Fix and Flip Financing with Shaun Ashkenazy

Good day, fellow deal makers. Welcome to the deal. Scout. On today's show, we're going to have a conversation with Sean, who's going to talk to us about money, who's going to talk to us about financing deals, finding deals, and how to get those deals paid for. Sean, welcome to the show. 

 Thanks for having me. 

 Absolutely. All right, so, Sean, we're hanging out in Miami because that's where you are, and we're having coffee or espresso or something like that. Someone walks up and they go, who are you? What do you do? How do you respond? 

 Yeah. So I'm Sean. I'm the principal of onyx funding. We're a commercial real estate financing and advisory firm. What we do is we empower real estate investors and developers to get their dial done. We mainly specialize in the loan origination side and that brokerage side, but we also able to leverage relationships and put people together and pretty much just put the focus on making these deals happen. 

 Got it. Awesome. Loan origination and debt, that's the core that's where you spend the majority of your time. 

 Correct. 

 For someone who might be new in deal making or even in real estate, what does that mean? 

 Well, basically almost every property has a loan on it. That's how these deals get done. Loan origination basically means that we put that together. There's a process to get a loan done. We have to vet the person who's going to buy or the person who wants to refinance, who owns the property now. You have to vet them and underwrite them and then you have to go through the process of meeting the property and underwriting the property. Before you even get to that part, you have to find the best person or bank or lender or debt fund or what kind of institution is going to want to lend money on it and what kind of terms. Loan origination is the process of making that deal happen. 

 Yeah, got it. Your job, someone comes to you, they're a real estate investor or someone buying this, maybe they've been renting for a long time their office building, and now they want to buy the building, become their own landlord. Right, right. They come to you and they say, I need money to buy this because I can't write a check for $2 million. Right, so what does that process working with you versus maybe going to a bank and working with a bank, what does that process? What's different about that? 

 Yeah, absolutely. Well, it separates into two different places, right? First of all, there's what kind of relationships you have and what kind of lenders and what kind of banks it is a whole world and a whole, this that it constantly changes. If you are running a business, whether you are running just a business and you want to own the office that you operate out of, or if you're just specifically a real estate investor, your time is spent on just doing that part of the business as best as you can. That's what you do. It's almost impossible for someone to split their time and do that. Plus meeting ID pulse on the financing market every day, doing a million deals, seeing how all these things work and keep up with rates and terms and which bank is going to be the best one to finance your specific deal. 

 In that aspect, someone like me, for example, or any debt broker, really, that's our specialty is to really know where the market is, what are the team chat is the best out there. What we really strive to do is to really find that unicorn quote. That best possible financing solution for your specific situation, whatever that may be. So that's one side of the equation. The other side is to really make that happen. To get a loan is a process. You need to know what you're doing, you have to collect documents, you have to be able to coordinate the entire transaction, really. Even though we're coming in at the loan side and you're on the broker side as well, how fragile these things can get. Having someone that really is able to control and really kind of orchestrate the entire thing from start to finish is also very important for the success of the deal and also to maintain the terms that were negotiated upfront to make that happen for the buyer or the owner. 

 When doing these kind of deals. What typically can go wrong when doing a deal? Let's just say the credit looks good, the asset looks good, let's say it's cash flowing and the projections look good. What can make a deal, from your perspective? What can make a deal on the financing side fall out? 

 Well, first of all, in every real estate deal, there's just so many elements, so many people that are working on it. You have insurance and title can come back not clean. If you're buying, for example, an industrial property, the environmental report can come back dirty. There's property stuff that can come up and change some of the terms of the deal. The other thing is, and what we're seeing now a lot, unfortunately, is we're in an environment where rates are just exploding, right? They're just changing every day. Guidelines change every day. One of the most, I would say, delicate things right now, especially for the multi family or on the permanent financing side, is that you can start a deal today, and deals typically take between 45, 60 days to close if it's a bank or credit union or an agency like CMS, F****, Freddy. For a lot of these loans, the rates, they just don't lock until you close. 

