Our recent event is on a topic that should interest almost everyone at the moment: the impact of disasters (natural and economic) on mobile home park investing. Sure, Covid-19 is the current disaster in America, but it’s not the only one we’ve endured over the last three decades (The Texas S&L Crisis, the Dot.com bust, earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, Katrina, Harvey, and the Great Recession). So if catastrophes are a part of American life, what is the impact on the mobile home park industry and how will these events impact your investment?
Your host is Frank Rolfe who, with his partner Dave Reynolds, is the 5th largest owner of mobile home parks in the U.S. But more importantly, he has lived through every crisis in modern American history, and seen 16% interest rates, every office building in Dallas posted for foreclosure, floodwaters, fires, the mobile home “chattel crisis” of 1999 – and everything else you can name. And he has seen first-hand the impact on mobile home parks from these issues.
If you want to learn skills to succeed with mobile home parks, attend our first ever Virtual Mobile Home Park Investor's Boot Camp. You'll learn how to identify, evaluate, negotiate, perform due diligence on, finance, turn-around and operate mobile home parks. The course is taught by Frank Rolfe who, with his partner Dave Reynolds, is one of the largest owners of mobile home parks in the U.S. To learn more Click Here or call us at 855-879-2738.
Floods, Famine and Pestilence: The Impact of Crisis on the Mobile Home Park Industry - Transcript
Welcome to our next MHU lecture series event titled, Plugs, Famine and Pestilence. The Impact of Crisis on the Mobile Home Park Industry. Now, I chose that title, because we all have to come to grips with the fact that we have had multiple crisis, many crisis in American history. I didn't want to title this thing COVID-19 and The Impact of Crisis, because that's not really fair. Because there's been many, many other times in American history when we've had bad things happen.
Let's just do a quick rundown of all the things that have gone bad in America since its founding. Back in the 18th century, we had three recessions not too long after we founded America. We had the panic of 1785, the panic of 1792, and the panic of 1796. Then you move to the 19th century, we had the panic of 1819, which was a huge banking failure recession. In fact, it was considered the U.S.'s first boom to bust economic cycle, the panic of 1819. Then you had the panic of 1837, this was another major recession with many bank failures, and it resulted in a five year depression. Then you have the panic of 1857, another huge recession, lots of bank failures. The panic of 1873, the panic of 1884, the panic of 1890, the panic of 1893, and the panic of 1896.
Then you proceed to the 20th century. We had the panic of 1901, a huge recession that started with a fight for financial control of the Northern Pacific railway, that was clearly a different time in American history. Then we had the panic of 1907, then we had the depression of 1920. Then, of course, we had the big one that gets all the notoriety, the Wall Street crash of 1929 with the Great Depression.
Now, you know I collect history, and I found a magazine article years ago, to show you how big the depression was. Somebody had written an article, what they did is, they found a record of, in 1925 there was a business meeting held at the Edgewater Hotel in Chicago, among the top business leaders in America at that time. They had, Charles Schwab, the head of the largest independent steel company, not the current Charles Schwab, the brokerage, but Charles Schwab, who was the head of the biggest steel company. Samuel Insull, the president of the world's largest utility company. Howard Hopson, the head of the largest gas company. Ivar Kreuger, who was the president of International Match, which was one of the world's largest companies at that time. Leon Frazier, president of the Bank of International Settlements. Richard Whitney, the president of the New York Stock Exchange. Arthur Cutten and Jesse Livermore, which were two of the largest stock owners in the United States. Albert Fall, who was from President Harding's cabinet.
They then revisited what happened to them, and wrote an article a couple of decades later. Here's what had happened to them. Schwab had died penniless, after living on borrowed money for five years. Insull, Kreuger and Cutten had also died broke. Hopson had gone insane. Whitney and Albert Fall had just been released from prison. Frazier and Livermore had committed suicide. So I think it's safe to say that, that was quite an event, quite a calamity of the Great Depression.
Then we move to the 1970s, you had the OPEC oil price shock recession of 1973, that's the first one that I remember. I was in high school at the time, but I remember that one. Then of course, you had the 1979 energy crisis. Man, do I remember that one, I had a summer job where I was paid at an ad agency and my job was to fill up the owner of the ad agencies car. That was a full time job back then. I would have to go and stand in lines to gas stations sometimes for hours on end, and often when I get up to the front of the lines the pump was out of gas, I had to go find another gas station and stand in line again.
