Seth: Hey folks, how's it going? This is Seth Williams. You're listening to the REtipster podcast. This is episode 188.

Today, I'm really excited because I get to talk to Marco Santarelli. Marco is someone I really look up to in the real estate industry. This guy has been in the business for a long time. He's seen a lot of things. He's done some big deals. I've heard Marco present a couple of times at REWBCON and every time he talks, I walk away with some big aha moments that help me understand the real estate market better. This guy is like a walking encyclopedia of knowledge.

And Marco is an investor, an author, a two-time Inc. 1000 entrepreneur. He runs Norada Real Estate Investments, a company that helps investors achieve financial freedom through smart turnkey real estate opportunities. And today, he's going to share his wisdom and experience with us.

Marco, thanks so much for being here. How are you doing?

Marco: I'm good, Seth. How are you?

Seth: I'm very good. So yeah, I wasn't joking when I said I was excited to talk to you because I've watched you and respected you for a long time. And I think people are going to learn a lot from whatever we talk about here. So maybe we can just kind of start where a lot of these conversations start.

If somebody has not heard of you, tell me a little bit about your journey. Like when did you get into real estate investing? How long have you been at it? What drew you into the niche of real estate that you're currently in?

Marco: Well, the short story is basically this. I fell in love with investing in real estate when I was a teenager. It's a weird thing to say, but I just looked around and I realized I wanted to be financially free. I called it being “rich” back then, but not really understanding what rich meant and what being wealthy meant and all that kind of stuff.

But ultimately, I just wanted to live life on my own terms and have time freedom. So for me, that was just being rich.

But today I look back and I realize, okay, I just want to be financially free. And that gives me the time freedom. But I discovered that as a teenager. And then, when I turned 18, I bought my first rental property. And it's a pretty young age for becoming a real estate investor. But I knew what I wanted. I just had to wait till I could qualify for financing.

So I had to be an adult. And that means I had to be 18. So I started when I was 18 years old. But yeah, that's how I got started in real estate. Slow at first. Then I bought a second property. I got my real estate license and started selling real estate to better understand it and to make money because every real estate agent thinks that they can make a lot of money through real estate commissions. So that was kind of the path I was taking at the time.

And that didn't last for too long because I hated being a chauffeur and carting people around in the backseat of my car, showing them houses. But I've always had a love for business, entrepreneurship, and investing. And everything I've done since then through an interesting winding journey of successes and failures have been through businesses, entrepreneurship, investing in anything and everything from oil and gas to crypto to cannabis to real estate, you name it. I just found out over the years where my strengths and interests lie. And I just started to focus more and more on that.

And so I love business. I love real estate. I love technology and technology-based businesses. And I love passive income and something that real estate is great for in terms of providing us passive income, tax benefits, and the ability to not only preserve our wealth, but to grow it over time. And that's why I focus on those two things.

And really, if you step back and you look at my journey, it was all about building businesses, scalable and viable businesses to generate income and take that income and invest it into income-producing assets and business, other business ventures. So you just kind of stack on your successes and leverage the income and the profit you make from your businesses into growing it into more profitable business ventures.

And that’s what I’ve done over the years. It’s just building on one success after another. Not all of them are successes. I've had failures too.

Seth: You've had failures. No way. That's impossible.

Marco: If you don't have failures. I don't see how you could be successful.

Seth: Yeah. I think, Seth Godin said if failure isn't an option, then neither is success. Something to that effect.

Marco: Yeah. I think it's something to that effect. I've heard it said that you can learn at least 10 times more from a failure than you can from a success.

Seth: Yeah.

Marco: There's not a lot you can get from a success other than just knowing exactly what you should be repeating and continuing to keep having that success. But when you have a failure, you can look at everything that has gone wrong and what was going right and learn how to change what you're doing, your systems, your processes, whatever it may be, your marketing, your operations and do things better.

So there's far more to be learned by a failure. In fact, if you have a failure and you walk away, not learning anything from it, you've actually completely failed. Because a failure can be a success by learning lessons from the failure in order to know what to do and what not to do the next time.

Seth: Well, I appreciate you talking about that and just mentioning failures because that's something that I feel like nobody talks about in these interviews. So I'm curious, what is an example of a failure you've had and what happened to make it fall apart? What were some of the lessons you learned from whatever that was?

Marco: Well, there's probably many. The first one that popped into my mind was back in the dot-com days. So let's just talk about that. It's not necessarily real estate-related, but it's just being an entrepreneur and wanting to build something and make money or be profitable or be rich.

So back in the late 1990s, in the dot-com era, when everybody was trying to make a fortune with the dawn of the internet and where that was going, that was the new frontier. Two business partners and I got together to form a dot-com business. It was actually the offshoot of a brick-and-mortar business, an online business, a publishing business. And so we wanted to create the Costco for the club industry.

When I say club, I mean golf clubs, country clubs, even city clubs and whatnot. They buy everything from toilet paper to tractors, food and beverage, you name it. Like, if you go to a country club or any kind of golf club, anything and everything that's there is something that they have to purchase.

And so my cousin, he had this media business and he published a magazine to the industry. And so we decided to launch a dot-com business. So we started raising capital from venture capital lenders or investors in Northern California, we ultimately raised a total of $9.5 million. And we built this company up to 105 employees.

And operationally, it was doing well. But from a marketing and sales perspective, it was failing. We weren't generating enough revenue and profit to keep the business going, to sustain it for a long period of time. Which was typically not a problem back in those days. Because if you had essentially a dot-com business, venture capitalists would continue to fund your ventures until you got profitable or you went public or you had some sort of exit or liquidity event, which made it profitable for everybody.

Well, that's the path we were on. We were on the path to an IPO, to taking the company public, and then everybody would have an exit. Long story short, the stock market crashed. And at that point, everybody got cold feet. So all the investors, as in the venture or capital investors, they basically put brakes on providing any more funding. And so we had no more funding. We had a burn rate of over $100,000 a month and we didn't have the capital to keep going and sustain the business.

So, ultimately, we just had to fold the business. We had to close shop and we laid off all 105 people. I was the third employee. I was the partner and I was the third last to leave. So it was kind of a sad last few months, if you will, just having to let everybody go.

Anyway, that's a failure, but it was a good idea. It was just too early. It was too much, too soon, too early. And if we had started six months earlier, we probably would have gotten to that publicly traded level of having an IPO and offering, and just been sitting on a whole bunch of cash because of the liquidity event from that. Or at least in part, because you can't sell all your shares right away.

