Episode 79 - The Real Estate Strategy Anson Young Has Used Since 2015

Jul 9

In this episode, I sit down with Anson Young to discuss how he built a successful real estate investing business by focusing on consistency instead of constantly chasing the next big strategy. Anson shares how a small direct mail campaign led to his first deal and why that same marketing approach continues to generate opportunities today. We also discuss why so many investors struggle with shiny object syndrome, how systems create long-term growth, and why building wealth often comes from mastering one strategy rather than jumping between many. Anson also shares practical insights on house hacking, scaling an investing business, and helping clients create financial freedom through real estate.

Stephen and Anson talked about:

00:00– Why direct mail still works in 2026
04:52– The BiggerPockets conference and Anson's investing journey
06:05– How 250 letters landed his first deal
09:19– The numbers behind successful direct mail
17:21– Why Anson shifted from flipping to long-term investing
18:40– The danger of shiny object syndrome
26:11– Why house hacking works in expensive markets
30:39– Building wealth without owning hundreds of properties
35:06– ADUs, development, and future opportunities
56:05 – Living, investing, and building a life in Colorado

TRANSCRIPT

∎ Teaser / Highlighted Clip

00:00 Anson Young: That is the hardest piece to let go is that kind of acquisitions piece. If you're in this business and you're like, I talked to a lot of investors and even myself, it took me forever to kind of hand off that final piece of, okay, I can train somebody to actually take these calls, build rapport, go through this with the homeowner, really have a good idea of what the seller wants. Can we meet those expectations? Can we... solve their problems, let's just say, all the way almost to the end. I do a final approval on the pricing and making sure that the numbers work for the deal, for what we're trying to do. But I am to the point where I've handed off 99% of that process to our acquisitions managers. They take the calls, they do the follow-up, they build the rapport, they do all of that. And not everyone's there yet, of course, but that part is hard to let go because you're always, ah, nobody can do this better than me. So once you let that go, you have actual opportunity to grow your business instead of being on the phone all day.
00:56 Stephen Husted: If you don't enjoy what you're doing and you're stuck in it, you're stuck in it. And it'll be worse than any W-2 bad boss you've ever had in your whole entire life.

∎ Podcast Intro:

01:08 Stephen Husted: I'm Stephen Husted, and you're listening to The Breakthrough Podcast, a space designed for clarity, curiosity, and the stories that move us. Here, we step away from the noise and into the moments that define us, the early influences, the hidden struggles, and the breakthroughs that reshape our lives. From personal reinvention to building a life through real estate and entrepreneurship, these conversations remind us that success isn't a straight line. It's a series of honest decisions.

∎ Guest Introduction:

01:47 Stephen Husted: Today's guest is Anson Young, a real estate investor, entrepreneur, and agent who has built a reputation by mastering one of the oldest marketing strategies in the business. direct mail. Most investors follow trends. Anson built something better. Over a decade, he refined a system that consistently finds deals and spots opportunities his competitors miss. Anson proved that simplicity scales. A handwritten letter campaign of just 250 mailers generated his first deal and became the blueprint for expanding into multiple markets and building a substantial real estate portfolio. In this episode, Anson breaks down his evolution from transactional deals to buy and hold wealth creation, explains why staying focused matters more than chasing trends, and shows how house hacking has accelerated financial freedom. for his clients we explore direct mail marketing investing in competitive markets development opportunities and the systems that let you scale beyond yourself let's jump in

∎ Podcast Proper:

02:52 Stephen Husted: all right anton we finally got you
02:53 Anson Young: on yeah for sure thanks for having me
02:55 Stephen Husted: is it three is a charm
02:57 Anson Young: That's right. Three different times of having like catastrophic things happen. Not really catastrophic, just technical difficulties and other difficulties. Yeah,
03:06 Stephen Husted: but you had one. Didn't you have an issue on one that like a tree fell on a house?
03:09 Anson Young: Yeah, a listing of mine where my clients are moved out of country. And so I'm kind of managing the property and making sure that everything's. going just fine with it. And a neighbor had called and one of our storms took down a tree and kind of hit, clipped the side of the roof and broke a window and there was water getting into the property. So it was like, there's no one else on call since they don't live here. So I went to go coordinate getting that taken care of. Yeah, it was for us in Denver. I think everywhere's had a really dry winter and we got this late spring storm that brought down tons of trees. I had five or six limbs in my yard, pretty big size. And just driving around,
03:50 Anson Young: it felt apocalyptic. There was just leaves everywhere. There was tree branches down. There was trees split in half. Heavy, wet snow plus leaves, probably not a good combo.
03:59 Stephen Husted: No. Don't you guys get golf ball size hail too at points?
04:05 Anson Young: Yeah, it just hailed two days ago. Thankfully, where I'm at, it was very tiny. It was like pea size, I guess. But man, the last two years, I got a car that got hit twice, totaled basically twice. And yeah, like... golf ball size hail. It'll look nice. Then all of a sudden it gets really dark and the sky turns kind of greenish and then boom, you get hit by hail.
04:23 Stephen Husted: That just takes your car. That's just multiple dents.
04:26 Anson Young: It's your car just looks like somebody just sat there and threw golf balls at it all day. And thankfully I didn't have any window breakage, but I've had friends of mine where their entire windshield is shattered, the back window shattered, all the hails getting inside the car. So you have all the water damage inside the car, plus all the body damage. Yeah. It's seems to be getting. worse these days. We didn't have this many hailstorms maybe 10, 20 years ago. So we're just getting more. So thankfully yesterday or the other day, we were just fine. But there's other parts of Denver where they got nailed pretty hard.
04:58 Anson Young: I think downtown got just really hit hard.
05:01 Stephen Husted: And some of the higher elevations get it year round, correct? In the summer too, when these big storms come through just in the late afternoon.
05:08 Anson Young: Not really hail, but there is a rule of thumb that if you're hiking up in the mountains, especially if you're above treeline, which is I think 11,000 feet, be done by 2 p.m. because 2 p.m. storm could roll through and really heavy wind. It could snow even the summer that high. It can definitely hail, but then you also have the lightning and the lightning factor too. So anytime we go hiking and we're up that high, it's like you start at five in the morning and you're done by noon or one o'clock because you don't want to be stuck up there at 2, 3 p.m. because those storms seem to roll through like all the time. how it is
05:45 Stephen Husted: yeah my first experience in colorado was doing the leadville 100 and so you start like real early in the morning five ish sixes in the end they want you off columbine by no later than one o'clock you want to be heading back home
05:58 Anson Young: especially on those races because you're like really exposed and you're kind of way out there
06:01 Stephen Husted: yeah it's crazy the thing was columbine's like 13 500 because leadville is at over 10 it's like a pressure cooker in your head it's so crazy so Interesting enough, I met you a long time ago at a BiggerPockets conference that you're speaking at. Yeah, and you're speaking about handwritten letters. That was it. Are you still doing that?
06:23 Anson Young: Yeah, we are. I've been doing direct mail since 2015 and have consistently... Kept it going because it's honestly the best ROI on consistently finding deals. And we've expanded out into markets out of state. But basically the first thing we're doing is the analysis. And then the second phase is where we go straight into testing marketing. And it's a lot of the same stuff that we use here in Denver. We're using out of state. But yeah, the handwritten letter or the handwritten format of letter still works in 2026. I didn't think it would still be working, but it's so old school.
06:54 Stephen Husted: Dude, yeah. It's been around a long time, but you were kind of like the OG of it back then. I just remember going, oh. But when you first started doing it, maybe you closed a couple of deals and did that give you some momentum to go, okay, we're onto something here. Let's expand this.
07:08 Anson Young: Yeah, for sure. I was resistant to it. I had been finding all my deals on MLS or from referrals from agents and stuff, and it wasn't very consistent. And I got into a mastermind and met some friends who have been doing direct mail for even longer than I have. But once I kind of downloaded the information into my brain and I was like, do I want to be the guy who's sending out 5,000 mailers a month and having those incoming calls and people are mad at you for sending a mail and all that stuff. And honestly, I have one of those unicorn stories on my first mailing sequence where I did Drive for Dollars and then I mailed that list. So it's very, very old school. I even remember this house. It was one of those that was just very borderline. It was like, does this make the driving for dollars list? Is it bad enough? It just had some discolored siding and some chipped paint on the trim. But otherwise was the roof looked decent. The windows looked fine. And I hemmed and hawed and I go, you know what? It's 50 cents or it's 75 cents for the stamp. And why not? In a sequence of eight letters, that'll cost me at maximum $8 to add this to my list, right? And I came home, compiled the list, sent out. that mailing batch i think it was a small batch of maybe 250 so my very first mailing list was like 250 and got a call from that owner and he wasn't in any kind of financial distress he had a really good job he's actually a mortgage broker of all things so he knows a ton of agents and everything but he still called me we made that deal work he wanted out of it and wanted to move just a couple neighborhoods over to get into a different high school for his kids. But there was just enough deferred maintenance there to make a deal. He was just like, I don't want to deal with this. I don't want to put it on the market. So we made that deal happen. And so it was one of those things where it doesn't happen to everybody, but the first mailer. I got my first deal and yeah, immediately proved the concept of, oh, okay, this is working. They're coming to me based on the marketing that I'm sending out. And so scaling up from there was pretty easy. I quadrupled that list the next month. And so I had about a thousand that went out the next month. And so yeah, I have been continually building that up. And the fact that it's easily scalable is pretty nice, but yeah, having it strike the first time I'm mailing, that was like. Oh, and I know that doesn't happen to everybody. It definitely doesn't happen to me when I go into a new market. It doesn't always happen. It was like immediate proof of concept. Oh, OK, this works. And that quality of seller and that deal was great.
09:33 Stephen Husted: So what do you think the average is to finally get something, a deal put together from a mailer? And is your letters themselves? Is there an art behind the letter?
09:44 Anson Young: Oh man, we're going to be here for hours talking about it. I could talk about this all day, obviously, but yeah, there's definitely a volume amount that helps with that kind of success rate. Kind of like the more you send, the more leads you get, the more calls you get, those leads kind of get filtered down into appointments. And then the amount of appointments that you go on, like you're increasing your chances of all of those things, which means you're increasing your chances of a deal. Of course, I wish that there was like a hard and fast metric. I've even looked through my KPIs of, okay, like how many mailers do you have to. per deal it gets a little weird because then the next month you're sending to that same list. And then the next month you're sending that same list. So are they responding to that first one? Are they responding because you've mailed them for two years straight? What is actually causing those numbers to gel? And it is a little bit hard to nail that down a bit. But I would say if you're just starting, don't expect to send 10 letters and get an amazing response or anything like that. If you kind of look at nationwide response rates, and it definitely varies by market, but expect 1% or lower. to respond to your marketing. So sending out 100, you might get one phone call. You may not know your KPIs from there or your metrics, but usually we're about 20 phone calls per deal. So if you can... back out those numbers, you would realize, okay, I need 20 more. I know I basically need 20 months of sending out a hundred mailers to probably get a deal. The nice thing is that that is a numbers game, but if you are mailing, I would say start with hopefully 250, 500, a thousand would be ideal because then you can at least get 10 phone calls in to kind of work those numbers. Those metrics get a little fuzzy, but to your second question, is there an art to the actual mailer? Yes, there's, I have a whole philosophy around it. We've had really good with handwritten and handcrafted is kind of like the mantra. And so handwritten doesn't have to be physically handwritten. It just has to look like it's handwritten. We've done everything inside of this space, including hiring handwriters, having a handwriting machine that plots out the handwriting to just printing handwritten. high quality, handwritten fonts. And the response rate isn't enough to justify the more expensive options. Buying a $10,000 handwriting machine, you probably don't need to do that. The handwriting fonts will convert. probably just as well. And then inside of there, we send everything that's branded. So nothing that's anonymous. I'm not doing yellow letters circa 2013. I'm not doing that kind of thing where it's just anonymous. Hey, I'm a guy who works out of my van. Sell me your house. It's not that kind of thing. Everything's branded and that it's personalized as well. So we're not just saying, dear homeowner, we're saying, dear Mr. Smith, we're interested in purchasing your property at 123 Main Street in the Andover neighborhood or whatever that looks like. And so there is a little bit more thought put into that. Making the letter definitely seller benefits oriented. I have a friend who sends out these letters and he kind of wonders why he doesn't get traction, but it's all about him. I've been in this business for 23 years and I've closed 1,500 deals and we have $5 million in line of credit ready for your house. And it's like, the seller doesn't care about that stuff. They care what you can offer them. Can you close fast? Can you give them a fair offer? They can leave their stuff there. Anything that they want to leave there, they can leave there. I think if you put all those things together inside the mess, and the medium of your letter, you'll have a lot more success than just sending out a form letter, talking all about yourself and it not being personalized to the homeowner and stuff like that.
13:15 Stephen Husted: He didn't follow your lead, I think.
13:19 Anson Young: He's a little too egotistical to listen.
13:21 Stephen Husted: Yeah, you really have to make it about them. You're trying to help them out. Can you solve these problems? Because if you can solve those problems, that's going to connect with them and they're going to be ready to pick up the phone because you can execute. And they can be moved on.
13:33 Anson Young: And you see it in the agent space too. I'll get letters in my mailbox that are like the agents talking all about their experience and how much experience they have. And that's great. I get the mentality behind that. It's, oh, if I project, okay, I've been in this business a long time. I know what I'm doing. I've closed a bunch of deals that will tell the homeowner that they can trust me or that I'm successful or whatever that is. But if you're like, hey, we'll.
13:58 Anson Young: We work with sellers to make sure that they get the most for their house and benefits to them. So we can talk about the flexible closing or options to get you into your next house. Those are like the real questions that people have. And so if you can answer those questions up front inside of your marketing, you're like doing a lot of heavy lifting without really knowing it. You're answering all those questions before they come up.
14:19 Stephen Husted: So when those calls do come in, is somebody else on your team handling them? And then are you the final? talking point to the whole equation? Or at this point, you've probably grown to a big, maybe not be you anymore. I don't know.
14:30 Anson Young: Yeah. So that is the hardest piece to let go is that kind of acquisitions piece. If you're in this business and you're like, I talked to a lot of investors and even myself, it took me forever to kind of hand off that final piece of, okay, I can train somebody to actually take these calls, build rapport, go through this with the homeowner, really have a good idea of what the seller wants. Can we meet those expectations? Can we? solve their problems, let's just say, all the way almost to the end. I do a final approval on the pricing and making sure that the numbers work for the deal, for what we're trying to do. But I am to the point where I've handed off 99% of that process to our acquisitions managers. They take the calls, they do the follow-up, they build the rapport, they do all of that. And not everyone's there yet, of course, but... That part is hard to let go because you're always, ah, nobody can do this better than me. So once you let that go, you have actual opportunity to grow your business instead of being on the phone all day.