In the 1980s, you had Black Monday of 1987, huge stock market collapsed. Then you had the ever famous, the biggest recession that I was ever involved in, the savings and loan crisis of 1986 to 1995. This thing was so big that of the 3,234 savings and loans in the United States, 1, 043 of those went out of business. To me, that that was my early live version of the Great Depression. It was an unbelievable moment in history.
Then you move into 2000s and who can forget the.com bust of 2000 and 2002, that was always remarkable, that's when people had come up with all these great internet ideas, none of which made any money and all created at one time. Then of course the one that we all know, everyone just calls them... I'm sure familiar with the 2007 financial crisis which was caused by subprime mortgage meltdown in the class, in the U.S. housing bubble. That also brought forth the automotive industry crisis of 2008 to 2010. So if you ranked them together, our current 2020 COVID-19 crisis is number 23 since the founding of America. So we've had 23 major crisis.
So what causes these events? Why do we keep having these events as a nation? Well, I think there's basically four types of these crashes. One crash is the kind where you have a lot of speculation which leads to a bubble and then the bubble also really collapses and that would be like the Great Depression of 1929. Another kind of crisis you have is, when you have a sudden affliction on a certain very high profile industry, that to me that would be like the oil and gas crash. Then you have a change in tax law or other regulations. That's what set forth the savings and loan crash. Then finally you have a natural disaster, could be Hurricane Harvey, and in this case, it's COVID-19. So that's kind of, to me that's like the one we're in now.
So what's important to acknowledge in every crisis in American history is that, some are temporary and some are permanent nature. There's some things that change, the change in the tax laws, the oil and gas crisis, that came and then oil and gas came right back, it seems to always cycle, crash and crash again.
So what is COVID-19? Is this a permanent or is this a temporary crisis? Well, it really all depends on who you are and what you're doing, because like all crises, it's not universally fair, but it affects certain people more than others. So the first thing I would note is COVID-19 really depends on what business you're in. So mobile, home parks and Amazon and fast food, well, we're properly situated for this crisis because we all deal in product that you have to have. You have to have housing, you have to buy some goods and you got to eat. So the essential industries, the bare bows, the things that people rely on day-to-day to live, those seemingly are fine. Sure, we'll have some issues, maybe some collections issues and other items, but people have to have our products, so our products move on.
But then you have a whole another list of businesses, retail shopping centers, strip centers, hotels, in-dining restaurants, bars, cruise ships, airlines, casinos. These may all have permanent issues coming out of this and the reason for that is yes, when they reopen, people may flock to them again. I don't know that people will not be right down there on this trip in Vegas as soon as Vegas is officially reopened. But I think they'll have an issue with investor confidence, because I think investors will never forget the fact these things closed and that will make it really hard in the future. If you want to build a new casino to get financing, if you want to buy some airplanes at an airline, it'd be kind of hard because people will say, "Wait a minute, we've already learned now from COVID-19 that the American government will shut things down when that kind of thing comes to town." People are already predicting COVID-19 may return in the winter.
So again, it depends on whether you're in an essential industry that people have to have or if you're in something that people just don't have to have. Also, it all depends on where you are geographically. I'm sure everybody that reads the COVID-19 stats every day and I'm one of them, but I'm sure you are too, when you go to the sites, it shows you where the virus is most heavy hitting and where is it not? Well, it's not hitting heavy in Kansas city, right? I mean if you look at Missouri and Kansas's cases, almost all the Missouri cases are in St. Louis area, very few in Kansas city.
So Kansas city will probably be in the very first wave of reopening, because there hasn't been that many cases there and there don't seem to be many new cases popping up. But if you're in New York city, yeah this can go on for a really time. I mean New York city or the last time I looked, it's almost 50% of every COVID case between New York and New Jersey, so that's kind of the epicenter of all the problems. So definitely geography will have some impact on how long this crisis goes on.