But it was a failure, not because of something we did wrong. It's a failure because of poor timing, a stock market crash, and maybe it was a great idea, but just too soon.

Seth: Yeah. So it seems llike,in terms of like a lesson, it's almost like there was no lesson because you couldn't have known that, it wasn't really your fault. It's not like you made a mistake. Is that the universe was not working well with you at that point in time, right? Or was there something you could have done differently with the limited knowledge you had back then?

Marco: Well, there's always something to learn if you dig deep enough.

Number one, the importance of timing. If you have a good idea, you have to make sure that you're entering the market and executing on your marketing plan and whatever your strategic plan is at the right time and executing fast enough and hitting your milestones soon enough.

Because if you don't do that, that six months’ difference, from starting six months earlier and being able to hit our milestones, our target dates for taking the company public six months sooner, made all the difference from making no money and losing money to having made millions of dollars. Timing is so critical in a lot of ventures.

Two, it makes you look at the importance of revenue and the importance of profitability. If you have revenue but no profit, you don't have a sustainable business. You won't be able to survive for very long because you're going to be burning whatever you have in your coffers, your bank account. So you have to consider revenue, but you have to consider profitability. You have to consider your expenses. You have to consider what your profit margins are and how soon you can get to profitability.

Because if you don't have a profitable business, it's not sustainable. If it's not sustainable, you'll never get to a viable business where you have all the systems and operations and procedures in place to continue running that business and actually walk away with it and let the business keep running without you being there.

So you start to look at these things in terms of timelines.

Seth: Yeah, that's the tricky balance with business. On one extreme, you could say, I just want to do good for the world and money doesn't matter. But you can't do that. You got to think about the revenue and the profitability.

But, I don't know, it's kind of like it loses its soul when you don't actually have a greater purpose or mission behind it. But finding that sweet spot where you're doing good for the world and you're making good money from it, that's kind of like the Holy Grail everybody's looking for. It's not always easy to find that.

Marco: No, it's true. And you're talking about purpose, and it's good to have purpose in a business.

Today, with the business ventures that I'm involved in and with several of my business partners, purpose is a central focus. We give back. In some of our companies, some of our businesses, we give back 10%. We contribute or donate 10% of the profit to charitable nonprofit ventures.

And the one specifically that my partners are building that I'm involved in is called Impact Others. And it actually has a website called impactothers.com. And we have people making donations as little as $25.

But what we're doing is we have projects all around the world where we're providing communities, needy communities, with clean, drinkable water, often from wells that they don't have. Like they just don't have water. You know, water is a struggle, basic thing. But clean, drinkable water, food on a daily basis, training the locals in entrepreneurship so they can be self-sustaining, learn how to run a small solopreneur business and be sustainable. So now they can feed themselves and their families. Schooling, like education for the children in the community and make that a sustainable part of it.

And so these projects can be anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000. And so, the donations that we bring in just go to funding those projects. And we put each project on the website so they can see, oh, here, this one's in Ghana or this one's in Pakistan or in India. And this is a $50,000 project. And here's what we're building out. So that's the purpose. Like, that's the give back part of it all.

Seth: It's awesome. I'll link to impactothers.com in the show notes, retipster.com/188, if anybody wants to check that out.

So Marco, the things that you've talked about the past couple of years at REWBCON is why you are bullish on real estate. And in other words, like things are looking up. It's going well. It's going to keep going well.

I'm curious why, because that's something I think I needed to hear a lot last year. And you gave really good sound reasons for that. It's something a lot of people are constantly wondering about. Like, is the bottom going to fall out next year? Is it all going to go horribly wrong? So what are your reasons for why things are looking up?

Marco: Well, there's a lot to say about that.

Seth: Try to summarize in 30 seconds if you can.

Marco: Yeah.

Seth: I'm just kidding.

Marco: Yeah, I'll try not to be long-winded, but we can kind of do a little bit of a deep dive in two or three of those areas.

Basically, it's this. It's if you consider what Jon Gray said, who's the president of Blackstone, very smart guy. I mean, he's the guy who started Invitation Homes back in 2012. And they've just been one of the largest, if not the largest purchaser of single-family homes in and around the United States for the longest time. Very, very smart guy. He's probably got a net worth of $7 billion, according to Bloomberg. So he's not a schlep. He's a very successful person.

And Blackstone, as a company, brings in between $100 and $200 billion of capital a year, if not more. They bring in a lot of money. So they put that money to work. And a lot of what they've been focused on is residential real estate And back in January of 2022, in the Wall Street Journal, he said, never in his 30-year career has he seen real estate fundamentals as strong as they were two years ago, like two years ago around this time. And that's pretty much still true to this day.

So Jon, at the Blackstone earnings call they had in late January of this year, he basically said that the overall backdrop in the U.S. is a housing shortage. And that's namely in the single-family space, like the residential but single-family space. And that's the area that they've been focused on for a long, long time. And these guys spend lots of time and they put a lot of resources and people and money into doing research around the country and figuring out what the heck is going on.

So this kind of spills over into the multifamily space like duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and even small-to medium-sized apartment buildings, which is kind of where Blackstone is moving towards. It's not just single-family homes, but in the duplex, fourplex and small apartment space, because there's such a lack of inventory for residential real estate. That kind of sets the stage of what is going on.

But at the core of it, it's really about fundamentals, like the macroeconomics of it. And that's just supply and demand, economics 101. When you look at our existing housing supply, what inventory is available, the inventory that's available right now is floating somewhere around 1 to 1.1 million units.

Now, that sounds like a lot, but that is actually almost at the historic low. Because if you go back to 1982, the historical average of our existing housing supply is about 2.2 million units. That's how many units we need per year to supply the existing demand for sales and new households, new household formations in the country because of organic growth and immigration.

And if we don't have 2.2 million units, and you'll see different numbers on this, you'll see 2.5, 2.7. The point is still the same. If we don't have that number of household units per year, then we're in a deficit. And that just means that each and every year we are getting further and further behind in terms of how much housing we actually need.

So this is a perpetual problem where we have housing demand exceeding the existing supply. Now, granted, it's improved over the last two, three years, because builders have just hit the gas pedal and started to create more and more new housing construction, like new housing units, which is great. It's helped.