15:29 Stephen Husted: Yeah. So speaking of how you've grown, I think you were speaking at the BiggerPockets conference. I think it was like 2019, maybe somewhere in there. I can't recall. How far, how have you evolved since then? Like, how's your business changed?
15:42 Anson Young: Yeah. So if that was 2019, we were probably just starting to change our model from wholesaling and flipping to more of a burr cashflow model. And that honestly took me longer than expected. We were going to launch that in 2020, but of course kind of pandemic stuff happened and nobody knew what was going to happen inside of real estate and how that would affect anything. And so I put that. on the shelf for about a year and a half before we finally launched three markets out of state. And we're primarily focused on doing BRRRR hold deals there and basically wholesaling anything that doesn't meet our model. We're cherry picking the best deals and anything that's not inside of our... wheelhouse we're wholesaling out that's been a huge change of moving from more transactional real estate i hadn't held any properties until 2022 or so and then from then on that's all i'm focused on and getting rid of all the other shiny objects and remaining focused there
16:41 Stephen Husted: we think we could do a whole episode on shiny objects it's just the funniest
16:44 Anson Young: in my brain it's so wired to them i want to jump on all these fun things but i know from experience that it like totally derails my business and like Everything suffers while I'm like focused on the shiny object.
16:56 Stephen Husted: The funny thing is that so many people that fall for it. Everybody taught me, look, you can listen to Pace Morby. Start with a single family who's doing short-term rentals. I don't want to do this. I want to do RV parks. It's all evolving in. Trying to figure out what works for your business.
17:10 Anson Young: And it's hard because if you're on social media of any kind, there's 10 shiny objects per minute shoved at you. And it makes you really question, well, I thought I wanted to do single family burrs, but this guy's killing it in notes or this guy's killing it with multifamily or syndication or listening to even one of Pace Morby's things. You're like, oh, I want to do creative. I want to do innovations or whatever. But I found sticking. to what I do best and not deviating, that's when I've actually seen growth because I've jumped into a million shiny objects and almost always regretted it. So now I'm a little more disciplined, I guess.
17:49 Stephen Husted: Yeah. And you have to learn that over time. My motto is I just do what I like to do. I got to really like to do it. I don't care who's doing what and making how much money doing what they're doing. I don't really care about that. I want to enjoy what I do. If you don't enjoy what you're doing and you're stuck in it, you're stuck in it. And it'll be worse than any W-2 bad boss you've ever had in your whole entire life.
18:13 Stephen Husted: Well, back in 2015, doing midterms, but they were called corporate housing. And that was cool. Furnished. Got some good guests that stay. This is cool. And then I started going out of state, doing long-term on the Midwest. Then we bought a cabin in the Smokies and started doing that. And now we're developing and flipping and doing that. And I don't want to do any of the other things. I want to leave the long terms to the property manager to handle. But the short term and the midterm, it's like the anxiety of sometimes waking up in the morning and seeing that red notification going, oh, shit, it's Sunday and it's Easter. There's a bear that has gone on the deck and taken all their food.
18:55 Stephen Husted: I don't want anything to do with it. And I tell everybody this. And everyone's like, oh, so does it mean that short-term rentals is a bad idea? I'm like, no, it could be a great idea for you. But it isn't for me. Back to the shiny objects. At the end of the day, if you could be a disciplined investor and pick something that you truly will enjoy doing. And you can really dedicate to it. I think you can really put in some serious growth. And, you know, if down the road you want to pivot on something else, go for it. But the juggling of multiple things
19:23 Anson Young: is a bad idea. And I found like when people are new and they're just starting out and they're trying to really figure out what they want to do. And I was in this exact boat when I first started. They want to do like 10 things at once and they never go anywhere because they're so scattered. Once you have that laser focus and you block out everything else, you have so much more clarity and you know exactly what the tasks are. do next to get your first deal or whatever that looks like. And then, like you said, you said it perfectly where once you have that working and then you want to pivot later, go for it.
19:53 Anson Young: But you're never going to start if you have 10 roads in front of you and you're not just going to pick one and go down it for a while. You just won't get started.
20:01 Stephen Husted: Because if you pick an investment strategy, you're starting a new business from scratch. You're in a startup. Okay. So if you bought a single family home where you started mailers. What's happening over a period of a year is you're systemizing as you're going along because all these different things, these events come up and you're like, oh, I don't want to go through that again. Let's systemize that. Let's know that for the next time. You're constantly building that out. And if you got 10 going, you're never systemizing because you're just whack-a-mole in through. a bunch of scenarios and you probably got that when you did your mailers you probably got that momentum got hyper focused kept making it better dialed it in grew how many you're mailing out and took on as a business of its own yeah
20:43 Anson Young: for sure not to say i haven't had stops and starts in there where you i did the classic thing where i mailed for three months and then i got so busy that i didn't mail for five months and then i wondered Hey, where'd all my leads go? What happened? And then restarting those mailers after five months of not mailing felt like starting all over because the momentum was gone. The snowball wasn't rolling downhill. And it felt like going from square one all over again and having to rebuild that momentum. That's hugely important.
21:11 Stephen Husted: You are actually helping other investors. buy real estate in Denver, correct? Yeah. The types of investo
21:17 Anson Young: I help in Denver are usually house hacking, house hackers. Since affordability is pretty important here, it's very expensive to get into real estate. And one of the probably better ways to get started is house hacking. I found that to be a really good niche because I'm not competing with myself. I'm not looking for flips for investors. There's not a ton of buy and hold guys here who
21:37 Anson Young: buying at huge volumes like they are in the Midwest. So house hacking is a pretty good niche to be in as far as using my license for that.
21:46 Stephen Husted: So the house hacking is one of the strategies. And so how are the clients that are coming to you? What are they trying to knock? And is this like their first property and then they're going to try to step up to their next? Or are they trying to become investor, multi-residential? What's their kind of their
22:00 Anson Young: strategy? Yeah, for the most part, they are investment oriented. So they want to get into their first deal. They've discovered that house hacking is probably the best way to do that. And so they are looking to, within a year or two, moving on to their next property. I have one client who's on his fifth house hack. And so we've gone through the process every…
22:21 Anson Young: like one or two years for the last seven years. And he's just moving up and he's keeping the last property and renting out the space that he was occupying and moving up. And his last one, he didn't buy a house hack because he got married and they kind of didn't want to do that anymore. But he now has five properties and kind of got the benefits of each one as he lived there and probably saved himself 10 or 15 years of just investing on the side. to get that many properties. And so he has a full-time job that he loves. He's a pilot. And so he doesn't want to go into full-time real estate, but he wants to own real estate. And so for seven years, it worked out really well for him to do that with his lifestyle. He wanted to settle down a bit more and get married. And we found him a great condo in a hit part of town. And that's where he and his wife live. And he has his four other properties that are cash flowing. And yeah, so it seems to be like they're very investment oriented. Going out and just buying a rental as their first property is probably not the most feasible thing. And so house hacking is probably the next best way to do that is to live in one part, rent out the others, rent out the rest of it, whether it's a duplex or triplex or fourplex. Most of them don't really want to do it full time. And some of them are also just real estate agents. And so they're in real estate every day. But this investment side is not what they do for the most part. And it just kind of runs the gamut of who it works for. That's kind of the default profile. How can I make this work in an expensive city? And that's
23:51 Stephen Husted: how we're making it work. To have 100 doors, you can have three. You could do this strategy. And that's what's really cool. You don't have to follow everybody else's. lead on what they're doing like that's the way to do it you can always carve out your own path the house hacking one is an amazing thing well it's funny enough i did a house hack on my first townhouse that i bought way before it was called the house hack it was like 2004 and it was just purely because i'm like i got three bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms i'm just gonna move my friends in i moved them in i think i was getting 500 bucks a room i was like oh, this is cool. This is paying for part of the mortgage. This is kind of a good idea.
24:26 Stephen Husted: I like this. The people who dismiss it as
24:28 Anson Young: just like having, oh, it's just having roommates and charging them. It can be so much more than that. You did the roommate thing and it worked out great. And there is, and I have two friends in their forties who are both real estate agents and they invest on their own and they're both house hacking. It just. Makes so much sense. One built out his basement into its own unit. They do midterm rentals down there. That amount covers their entire mortgage. And then I have a friend, Katie, who they'll short-term rent their house while they're out camping because they'll go camp for two weeks. So they'll go deep into the mountains, Colorado, and they'll be out there for two full weeks. They have their house set up to where they can short-term rent it while they're gone. And it pays for the entire trip and their mortgage for the month. And so it's crazy. It's like there's a million ways to skin that cat, but you don't have to be 20 with a bunch of friends or in college with a bunch of your friends renting out rooms. There's investors I know in their 40s who can definitely, they don't have to house hack, but they're still doing it because it makes so much sense and it offsets their housing payment, which is crazy.
25:33 Stephen Husted: A lot of development out there and we'll buy a small little two bedroom, one bath, single family, and you'll have a basement and we'll rehab both. We'll turn them into three, two. in the basement and then build the ADU in the backyard. We finished this. I'm like, God, I would live in this. This is amazing. We don't have basements here. I live in San Jose, California. And so we don't have a lot of basement. The whole setup is different. Even if it comes down to the development part of the ADUs, the houses out there, they sit closer to the front of the street and like to the right. So you have a lot of space on the left and they have a lot of alley accesses. So you can literally just take that garage foot and just. go-to story and then put a fence and so it's separated and everybody's got their space and you can go to a lake we tried to back in like february i found this old like hundred plus year old home that had this amazing basement and it had a nice lot i could do everything i wanted to do and i went all in wrote the best offer the highest offer and the neighbor to the left who already owns his home there, a nice house. He just knew somebody was going to go in there and develop and do things. He got it. And he just swindled his way with the listing agent saying, oh, I knew the owner. She was 100. And I have some of my stuff there. And he got it for $50,000 below my offer. I was so upset. Then I just held back because I want that house hack type scenario. I want something that I could cash flow or it's going to be two units when I retire. I just have two ways to bring money in. That's another part of the whole equation. But it's a little different here.
27:04 Anson Young: Yeah, I might have to talk to you about ADUs because I'm looking at a property where we might want to do something like that, where it's either generational living, like if my son goes to school here in town, he can have his own place. But in the meantime, we could rent it out or something like that. But ADU building is a whole different ballgame for sure. I haven't dipped my toes into development yet. So that's another shiny object that I'm holding off for a few years because I know I'm going to love it. to the point where I'm going to drop everything else. Would you rather do 12 flips a year or develop like four amazing properties per year? And what's like the time difference on that? And like, for me, I'm like, I'd rather do the lower volume, like higher output thing. But development's definitely in my future, I think. You're definitely the guy to talk to,
27:48 Anson Young: it sounds like, for the ADUL. Heck, yeah.
27:51 Stephen Husted: I am just all focused on that. And everything else is... ran by a team and all that but this is something that I'll watch a 30-minute somebody in Seattle that was at some type of mastermind and I'm just learning everything how I deal with architects in the city zoning just what can you actually do on the slot just getting creative but I find that it has been the most satisfying rewarding part of the real estate journey has been that by far and it just I think really just comes down because I just I love the fact that you take this raw land and you put a plan together when you design the house and now somebody's moving into it and you got this house there. That's going to be there for decades and decades. That's so cool. It's awesome. And it feels good. You're