It also depends on whether or not they find any cures to COVID-19. So for people who are really concerned about it, people who feel like they are in a high risk category, they're probably going to continue a social distancing until the cure is found, and that may mean that a lot of restaurants in certain geographies don't reopen for a long time. I'm not even fully convinced we'll have a football season or I'm really not sure. I think if things break out again, it's very easy to see them canceling all those things again. So there may be industries that have relied on groups as their business model that are just forever altered. They may just have to deal with a new reality, that basically their business model just may not work consistently or safely in the new world we live in.
So what are some tips on dealing with a crisis when you have a crisis such as we're in now and that you will in the future and do we have in the past? Well, the first thing you want to do, is you want to stay calm. If you haven't seen it, go to YouTube and look up one the videos, there's a great video there, which is a reenactment with Sully Sullenberger's voice when he landed the plane in the Hudson river. It's not a cartoon, it's like a documentary sequence. It starts from when he first calls in that he has taken off with his airplane and it ends with his final transmission to the control tower, that he's landed in the Hudson. It shows where the plane is at each moment, it's got kind of a cartoonish airplane thing that did just reenacts what went on.
When you listen to that, what's amazing is, he's so incredibly calm, he takes off like a normal flight, he hits a bunch of birds, he loses his engines and he's calmly telling them what the options are, that he would like to return to the airport. When they say, "Okay, you're cleared to land." He says, "Well, I'm not going to make to the airport." They said, "Well, what will you do?" He said, "I'm just going to land it in the river." Before they can even say, "Oh my gosh, what's going to happen?" He had safely landed it. So staying calm is absolutely essential. There's no benefits to getting worked up in a crisis. Of course, its human nature, you want to get worked up, you're upset, but since there's no benefit, don't do it to yourself, just remain calm.
Number two, you want to conserve cash immediately. So any CapEx objects you have or you were going to do, if you were going to redo your roads in the Mobile Home Park, if you were going to buy a house, whatever you're going to do, you want to hold off on that. You want to conserve cash because cash is absolutely King in times of a crisis. It also means you may have to lay off staff. You've seen that happening right now in a lot of industries, unemployment in America is supposedly going to hit 30% ultimately, that's because people are laying off staff because they're trying to conserve as much cash as they capably can.
Next, you got to think about what the potential scenarios are, including what is your worst case scenario and you need to figure out what will the impact be financially. So if you have a restaurant and you figure, well the restaurant will be shut for at least three months or four months, what does that really mean in dollars and cents? To me, it makes it easier, less stressful, when you really calculate out what is really happening. I don't like the mystery and the uncertainty of not knowing the actual dollar amount, so I think it would be best if you figure out what the actual cost will be, so you have it quantified.
Then you want to gather weapons in alloy of where this cash might come from. You know how much this thing is going to cost, so how are you going to pay for it? Then you might start building the safety network of cash sources, maybe credit lines, friends and family, whatever the case may be. There's no reason to not as fast as you humanly can see crisis coming, to start figuring out what you might to do with it. What do you have available to use as a tool?
Also, you want to map out exactly, how can I mitigate your damages. Number one, you notice with a lot of restaurants they're still doing curbside. No, the revenue is not what it was when they had the in-dining, but it's a way to keep the doors open. It might be a way to pay the rent, it might be a way to keep some of the most valued employees. So you want to figure out how to mitigate your damages, because you don't want to start this mitigation tactics almost immediately. Then you want to approach your lenders and others with the plans based on realistic expectations. The minute you are able to see, that it's very realistic that X, Y, Z will happen to your business because of the crisis, it's time to get everybody in the loop. So go to your lenders, anyone else and say, "Hey, here's what happened because of COVID-19, or the next crash or the last crash before it, and here's what I think will happen and here's my plan and what I'm going to do about it. Here's what's going to cost. Here's the timing."
A lot of banks are very open to talking with people on their plan, but you got to have a plan. You can't go to the bank and say, "Hey bank, this terrible thing happened and I can't make my payment." That isn't going to work. You could go, "Hey bank, this terrible thing happened and here's my plan on paying you back. I'm not going to be able to pay my full payment for the next three months, but I propose paying 30% of my payments and then I'll try and catch up or maybe upload it on the back end of the note." Also, once you've talked to these people, you've got to keep them in the loop with complete transparency. When you call your bank and say you're having a problem and you need to maybe adjust the payments, the worst thing you can do is not call them back, not let them know what's going on. Then they become extremely concerned. Because a lot of people are bad enough business people, they don't ever call people back, they terrify them, they never keep them up to date.