But if you look at housing inventory from the oversupply or undersupply perspective, and you look at what's for sale, what's for rent, how many permits are being pulled versus how much new housing stock is actually being built by builders, you actually get a more interesting number. You will see that housing is actually undersupplied right now by about 2.1 million units.

So that is a pretty serious problem. Having higher mortgage rates as of late over the last year adds fuel to that fire, that problem, because it lowers affordability. Fewer people can qualify for housing to buy their own place. They're forced into the rental pool, which is not a bad problem if you are a real estate investor and you own a portfolio or you're building a portfolio, great. That pushes rental prices up, which lowers affordability for renters.

But it's good for you as an investor because it means more rent, more revenue, more profit from your real estate portfolio. It also pushes real estate prices up, which is price appreciation, which means your properties are actually valued at larger amounts, like larger dollars. So when you're on that side of the fence or on that side of the equation, it's better for you, but it still creates a problem.

So with these higher mortgage rates, they've been squeezing the market and squeezing people out of the buying pool and into the rental pool, which means that it's helpful because it lowers demand for housing, which is already constrained. But we're still seeing a downward trend in terms of housing inventory. That's a bad thing.

But that is turning around. Mortgage rates are coming down. They will continue to come down slowly over time. We will ultimately see this problem resolve itself based on current trends by about 2030. So we're still about six to eight years away before we see an equalization or normalization in the market. But that's subject to change too. There's a lot of factors that can come into play in terms of mortgage rates, people's credit, the amount of debt they carry, meaning how affordable, how well they can afford housing.

But the point of all that is this, lack of supply, strong demand, it's creating constraint in the market. So if you're a real estate investor, it's great for you. And this is why I'm bullish because we do have a lot of opportunity in the housing space, whether you're a builder, an investor, a flipper, whatever it might be.

So I can pause there. There's a couple other reasons I'm bullish, but fundamentally speaking, that's the big one.

Seth: So on that, a lot of people in our audience are land investors and many of them, the way that they work with land is they buy larger parcels of land and then subdivide them to create more parcels that they can then be built upon. It kind of goes hand in hand with the housing market and how much building is going on.

But I'm curious for like developers and subdividers and people like this who help create new inventory, what would be some warning signs to see on the horizon, whether it's one year or five years or 10 years from now? Like, what can we be looking at to say, this may be coming to an end pretty soon. Maybe we should slow up or we should stop working so hard as trying to create new inventory. Any ideas what the warning signs would be?

Marco: Are they subdividing the land to create buildable lots?

Seth: Usually, yeah.

Marco: So this is for residential?

Seth: Yeah. I mean, sometimes it's a major subdivide, where they take a big parcel and turn it into hundreds of smaller ones. Other ttimes,it's taking like a 40-acre parcel and turning it into four 10-acre parcels. But usually the idea is that something will be built there in the near future.

Marco: The best thing you could do as a real estate investor in general (it doesn't matter whether you're involved in land or not; it's irrelevant) but stay focused on housing trends.

In fact, that is so important to me. I actually spent five figures for the domain name housingtrends.com. That's how important it is to me. I'm actually building a site that's going to help land developers, land investors, residential investors. I'm building a tool. There'll be free content, but it's subscription-based tool that provide all kinds of data and analytics for people looking at what's going on in a state, a metro area, a subdivision, a zip code or a street. So you can see where supply and demand sits and pricing trends and all that kind of stuff.

So what I'm trying to say is you've got to stay focused on trends. If you stay focused on trends, you'll know what's going on. And trends can be price trends, sales trends, and a good one for land investors, land speculators, land flippers, or land developers are the number of permits being pulled by builders in an area.

If builders are not pulling permits or making permit applications, that's telling you that demand is waning or demand has gone away. But if builders are moving in into an area and they're pulling permits and they're wanting to build, they're planning to build in the next 6 to 12 months because they're pulling permits, that's a good sign. It just means that there's going to be demand for land and buildable lots and whatnot.

And you could position yourself to potentially sell that land to more of the smaller boutique builders, not just the D.R. Hortons or the Stanley Martins of the world. But you can look at the custom home builders or the small boutique builders because they don't want to buy land and put it on their books. They want to build a house on a parcel of land that's either pre-sold to a buyer or that they're going to buy at the last minute to build a house that they just sold to a buyer that wants to build it in the area.

So now they've got the buyer, they've got the deposit, they've got everything they need. They just have to lock down the land that they're going to be building on. So that's kind of a strategy.

Seth: I remember when I was building my storage facility, that was one thing I looked at kind of for a different purpose, but just to make sure there's no competitors being built at the same time I was building mine. I called the township and asked to see any permits they might have. And it was kind of a process. I'd put in a FOIA request and pay money and all this stuff.

So, how do you do that at scale? And is there some website that shows you all the permits being pulled and how much does that cost and how much is too much or not enough?

And even just in general, like your REWBCON presentation, there's so much information you look at to stay on top of these trends. Like, where do you even begin? What do you look at and how do you make sense of these trends?

Marco: Permanent information, it depends on the county. I mean, it's county by county. A lot of it is available at the county level. Sometimes it requires manual work, but that type of information is free.

But there are content aggregators. I can't name one off the top of my head. The data I buy is kind of from a private institution. It's very expensive data but they already aggregated the information from other sources. I don't know what all the other sources are, but I will say this: you could do a Google search and find information about permits being pulled.

I’m not sure what you would type in, like new building permit applications, new building permit trends, you'll probably go down a rabbit hole. You'll probably start to find some some websites and articles that provide that type of information. I think Zillow or Redfin or maybe Realtor.com has that information or had it at one time. They actually published existing home inventory and new home inventory. And then tied to that, they had building permit applications.

I will say this. I know the information is out there and it's available and it's probably available from multiple sites. It's just a matter of some Google searches to find it. But that information is available. I know I've seen it on many websites.

Seth: I know on Land ID, you can see where the developments are and who the developers are. I don't know if that's like building permits per se, but you can at least get an idea of, like, who's building in what areas of the city, that kind of thing.

Marco: Yeah. I know that information is available because the data service that I subscribe to, which is over $3,000 a month (it's not cheap), provides that information on a community basis, like down to the community level. So you can see who's pulling the permits and how many are being pulled, right down to the community level.

So that information exists. I know it's out there. It's just how it's presented or packaged.

Seth: So this other data that you look at for your REWBCON presentation, like understanding the current inventory throughout the country. How much stuff have you looked at to come up with that? Is there some website you're following or something, or does it just take you hundreds of hours to pull that information together?