28:38 Anson Young: not helping me with my money. You're selling it. No. Well, I'm sure you used to flip, right?
28:44 Stephen Husted: We'll flip when there's just a great opportunity. The numbers just make a lot of sense. Doing nice. big project we're doing one right now because it fell in our lap and it's got it funny enough we got this one that was a really just crazy house just overgrown cars everything hoarder house and we picked it up for 400 000 but it came with another lot And this is in West Seattle. We've been rehabbing the house. We got it for four. We're going to be in it for two. And probably ARV will be around 925 when we're done. And then we have the lot that's in front of it as you drive up the street. We have another 6,800 square foot lot that we're now implanting. That's a little bit more complicated, but we're thinking we're going to build two units at least. It's already got its own parcel number. So we don't need to condoize or do all this stuff we have to do on these other lots. Yeah, we're going to flip that one to... gain some capital. And the only thing about development is you need a lot of capital. If you're doing a lot of projects, one project, you can do 20% down and get a construction loan on it and be okay. And once you condoize the lot, now you have a free and clear lot. So you can go get a loan for that whole amount right then and there. That's wild. A lot of people don't understand that until they find it out. When you find out like, oh, wait, the lot gets condoized. It's free and clear. Now I can get a loan. So if I'm going to bill that 400, 450, the bank's going to give me the loan for 450. That's pretty wild. It's amazing. There's some steep slopes. There's some other scenarios that we have to work through. Our architect thinks that we can definitely pull off two or maybe it turns into one big house. The key is that. It's a free lot. Complain about that. I can't complain. If you have a project, like if you have a house that you own right now with a decent backyard that seems like it makes sense, you should just explore it. Just do it casually, like work through that process on it. Take the timeline, just work through it. I have some lenders for you.
30:39 Anson Young: Have you looked into any prefab or mass timber or anything like that on those?
30:43 Stephen Husted: When we first got out into Seattle, it was 2024. It took six months to build the team. 2024, we went out there, we bought one, then we got another one the following month. And then we had five by year one. And then we had 13 in development. Then it was like, oh gosh, I need to systems and now I got to focus. So I didn't want to ever get distracted. So I just hired good contractors and I stay focused. But the prefab could be a great option too.
31:11 Anson Young: That stuff's come so far that it's like, to me, it's very interesting. Like prefab, maybe. 10, 15 years ago was just like, what are you talking about? Manufactured homes? Maybe. I don't know. But now they do the panels in the factory and ship them out. And it seems like there's a trade-off for your hold time or the construction time versus getting it up in three weeks. Can you go from slab to like house in three weeks versus at least here in Denver, it's a new build projects, like at least 12 months or nine months or something like that.
31:40 Stephen Husted: I've never been to Denver, so I don't know you guys' neighborhoods, but like how do your houses sit on lots and do you guys have alleys? And do you think that... Putting an ADU in the backyard was really separated. And people get, oh, you're not going to live in someone's backyard. And I'm like, what do you mean? You would live in a townhouse community with people everywhere. or a condo development what's the difference here something doesn't make sense but how was it in denver
32:02 Anson Young: yeah it's like you're gonna live at an apartment above a two-car garage and it's like you lived in an apartment right you lived in a condo so i guess the older part of denver i guess kind of like the central denver area is basically on that alley system as well and so they did just change zoning to where you can pretty much put an adu up there used to be specific zoning for specific areas for adus and now they've opened it up to like where almost anybody could put up an ADU if they have the room. And you don't necessarily have to have an alley. There's ways to do it. The property I'm looking at, it's in a suburb of Denver, but it's on a cul-de-sac and there's room in the back and the parking is already there. So being able to do that, it's pretty easy to be able to do it. But obviously the alley situation is so much better because they have their own parking or they have the garage or whatever that is, depending on, do you guys kind of do the garage with the unit above or do you do two on its own or what?
32:55 Stephen Husted: And then yes, you can have a one car garage and maybe you have a open space to the left of it. And then you go two stories and getting in a three, two and a half, 1200 square feet in that range. Do you know if you can condolize in Denver? I guess you could do it a different way too. If you guys have other types of build, like we have SB9 where you can just lot split and build
33:14 Anson Young: from there. I think for us, it is a lot split. situation are you selling off the adus it's not that advanced here i think it's still attached to that front property and so the loan and everything is obviously a little bit different when you go to sell it you're selling both houses there are definitely ways to split the lot for sure it takes time and i think the majority of people are just doing the adu for extra income or if you're buying a rental and you want to put another rental property on there like they're just doing it that way i don't think that they're going through the process of splitting it and selling them off separately unless it's like a side-by-side duplex i think that's very easy to do like if you're doing development doing that side-by-side duplex is obviously you're going to do the lot split the party wall agreement for basically the the shared wall i think you have to have that for the lot split and then selling each piece with its own lot size obviously its own property everything like that so yeah that is very interesting that seattle is doing it where you can just condoize it and you just separate it just directly from there and then its own thing
34:18 Stephen Husted: san jose where i live they implemented that as well san jose california's got a lot of progressive density things that they're doing with like adus and different ways that you can chop up a lot and It's really popular. So I would imagine at some point it's traveling throughout the United States. I think what happens is some people just watch how it's been rolled out in other places. In Seattle, they are surrounded by water. They don't have a lot of land. And so they need housing badly. And so they're just very proactive on getting these units built. I wish they'd be a little faster at the city. That's a whole nother podcast in itself.
34:58 Anson Young: I could be wrong. Like Denver might be now on top of that. I just don't follow like that very closely. So there's a very good chance that it's me that I'm getting it, that I'm wrong. So
35:08 Stephen Husted: I think you should just try one. Whenever that moment comes, I've got everything else running smoothly, I would say. that you could dedicate some time because you're going to know how it is. The minute you jump into something new, that's what you're doing if you want to be good at it. Like $350,000. I guess up
35:23 Anson Young: there in Seattle, what's kind of your typical price per
35:25 Stephen Husted: square foot on the build? And we were in it for about $412,000 and it appraised for $750,000. And we're going to rent it out. We haven't put it on the rental market anywhere between $3850,000 and $4,000,000. And we just refinanced. So we had some problems on this one. So we had a great appraisal. getting ready to put it on the rail market. Then the city came out and made us do an adjustment and made us do an infiltration system between the single family and the new, they call them daddies, but I'm tired of calling daddies because people don't know what it is. So I just say everything's an ADU. It's a dadu out there. It's detached accessory dwelling unit. So they made us do something. We did it really fast, got with our architect, got it ready. And then we're sitting waiting. And then the city for electrical connection, this lot is a 12,000 square foot lot. And what we did, now we can add more density. So then we connected with our architect and started working on the rest of the lot. That tripped up city light on what we were doing. They're like, oh, whoa, you're doing a commercial development now. So we're going to take it upon. And so they cut our application for the dadu. Then we had to get back in line, which now means that we have to wait until July 20th. We've been done with this project since last month on a mortgage. So now we're losing $3,200 a month on that unit. But for that one, we paid CAD for the main house. We rehabbed the main house. We made it into a duplex. It's rented. We self-funded the DADU project all the way to about 90% and then took a draw. And so we did that because we're like, okay. we got a lot going on in this lot. The laws just think we're going to run into problems. And so we did it that way. And then, of course, we ran into problems. And now we can absorb that hit because we planned for it somewhat. But it was just something out of our control. It's just nuts.
37:14 Anson Young: Yeah. So I guess if you waited until after the detached AEU was fully approved and everything, and then fine, you wouldn't have run into
37:22 Stephen Husted: that, right? Yeah. They changed the laws and were like, oh, cool. And then so I contacted my architect and I said, all right, what can we do here? And he comes back. He's, oh, you can just knock down the single family and we'll put 10 units up. I'm like, no, we just finished rehabbing that. I'm like, what can we do on the left side of the house? And we ended up going with a duplex towards the very back of the left part of the lot and then another unit in the middle and then another unit in the front. So we'll have a total of seven units. Oh, wow.
37:51 Anson Young: And right now there's the duplex and then the detached ADU. So building out four more units on there. Wow. On 12,000 square feet? Yeah, it's
38:00 Stephen Husted: pretty cool. Wow. Okay. It's an interesting, that was our first purchase in Seattle. We got it for 740. It's not my favorite location. It's like at the end of the street and the freeway is really close to it, but it's got a ton of trees. But then it backs up to a really cool park. The lot allowed us to do so much more on it. And so people don't care. They don't care that they're by the freeway. It's just things that I'm not used to where I live. I don't want to live by a freeway. It's not that bad. It's just not my cup of tea. But it's been cool watching the project. You know, they have different laws now. You can do the middle housing out in Seattle. So you can go bigger than 1,200 square feet that they were doing on their original dadu builds. We're pushing at about 1,200 square feet. So we went a little bit bigger. But there's also a lot of talk about... Just because you can add that square footage doesn't mean you're going to get the ROI out of it on the resale part of it. I think we're building at 1,400 square feet a unit now on those ones. And we're just going to test it. We're going to test and see what's going to go on. We have to do a ton of infrastructure when it comes to utilities on this one as well now. Underground utilities for the electrical and all that. And that was going to be like 120,000, I think, just on that. But just on that, everything else seems okay. But it's either that or you just have a chunk of raw land sitting there. What are you going to do? Are you going to take some profit on paying for all these utility scenarios and then take your profit on the other ones? But I don't know. It's cool. I should send you the drawings for it. It's pretty amazing. They do crazy stuff out there in Seattle on some of these lots. They can get that density in there. It's pretty amazing.
39:33 Stephen Husted: Yeah. We like
39:34 Anson Young: Denver changed to where, cause we had these lots where they were like mixed unit five or something that they were called. And people were like tearing down a house and then putting these like sideways. There's no front door facing the street. So like they stacked sideways and they could put five or 10 units in there, which sounds crazy, but they just rolled that back or they walked it back because just. Like you're driving by,
39:56 Anson Young: you have house, house, house, and then you have a sideways condo, row house, I guess, that nothing faces the street. And so the aesthetics of it was, I guess, unpopular. So now you have to have a front door that faces the street. And I don't know what you can put behind that. Then everything else can be sideways or something like that. But it is interesting how that stuff changes and then like changes back. It could change next. next year to where you can do it again i guess you just have to really pay attention to that stuff when when you're in the development side like
40:26 Stephen Husted: you'll think oh you're ruining the neighborhood or that's going to stick out the way they the they design and put design and blend them into the lots it's pretty cool and there's some alleyways that look like little mini neighborhoods now because there's they got so many of them popping up everywhere it just looks completely normal Yeah, it does. So what do you like to do out in Denver? What are the cool things to do out there00:00 Anson Young: That is the hardest piece to let go is that kind of acquisitions piece. If you're in this business and you're like, I talked to a lot of investors and even myself, it took me forever to kind of hand off that final piece of, okay, I can train somebody to actually take these calls, build rapport, go through this with the homeowner, really have a good idea of what the seller wants. Can we meet those expectations? Can we... solve their problems, let's just say, all the way almost to the end. I do a final approval on the pricing and making sure that the numbers work for the deal, for what we're trying to do. But I am to the point where I've handed off 99% of that process to our acquisitions managers. They take the calls, they do the follow-up, they build the rapport, they do all of that. And not everyone's there yet, of course, but that part is hard to let go because you're always, ah, nobody can do this better than me. So once you let that go, you have actual opportunity to grow your business instead of being on the phone all day.