There's nothing worse you can do to a banker than present uncertainty to them. They don't know what to tell others in the bank, their boss, the banking committee, and it's not a good position to be in. So once you've identified everybody that needs to be in the loop, you need to keep them completely updated with complete transparency of what's going on. Also, don't be ashamed when you have an issue like COVID-19 or the next recession or the next recession before that, because you didn't cause it. These are facts of American life. We were having recessions and depressions in the U.S., as I said a minute ago, all the way back in the 18th century, I mean we had no sooner started the country, then we had three recessions in a very short span of time. So it's just a part of life. You didn't cause it. You can't even anticipate it.
I guarantee you there's no one on this call, not one person that saw COVID-19 coming. If I had told anyone in February, we will shut most of America down by April 9th, no one would've taken that bet. Not a soul. So basically you don't cause these crashes, it's just a part of life and you have to learn to work with them, but don't be ashamed about it.
All right, I'll see you want to remain 100% accessible to your Bay investors and everyone, if they have a question, you should be able to go ahead and give them a call and they should be able to call you. So you don't want to have a situation whereby you're not accessible to everyone, because you want them to be able to reach you. That gives them a greater peace of mind if they can reach you.
Also, develop a playbook for every possible scenario and don't be afraid to get mean if necessary. What I mean by that is, you did not cause this recession, this depression, and there's no reason that you should have to take it on the chin, if there's anything out there available to you, any rights available by any legal means necessary, you need to do what you need to do because you don't want to be a victim. If you can help it, you want to get everything that's coming to you that you can fairly get.
Also, one of the most important lessons from the Great Depression, and I read just about every book on the depression because I was so scarred by the savings and loan crisis because the only thing I could find in American history that was as bad was the Great Depression. So I used to read every book there is, I've written... read, all those crazy books that no one ever reads, the thousand page critics by economist and what happened. In many of the books they noted that, one of the key items you do that separated people in the Great Depression from the winners and survivors from those who did not, is that they cut their ties fast from all the other sinking ships.
What that means is, don't start making loans to vendors and loans to people. It's just like, if you're in a ship wreck, if you have an inner life boat and a lot of people are clamoring to grab on to that lifeboat, but will ultimately sink the lifeboat, you have to be able to cut ties and not let other shifts to bring you down. It's very, very important. That's one of the key observations. If you read those thousand page, Great Depression books, the businesses that acknowledged they had a problem and moved quickly were the ones that made it, the ones that ignored it or they saw themselves as somehow some kind of savior that would go out and start making loans to all the other companies that were their vendors because they felt sorry them. Those were the ones who really, really got in trouble.
So what is the potential risk to the Mobile Home Park industry from this latest crisis? Well, the first one on a macro level is, well, we're really in pretty good shape. You know, the depression proved that in a disaster, there's basically two big winners, necessities and vices. That was why St. Louis used to proudly call itself after the Great Depression, first in shoes, first in booze. Why was that important to St. Louis? Because shoes were a necessity and booze were too many people were a necessity, because it was in a way to forget what was going on. In fact, it's worthy to note that the sales of shoes in America went up during the Great Depression. It's one of the few industries that actually improved, as did the vice industries. Tobacco, particularly.
Number two, our industry has always been all about no pay, no stay. But we've never had a moment in American history where we did not have evictions courts that were open. That's a problem. Even if you're in a state that is not putting any kind of stay on evicting residents, you can't do it if the court is not opened. So now what's going to be happening is that the residents, they may not pay you. They ultimately will have to, because you can still evict them, you just can't evict them yet because the courts aren't open. The rent is still due. But what's causing the awkward moment here is the fact that I can't follow my normal, rent is late, send a demand letter, don't pay that, file the evictions. That's going to be a problem.
Now, one big plus right now on collections in Mobile Home Parks is that the people who live in Mobile Home Parks, most of them are either retired or in essential services. I mean, our customers are big into such industries as fast food, work in the supermarkets, all kinds of jobs where they have not lost their job. Those who have lost their job have two big advantages that people didn't have in the Great Depression. Number one, they're getting these giant amounts of money on stimulus checks. Now, I know it seems unfair because the ratio of the stimulus to their earnings is gigantic, whereas to perhaps the millennial with the high paid job, it's barely anything at all.