 You can start a deal today at 5.5% or whatever the market is, and you can end up at something that is higher than that, and that can change your debt service coverage ratio, which is basically your property income versus the expenses and debt. That can really change the entire transaction. It can cut your loan amount, it can make the thing not even worth doing. That's where the problems arise now. 

 Yeah. Being in this industry as professionals, we're incentivised to get the dial done right. We get paid when the deal is done and funded right. We could work on a project for 60 days and then day 59 or whatever, the dial could fall apart. You're incentivized to make sure that the deal's docked outright. You're incentivized to make sure that the deal is going to close, that everything's on the place. Your job is to worry about making sure the deal gets done on the debt side. Right. As you're building this out, how do you go about staying on top of all the changes with interest rates and what's going on in the market and all the details of the project themselves? How do you do that as a founder? 

 Well, first of all, we're a small team. I'm very hands on. We all are, right. We are about ten people now and it's constant. That's all we do. What I do specifically is between managing the business and hiring and doing the books and all that fun stuff of just running a business, right and hiring people and training and all that. I still do some of these deals I do myself, right? And we're all in the same office. That's something that I'm really big on is just having everybody together and no one works remote. We're all in the same office. We do a lot of volume. We get to always talk to clients, talk to prospects. On the other side, we constantly talk to lenders to either price out deals or work on things that we're already having processed. We have a pretty good kind of, like, constant pulse on the market and what's going on? 

 How in the world did you get into this business? Now you're from Israel, and you ended here about four years ago. How did you get into this business? And why did you choose this one? 

 It's a good question. So in Israel. So I was born in New York. We moved to Is when I was four. Moving back was always something I was thinking about. I was in Israel, I had a business. We did mainly sales and marketing consulting for fintech companies. 

 Connect. 

 Me and my partner would go into these companies and be hands on, helping them with sales, like training building pitches, building sales cycles, helping them with the marketing. My last project with that situation was we got hired to build for a company, a sales organization in Serbia. In Europe. So we did that for a year. Took that, just built the whole lake. Sales work from zero to 100 people, trained everybody, put managers there, and then they wanted us to go do the same thing for them. And this was Ukraine. And I was 28 at a time. I was like, this is not scalable. I can't keep building businesses for other people. Even though it was my business to build, were building it for other people. I was like, I need to do something for my own. I already lived for a year outside of Israel, so everything was packed. 

 I was kind of ready to go. I went from Serbia for about two months, back to Israel, and just flew out to San Francisco and started interviewing for some companies. I was an owner for a while. I managed people in me. Take your year and go back to being an employee and see how they do it over here. And that did not work. Couldn't be an employee. Especially because my company before that. What I'm really good at was building companies and sales and all that stuff and helping companies improve. Going into these companies or live working at a company where I can just see all the issues and not being able to fix it was just burning at me. I left that peter three months, I can't do it. More time over there, three months. I started working on an insurance product that I have in mind while helping one of my best friends with his startup, which was like a crowdfunding for real estate. 

 So. It's called realty folio. By doing that and looking at that world what I noticed is that a lot of these lenders and mainly lending home and Lima and all these people live massive lenders for fix and flippers. They pay salespeople to prospect. So brokerages do that too. They spend a lot of time on trying to find numbers online or emails. Half of your day is spent on trying to find leads. As a salesperson, at least from my perspective, your time is most valuable just talking to people, whether it's going on meetings or doing phone sales and not lead generation because then once you have 50 numbers, you call them half of the wrong numbers, you manage to do live what, 30 calls a day maybe. With that in mind, I started generating leads for real estate investors that are looking for financing. My goal was to just sell these leads of lenders, right? 