00:56 Stephen Husted: If you don't enjoy what you're doing and you're stuck in it, you're stuck in it. And it'll be worse than any W-2 bad boss you've ever had in your whole entire life.
01:08 Stephen Husted: I'm Stephen Husted, and you're listening to The Breakthrough Podcast, a space designed for clarity, curiosity, and the stories that move us. Here, we step away from the noise and into the moments that define us, the early influences, the hidden struggles, and the breakthroughs that reshape our lives. From personal reinvention to building a life through real estate and entrepreneurship, these conversations remind us that success isn't a straight line. It's a series of honest decisions.
01:47 Stephen Husted: Today's guest is Anson Young, a real estate investor, entrepreneur, and agent who has built a reputation by mastering one of the oldest marketing strategies in the business. direct mail. Most investors follow trends. Anson built something better. Over a decade, he refined a system that consistently finds deals and spots opportunities his competitors miss. Anson proved that simplicity scales. A handwritten letter campaign of just 250 mailers generated his first deal and became the blueprint for expanding into multiple markets and building a substantial real estate portfolio. In this episode, Anson breaks down his evolution from transactional deals to buy and hold wealth creation, explains why staying focused matters more than chasing trends, and shows how house hacking has accelerated financial freedom. for his clients we explore direct mail marketing investing in competitive markets development opportunities and the systems that let you scale beyond yourself let's jump in
02:52 Stephen Husted: all right anton we finally got you
02:53 Anson Young: on yeah for sure thanks for having me
02:55 Stephen Husted: is it three is a charm
02:57 Anson Young: That's right. Three different times of having like catastrophic things happen. Not really catastrophic, just technical difficulties and other difficulties. Yeah,
03:06 Stephen Husted: but you had one. Didn't you have an issue on one that like a tree fell on a house?
03:09 Anson Young: Yeah, a listing of mine where my clients are moved out of country. And so I'm kind of managing the property and making sure that everything's. going just fine with it. And a neighbor had called and one of our storms took down a tree and kind of hit, clipped the side of the roof and broke a window and there was water getting into the property. So it was like, there's no one else on call since they don't live here. So I went to go coordinate getting that taken care of. Yeah, it was for us in Denver. I think everywhere's had a really dry winter and we got this late spring storm that brought down tons of trees. I had five or six limbs in my yard, pretty big size. And just driving around,
03:50 Anson Young: it felt apocalyptic. There was just leaves everywhere. There was tree branches down. There was trees split in half. Heavy, wet snow plus leaves, probably not a good combo.
03:59 Stephen Husted: No. Don't you guys get golf ball size hail too at points?
04:05 Anson Young: Yeah, it just hailed two days ago. Thankfully, where I'm at, it was very tiny. It was like pea size, I guess. But man, the last two years, I got a car that got hit twice, totaled basically twice. And yeah, like... golf ball size hail. It'll look nice. Then all of a sudden it gets really dark and the sky turns kind of greenish and then boom, you get hit by hail.
04:23 Stephen Husted: That just takes your car. That's just multiple dents.
04:26 Anson Young: It's your car just looks like somebody just sat there and threw golf balls at it all day. And thankfully I didn't have any window breakage, but I've had friends of mine where their entire windshield is shattered, the back window shattered, all the hails getting inside the car. So you have all the water damage inside the car, plus all the body damage. Yeah. It's seems to be getting. worse these days. We didn't have this many hailstorms maybe 10, 20 years ago. So we're just getting more. So thankfully yesterday or the other day, we were just fine. But there's other parts of Denver where they got nailed pretty hard.
04:58 Anson Young: I think downtown got just really hit hard.
05:01 Stephen Husted: And some of the higher elevations get it year round, correct? In the summer too, when these big storms come through just in the late afternoon.
05:08 Anson Young: Not really hail, but there is a rule of thumb that if you're hiking up in the mountains, especially if you're above treeline, which is I think 11,000 feet, be done by 2 p.m. because 2 p.m. storm could roll through and really heavy wind. It could snow even the summer that high. It can definitely hail, but then you also have the lightning and the lightning factor too. So anytime we go hiking and we're up that high, it's like you start at five in the morning and you're done by noon or one o'clock because you don't want to be stuck up there at 2, 3 p.m. because those storms seem to roll through like all the time. how it is
05:45 Stephen Husted: yeah my first experience in colorado was doing the leadville 100 and so you start like real early in the morning five ish sixes in the end they want you off columbine by no later than one o'clock you want to be heading back home
05:58 Anson Young: especially on those races because you're like really exposed and you're kind of way out there
06:01 Stephen Husted: yeah it's crazy the thing was columbine's like 13 500 because leadville is at over 10 it's like a pressure cooker in your head it's so crazy so Interesting enough, I met you a long time ago at a BiggerPockets conference that you're speaking at. Yeah, and you're speaking about handwritten letters. That was it. Are you still doing that?
06:23 Anson Young: Yeah, we are. I've been doing direct mail since 2015 and have consistently... Kept it going because it's honestly the best ROI on consistently finding deals. And we've expanded out into markets out of state. But basically the first thing we're doing is the analysis. And then the second phase is where we go straight into testing marketing. And it's a lot of the same stuff that we use here in Denver. We're using out of state. But yeah, the handwritten letter or the handwritten format of letter still works in 2026. I didn't think it would still be working, but it's so old school.
06:54 Stephen Husted: Dude, yeah. It's been around a long time, but you were kind of like the OG of it back then. I just remember going, oh. But when you first started doing it, maybe you closed a couple of deals and did that give you some momentum to go, okay, we're onto something here. Let's expand this.
07:08 Anson Young: Yeah, for sure. I was resistant to it. I had been finding all my deals on MLS or from referrals from agents and stuff, and it wasn't very consistent. And I got into a mastermind and met some friends who have been doing direct mail for even longer than I have. But once I kind of downloaded the information into my brain and I was like, do I want to be the guy who's sending out 5,000 mailers a month and having those incoming calls and people are mad at you for sending a mail and all that stuff. And honestly, I have one of those unicorn stories on my first mailing sequence where I did Drive for Dollars and then I mailed that list. So it's very, very old school. I even remember this house. It was one of those that was just very borderline. It was like, does this make the driving for dollars list? Is it bad enough? It just had some discolored siding and some chipped paint on the trim. But otherwise was the roof looked decent. The windows looked fine. And I hemmed and hawed and I go, you know what? It's 50 cents or it's 75 cents for the stamp. And why not? In a sequence of eight letters, that'll cost me at maximum $8 to add this to my list, right? And I came home, compiled the list, sent out. that mailing batch i think it was a small batch of maybe 250 so my very first mailing list was like 250 and got a call from that owner and he wasn't in any kind of financial distress he had a really good job he's actually a mortgage broker of all things so he knows a ton of agents and everything but he still called me we made that deal work he wanted out of it and wanted to move just a couple neighborhoods over to get into a different high school for his kids. But there was just enough deferred maintenance there to make a deal. He was just like, I don't want to deal with this. I don't want to put it on the market. So we made that deal happen. And so it was one of those things where it doesn't happen to everybody, but the first mailer. I got my first deal and yeah, immediately proved the concept of, oh, okay, this is working. They're coming to me based on the marketing that I'm sending out. And so scaling up from there was pretty easy. I quadrupled that list the next month. And so I had about a thousand that went out the next month. And so yeah, I have been continually building that up. And the fact that it's easily scalable is pretty nice, but yeah, having it strike the first time I'm mailing, that was like. Oh, and I know that doesn't happen to everybody. It definitely doesn't happen to me when I go into a new market. It doesn't always happen. It was like immediate proof of concept. Oh, OK, this works. And that quality of seller and that deal was great.
09:33 Stephen Husted: So what do you think the average is to finally get something, a deal put together from a mailer? And is your letters themselves? Is there an art behind the letter?
09:44 Anson Young: Oh man, we're going to be here for hours talking about it. I could talk about this all day, obviously, but yeah, there's definitely a volume amount that helps with that kind of success rate. Kind of like the more you send, the more leads you get, the more calls you get, those leads kind of get filtered down into appointments. And then the amount of appointments that you go on, like you're increasing your chances of all of those things, which means you're increasing your chances of a deal. Of course, I wish that there was like a hard and fast metric. I've even looked through my KPIs of, okay, like how many mailers do you have to. per deal it gets a little weird because then the next month you're sending to that same list. And then the next month you're sending that same list. So are they responding to that first one? Are they responding because you've mailed them for two years straight? What is actually causing those numbers to gel? And it is a little bit hard to nail that down a bit. But I would say if you're just starting, don't expect to send 10 letters and get an amazing response or anything like that. If you kind of look at nationwide response rates, and it definitely varies by market, but expect 1% or lower. to respond to your marketing. So sending out 100, you might get one phone call. You may not know your KPIs from there or your metrics, but usually we're about 20 phone calls per deal. So if you can... back out those numbers, you would realize, okay, I need 20 more. I know I basically need 20 months of sending out a hundred mailers to probably get a deal. The nice thing is that that is a numbers game, but if you are mailing, I would say start with hopefully 250, 500, a thousand would be ideal because then you can at least get 10 phone calls in to kind of work those numbers. Those metrics get a little fuzzy, but to your second question, is there an art to the actual mailer? Yes, there's, I have a whole philosophy around it. We've had really good with handwritten and handcrafted is kind of like the mantra. And so handwritten doesn't have to be physically handwritten. It just has to look like it's handwritten. We've done everything inside of this space, including hiring handwriters, having a handwriting machine that plots out the handwriting to just printing handwritten. high quality, handwritten fonts. And the response rate isn't enough to justify the more expensive options. Buying a $10,000 handwriting machine, you probably don't need to do that. The handwriting fonts will convert. probably just as well. And then inside of there, we send everything that's branded. So nothing that's anonymous. I'm not doing yellow letters circa 2013. I'm not doing that kind of thing where it's just anonymous. Hey, I'm a guy who works out of my van. Sell me your house. It's not that kind of thing. Everything's branded and that it's personalized as well. So we're not just saying, dear homeowner, we're saying, dear Mr. Smith, we're interested in purchasing your property at 123 Main Street in the Andover neighborhood or whatever that looks like. And so there is a little bit more thought put into that. Making the letter definitely seller benefits oriented. I have a friend who sends out these letters and he kind of wonders why he doesn't get traction, but it's all about him. I've been in this business for 23 years and I've closed 1,500 deals and we have $5 million in line of credit ready for your house. And it's like, the seller doesn't care about that stuff. They care what you can offer them. Can you close fast? Can you give them a fair offer? They can leave their stuff there. Anything that they want to leave there, they can leave there. I think if you put all those things together inside the mess, and the medium of your letter, you'll have a lot more success than just sending out a form letter, talking all about yourself and it not being personalized to the homeowner and stuff like that.
13:15 Stephen Husted: He didn't follow your lead, I think.
13:19 Anson Young: He's a little too egotistical to listen.
13:21 Stephen Husted: Yeah, you really have to make it about them. You're trying to help them out. Can you solve these problems? Because if you can solve those problems, that's going to connect with them and they're going to be ready to pick up the phone because you can execute. And they can be moved on.