So that's one thing that will really help people is that they get the stimulus. Then additionally, they're going to get unemployment insurance, which in many areas is roughly 45% of their current earnings over 26 weeks. Although, in some States that's now been enhanced to 39 weeks. In fact, some States have enhanced that you get 45% of your income plus an additional cash payment along with that. So those two factors should really help the collections in Mobile Home Parks. But nevertheless, the fact that you can't evict, that a problem.
Number three, selling or renting homes with offices closed by governmental authority. We have a lot of demand for our product, but in many areas we can't open the office because the offices are closed, because we've been deemed not essential enough to be able to sell when we're at homes. So again, we've never had that problem before. We've always had our Mobile Home Parks offices open in every major crisis of the past. So this is something entirely new.
Then you have renovating homes left by residents who were displaced as a result of the crisis. No one loves renovating mobile homes, but we assumed it would be just business as usual this year, but now suddenly we know we're going to have more homes to renovate, because we are going to have more residents who potentially do that because they lost their jobs. So, that's another challenge from this crisis.
Danger in getting CMBS debt renewed or a new loan with CMBS debt. Conduit debt has pretty much already left the building, he does it every time there's a crisis. Just this is just as typical as night and day and when will it return? Sometimes it returns in a matter of months, sometimes they return in a matter of a year, 18 months. So if you've got conduit debt out there and it's coming up for renewal, you've got to start moving quickly and thinking outside the box.
Also, you have difficulty in conducting due diligence if you're trying to buy a park right now because a lot of things are closed. It may be very hard to get a phase one of [inaudible 00:22:01] done, very hard to get a survey done, very hard to get a title company that's open. So a lot of difficulty in conducting due diligence.
Also, you have danger in buying parts right now without knowing the April and May rent cycles. You don't at this time really know with visibility with any certainty, even in a park that has lots of residents, are they really going to pay April and May and then how many of your residents are going to be in the category of the nonessential jobs, will they lose their jobs. On top of that, even though despite stimulus and unemployment, just don't have the desire, the gumption in them to go out and get a new job and then they would move out. So, you really need to be watching very carefully that April or May rent cycle if you're buying right now.
Finally, difficulty getting a new loan when the banks are closed. It's one thing for Conduit to pull up stakes and leave town, but a lot of the bags which are still in business, they're closed. You can't even go in the branches and people are working from home, and that's going to mean complications in having loan committee meetings and complications in paper in your loan and all kinds of stuff. So those are kind of the challenges you have right now in the Mobile Home Park industry specific.
Then, to me a more important issue is, what can I do to mitigate these risks? What should we be doing right now to mitigate these COVID-19 complications? Well the first one, let's look at collections for a moment. So again, we're seeing that most owners are seeing... I get emails from lots of people, so far so good. People are saying that the people that pay them every month back in February and March, well they're paying them again in April, and that's simply because we have a lot of nice residents who are not impacted by the shutdown, they're either retired or they're working in essential services. So at any Mobile Home Park out there and most of them, there's just a small portion of people who are in those nonessential occupations. The people in nonessential jobs, while again, they've got the stimulus money coming, they don't have it yet, but they're promised of that coming, as well as unemployment insurance. So, so far so good.
But nevertheless, we still want to proactively offer payment plans to those who can prove out that they've lost their jobs due COVID-19. As long as they have a reasonable plan to turn things around. So if someone came to us and said, "Hey, I'm a waitress at Red Lobster and I've been laid off and I don't have my stimulus money yet and I don't have my unemployment money yet but I love living here and I've never been late on a payment before."
Well we have an agreement they can sign, where we can do a payment plan with them. We typically hate payment plans, don't like them, but at the same time, it's easy to see a good resident could be caught in a trap, just a time in trap really, between receive this stimulus and unemployment and when the rent it due. So if they have a reasonable plan and that plan includes that, they'll get caught up on the rent when they get their stimulus check or their unemployment check arrives, it's a whole lot better off to do a payment plan with them, than to lose them and have to go out and get a new resident, which can be very, very costly. So we would much rather work with them.
Now, those who have no plan, it probably doesn't help to do it, because nothing's ever going to happen. So if someone tells you on the front end, "Yeah, I lost my job and I don't want to apply for another one." That's not really a plan. So if someone wants a payment plan and they actually have to have a plan to get from point A to point B.