 That's what I did for . I mean, like two or three weeks because they got frustrated. So I generate leads. I gave them to a few different lenders to test them and I didn't get the feedback I wanted. They weren't live chasing me or telling me how the leads are, didn't see what the results are. I thought it's a very quick thing because that's the market I'm coming from, which was live more capital markets and stuff like that. So it's very fast paced. So it annoyed me. I was like, I'm going to call these people on my own while I'm building that other product that I was working on, which kind of live got entangled different legal structures because it was insurance. It's kind of complicated on that end. I got a license, got a mortgage broker license and started calling my own leads close. 

 My first deal within live three weeks was a $160,000 bridge loan, like something super small. But that kept me going. I was like, okay, there's a business tier, there's something interesting. Just by calling some of these people and talking to them and getting deeper into that world and learning and getting very professional in it, that just sucked me in. So we're here now. 

 Yeah. You mentioned a bridge loan kind of being your first deal that you did on financing. Why don't you explain what is a bridge loan in the world of real estate? 

 Yeah, absolutely. Bridge loan is really what it sounds like. It's a bridge from one point to another. There's really two or three different types of financing you either build something, you either need to fix it and stabilize it or you want to hold it long term which is a permanent loan or a term loan. A bridge is what connects you from buying a proverbs or fixing it or stabilizing it or repositioning it into a place where it can be either sold or refinanced and placed into a permanent loan. It's pretty much a bandaid to a certain situation. Most investors, for them to buy something and make money for it to worth their while to invest in it has to have some an issue most of the time so you either need to fix it up or maybe it's not leased so you need to buy it and lease it. 

 Maybe the leases are below market so you have to switch the tenant or wait for the leases to roll over and then you can increase rent. There's always something that needs to happen for you to create that equity or really profit because we all know that you usually make your profit at the purchase and not at the sale of the property, right? Yeah and that's where it comes from. 

 Got it. Someone getting into a real estate project. What's the best way to know if you need a bridge loan or a construction loan or any other type of loans? How do what kind of loan to use? Maybe could you give us an overview of maybe some different loans for real estate investors and deal makers? Give us an overview of different types of loans. 

 Absolutely. Construction loans really when you want to build something from the ground up, right? You buy a land and you want to develop it, build something whether it's a spec home like a single family or a condominium or multifamily or the industrial asset class is exploding right now as well. There's a lot of construction there too. Construction loan is really for just building. Right. On the other side you have permanent loans which is when you want to keep holding the property and enjoy the connect the income from it. Whether it's rental or airbnb or a multifamily or shopping peter a hotel, whatever that may be, those loans are typically five years plus, so 510 30 years if it's a residential investment proverbs in order to get to that point the property needs to be stabilized, the income needs to be good and the income from the proverbs needs to be able to support your debt. 

 It needs to flofr the mortgage in order to get there. You can either buy something that is already stabilized or you just do a buy and hold. You just purchase it and hold it but a lot of times you will need to buy it and fix it or stabilize or reposition or do all these things for it and that's where bridge one comes into place and that's a very flexible niche. That's really something that it covers a wide range of situations. There's bridge loans for pretty much any type of real estate in most cases. If it's not something that you build and it's not something that fits right now to get a permanent financing on it, a bridge loan is probably the solution if you want to own that property. 

 Got it. Now, I'm looking on your website, which is onyxfundingllc.com, and I'm seeing that you do commercial fix and flip rental and then refinance fix to rent, new construction, multifamily bridge. Those are the kind of the main categories. 

 We do everything right. The website is actually onyxfundingllc.com, so we switched the domain. 

 Got it. Cool. Sorry, I got the wrong one. 

 No worries. That's actually something relatively new. I think we did it live a couple of weeks ago. So yeah, those are more like situations. Right? Whether you want to fix and flip the property or fix and rent, buy and hold, that's something that is extremely popular right now. Or if you want to buy a multi family, you need to rehab it and lease it up. In order for a multi family to be able to be refinanced or place with a permanent loan has to be 90% occupied for a certain amount of time. Banks and institutional leadersre, when they go into a property like that and they want to finance it, they will look at the historical financial performance of the property. As long as that's good, you can get a loan from a bank or credit union or an agency lender. If that's not the case, you can either buy cash and do it yourself or you use a bridge loan to bring that property into a place where it can sustain a permanent loan. 