Marco: No, there's all kinds of websites out there.

And again, it goes back to doing Google searches, but every website out there has similar information, but also different information. And sometimes it's the same data, but they present it differently.

Like Neighborhood Scout is a website that I helped shape. I have no interest in it. I'm not an owner. It got bought out by CoreLogic. So Neighborhood Scout is one. Then there are chunks of information available from Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com. They aggregate a bunch of information. John Burns Real Estate Consulting has some information on their social media platform.

Seth: I'm linking to all this stuff in the show notes again for all the listeners out there.

Marco: Yeah, Altos, A-L-T-O-S. Altos Research is also a good site. They have a lot of good information and they pull from all the MLS sources around the country.

Seth: Nice.

Marco: Not the actual data. Well, they pull data, but they pull the trends from that data. The government websites aggregates all the statistics.

Datausa.io is another one. The National Association of Realtors has tons of information. Harvard. It publishes a lot of great information as well.

Seth: So that's the kind of stuff you look at when you're trying to make sense of what's going on nationwide?

Marco: Yeah, that's some of it. Believe me, there's tons of it. ApartmentLlist.com used to publish rent-based data. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's the one I was thinking of. So U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has mountains, mountains of data. So it takes a little effort to kind of weed through it. That's another one. So that's BLS.gov, the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Statista is kind of a mess of information, but you can find some very interesting research and insight there.

The Milken Institute used to publish information. I don't know if they still do, but they used to publish a lot of information. There are so many others.

Like, I mean, Google's almost your best friend. And just typing in search phrases that are clear and specific, and it'll just take you to a whole bunch of places that you can go down rapidly.

Seth: Yeah, I've heard of some of those. I have not heard of all of them, but that's great info to start with.

That's a funny thing with the Google. It's almost kind of like a forum sometimes where it's like, this is good info, but like, how do you really know when it's the best or the right info or if that person really knows what they're talking about? So it's helpful to hear from you the specific places you check out.

Marco: Yeah, those are many of them.

And then there's a bunch of them that are paid subscriptions. Like you won't get any kind of information, but they’re warehouses of massive data, like they have an unbelievable amount of data on every single property in the country. It's just a crazy aggregate.

And those are the people that I'm talking to in order to build the website. I ultimately want to build that housingtrends.com. I'm going to license the data and then use that data to create the maps and analytics and trends and reporting and stuff that I want to provide to real investors, ultimately.

I mean, that's more of a pet project for me. It's not something I need to do. I just don't have the time for it.

Seth: No, that sounds super valuable.

Marco: I want to do it just as a pet project.

Seth: Man, that's awesome.

So like, are there any particular challenges you see investors facing today or that they will face in the next few years? And how do you think they're going to overcome those?

Marco: Yeah. One challenge is just the lack of available inventory.

If you roll back to pre-COVID, it wasn't that difficult. It was getting more difficult to find inventory, but it wasn't that difficult. But then things got tighter and tighter and inventory kept dropping while demand continued to increase. So one challenge is finding enough inventory for your purposes.

But as I mentioned to you before, and something I said in my keynote presentation at the conference, is when I get asked the question, “Is now a good time to be buying real estate?” And my answer to that is yes, it's always a good time to be buying real estate.

And it's not because it's not a question of when; it's a question of where. There are always opportunities. The United States is made up of over 500 metropolitan statistical areas, and they're all broken up into sub-markets and then areas and then neighborhoods and communities and whatnot. So there's something going on everywhere all the time.

And so there are always opportunities. It's just a matter of, where is their inventory? Where do the numbers make sense? And where can you find a deal that will make sense—carry itself, has positive cash flow, has growth potential, is in a market that has stability, is in a market that has jobs and ideally job growth, and a market that has population growth. If you have those two things, you've really licked 70% of your decisions.

And then as long as you're in a good community, like a neighborhood, like what I'll classify as a B, B-plus, A-minus type of neighborhood, you've probably mitigated 80% of your investment risk. When you you have those factors in play, don't start with the property. Start with the market and the neighborhood.

The market is the most important deciding factor in where to look. The neighborhood is where you mitigate your risk because you want a strong rental pool. You want high desirability in that neighborhood. You want the numbers to make sense. You want it to be, relatively speaking, low crime, a desirable area. And then you look at the property, the condition of the property, and the numbers on the property. A lot of investors actually do it backwards.

They start with the property and then really kind of neglect the neighborhood or don't pay a lot of attention to the neighborhood. And the market is kind of an afterthought. So top-down approach.

Seth: That makes a ton of sense. So if you were talking to 18-year-old Marco today, if he were to come into the future and sit in your office right now, are there like top one or two or three markets you would tell yourself to go look at right now?

And why is that? Like, are there any specific places that you know off the top of your head? Yeah, this is a good market because of this. And this is how I know that because I went to this website and it told me this.

Marco: If you're asking me about the best markets or the top markets to invest in, first of all, you have to understand that my company, Norada Real Estate Investments, is in 25 markets. So when I try to narrow those 25 markets down to three, I can pick any three and they're all fine. They're all good, but for different reasons. Some are more prone to appreciation potential. Some markets are better suited for cash flow and cash-on-cash return.

And so when we're talking to an investor or when an investor is talking to an investment counselor at our company, we're going to ask questions and figure out what's most important to them. Is it the cash flow? Is it the immediate returns, cash-on-cash? Or is it price growth or appreciation potential in the years to come? Are they short-term, long-term investors? We'll kind of figure out where their head's at and what their investment goals are.

So I can answer that question basically in different ways, depending on what you're looking for.

Seth: Is your housing trends software going to do that? Like ask questions? Like, do you care more about appreciation or cash flow? And based on those answers, here you go, look at these markets. Is that kind of where that would be going?

Marco: It won't ask you the questions, but it'll answer the questions. That's part of the reason why I want to do it is just to help people zero in on starting with this country that's massive, that has 500 MSAs, and then zero down on markets that make sense.

So when we look at the markets right now, you can look at the top markets in the country and about 80% or 81% of them, we would rank as either in normal home market conditions, like supply and demand and sales are normal. It's basically normal inventory, normal sales cycle, normal everything. They're either normal, strong, or very strong.

Most markets today are back into the normal state. They used to be strong or very strong in terms of sales, the number of sales, sales briskness, the lack of inventory, price appreciation trends. That's what we saw for years, especially over COVID.