Another option you have would be cash for keys. If someone says, "Hey, I lost my job, I have no energy or desire to get another job. I don't know what I'm going to do. I got no plan." Sometimes you're better off to just say, "You know what, yeah this COVID-19 thing is terrible, so here's the deal, I'll just go ahead and pay you $300, just to go ahead and move out and just give me your keys, by Monday and I'll give you 300 bucks." Whatever cash amount you agree to. Because, often that's just the fairest bestest thing to do. Yeah, it seems odd paying someone who owes you money, but at the same time, if you pay them and they leave and you look at the court costs and the time lost in rents, possibly the fact the property will be in worser condition that they leave on an unhappy state, then you may well be better off just doing cash for keys.
Now, when the courts reopened, we will all go back to our traditional no pay, no stay. So we're all watching to see when the courts reopen. Again, it will be different in different parts of America, so we may have a lot of courts who reopen in May, you may have other courts who reopen in June. I'm going to say in most areas of America, I assume you'll just have basically two rent cycles without court's, April and May. There may be some parts of America, it might be April, May, June, maybe April, May, June, July in some parts.
Most of the areas that we're in, most of the flyover States, great plains, Midwest, most of these States are planning on reopening on the very end of April. We assume that it will then take a while to get the court caught back up. We'll have a lot of cases to go through from the past, particularly in the kind of criminal cases. But then we will go back to no pay, no stay. So for most of America you're talking a funky collection cycle that might go on for two maybe three months.
Then, selling or renting homes when the office is closed. How can you mitigate that? Well, try some new ideas to show homes, but yet maintain social distancing. One idea is to go in for the lockbox on the home with the code, you can change those codes anytime you want and you can give the customer the code, they can unlock it, look at it. It's a common feature, right in single family homes, so that's nothing unusual. Other people out there are doing virtual showings, take your phone into the home and you can record it or you can even do it live for the customer and show them and you can even post online what the homeless like on the inside.
Another thing we do in some parts is you can unlock the doors to the homes in the morning and lock them back at night. People can then go look at the home, at their predetermined time, they don't even have to talk to someone in the property. Then you can let the resident fill out the application at their own home and email them in. That gets the process started and you can do, and we've been doing the whole financing program, all the documents signed and the whole thing off site. But the problem is with most of those letters you still have to have what are called, wet signatures. You cannot have the customer sign digitally, so they'll still have to mail or FedEx them back in. But there's no reason you can't do the entire transaction from start to finish without ever physically seen the resident.
Since COVID began, I think last week, I want to say we sold like 11 homes. It was an astounding number. There were all done without face to face meetings with social distancing and closed offices, where basically the customer was able to see the home without face to face encounter with our manager, and there was able to complete all the documentation and everything, even though they weren't in the office filing it out. Renovating homes, there are some opportunities for renovating homes that will come out COVID-19 and all the layoffs. So right now we're trying to harness that power by putting banners up on the fences that say things like, "Skilled carpenters needed." Because, you have a lot of people who've been laid off that may have some pretty good skills. So we're hoping to capture the attention of people who drive by the parks all the time, see the banner and then say, "Wait a minute, I just got laid off, I'm a great carpenter."
We're also going to be [inaudible 00:29:34] resident referral letters about, "Contractors Needed." We've never done that before, but there's a lot of people out there who may have friends and family who were laid off, who has some skills for renovation, so we want to capture and harness that power. We're also looking at doing a bonus plan to managers on homes renovated. We have lots of bonus programs on selling or renting homes, well, why not on renovating homes? Our average renovated home always sits in the market for 14 days. I think throughout America and most parts with the demand out there for affordable housing, if you have a home that's priced decently in good condition, you're going to sell or rent it. So renovation is key. So why not right now, while there's so many people who are not employed, who might be able to renovate homes. We really put a special focus on renovating homes.