13:33 Anson Young: And you see it in the agent space too. I'll get letters in my mailbox that are like the agents talking all about their experience and how much experience they have. And that's great. I get the mentality behind that. It's, oh, if I project, okay, I've been in this business a long time. I know what I'm doing. I've closed a bunch of deals that will tell the homeowner that they can trust me or that I'm successful or whatever that is. But if you're like, hey, we'll.
13:58 Anson Young: We work with sellers to make sure that they get the most for their house and benefits to them. So we can talk about the flexible closing or options to get you into your next house. Those are like the real questions that people have. And so if you can answer those questions up front inside of your marketing, you're like doing a lot of heavy lifting without really knowing it. You're answering all those questions before they come up.
14:19 Stephen Husted: So when those calls do come in, is somebody else on your team handling them? And then are you the final? talking point to the whole equation? Or at this point, you've probably grown to a big, maybe not be you anymore. I don't know.
14:30 Anson Young: Yeah. So that is the hardest piece to let go is that kind of acquisitions piece. If you're in this business and you're like, I talked to a lot of investors and even myself, it took me forever to kind of hand off that final piece of, okay, I can train somebody to actually take these calls, build rapport, go through this with the homeowner, really have a good idea of what the seller wants. Can we meet those expectations? Can we? solve their problems, let's just say, all the way almost to the end. I do a final approval on the pricing and making sure that the numbers work for the deal, for what we're trying to do. But I am to the point where I've handed off 99% of that process to our acquisitions managers. They take the calls, they do the follow-up, they build the rapport, they do all of that. And not everyone's there yet, of course, but... That part is hard to let go because you're always, ah, nobody can do this better than me. So once you let that go, you have actual opportunity to grow your business instead of being on the phone all day.
15:29 Stephen Husted: Yeah. So speaking of how you've grown, I think you were speaking at the BiggerPockets conference. I think it was like 2019, maybe somewhere in there. I can't recall. How far, how have you evolved since then? Like, how's your business changed?
15:42 Anson Young: Yeah. So if that was 2019, we were probably just starting to change our model from wholesaling and flipping to more of a burr cashflow model. And that honestly took me longer than expected. We were going to launch that in 2020, but of course kind of pandemic stuff happened and nobody knew what was going to happen inside of real estate and how that would affect anything. And so I put that. on the shelf for about a year and a half before we finally launched three markets out of state. And we're primarily focused on doing BRRRR hold deals there and basically wholesaling anything that doesn't meet our model. We're cherry picking the best deals and anything that's not inside of our... wheelhouse we're wholesaling out that's been a huge change of moving from more transactional real estate i hadn't held any properties until 2022 or so and then from then on that's all i'm focused on and getting rid of all the other shiny objects and remaining focused there
16:41 Stephen Husted: we think we could do a whole episode on shiny objects it's just the funniest
16:44 Anson Young: in my brain it's so wired to them i want to jump on all these fun things but i know from experience that it like totally derails my business and like Everything suffers while I'm like focused on the shiny object.
16:56 Stephen Husted: The funny thing is that so many people that fall for it. Everybody taught me, look, you can listen to Pace Morby. Start with a single family who's doing short-term rentals. I don't want to do this. I want to do RV parks. It's all evolving in. Trying to figure out what works for your business.
17:10 Anson Young: And it's hard because if you're on social media of any kind, there's 10 shiny objects per minute shoved at you. And it makes you really question, well, I thought I wanted to do single family burrs, but this guy's killing it in notes or this guy's killing it with multifamily or syndication or listening to even one of Pace Morby's things. You're like, oh, I want to do creative. I want to do innovations or whatever. But I found sticking. to what I do best and not deviating, that's when I've actually seen growth because I've jumped into a million shiny objects and almost always regretted it. So now I'm a little more disciplined, I guess.
17:49 Stephen Husted: Yeah. And you have to learn that over time. My motto is I just do what I like to do. I got to really like to do it. I don't care who's doing what and making how much money doing what they're doing. I don't really care about that. I want to enjoy what I do. If you don't enjoy what you're doing and you're stuck in it, you're stuck in it. And it'll be worse than any W-2 bad boss you've ever had in your whole entire life.
18:13 Stephen Husted: Well, back in 2015, doing midterms, but they were called corporate housing. And that was cool. Furnished. Got some good guests that stay. This is cool. And then I started going out of state, doing long-term on the Midwest. Then we bought a cabin in the Smokies and started doing that. And now we're developing and flipping and doing that. And I don't want to do any of the other things. I want to leave the long terms to the property manager to handle. But the short term and the midterm, it's like the anxiety of sometimes waking up in the morning and seeing that red notification going, oh, shit, it's Sunday and it's Easter. There's a bear that has gone on the deck and taken all their food.
18:55 Stephen Husted: I don't want anything to do with it. And I tell everybody this. And everyone's like, oh, so does it mean that short-term rentals is a bad idea? I'm like, no, it could be a great idea for you. But it isn't for me. Back to the shiny objects. At the end of the day, if you could be a disciplined investor and pick something that you truly will enjoy doing. And you can really dedicate to it. I think you can really put in some serious growth. And, you know, if down the road you want to pivot on something else, go for it. But the juggling of multiple things
19:23 Anson Young: is a bad idea. And I found like when people are new and they're just starting out and they're trying to really figure out what they want to do. And I was in this exact boat when I first started. They want to do like 10 things at once and they never go anywhere because they're so scattered. Once you have that laser focus and you block out everything else, you have so much more clarity and you know exactly what the tasks are. do next to get your first deal or whatever that looks like. And then, like you said, you said it perfectly where once you have that working and then you want to pivot later, go for it.
19:53 Anson Young: But you're never going to start if you have 10 roads in front of you and you're not just going to pick one and go down it for a while. You just won't get started.
20:01 Stephen Husted: Because if you pick an investment strategy, you're starting a new business from scratch. You're in a startup. Okay. So if you bought a single family home where you started mailers. What's happening over a period of a year is you're systemizing as you're going along because all these different things, these events come up and you're like, oh, I don't want to go through that again. Let's systemize that. Let's know that for the next time. You're constantly building that out. And if you got 10 going, you're never systemizing because you're just whack-a-mole in through. a bunch of scenarios and you probably got that when you did your mailers you probably got that momentum got hyper focused kept making it better dialed it in grew how many you're mailing out and took on as a business of its own yeah
20:43 Anson Young: for sure not to say i haven't had stops and starts in there where you i did the classic thing where i mailed for three months and then i got so busy that i didn't mail for five months and then i wondered Hey, where'd all my leads go? What happened? And then restarting those mailers after five months of not mailing felt like starting all over because the momentum was gone. The snowball wasn't rolling downhill. And it felt like going from square one all over again and having to rebuild that momentum. That's hugely important.
21:11 Stephen Husted: You are actually helping other investors. buy real estate in Denver, correct? Yeah. The types of investors
21:17 Anson Young: I help in Denver are usually house hacking, house hackers. Since affordability is pretty important here, it's very expensive to get into real estate. And one of the probably better ways to get started is house hacking. I found that to be a really good niche because I'm not competing with myself. I'm not looking for flips for investors. There's not a ton of buy and hold guys here who
21:37 Anson Young: buying at huge volumes like they are in the Midwest. So house hacking is a pretty good niche to be in as far as using my license for that.
21:46 Stephen Husted: So the house hacking is one of the strategies. And so how are the clients that are coming to you? What are they trying to knock? And is this like their first property and then they're going to try to step up to their next? Or are they trying to become investor, multi-residential? What's their kind of their
22:00 Anson Young: strategy? Yeah, for the most part, they are investment oriented. So they want to get into their first deal. They've discovered that house hacking is probably the best way to do that. And so they are looking to, within a year or two, moving on to their next property. I have one client who's on his fifth house hack. And so we've gone through the process every…
22:21 Anson Young: like one or two years for the last seven years. And he's just moving up and he's keeping the last property and renting out the space that he was occupying and moving up. And his last one, he didn't buy a house hack because he got married and they kind of didn't want to do that anymore. But he now has five properties and kind of got the benefits of each one as he lived there and probably saved himself 10 or 15 years of just investing on the side. to get that many properties. And so he has a full-time job that he loves. He's a pilot. And so he doesn't want to go into full-time real estate, but he wants to own real estate. And so for seven years, it worked out really well for him to do that with his lifestyle. He wanted to settle down a bit more and get married. And we found him a great condo in a hit part of town. And that's where he and his wife live. And he has his four other properties that are cash flowing. And yeah, so it seems to be like they're very investment oriented. Going out and just buying a rental as their first property is probably not the most feasible thing. And so house hacking is probably the next best way to do that is to live in one part, rent out the others, rent out the rest of it, whether it's a duplex or triplex or fourplex. Most of them don't really want to do it full time. And some of them are also just real estate agents. And so they're in real estate every day. But this investment side is not what they do for the most part. And it just kind of runs the gamut of who it works for. That's kind of the default profile. How can I make this work in an expensive city? And that's
23:51 Stephen Husted: how we're making it work. To have 100 doors, you can have three. You could do this strategy. And that's what's really cool. You don't have to follow everybody else's. lead on what they're doing like that's the way to do it you can always carve out your own path the house hacking one is an amazing thing well it's funny enough i did a house hack on my first townhouse that i bought way before it was called the house hack it was like 2004 and it was just purely because i'm like i got three bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms i'm just gonna move my friends in i moved them in i think i was getting 500 bucks a room i was like oh, this is cool. This is paying for part of the mortgage. This is kind of a good idea.
24:26 Stephen Husted: I like this. The people who dismiss it as
24:28 Anson Young: just like having, oh, it's just having roommates and charging them. It can be so much more than that. You did the roommate thing and it worked out great. And there is, and I have two friends in their forties who are both real estate agents and they invest on their own and they're both house hacking. It just. Makes so much sense. One built out his basement into its own unit. They do midterm rentals down there. That amount covers their entire mortgage. And then I have a friend, Katie, who they'll short-term rent their house while they're out camping because they'll go camp for two weeks. So they'll go deep into the mountains, Colorado, and they'll be out there for two full weeks. They have their house set up to where they can short-term rent it while they're gone. And it pays for the entire trip and their mortgage for the month. And so it's crazy. It's like there's a million ways to skin that cat, but you don't have to be 20 with a bunch of friends or in college with a bunch of your friends renting out rooms. There's investors I know in their 40s who can definitely, they don't have to house hack, but they're still doing it because it makes so much sense and it offsets their housing payment, which is crazy.