Like COVID, 2020 and 2021 were crazy years. We saw an average of about 20% appreciation on a nationwide basis, two years in a row. And that's just unsustainable and crazy when you stop to think about it. Things have normalized since then, obviously. But today, most of the markets, about 80% of them, are what we would classify normal or strong.

And so right now, from a sales perspective, like market conditions, Charlotte, is what we would call a strong market. Although I don't recommend anything in California, LA and Riverside are relatively strong in terms of property sales, but most of the country has a normal market. And a lot of the markets that we've been focused on are the Midwest, pockets of the Northeast, a good portion of the Southeast, heavily into Florida. To a lesser degree now, Texas, just because prices have appreciated so much relative to rents.

But the Midwest, Indianapolis is a perennial market. Kansas City, Missouri is a perennial market for us and great for investors. We've been in Kansas City for almost 20 years straight now. It's just a perennial market for us.

We're in many markets within Florida, in and out of markets like Jacksonville, Cape Coral, that whole southwestern corridor. To a lesser degree, Orlando. Can't get anything in Atlanta right now. Memphis, Tennessee is a strong market for us as well; we have a lot of inventory so we've we're in and out of that market when we get inventory. But we're always bullish for the Memphis area.

Seth: When you're deciding on these markets, do you have a checklist of, “We got to get answers to these 10 questions and this will tell us yes or no to this market because of this.” Do you have something like that?

Marco: It's basically this. Is there inventory in the market? Do the numbers make sense in the market? A lot of people refer to it as the price, like the rent-to-value ratio or the price to rent ratio. If you can't buy, San Francisco won't make sense. Why buy a one-bedroom place for a million dollars that you can only rent for about $4,000? That 0.4% rent ratio, it's not going to work. It won't cash flow. Like you'll be upside down.

And then you also have kind of higher risk of downside side price declines rather than upside. If you look at a market like Kansas City, Missouri, or Memphis, or some of the Ohio markets that we're in, you can get $150,000 property. Like a single-family, three-bedroom detached home for, I'm talking between 100,000 and 200,000, but call it 150,000, that will rent for $1,300 or $1,400 a month. The numbers work. It will cash flow. It will carry itself. It's in a good neighborhood. It's in a relatively strong market. It's not like a great market for strong price appreciation looking into the future, but it's a market that will do well. It'll carry itself.

So we look for good markets. Where there's inventory, the numbers make sense at the metro level. There's job stability, ideally job growth, population growth, ideally. If it's a flat market, that's fine because you're going to be in a desirable neighborhood.

You want a property that is either new, like- new construction, or like new, meaning there's no deferred maintenance. It's what we call turnkey inventory, turnkey real estate. So it's new or like-new. So no deferred maintenance.

Like I said before, the numbers make sense. It's got a rate of return. Turn it's in a good area good neighborhood. That's a very important thing. I would say a B-plus type of neighborhood, bread and butter, it's a cross between white collar and blue collar employees, large rental pool, low crime, good not great but good schools.

That's kind of your middle of the bell curve type of area, so the bread and butter communities, which are, for me, B, B-plus, A-minus graded neighborhoods. They don't have to be premium areas, luxury areas, and they don't have to be in war zones. You want to stay away from that.

I'm not a big fan of like the low, lower-middle income areas like the C-class neighborhoods. They look good on paper and they can do well, it's just I find that, over time, they can be expensive because of the high cost of the turnovers and the damage that could be done or left behind by by tenants. It's just you're dealing with a different demographic, a different class of tenants, so for me I like being in those B-class neighborhoods. So that's kind of the checklist.

And then of course, if you're not self-managing, having a great full service professional property management company—not an individual, but a professional company, a management company that manages your properties. You could self-manage. It's not a problem. You can do that.

So that would be the checklist. And that's exactly what we walk investors through.

Seth: Yeah. So when you sell a turnkey rental, do you have a property manager picked out already that kind of meets that criteria? Because I know that's a common issue I hear from a lot of people, and I’ve experienced it myself, where some property managers are terrible. So how do you make sure you get a good one?

Marco: Yeah. So being a turnkey property provider, we provide everything for the investor and, at no cost, we don't charge for our service.

So we've got an inventory of properties in 25 markets. The management is tied in with it, but you don't have to use that property manager. You can use any property manager you want. You can self-manage it if you want. We just provide it for you, someone or a company that we work with, that we've vetted, that we know we can provide the financing and everything else.

But with the property management company, again, like I emphasize, full-service professional management, a lot of property management companies go off of reputation, meaning that you want to look into their track record and reputation. And that's not that hard to find. You'll find all kinds of information online as well as reviews. You can also ask them for references. Of course, they're going to give you their best references, but nonetheless, it's good to know.

Talk to the team, talk to more than one person, interview more than one person from the company. Talk to the owner if you can, talk to the leasing agent, talk to the maintenance coordinator. Just get a feel for how their systems and operations are and what kind of operating procedures they have in place. Because it's kind of like a marriage, they want to work with you ideally and you want to work with them, but you want to make sure it's the right fit, and you want to understand how they work, what they can and can't do.

Seth: And just one last question. So I heard you say a few times, you got to make sure that there's inventory in the market. So what do you mean by that? What is enough inventory? Is there a certain ratio or number you're looking for to be like, okay, that is officially enough. Now I can go there versus that's not enough.

Marco: It's not a number, exactly. It's really just if that market checks the boxes in terms of the rent-to-price ratio, meaning that there are areas within that market where the numbers will work.

You can't get something that will make sense. Cash flow has a positive cap rate, the cash-on-cash return. You want to make sure that there's enough available inventory for sale that you can actually pick something or find something. Because if something goes on for sale in that market, in the bread and butter communities, and there are five offers the day it's listed, you're going to have a hell of a time getting a property there. It’s a numbers game. You'll ultimately get something.

But if you're competing, if inventory is low, there's not a lot for sale and you're competing against a lot of people who are wanting to buy whatever comes up for sale, it's going to be a difficult market to try and get something with the numbers that you want to get them at. You may be forced to pay over the fair market value, and that's only okay if the number still makes sense and it's a market that presents strong appreciation potential. Because if you have to pay a little bit over market, that market will quickly catch up to what you've overpaid if you're paying over fair market value.