 Yeah, when it comes to fix and flippers, right, it looks like you have a program for fix and flippers. First of all, what is the difference between just a regular loan and then maybe a fix and flip kind of loan? How do you serve that real estate investor in market? How do you do that? 

 Yeah, great question. The difference between just a regular bridge loan, for example, and a fix and flip loan is that it has a rehab component to it, right? You'll get a loan to purchase the property and that can be anywhere from 90% of your purchase price. You will have another separate component. It's basically the same loan, but that's going to be money to help you rehab that property. Whether you're buying something, let's say you buy something for a million dollars, it's a nice home, you want to fix it for another $150,000. You'll get, let's say, 90% from your acquisition to purchase the property. The lender is going to place $150,000 in escrow for you to be able to rehab that property. Yeah. 

 My goal with this because there's a lot of fix and flippers. There's one guy right next door, so this is good. Why is that loan type valuable for fix and flippers? 

 It depends on every person's strategy for the most part. In most businesses, the first rule is use other people's money. And that's really what it is. Now, it's more expensive because obviously the entire market has higher rates. But those loans are very flexible. It's twelve months, twelve month term interest only, no prepayment penalties. It gives you most of the money to do it. If you're a fix and flipper and you buy one house and you do it all cash, then you can typically just do that property. Right? If you use financing, you leverage your funds. You can do that property with only 10% down, plus closing costs and carry costs, whatever. You are able to just scale your business or go into it. If you want to buy something for $350,000, you need to have $350,000 or you do it with 50,000, you get a loan. 

 Right? 

 Right. 

 Loans help fix and flip or just either do more volume and reduce their risk of just cash flow. 

 Yeah. I have a lot of guys who reach out to me having this show. We get a lot of people that reach out and they go, hey, I'm looking for money. I say, okay, talk to me about this. They go, I want to be a Fix and Flip and I'm looking for money. I go, do you have a dial? And they go, not yet. I said, Go find a deal, then we could find you the money. 

 Right? 

 Is that your view? Which comes first? Should you find the deal first or should you try to find the money first? 

 The money can't do anything without a deal, so it's definitely deal first. You can learn how the money works, so it helps you navigate the deal market and see what makes sense. I don't have anything to do with someone if he doesn't have a deal, we come in with a deal happens. Now, on the flip side, we do have a lot of clients and a lot of our relationships and people that we know always look to buy and sell. A lot of times we don't do investment sales per se, but we will leverage relationships and put people together and we can help connect people with deals. For the most part, from the money perspective, it's deal first. 

 Yeah, absolutely. Find a deal. Which is sometimes the hardest thing to do because you have how many leadersre do you have relationships with? 

 200 and something more than 250. 

 Yeah. By the time someone says, okay, I have established money, I go find a deal, the money could change because rates go up, the market could, all sorts of regulations could change. 

 Absolutely. Also, it depends on the property. Fixed and flips are usually between 100,000 to live, 5 million, or let's say between 100 to 2 million. That's where most fix and flip lenders play. Those are mainly like single family homes and stuff like that. When you go into the commercial side, there's different lenders for different purchase prices or different loan amounts. Right. There are some lenders that will not look at anything that is below $20 million or $50 million. It opens up a whole new world when it depends. It just depends on the team chat you're doing or location. Like a lot of lenders don't land in certain places and their terms change in certain places. 

 Yeah, absolutely. What about you? Where do you do deals? Are you strictly in Florida? US. 

 No, we're not global, but we're nationwide with the exception of Nevada. So we do loans everywhere. 

 Why not in Nevada? 