Now, on CMBS debt, how do you mitigate that? Well, the first thing you do is you want to start your process way, way early. We've always said that, whenever you have a loan and it's coming up for renewal, you want to start that process at least a year ahead and maybe even two years ahead. That gives you a long time, many, many months to find a replacement that if you fail, there's still time to sell the park off. Now, if you haven't given yourself enough time, then what you would need to do is, you go to the servicer and see if there's some way that you could do what's called, an extend and pretend. That's where they extend out when the loan comes due and therefore pretend that it's not a trouble loan because it's not in default. A lot of banks do extend and pretend, some loan servicers have done it.
But again, you want to get out of the front end and say, "Hey, here's what's happened, here's my plan." Remember again, this is not your fault, because you did not cause COVID-19, you did not cause the Great Depression, the energy crunch, the savings and loan crisis. No, you were a victim of this thing. You did not do that. There's no reason for any guilt at all. Just go to your bank or your servicer and just say, "Here's what I have going on." Right? You can also talk to any loan broker and say, "Hey, I have this loan coming up but I can't get it renewed because this bank won't do it, this bank has failed. What are my other options out there?" So, don't be shy again, to call up loan brokers who have access to, not one, not two, but hundreds and hundreds of banks and see what ideas they've got.
Worst case, is the segment is a loan crash. What people would do is they would always tie up their loans and litigation until they can get time to replace it. I'm not saying it's a great idea, it was very, very common back in Texas during the same as the loan crash. So people would all the time, if they couldn't get their loan renewed, what they would do is, they would just come up with any [inaudible 00:32:12] stuffs and file some kind of suit and that suit will then slow things down long enough for them to find a replacement. Again, I'm not advocating that, I'm just saying that's something that people did back in the SNL crash.
How do you mitigate difficulty in conducting due diligence when everything is closed? Well, you may have to get an extension. Any seller out there should know right now given what they see on TV with COVID-19, an extension is fully necessary because you can't buy a property without phase one and a survey and the title and all these many third party reports and you don't have any control over that. So if you need an extension, say I need an extension. Don't be shy, you didn't cause this crisis, just say, "Hey, this crisis came up, I didn't plan on it, I can't get this or that thing done in time and I have got to get an extension." The same is true about the April, May rent cycle. Again, you want to see who pays and who does not pay for April and May, because that's going to tell you a whole lot about what your finance shoals mean, looking after you close on it, what kind of customers you have, many, many different items.
So you're going to have to get an extension. If you are, for example, going to close next week, I would get an extension to see who stays and who goes. I think you really, really at this point in the move, you want to see your April and May rent cycle. Now, if you're comfortable with April, if April has gotten through and everyone has paid like clock work and there's no reason why they would not. If a park is mostly seniors or if you have a park where everyone's in the central industries, there's no reason why April would be any different than January, February, or any other month. But if that's not the case, if you're concerned there may be people who are dislocated from the crash, then you definitely would want to see the April and May rent cycle just to see what happened.
Now, if you can't get an extension for that, then at least make sure you buy the park with numbers strong enough that you could handle losing some degree of residents, because you know something will probably happen in an average park. So if you buy something that's super tight at very low CAP rate and you have no fluff in it at all, that may be a problem for you. If you're buying it at a really good CAP rate and you have lots of things you can improve on or raising rent, you may say to yourself, "You know what? I don't want to anger mom-and-pop to ask for an extension, I'm just going to go and buy it anyway."
Finally, difficulty in getting a new loan when the banks are closed. Again, you may need to get an extension. Right now, if you talked to a lot of banks, if you talk to M.J. Vukovich or another loan broker, they'll tell you right now, if the banks that were doing stuff in 60 days, well that's now become 90, some of them will become 120. It may be for a while here, the typical contract is 60 days of diligence and another 60 to 90 days starting at the end of diligence to get your deal papered. But again, there's nothing to be ashamed of, you didn't cause it and you're not causing it. The fact is with social distancing, the banks can't be open as normal.
Obviously any seller should know that, that is where the ramifications would be. Banks are people, businesses. You cannot have a loan committee meeting in the traditional sense without having a bunch of people in a room and you can't put a bunch of people in a room anymore. So it should become as no shock, this is a seller that you may need to get an extension. How big an extension, talk to the bank, "Hey bank, I want to be realistic with the seller, how long do you think I will be able to get the loan done in COVID-19." "Well, let's see, to tell you the truth, I think we're running right now 90 days." Well, then that's the information you need to convey that onto the seller. Again, I think most sellers will be very realistic on that.