25:33 Stephen Husted: A lot of development out there and we'll buy a small little two bedroom, one bath, single family, and you'll have a basement and we'll rehab both. We'll turn them into three, two. in the basement and then build the ADU in the backyard. We finished this. I'm like, God, I would live in this. This is amazing. We don't have basements here. I live in San Jose, California. And so we don't have a lot of basement. The whole setup is different. Even if it comes down to the development part of the ADUs, the houses out there, they sit closer to the front of the street and like to the right. So you have a lot of space on the left and they have a lot of alley accesses. So you can literally just take that garage foot and just. go-to story and then put a fence and so it's separated and everybody's got their space and you can go to a lake we tried to back in like february i found this old like hundred plus year old home that had this amazing basement and it had a nice lot i could do everything i wanted to do and i went all in wrote the best offer the highest offer and the neighbor to the left who already owns his home there, a nice house. He just knew somebody was going to go in there and develop and do things. He got it. And he just swindled his way with the listing agent saying, oh, I knew the owner. She was 100. And I have some of my stuff there. And he got it for $50,000 below my offer. I was so upset. Then I just held back because I want that house hack type scenario. I want something that I could cash flow or it's going to be two units when I retire. I just have two ways to bring money in. That's another part of the whole equation. But it's a little different here.
27:04 Anson Young: Yeah, I might have to talk to you about ADUs because I'm looking at a property where we might want to do something like that, where it's either generational living, like if my son goes to school here in town, he can have his own place. But in the meantime, we could rent it out or something like that. But ADU building is a whole different ballgame for sure. I haven't dipped my toes into development yet. So that's another shiny object that I'm holding off for a few years because I know I'm going to love it. to the point where I'm going to drop everything else. Would you rather do 12 flips a year or develop like four amazing properties per year? And what's like the time difference on that? And like, for me, I'm like, I'd rather do the lower volume, like higher output thing. But development's definitely in my future, I think. You're definitely the guy to talk to,
27:48 Anson Young: it sounds like, for the ADUL. Heck, yeah.
27:51 Stephen Husted: I am just all focused on that. And everything else is... ran by a team and all that but this is something that I'll watch a 30-minute somebody in Seattle that was at some type of mastermind and I'm just learning everything how I deal with architects in the city zoning just what can you actually do on the slot just getting creative but I find that it has been the most satisfying rewarding part of the real estate journey has been that by far and it just I think really just comes down because I just I love the fact that you take this raw land and you put a plan together when you design the house and now somebody's moving into it and you got this house there. That's going to be there for decades and decades. That's so cool. It's awesome. And it feels good. You're
28:38 Anson Young: not helping me with my money. You're selling it. No. Well, I'm sure you used to flip, right?
28:44 Stephen Husted: We'll flip when there's just a great opportunity. The numbers just make a lot of sense. Doing nice. big project we're doing one right now because it fell in our lap and it's got it funny enough we got this one that was a really just crazy house just overgrown cars everything hoarder house and we picked it up for 400 000 but it came with another lot And this is in West Seattle. We've been rehabbing the house. We got it for four. We're going to be in it for two. And probably ARV will be around 925 when we're done. And then we have the lot that's in front of it as you drive up the street. We have another 6,800 square foot lot that we're now implanting. That's a little bit more complicated, but we're thinking we're going to build two units at least. It's already got its own parcel number. So we don't need to condoize or do all this stuff we have to do on these other lots. Yeah, we're going to flip that one to... gain some capital. And the only thing about development is you need a lot of capital. If you're doing a lot of projects, one project, you can do 20% down and get a construction loan on it and be okay. And once you condoize the lot, now you have a free and clear lot. So you can go get a loan for that whole amount right then and there. That's wild. A lot of people don't understand that until they find it out. When you find out like, oh, wait, the lot gets condoized. It's free and clear. Now I can get a loan. So if I'm going to bill that 400, 450, the bank's going to give me the loan for 450. That's pretty wild. It's amazing. There's some steep slopes. There's some other scenarios that we have to work through. Our architect thinks that we can definitely pull off two or maybe it turns into one big house. The key is that. It's a free lot. Complain about that. I can't complain. If you have a project, like if you have a house that you own right now with a decent backyard that seems like it makes sense, you should just explore it. Just do it casually, like work through that process on it. Take the timeline, just work through it. I have some lenders for you.
30:39 Anson Young: Have you looked into any prefab or mass timber or anything like that on those?
30:43 Stephen Husted: When we first got out into Seattle, it was 2024. It took six months to build the team. 2024, we went out there, we bought one, then we got another one the following month. And then we had five by year one. And then we had 13 in development. Then it was like, oh gosh, I need to systems and now I got to focus. So I didn't want to ever get distracted. So I just hired good contractors and I stay focused. But the prefab could be a great option too.
31:11 Anson Young: That stuff's come so far that it's like, to me, it's very interesting. Like prefab, maybe. 10, 15 years ago was just like, what are you talking about? Manufactured homes? Maybe. I don't know. But now they do the panels in the factory and ship them out. And it seems like there's a trade-off for your hold time or the construction time versus getting it up in three weeks. Can you go from slab to like house in three weeks versus at least here in Denver, it's a new build projects, like at least 12 months or nine months or something like that.
31:40 Stephen Husted: I've never been to Denver, so I don't know you guys' neighborhoods, but like how do your houses sit on lots and do you guys have alleys? And do you think that... Putting an ADU in the backyard was really separated. And people get, oh, you're not going to live in someone's backyard. And I'm like, what do you mean? You would live in a townhouse community with people everywhere. or a condo development what's the difference here something doesn't make sense but how was it in denver
32:02 Anson Young: yeah it's like you're gonna live at an apartment above a two-car garage and it's like you lived in an apartment right you lived in a condo so i guess the older part of denver i guess kind of like the central denver area is basically on that alley system as well and so they did just change zoning to where you can pretty much put an adu up there used to be specific zoning for specific areas for adus and now they've opened it up to like where almost anybody could put up an ADU if they have the room. And you don't necessarily have to have an alley. There's ways to do it. The property I'm looking at, it's in a suburb of Denver, but it's on a cul-de-sac and there's room in the back and the parking is already there. So being able to do that, it's pretty easy to be able to do it. But obviously the alley situation is so much better because they have their own parking or they have the garage or whatever that is, depending on, do you guys kind of do the garage with the unit above or do you do two on its own or what?
32:55 Stephen Husted: And then yes, you can have a one car garage and maybe you have a open space to the left of it. And then you go two stories and getting in a three, two and a half, 1200 square feet in that range. Do you know if you can condolize in Denver? I guess you could do it a different way too. If you guys have other types of build, like we have SB9 where you can just lot split and build
33:14 Anson Young: from there. I think for us, it is a lot split. situation are you selling off the adus it's not that advanced here i think it's still attached to that front property and so the loan and everything is obviously a little bit different when you go to sell it you're selling both houses there are definitely ways to split the lot for sure it takes time and i think the majority of people are just doing the adu for extra income or if you're buying a rental and you want to put another rental property on there like they're just doing it that way i don't think that they're going through the process of splitting it and selling them off separately unless it's like a side-by-side duplex i think that's very easy to do like if you're doing development doing that side-by-side duplex is obviously you're going to do the lot split the party wall agreement for basically the the shared wall i think you have to have that for the lot split and then selling each piece with its own lot size obviously its own property everything like that so yeah that is very interesting that seattle is doing it where you can just condoize it and you just separate it just directly from there and then its own thing
34:18 Stephen Husted: san jose where i live they implemented that as well san jose california's got a lot of progressive density things that they're doing with like adus and different ways that you can chop up a lot and It's really popular. So I would imagine at some point it's traveling throughout the United States. I think what happens is some people just watch how it's been rolled out in other places. In Seattle, they are surrounded by water. They don't have a lot of land. And so they need housing badly. And so they're just very proactive on getting these units built. I wish they'd be a little faster at the city. That's a whole nother podcast in itself.
34:58 Anson Young: I could be wrong. Like Denver might be now on top of that. I just don't follow like that very closely. So there's a very good chance that it's me that I'm getting it, that I'm wrong. So
35:08 Stephen Husted: I think you should just try one. Whenever that moment comes, I've got everything else running smoothly, I would say. that you could dedicate some time because you're going to know how it is. The minute you jump into something new, that's what you're doing if you want to be good at it. Like $350,000. I guess up
35:23 Anson Young: there in Seattle, what's kind of your typical price per
35:25 Stephen Husted: square foot on the build? And we were in it for about $412,000 and it appraised for $750,000. And we're going to rent it out. We haven't put it on the rental market anywhere between $3850,000 and $4,000,000. And we just refinanced. So we had some problems on this one. So we had a great appraisal. getting ready to put it on the rail market. Then the city came out and made us do an adjustment and made us do an infiltration system between the single family and the new, they call them daddies, but I'm tired of calling daddies because people don't know what it is. So I just say everything's an ADU. It's a dadu out there. It's detached accessory dwelling unit. So they made us do something. We did it really fast, got with our architect, got it ready. And then we're sitting waiting. And then the city for electrical connection, this lot is a 12,000 square foot lot. And what we did, now we can add more density. So then we connected with our architect and started working on the rest of the lot. That tripped up city light on what we were doing. They're like, oh, whoa, you're doing a commercial development now. So we're going to take it upon. And so they cut our application for the dadu. Then we had to get back in line, which now means that we have to wait until July 20th. We've been done with this project since last month on a mortgage. So now we're losing $3,200 a month on that unit. But for that one, we paid CAD for the main house. We rehabbed the main house. We made it into a duplex. It's rented. We self-funded the DADU project all the way to about 90% and then took a draw. And so we did that because we're like, okay. we got a lot going on in this lot. The laws just think we're going to run into problems. And so we did it that way. And then, of course, we ran into problems. And now we can absorb that hit because we planned for it somewhat. But it was just something out of our control. It's just nuts.
37:14 Anson Young: Yeah. So I guess if you waited until after the detached AEU was fully approved and everything, and then fine, you wouldn't have run into
37:22 Stephen Husted: that, right? Yeah. They changed the laws and were like, oh, cool. And then so I contacted my architect and I said, all right, what can we do here? And he comes back. He's, oh, you can just knock down the single family and we'll put 10 units up. I'm like, no, we just finished rehabbing that. I'm like, what can we do on the left side of the house? And we ended up going with a duplex towards the very back of the left part of the lot and then another unit in the middle and then another unit in the front. So we'll have a total of seven units. Oh, wow.
37:51 Anson Young: And right now there's the duplex and then the detached ADU. So building out four more units on there. Wow. On 12,000 square feet? Yeah, it's
38:00 Stephen Husted: pretty cool. Wow. Okay. It's an interesting, that was our first purchase in Seattle. We got it for 740. It's not my favorite location. It's like at the end of the street and the freeway is really close to it, but it's got a ton of trees. But then it backs up to a really cool park. The lot allowed us to do so much more on it. And so people don't care. They don't care that they're by the freeway. It's just things that I'm not used to where I live. I don't want to live by a freeway. It's not that bad. It's just not my cup of tea. But it's been cool watching the project. You know, they have different laws now. You can do the middle housing out in Seattle. So you can go bigger than 1,200 square feet that they were doing on their original dadu builds. We're pushing at about 1,200 square feet. So we went a little bit bigger. But there's also a lot of talk about... Just because you can add that square footage doesn't mean you're going to get the ROI out of it on the resale part of it. I think we're building at 1,400 square feet a unit now on those ones. And we're just going to test it. We're going to test and see what's going to go on. We have to do a ton of infrastructure when it comes to utilities on this one as well now. Underground utilities for the electrical and all that. And that was going to be like 120,000, I think, just on that. But just on that, everything else seems okay. But it's either that or you just have a chunk of raw land sitting there. What are you going to do? Are you going to take some profit on paying for all these utility scenarios and then take your profit on the other ones? But I don't know. It's cool. I should send you the drawings for it. It's pretty amazing. They do crazy stuff out there in Seattle on some of these lots. They can get that density in there. It's pretty amazing.