 Just a licensing, then. Just separate license. 

 I understand that. Awesome. 

 We'll get there. 

 Awesome. You have a team of ten now, right? 

 Yeah. 

 Really great job building this out and building that. What's the future look like for Sean as a deal maker? 

 Good question. My focus now is really building the team and focus on hiring and building our image and brand. Right. So that's my focus now. Over the next three years, we'll probably be about 30 to 40 people, and what I want to do is to be able to offer our clients more value. Right now we're doing financing and we're doing some like I said, we connect some wholesalers or off market deals with some people. We do that, we do some advisory, but it's really to hone on that and basically build vertically so we can offer our clients just more value so we can empower them to get out there and do what they do best, which is find deals and make them happen. 

 Yeah. As you're looking at deals all day long, right? You get a tremendous amount of deal flow. What kind of deals would you be personally interested in, or do you just stay on the side of debt? What about you? 

 What am I buying, for example? 

 Yeah, what kind of deals do you like? Do you invest in technology, real estate, commercial, residential? 

 Yeah, I'm not really investing in real estate yet. Really? We do participate with some of our clients as equity investors or preferred equity. So we like to do that. Most of my focus right now is the business. So just growing the business. 

 It comes on the side of equity right. As preferred equity investor, you take a look at a project and they have a gap, right? 

 Right. 

 They need a million bucks for the project. They only have 50 grand. They need to come up with X. Is that where you guys step in? 

 Oh, no, absolutely not. If someone comes to the million dollar project, I have. $50,000 back. That's not going to work. 

 Okay, where do you guys step in? 

 If someone has a $10 million project and they have a loan that is 60 live percent, for example, so six and a half million and they have another 2 million. They're at eight and a half and you need another 15% of that or 10% for their capital stack. That is where that world plays with. The gap needs to be a lot smaller. Usually what we see on the preferred equity side, which is a very tough and tight market these days especially and it is something that is always, at least from what I'm seeing historically, has been the one thing that always has more demand than availability. On the debt side, that's the opposite. There's just money trying to find the good deals. Right? You can get selective and it's a very competitive world. It's not as much on the preferred equity side, it's just more risk. 

 It's a different world. What we typically see is that preferred equity investors, or even when we want to participate in a deal, we want sponsor to have at least 10% actual equity. The deal you have to have skin in the game. 

 In the game, in the game, 100%. I agree. As you're building out your sales team, what do you look for in a sales person? Right? If you're like, I don't think this would be a good fit or you would be great. How do if someone's going to do good in sales or not? 

 No, that's a great question and that's something that I've been hiring has been one of the hardest things that I've had to do in Miami. I don't know if it's Miami itself or if it's just the situation with Covet and the work from home and the checks and all that stuff that people have less of a desire to work when I look into someone. Look, being a loan originator is a tough job. You have to be good in sales. Relationships and charisma and conference link energy and have grit and hustle and try to go like a hunter's mentality. On the other side you have to be good with problem solving and being analytical and working with documents and Excel sheets and talking with lenders and writing emails, which is kind of a contrast. Usually you don't find these two and the same person. It's either you're really analytical or you're very good at sales. 

 Right. That combo is something that it's tough to find in someone. 

 To find that. 

 Yeah, absolutely. What I've done now is we've tried different structures but what we're doing now is we're hiring for sales. So we're looking for people. We have a lot of leads that's one of our strong suites in terms of the business is that we're able to generate a lot of good leads for financing. Right. What we're doing now is I'm hiring specifically for people that will just do the sourcing deal, sourcing relationship building, business development, get in front of investors, get in front of these developers, let them know what we do, hunt their business, try to win, right? On the other side we have the loan originators, which also do that. Look, once you have a pipeline of 20 dial that you need to originate, the likelihood of you making even ten calls a day is just almost impossible. It's just like it's so demanding, it's tough. 