So it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's easier to work in a market where there is lots of available inventory, which is why we like places like Memphis, Tennessee, Kansas City, Missouri, Indianapolis, pockets in the Northeast, for example, some of the secondary markets in Pennsylvania, the Ohio markets like Cleveland, Cincinnati, to a much lesser degree, Akron and Toledo. But there's definitely inventory in those markets.

Seth: Yeah. Like you said earlier, it's not like you're getting on Zillow, looking in Cleveland and say, okay, good. There's 400 properties. I'm all set. It's more about, I'm going to crunch the numbers on a number of properties, see if the numbers work. If they work, if I can actually get this property, that's how I know there's inventory. It's not necessarily about the number of properties on the market. Is that accurate?

Marco: Yeah. Another way of saying that is if I can't find properties that make sense for me, the numbers work, it's in the right areas, it's available for sale, I can make an offer and I have a good chance of getting it or buying it, or if it's new construction, of course, getting it from a builder, then yeah, then inventory is going to be tight.

And there are degrees of tightness. How difficult is it going to be to get that ideal property that you want to add to your portfolio?

Seth: That's a good distinction to make. Because in the land business, a lot of parallels there in terms of choosing market and figuring out what is the sold to for sale ratio and how many days on the market are these properties there.

But in order to even go there, you need to already have some assumptions made about how much am I going to be offering for these properties? What's my plan for them? Am I going to be improving them in some way or not? Because that totally can change the course of what's acceptable for you or not. So it's kind of a holistic thing that you gotta take several different things into account.

But I want to switch gears just a little bit, talk about kind of your personal experience and advice for investors. Cause I know you've been in this business for a long time. You've seen a lot of things, you've talked to a lot of people and I know you've even done these kind of interviews quite a bit on podcasts and you've got your own podcast.

And I'm curious, when you get interviewed like this, or when you listen to other interviews and conversations about this business, what's something you think people talk about too much? And what's one thing you think they don't talk about enough?

Marco: Oh, wow. Never been asked that before. That's an interesting question.

What do they talk too much about? I don't know if there's any one thing that's too much, but a common question is like, what are the hot markets?

Seth: That seems to be what I asked you about.

Marco: Yeah. People who are not really well-seasoned will always ask, well, what's the hot market? My response is, how do you define a hot market? What's hot to you? Is it price growth, rent growth, sales activity, available inventory?

The thing that all the investors are talking about what's hot today in terms of investor interest, what are they tweeting about versus something else. Define a hot market? Hot in terms of cash flow, hot in terms of appreciation, that can mean different things to different people. And so I see that being kicked around a lot.

Sometimes people refer to it as best, not necessarily the hot market, but what's the best market. That's what's talked about a lot because obviously that's what people are interested in. Where should I be investing? What's the best market that I should be investing in right now?

Seth: I've heard it said that for every complex question, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. So I think maybe that's what's going on is people just don't want to think too hard about it. They want you to just give them an easy button and they'll realize the complexity involved and understand some of this stuff.

Marco: A hundred percent. Yeah, everybody wants the easy button. That's probably the thing, I think, has been talked about the most or too much. What was the other part of your question?

Seth: What's one thing you don't think they talk about enough?

Marco: Maybe it's some of the things we talked about, just the fundamentals and the principles, like what should I focus on? What is my checklist? How should I be approaching real estate investing?

Like, for me I have all these rules like, and one of them is like taking a top-down approach. Don't be presented a whole bunch of properties and evaluate the property. And then look at other factors around it, more big picture, start with the market. I call it the funnel approach. Start with the metro area, the markets within it, the neighborhoods, and then the property. And then you build your team around you, your property manager, your lender, etc.

Taking that top-down approach will assure that you have a high degree of success.

Seth: What is something that you hear novice real estate investors or critics of real estate investing complain about that makes you roll your eyes?

Marco: Damn, that's a good question. I wish I had known these questions beforehand.

Seth: My goal was to stump you.

Marco: I think the biggest thing that makes me cringe is what I call real estate speculators. They think they're investors, but they're not. They're gamblers. And they speculate on the market. And that’s their sole focus.

My pseudo-cousin is an example of this. He's just been lucky or fortunate because he's been in markets that have just been experiencing hypergrowth. So he's done well from an equity perspective, but not from a cash flow perspective. And it's just investing in the so-called hot markets, markets that are experiencing strong growth and price appreciation.

But if that's your sole focus and you've got blinders on, you're not considering all the other factors that you should be considering, then I refer to you as a real estate speculator, not a real estate investor.

A real estate investor is focused on sustainability and cash flow. So they've got the cash flow. They've got cash flow to carry the property in the short term and forever, but they know that they're in markets that have growth and appreciation potential. So they're going to make out well in the years to come.

That's investing smart and strategically rather than just focused on rolling the dice at a craps table and saying, “Yeah, you know what, I should be able to flip this house in a year and make 50 grand on it,” or something like that if they wanted to sell it.

So that's a mistake a lot of investors make, but especially made in the early 2000s, like leading up to 2006 and the housing crash. That's where a lot of mistakes were made and a lot of investors were left with their shorts down when the water went down because they couldn't carry the property. They bought a property, went up fast in value, and then the market turned and then that equity disappeared and dried. Then they were upside down. They owed more than the house was worth, what they could sell it for, and they couldn't carry it.

If they were able to keep that property and carry it for the next three, four years, they would have made out okay. They would have come out on the other side whole and then would have made gains in terms of appreciation from that point forward. But because they had negative cash flow, they couldn't afford to keep it. They couldn't carry it. And they were forced to sell, liquidate, foreclose, or file bankruptcy.

Seth: Now that you've gotten this far in your business and your career, you're successful. I don't know what your PFS looks like, but I presume you've made plenty of money in your career. You're in a place where a lot of people would dream of being.

And now that you're on this side of the fence, what's something that really is everything you thought it would be? And then, what are some dreams that you had early on that turned out to be maybe false hopes or just harsh realities of the business?

Marco: Well, I guess the more success you gain and the more financial freedom you have, the more things you can do that are more fun projects.

Like we were talking about this before with with Broadway, it just gives you the freedom and flexibility to do other things. Some of them being passion projects or investments that are beyond what you started with. For me, it was business and real estate. And then that ventured out into me creating Norada Capital.

Norada Capital Management is my private equity firm, but it's an investment fund. So investors are investing every day, but certainly every week, to make 12% and 15% gains. And we arbitrage that capital and I can build things, build business ventures and projects and whatnot that I want to do. Not that I need to do, but that I enjoy, understand, have fun and can make more money and then contribute back to impact others, for example, or other purpose-based projects or purpose-based endeavors.

