, little things. And the thing is, they're still those are still like in terms of scenarios which are very easy ones to do. It's like yes or nos, you know, but what we have mapped out is almost like, have you ever like, have you ever seen like a, like a funnel builder? Like it's basically like this thing that, this, that, this, that. So we've got all that stuff being mapped out where that, you know, once those start to go, it was Rick was right. He's like Brett just put out a couple easy ones. You know. You know get your base hits on it. Then we'll make some badass ones. And so that's the kind of the that's the goal for you know, first quarter of 2024. And I just looked.

Josh (00:33:00) - At your website. You guys have a podcast show.

Brett (00:33:03) - Oh yeah. Yeah yeah yeah. That's that's the YouTube YouTube channel. So yeah, we, we have, we have a yeah I forget we're on like one, 120 something.

Josh (00:33:12) - Do you guys have been cranking. Good job man. Really really nice work. You and yeah yeah cranking it man 100 and something episodes. Good job.

Brett (00:33:20) - Yeah, yeah. It's I'll tell you what I'll give you. I got to give you props, man. It's it's I mean, we're in a unique position because a lot of our episodes come from questions that people ask me or support. They come through. And people, like, mean, the one we shot one today won't be out till, um, middle of December. But basically, you know, when there's a, when the payoff, a payoff is what is owed on the loan at the end of the loan is higher than the unpaid principal balance. Should I be bidding off the payoff, or I should be bidding off what the unpaid principal balances and when and when? When should I? Is that outperforming or not? I'm like, well, that's a very good question. Let me ask Rick. So that's usually what happens is there's a lot of times it's just me sitting there.

Brett (00:34:01) - Right? Rick. This is the question. What do you say? And then he'll go through and sitting in the same room and he'll answer the question. And we put it out in audio format and video format.

Josh (00:34:10) - Very cool, very good. So people could go to the Paper Step podcast so you guys could check it out there or paper stack and that's paper stack.com. And you can check out their podcast, their Academy which will run through scenarios which I'm really excited about that I think that that I think you guys are really on to something there, because you could have a one on one level, you could have like, hey, teach your kids how to buy and sell debt, right? Yeah, let them play with $100 fake money and buy and sell and so cool. I would love that. Keep me updated for that. Um, but this is this is really cool and it's really good to connect with you again, man. It's been way too long. It's been over a year and I'm really glad to reconnect to you during this interview.

Josh (00:34:54) - Was there any other questions that like, you're like, hey, Josh, make sure you ask me this before we say goodbye?

Brett (00:34:59) - No, I think you asked a lot of good questions. I forgot, you know, I need to write all these things down. You know, forget about you know, we have because we have, you know, all the things we've created over these years. Now, you know, no closings. Enterprise. I didn't speak on that. We're rolling out our enterprise product. That's for huge transactions, uh, enterprising and indexing product where which is it's we didn't know how big of a deal this is, but being able to, like, if I'm doing a big trade, some of the biggest, hardest parts for big sellers and buyers is that they're not. Sometimes this stuff's not organized. It's not like they get like, you know, all this stuff over. It's all like neatly organized. It's just a mess. It's just a bunch of lob of, you know, PDFs and spreadsheets and just galore.

Brett (00:35:40) - And so what we're doing now is basically give us your blog and we're using AI to basically go, what's the like, you know, discerning factors that match, oh, these all have these 50 documents, all have the same address on them. Okay. This one's oh look this one has valuation on it. This must be the BPO. And and then indexing them all. So being able to index everything. And we recorded that from stage in November. Yeah. Earlier this month. And like one of the bankers here was like really he said that. That's funny. He came up to Rick. He's like that was sexy. And I was like, it's like he said that really. He's like, yeah. And I was like, what else he said? He said the he said the banker. The banker told Rick, what you just are able to do. He's like, that usually takes us like 4 to 5 hours every time we trade. And it's we hate it. He's like, if you can cut that down to like seconds, he's like, yeah, that's amazing.

Brett (00:36:28) - So that's that's going in our enterprise product. And then we had some other enterprise features, you know, basically being able to like grab your entire portfolio and throw it into a paper, paper price predictor and understanding what your exact portfolio is worth on the open market. So like a lot of stuff's coming, you know, like it's just, you know, it's it's it's definitely interesting isn't.

Josh (00:36:51) - Just a single family, you know, selling notes if you're a bank out there or a portfolio holder and you just want to get a valuation, just an idea of what it could be worth on, on, on a marketplace like this. Connect with Brett over at Paper Stack. Just say, hey, heard you on Josh's show and maybe find a way to do a deal together. Brett, I got to go. Yeah, but, man, it's so good to connect with you. Just say, hang in there one second. We'll say good. But for everybody out there in the audience, as always, reach out to our guest, say thanks for being on the show.

Josh (00:37:22) - Their contact information will be in the show notes below. And if you have a deal, or a marketplace or a platform or some way that you're doing deals uniquely, head on over to the deal. Scout, fill out a quick form and maybe we will get you on the show next. Till then, we'll talk to you all on the next episode. Love you guys!