 We have it split to new business and origination, a place where you can start and just have conversation, talk to people, look for the deal and not worry about underwriting it and getting it done. That allows our sales team to be able to just generate a lot of new business faster, see more deals that they get to work on and experience and cut their teeth on, while someone else is really taking care of that deal once it's submitted into the origination side. That learning curve for them is a lot smoother, what I mean? For the ones that show the skills that are also transferable and will be good for the origination side, we then promote them to being their own loan originator, run their own book of business. But some people just enjoy the hunt. It's just very different worlds. Yeah. 

 I'm a hunter through and through, right? Like deal origination, top funnel, that's fun for me. I have a team of people who kind of manage the middle, which I would drop the ball on, follow up and this and that. I'm good at cracking open to deals, new relationships. I think that's really smart what you did. There is sometimes there are super people out there who are like super human and they got the best of both world. That's not me. I'm really good at one, terrible at the other. What about you? Where are you better at or worse at? 

 I'm the free combo, kind of because I'm really good at both. What I enjoy though, what I like is live. I'm a salesperson, I'm good, I like the hunt, I like the sale, I like to talk to people and all that stuff, but I'm also very good at the other stuff, which sometimes is not good for a business owner or you have to delegate a lot of these things. That's something that I'm working on constantly is to be able to not do some of these things and let loose of the control. 

 Got it. How long did you spend in Israel? You were over there from age four to how old? 

 27. 

 How many languages did you pick up? 

 Oh, no, I just do Hebrew and English languages is not my thing. 

 What language do you dream in? 

 That's a very good question. Now it's mainly English, so I speak English all day. I now think in English. I do talk to my dog in Hebrew sometimes, so me and him have our own thing. 

 You have your relationship with the dog, right? 

 Also we have a lot of Israeli clients, Israeli investors, so I do speak still a lot of Hebrew during the day, but it's mainly English. Also in Israel, the past live, I think five years before I moved to the US, my work was mainly English. We worked with Israeli FinSA companies, but they were like global startups selling to Europe and Canada and Australia and Asia and stuff like that. It was mainly English for a lot of that period of time before moving here. Now most of my dreams are in English. Unless it's a more exotic feel. 

 Yeah, right on. 

 I'm joking. 

 Yeah. Do me a favor. This is the deal, scout. The show the deal. Scout My name is Josh. Give us live in Hebrew. Say welcome to the deal, Scout, a show hosted by Josh. Hope you enjoy or something. Live that. Could you give us a plug in Hebrew? 

 Sure. Josh son. This is pretty much what that is. 

 Awesome. Thank you very much. We were over in Israel, 1998 for the year jubilee of becoming a nation. The food was the food amazing, the culture amazing. Team chat food. Do you miss the most? 

 D***, probably. Shuharma hummus. The real authentic. 

 Get some falafel. Yeah, good. 

 There's a few good places here in South Florida Aventura and Miami, but it's not the exact same. 

 Yeah, awesome. So sorry. Back to deals. We're doing some fix and Flips and Real Estate Group works with you. At what point is it better to go maybe hard money versus a program like yours to fix and flip? Or is it the same thing? 

 Hard money and fix and Flip are usually very similar, if not live. The connotation is the same, right? Hard money in my world, live. Coming from the financing side, hard money is typically going to be more like local hard money lenders that will give you anywhere from I mean, leverage really depends on the person, but the rates are typically higher. So 1012 percent, a couple points. Pretty aggressive people. They close very fast, they don't ask too many questions, but they're not the most flexible in terms of if you need an extension or if you need these things. It's good if you have a relationship with them and you keep local, that's fine. We typically work with the more national debt funds. They ask more questions, they require more documents, they will vet your deal a little harder, but the cost of money is a lot better. 

 You work with someone who is everybody's on the same page wanting to make the deal happen and successful throughout. They're more helpful, they're more flexible, stuff like that. Kind of just also as a rule, of thumb, the easier it is to get the money, the more expensive it is. On the other side, the harder it is to get the money, the cheaper it is. 