I think the first goal for a lot of people probably should be to be financially independent, which means that you've got your monthly expenses covered. And beyond that when you 2-5x that income, if you need $5,000 a month to live and cover everything and be okay, like completely sustainable, then you should look at at least 2x-ing that, get to $10,000 a month. Now you're financially free.

When you're 2x or 3x, you're financially free. When you cover your nut at $5,000 a month, you're financially independent. You can get to 2x to 3x that. That's financial freedom. And if you get 5x to 10x that, that's when I consider a person to be truly wealthy. Now you shouldn't have very many concerns at all.

And you have a lot of time freedom to be able to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, how you want. And you can make a real difference. You can do things that can change the world, impact the world.

Which is like what we're doing with our Aspire tour events every month in different cities around the country. We bring in up to 4,000 or more people at each event. It's crazy. We're just providing people with all kinds of incredible content and education to build themselves personally, financially, and otherwise.

Seth: You've got a lot going on. You do all kinds of stuff, don't you? How do you juggle all this? How do you keep it all straight in your head?

Marco: A team. You can't just do it all by yourself. You have to hire the right people to help. You have to have the right partners and then the right team of people to help you execute and build.

You come up with the ideas and the vision. You build the right team around you to make it happen. And then you bring on the team, whether they're employees or contractors or outside staff or whatever it may be. You bring in the people that can execute and fulfill that vision.

Seth: How much of this stuff would you say runs without you? Like you could literally die tomorrow and this stuff would keep going without you. Is any of it like that? Or do you have to like kind of check in every week or every month or something? How much involvement is required from you at this point?

Marco: I'd say 80% of it is sustainable. The other 20%, either I need to be involved or I choose to be involved. And it's usually both. Usually those are tied together.

I don't want to let go completely. I don't want to be a control freak. I want to have some level of control and I want to know what's going on and be able to conduct and direct what's going on. So I want to feel that I have some level of impact and control over it, but I don't want to be micromanaging or a control freak and directing everything because then there's no point in having a team.

Seth: Yeah. To some extent, it's almost like if you don't want to play any role in it, then why is it there at all, you know? Like, why don't you shut the whole thing down? So there kind of has to be that balance of, you're sort of there but it doesn't need you necessarily to exist.

Marco: That, actually, is ideal. Building a real estate portfolio is a great example of this. If you can build a real estate portfolio that is profitable, cash flows, is sustainable, and doesn't require your time and attention on a daily weekly or monthly basis (especially if you have a manager managing it like a management company), then you can go on a vacation for a year. You can disappear for a year and come back a year later and everything should be running smoothly.

You might have someone as a backup in case your team or your property managers need to contact someone and you choose to make yourself not available. At least give someone the knowledge and authority to make decisions on your behalf while you're away. And under that scenario, theoretically, you could disappear for an entire year and come back and everything should be just as good, if not better, than when you left.

Seth: So this is kind of a random thing, but I noticed as I was preparing for this interview, I saw you had posted something on LinkedIn or Twitter or something. There was this quote that said, “You don't have to be extreme. You just have to be consistent.”

And I think I know why you feel this way. The statement makes perfect sense to me, but I'm curious if there are any situations in life where you do have to be extreme or when your life or career really does boil down to one key moment.

If so, what situations do you think that would be true?

Marco: You need to be extreme when you are required to hustle to get something launched.

I like to use the analogy of a rocket getting off the launch pad. When you first launch a rocket, it requires a lot of fuel and energy to get it moving. When you watch a rocket lift off, it moves up slowly off that launch pad. It looks like it's almost not even moving, but you're burning the most amount of fuel at that point in time to get it off the launch pad.

And then slowly, as you keep pushing it and burning that fuel and putting a lot of energy into it, it starts to move and accelerate faster and faster, until you ultimately are going hundreds of miles an hour. And then ultimately, you get into orbit, where it requires the least amount of energy. But now you're in orbit and you've built this thing. You've launched the rocket. You've got this thing going.

So that's when you have to be really aggressive and be hard and strong.

You know, it makes me think of David Goggins. He would say… He's one of the guys we have at our events each month at Aspire.

Seth: Oh, cool.

Marco: He just broke his leg. Well, not on purpose, but I was just looking at his cast.

Seth; Are you sure he didn't do it on purpose? Seems like he would do that kind of thing.

Marco: Well, it was a choice, but he had to get his leg fixed and they had to break his bone in order to fix it. So the pictures weren't pretty. But the guy’s a machine.

Seth: Does this stem from his experience in the Navy SEALs when he messed up his knee and had to tread water or something like that? Any correlation?

Marco: Yeah. He's had knee damage for a long time.

But one thing I like quoting him on is he would say, “Stay hard, mother*****r.” You can finish that sentence. But you do in the beginning. You need to stay hard and aggressive and not let up. You need to push with all your might and energy to get that rocket off the launch pad, because if you can do that, then the longer you go, the easier it becomes, the more sustainable and profitable your ventures are.

The first property you buy is going to be the hardest one. It’s got the steepest learning curve. It's going to be the most unnerving and stressful. The second one will be a little bit less. So the third one will be much easier. The fourth one will be even easier than that.

So you've got to push hard and build that momentum. And then, as you go, you'll realize, oh, damn, this wasn't so hard. You know, when you look back, it shouldn't have been as stressful as I'd let it be.

Seth: So this is the Aspire Tour. Is that right? I think I found that on Instagram.

Marco: Well, the website is Aspire with an A, AspireTour.com. A-S-P-I-R-E, Aspire. You know, like I aspire to be something bigger, better, greater than I am.

Seth: Yeah. Got that. Sweet. Yeah. I'll put that in the show notes too. It sounds fascinating.

Marco: So we usually post two or three months in advance on the website. Like we'll always add cities. We might have four or five of them there. The closest we just finished was Denver two days ago. It was Dallas before that. LA and then Dallas before that. The next one closest to you is probably New York.

Seth: Okay.

Marco: Maybe there's another closer market. But we just signed the agreement about a month ago for Madison Square Garden for July 20th.

Seth: Wow. Wait, what role do you play in this? Did you start this or are you a co-founder?

Marco: Yeah, I'm a co-founder. I'm essentially a one-third partner. So I have two partners building out Aspire and our money is mastermind and our real estate mastermind, which is called Level Up Real Estate.