39:33 Stephen Husted: Yeah. We like
39:34 Anson Young: Denver changed to where, cause we had these lots where they were like mixed unit five or something that they were called. And people were like tearing down a house and then putting these like sideways. There's no front door facing the street. So like they stacked sideways and they could put five or 10 units in there, which sounds crazy, but they just rolled that back or they walked it back because just. Like you're driving by,
39:56 Anson Young: you have house, house, house, and then you have a sideways condo, row house, I guess, that nothing faces the street. And so the aesthetics of it was, I guess, unpopular. So now you have to have a front door that faces the street. And I don't know what you can put behind that. Then everything else can be sideways or something like that. But it is interesting how that stuff changes and then like changes back. It could change next. next year to where you can do it again i guess you just have to really pay attention to that stuff when when you're in the development side like
40:26 Stephen Husted: you'll think oh you're ruining the neighborhood or that's going to stick out the way they the they design and put design and blend them into the lots it's pretty cool and there's some alleyways that look like little mini neighborhoods now because there's they got so many of them popping up everywhere it just looks completely normal Yeah, it does. So what do you like to do out in Denver? What are the cool things to do out there?
40:53 Anson Young: We do typical Denver stuff. We go hiking and hang out at breweries. paddleboard. And for me, I like to go to concerts and stuff. So it's all kind of the typical 40s stuff that everybody in Denver feels like we do. See you in the mountains. All right, see ya. Yeah, Red Rocks is great. I haven't been there in a few years. There just hasn't been a show that's rolled through that I wanted to go see. But they also have movies there. I think every week in the summer, there's a free movie that you can go see. And they're all Three Amigos and maybe Happy Gilmore and some of the stuff from the 90s and 80s that you want to go see. And then they'll do bigger. stuff like Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz and they'll do stuff there that's fun but get out at eight nine o'clock and enjoy Red Rocks and watch a movie outdoors with a couple thousand other people it's fun the sound is good it's not like because you look at the pictures of like when it was first built in 1910 or whatever it was it's like how did they figure out this is like a natural amphitheater that projects sound and just sounds really good and obviously they've built it up now to where it's a full-on venue but yeah the sound's great The sound and the atmosphere is just what you go there for. It is interesting because it's pretty vertical. Like all the seats kind of go up. So if you ever go down, if you're on stage or if you're just on that first level and you look like at eye level, you can probably only see five rows. And then you have to crank your neck up to see the other 50 rows that are up there. It is a bit surreal. It's a great venue. So it's like a bucket list for a lot of people. They were like, I want to see my favorite band at Red Rock. They'll fly out. And I know some friends who have midterm rentals and short-term rentals around there who just cater to the concert community. They all roll in for shows. It's a great place. And they have a bunch of hiking trails around there. And if there's not a show there, you can just go. There's a lot of people who work out running up and down the big steps. And you go there on a Saturday morning and there'll be dozens of people doing yoga on one side. And then there's these sweaty guys running up and down the middle. And then there's people just walking and milling around. I think it's like a city park when it's not being. used as a venue so you can go anytime and there's even people who get up on stage and they'll bring an acoustic guitar and they'll just play for a couple hours and do their thing and it's a pretty cool like yeah it's a total vibe they do have a structured yoga thing i think once or twice a month there'll be like a few thousand people like doing it there's always people there working out would
43:12 Stephen Husted: be one piece of advice you'd give a aspiring new investor
43:16 Anson Young: Being that I get to talk to a lot of new investors, it seems like their main kind of hangups are on basically like locking on their strategy and then being able to take action from there. So I would say, again, from experience, figure out what you want to do and then block out everything else. At least for two or three, four months, put some serious effort into one lane and gain traction there. before you switch gears because if you're switching gears too early you're switching roads or whatever that metaphor is you're not going to gain enough momentum to do what you want to do and so going back to the shiny objects like just try to block everything out get laser focused on one thing and put your effort all behind that before you jump off and lose your momentum try that for at least like 90 days or six months or whatever that looks like for you before you give up on it. Because once you give up and you move to the next thing, you're starting all over and you've just reset the clock on. You wanted to do bird deals, but now you're going to switch to creative. You're going to switch to development, whatever that looks like. You are starting over and give yourself the time to progress in that one lane before you switch and you'll be that much better for it. And switch later if you want. Flipping is great, but you want to go off into rentals. You at least now have this. strategies of finding deals, fixing them, and then now you just have to add on the rental piece. You don't have to start from zero on the finding, fixing, and then renting deals. You've got the experience here and you can always parlay that into another adjacent field for sure.
44:44 Stephen Husted: From time to time, from everybody out there, especially investors that have put out a lot of work. And the reason why we're saying this is because we've gone through it and we just want you to be the best and succeed. And just picking that one strategy, you'll go much further. And you'll get further down the road when you want to switch to the next one, too. So,
45:04 Stephen Husted: yeah, I appreciate you jumping on the breakthrough today, Anson. I'm glad we got you on. I know. Totally. Yeah. We weren't letting you go. I'm like, well, you can't come on again. OK, well, let's send in another email. Let's get him on. Yeah. And you know what's funny? You came up. Because we've been pulling a lot of the BiggerPockets guests off their podcast to get onto mine. And somehow I just remembered something about going to one of the conferences. You know what? I want to get Anson on because I remember hearing him talk about his letters and stuff. So I'm like, reach out. So you said yes.
45:36 Anson Young: Absolutely. Yeah. Me too. This is a lot of fun. I'm on the development shiny object. So thanks
45:41 Stephen Husted: for that. You got it. All right. Thank you so much. You have a great day. Thank you for tuning into our show, where we hope you found inspiration and gained valuable insights. If you enjoyed this conversation and want to stay updated on our latest episodes, be sure to subscribe to our podcast and share it with others who might benefit from it. We appreciate your support and look forward to bringing you more candid conversations and breakthrough moments in the future. Until next time, take care and keep exploring new ideas and strategies.
40:53 Anson Young: We do typical Denver stuff. We go hiking and hang out at breweries. paddleboard. And for me, I like to go to concerts and stuff. So it's all kind of the typical 40s stuff that everybody in Denver feels like we do. See you in the mountains. All right, see ya. Yeah, Red Rocks is great. I haven't been there in a few years. There just hasn't been a show that's rolled through that I wanted to go see. But they also have movies there. I think every week in the summer, there's a free movie that you can go see. And they're all Three Amigos and maybe Happy Gilmore and some of the stuff from the 90s and 80s that you want to go see. And then they'll do bigger. stuff like Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz and they'll do stuff there that's fun but get out at eight nine o'clock and enjoy Red Rocks and watch a movie outdoors with a couple thousand other people it's fun the sound is good it's not like because you look at the pictures of like when it was first built in 1910 or whatever it was it's like how did they figure out this is like a natural amphitheater that projects sound and just sounds really good and obviously they've built it up now to where it's a full-on venue but yeah the sound's great The sound and the atmosphere is just what you go there for. It is interesting because it's pretty vertical. Like all the seats kind of go up. So if you ever go down, if you're on stage or if you're just on that first level and you look like at eye level, you can probably only see five rows. And then you have to crank your neck up to see the other 50 rows that are up there. It is a bit surreal. It's a great venue. So it's like a bucket list for a lot of people. They were like, I want to see my favorite band at Red Rock. They'll fly out. And I know some friends who have midterm rentals and short-term rentals around there who just cater to the concert community. They all roll in for shows. It's a great place. And they have a bunch of hiking trails around there. And if there's not a show there, you can just go. There's a lot of people who work out running up and down the big steps. And you go there on a Saturday morning and there'll be dozens of people doing yoga on one side. And then there's these sweaty guys running up and down the middle. And then there's people just walking and milling around. I think it's like a city park when it's not being. used as a venue so you can go anytime and there's even people who get up on stage and they'll bring an acoustic guitar and they'll just play for a couple hours and do their thing and it's a pretty cool like yeah it's a total vibe they do have a structured yoga thing i think once or twice a month there'll be like a few thousand people like doing it there's always people there working out would
43:12 Stephen Husted: be one piece of advice you'd give a aspiring new investor
43:16 Anson Young: Being that I get to talk to a lot of new investors, it seems like their main kind of hangups are on basically like locking on their strategy and then being able to take action from there. So I would say, again, from experience, figure out what you want to do and then block out everything else. At least for two or three, four months, put some serious effort into one lane and gain traction there. before you switch gears because if you're switching gears too early you're switching roads or whatever that metaphor is you're not going to gain enough momentum to do what you want to do and so going back to the shiny objects like just try to block everything out get laser focused on one thing and put your effort all behind that before you jump off and lose your momentum try that for at least like 90 days or six months or whatever that looks like for you before you give up on it. Because once you give up and you move to the next thing, you're starting all over and you've just reset the clock on. You wanted to do bird deals, but now you're going to switch to creative. You're going to switch to development, whatever that looks like. You are starting over and give yourself the time to progress in that one lane before you switch and you'll be that much better for it. And switch later if you want. Flipping is great, but you want to go off into rentals. You at least now have this. strategies of finding deals, fixing them, and then now you just have to add on the rental piece. You don't have to start from zero on the finding, fixing, and then renting deals. You've got the experience here and you can always parlay that into another adjacent field for sure.
44:44 Stephen Husted: From time to time, from everybody out there, especially investors that have put out a lot of work. And the reason why we're saying this is because we've gone through it and we just want you to be the best and succeed. And just picking that one strategy, you'll go much further. And you'll get further down the road when you want to switch to the next one, too. So,
45:04 Stephen Husted: yeah, I appreciate you jumping on the breakthrough today, Anson. I'm glad we got you on. I know. Totally. Yeah. We weren't letting you go. I'm like, well, you can't come on again. OK, well, let's send in another email. Let's get him on. Yeah. And you know what's funny? You came up. Because we've been pulling a lot of the BiggerPockets guests off their podcast to get onto mine. And somehow I just remembered something about going to one of the conferences. You know what? I want to get Anson on because I remember hearing him talk about his letters and stuff. So I'm like, reach out. So you said yes.
45:36 Anson Young: Absolutely. Yeah. Me too. This is a lot of fun. I'm on the development shiny object. So thanks
45:41 Stephen Husted: for that. You got it. All right. Thank you so much. You have a great day.

∎ Podcast Outro:

Thank you for tuning into our show, where we hope you found inspiration and gained valuable insights. If you enjoyed this conversation and want to stay updated on our latest episodes, be sure to subscribe to our podcast and share it with others who might benefit from it. We appreciate your support and look forward to bringing you more candid conversations and breakthrough moments in the future. Until next time, take care and keep exploring new ideas and strategies.

Stephen Husted