 That's a great rule of thumb. If it's easy to get, it's probably going to be expensive. The harder is probably because you got to work for it. Sean, this is really cool. During this conversation, there's probably a question I should have asked you about you or about your industry or about the deals you do. What question should I have asked you? 

 At itself is a good question. What you should have asked me, I guess. What's next for the real estate market in general? 

 What a weird time. September 2022. What do you see in the industry, in the real estate market, and what are your thoughts? 

 Yeah, definitely. It's very interesting times, I think, from our seat as loan proverbs, doing deals nationwide on most property types, in most situations, we kind of have this bird's eye view on the broader market. We're not just the local situation, because the broker that only does deals in Miami lives in the Miami bubble, that everything is going up 30% a year versus someone who's in Phoenix, Arizona, or Boise, Idaho. This inventory is surging and prices are starting to cut down. As a market in general, it's tough to say, really, where this is going. Rates are obviously going up. The economy is in a weird place. Inflation is at what is it? 8.2%. What I think is that we'll see more pain in terms of increased inventory and rate hikes for the next about six to nine months, probably towards until the middle of 2023. Hopefully by then we can stabilize what's going on, and I believe that about six months after that. 

 Going into the new year of 2024, we'll start seeing things coming back to normal again, and hopefully they will reduce the rates back to probably not where we have them, because that was just totally low, but at least a place where the market is healthy and deals are happening, and it's a happy place for everybody. 

 Yeah, what we're seeing is, my gut tells me, because I was in real estate and construction since early 2000s, so I got to see many different types of markets. I think that this is going to be a great opportunity for investors fix and flippers and investors and people on the sideline waiting for good deals, because over the past two years, real estate has shot through the roof. I think that there's a lot of people waiting for good value because you mentioned it very early in the conversation. Money is made when you buy something, right? 

 Right. I mean, look, good deals happen. They exist everywhere. An opportunity can come when the market is high, when the market is low. Opportunities can arise in any different or any scenario, wherever the market is broadly speaking, maybe the values will come down later on, but also the money is going to be more expensive. Right. Maybe it's going to be harder to rent. It's tough to say, but I'm with you. I think that if someone is patient and they can wait and they have the capital, more opportunities will come later on. If you're open to it, there's opportunities that can come at any given moment. There's about $450,000,000,000 in loans maturing in 2023. There's always a loan maturing somewhere. A loan maturing means that someone needs to either refinance or sell, right? Yeah. So opportunities are always there. It's a question of what is important to you. 

 Do you want lower cost of capital? Do you want to buy lower? Do you want to each this own? In terms of strategy, we are seeing the same amount of volume. We're definitely meeting less people refinancing, because a lot of people that had to refinance did that this year earlier when the rates were lower. It shifted from the past year and a half or so, or two years from a refinance market into now a purchase market. Yeah. I think the volume is going to be in terms of deal velocity, we are going to see the same thing. I mean, obviously on the sales side, you have a multi family six months a year ago, you'll have 40 people bidding on it. Now maybe they're six. Right. The deal still needs to happen at some manner. 

 Yes. With that, Sean, for fellow deal makers in the audience who want to connect and do a deal with you, what's a good place to connect with you at? 

 Yeah. LinkedIn. Email, phone number? 

 We're twenty four seven and it's onyxonyxfunding.com is the new website. Awesome. 

 That's the website. 

 How do you pronounce your last name, Sean? 

 Ashkenazi. 

 Cool. All fellow deal makers in the audience, all his contact information will be in the show notes. If you're looking for different types of debt financing for your real estate investments, head on over to Annexfunding.com, fill out a quick form and maybe do a deal with Sean. If you have a deal that you'd live to talk about here on the Deal Scout. Head over to The Deal Scout.com and maybe get you on the show next. Hope you guys are having a great day. Talk to you soon. Bye bye.