The Aspire event is really to get 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 people in a room and just feed them tons of great information, content, value, personal development, business development, entrepreneurship, real estate education, and entertainment all in one full day. And then from there, if they love what they learn, they love what they see, we give them the opportunity to attend our master classes, our mastermind. They can go further down the rabbit hole with us, but they're going to get a ton of value and entertainment at the Aspire event.

Seth: Yeah, that's awesome. I'm looking at it now, there's a lot of big names that have been involved with that, so that sounds pretty cool. I'd have to check that out.

Marco: Yeah, if you, as my friend, want to attend any of them, just let me know. I'll give you VIP access as my guest.

Seth: I appreciate that. It's very, very kind of you. Yeah. I'll let you know if I'm ever able to fit that in.

I know we're coming up on our time limit here. One last thing I just wanted to mention, this is something a lot of people might not know about you. I know we kind of mentioned a little bit earlier, but you are a Broadway producer and co-producer, right? Your productions include, correct me if I'm wrong, A Beautiful Noise, Broadway Vacation, Harmony, Joy, The Devil Wears Prada, and Here Lies Love, among others. Is that right? And how did you get into that work and why?

Marco: Yeah, those are six of them. I think I'm involved in about 11 or 12 of them. We just had opening night last month for The Notebook, based on the movie and the book, which was phenomenal. I highly recommend The Notebook. It's such a great production.

And then if you remember the band The Who with Pete Townsend, so they have all kinds of great songs. But Tommy was one of the characters in one of their songs that you remember, Pinball. But anyway, we just opened up Tommy a couple of weeks ago. We had opening night for that. And that's a great, great production as well.

Seth: And you actually like one of the financiers of this, like you invest in the production and pay for it to get up and running. Is that right?

Marco: Yeah. I'm one of the co-producers. So, you have three levels, if you want, from an investment perspective in Broadway productions. And I'm talking in general terms, generally speaking, you have the lead producers, who are typically the general partners. Like if you had a real estate syndication, you have the GPs and LPs. So the GPs are typically the lead producers that could be one person or two or three individuals. And they're usually the ones that bring it all together, make the story come together, bring in the initial team to get that production off the ground.

Then they will bring in the investment capital needed through co-producers, which are often associates and people that they know in the industry and whatnot. And so the co-producers typically come in with bigger numbers as an investment and they're usually the people listed above the title. So you'll have the title like, Sister Act is another production that I’m in. You'll see Sister Act or Broadway Vacation, or The Devil Wears Prada, and above that you'll see a small batch of names. Those are the co-producers. And then, right above the co-producers you'll see one two or three names and those are the lead producers.

And then anybody else that could potentially be making an investment or just simply referred to as investors, they don't show up anywhere, but they've got a piece of the production in terms of an investment perspective.

Seth: So how much does it cost to, for you to do that kind of thing? Like per production? And what kind of return would you normally expect out of that kind of thing?

Marco: Well, it's an interesting question. You're actually asking me two fun fact questions. To invest in Broadway, it depends on the production, the amount of capital being raised, and the lead producers.

Some Broadway productions, off Broadway or smaller productions, can be $3-5 million total capital raise. Most of them are between $10 and $20 million. The larger ones, like the much larger expensive ones, can be $30 million-plus, but most of the productions I'm involved in are like $15 to $25 million.

The investment will depend on, again, the lead producer in the production, but the minimum investment is typically between $50,000 and $100,000. And then there's often no cap. It's just until they fulfill their capital raise. But I don't go in for $50,000. Like if I'm going to be involved, it'll be six figures. My largest one was seven figures as an investment.

So it took me a while to get my head wrapped around that years ago. Because if you're coming from the real estate space, an investment in a film or a Broadway or theatrical production does not make sense to you if you've got the mindset of a real estate investor. Because you don't get returns right away.

Your first goal, first of all, if you're going to write a check, you write the check as if you're never going to see that check again. The risk is pretty high, like about seven out of 10 productions will lose money. You won't recoup your investment. You'll lose money on it. Two out of 10, you should recoup your investment and maybe make some money.

And then it's to be determined how long you're going to make a return because it really comes down to how long that production's running. And then about one out of 10 will be like a Wicked or Hamilton or Phantom of the Opera or something like that, where it'll just run for years until you just want to shut it down. And those are big moneymakers. So those could be astronomical, like they'll just print money for years.

But it is a high level of risk. And you have to know that going in not every production makes money, a lot of them will lose money. But the rates of return can be anywhere from negative to zero to 10% to 30% on your money. And then the ones that run for years on end can be a lot more than that; they can 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x your initial investment.

Seth: So like, what's your track record? I don't know if you're open to sharing that, but like, do you lose money a lot? And if so, why do you keep doing this? Is it just fun for you?

Marco: Well, it is fun. It's sexy. It's entertaining. I like the arts. I support the arts. I love theater. I fell in love with musicals and theater long, long ago when I first saw Phantom of the Opera almost 30 years ago.

Seth: Did you see it in Toronto?

Marco: No, good guess, though. But it was actually in Calgary. The first time I saw it was Calgary, Canada. And then I saw it again in New York. And then I saw it again in Orange County, California.

I know one of the Phantom singers who played at the opera. We had him sing at Aspire actually a few times as entertainment right after lunch as people were coming back from their lunch. Yeah.

So it's a fun industry. You definitely will have your losses and successes. You should never invest in theatrical productions or Broadway if you're only planning to invest in one production because odds are stacked against you to not recoup your investment. So you have to go wide, not just deep in one.

Seth: Marco, thank you again so much for spending your time with me. I know we're at our time limit here. If people want to work with you in any way, I know you've got several websites. I'll link to all of them in the show notes. Again, retipster.com/188. But if there's one particular place you would drive them to, where would that be?

Marco: Probably just my personal website because I link to Norada Real Estate. I link to Norada Capital. I link to all the things I'm doing from there. So it's just my name, MarcoSantarelli.com. Just my full name, MarcoSantarelli.com.

And just as a side note, my Instagram, I couldn't get Marco Santarelli, so it had to be MarcoGSantarelli, my middle initial. But yeah, you can follow me on Instagram as well at MarcoGSantarelli.

Seth: Thanks again, Marco. Appreciate it. And hopefully we'll talk again soon.

Marco: Thank you so much, Seth. This has been fun. I appreciate your time today.