All right, so let's review the macro impact of past events like COVID-19 on the Mobile Home Park industry. So let's churn the best example ever, and that was the 2007, Great Recession. Why is that the best example? Well, because it happened fairly recently, right? So it was about 13 years ago. So even though we've had recessions, depressions in America since the 18th century, you can't really look at the panic of 1898 or 1778 and say, "Oh yeah, well let's overlay that." Because that's a different point in time.
So let's look at what happened 13 years ago, the 2007 Great Recession. I still remember it like it was yesterday, I don't know about you. First thing I noted was the demand for affordable housing skyrocketed, that was the big takeaway. I don't recall anyone really writing articles or saying the words, affordable housing until 2007, to be quite honest with you. I've never done a Google search, I don't think any of my articles prior to that ever talked much about affordable housing. But after that it became a major catch phrase. All those people who were unable to gather, retain single family homes and they had looked for cheaper ways to live, suddenly the word, affordable housing, became big and that it became big because the demand became gigantic.
Next thing that happened, the rent skyrocketed in our industry and that was because of apartment increases and just the demand, because we became a nation of owners to a nation or renters, apartments had an incredible heyday and as a resolve, apartment rents went way up, and because we follow along the rents of apartments and hubs, because again, we're a business just like they are. As their rents go up, our rents go up. So you probably have seen an acceleration in park rents since 2007 more than any other time in American history.
Another thing that happened in 2007 is, we had a just complete dry up of CMBS debt. So CMBS debt just literally left the building in 2007 and it didn't come back for about 18 months. Where did it go? Well, it just stopped. Why did it stop? It stopped because banks who do conduit debt, they don't like uncertainty. That scares them. Right? When they do those big bundlings of debt, they do it at very small marginal increases over what your interest rate is. So as a result, they just can't stand uncertainty. When 2007 happened, that really hurt them a lot. That was scary. Many of them. So what they did is, they just abandoned the building for about a year and a half.
Also in the 2007 Great Recession, it was the first time that Mobile Home Parks really got to most people's radar screen. To be honest with you, I think you'd have to credit 2007 with starting the industry consolidation that we've seen. I don't recall ever at any Mobile Home event prior to 2007, ever, seen any private equity group. Maybe they were there incognito, maybe they were tags instead of saying that they were with Apollo or some other large private equity group that said that they were with, [inaudible 00:39:00] stairs and decks. But, I didn't see people who are dressed nicely, who are professional, wearing fancy name tags until after the Great Recession.
I think what happened is a lot of investors following the Great Recession, a lot of industries that plummeted, they were looking around at new things and they noticed that mobile Home Parks have done pretty good, and now suddenly they were interested in them. Because everything that happened in the world of consolidation, all happened after 2007. I will say that I remember vividly back at MHI in Vegas in about 2008, 2009 there were people going around the show, there at Caesars Palace, telling everyone, "Hey, vote for the weakest politician you can because let's keep this recession going." Isn't it awesome? I vividly remember that, people were just loving the fact that the demand for what we do was going up, that the rents were going up and that we were for the first time getting any kind of respect or attention from other people.
Now, what good things come from a crisis, right? There are obviously lots of bad things. Turn on the news, watch it for an hour, you'll see all the bad things going on. But what is the good thing, what can we all learn? What can we all do in a crisis that's actually productive and even profitable? Well, if you look at J. Paul Getty, and I've read all the biographies of J. Paul Getty, a fascinating figure, he's a polarizing figure. A lot of people hated him, some people liked him, he wasn't really a very likable guy. This was the guy who refused to pay the ransom for his grandson, so he got his ears chopped off. But, he wrote some pretty good books, and if you read the books, he really loved a good old economic recession, depression. He saw that as one of the healthiest things that could happen to any business.
His theory was that when things are good, you get a little lazy, you get a little soft, you know that Tom, the sales guy isn't doing any good, but you don't get rid of him. But then when you have a crisis, it gives you a chance to, I think his quote was, "Scrape the barnacles off the boat." So you get rid of marginal people, marginal products, shut down factories that aren't producing. So he loved them. He was completely turned on with every recession in American history that happened during his lifetime. Maybe he's a little bit right. Maybe it is healthy to have that occasional recession just to help every business maybe get a little better, a little more efficient. So maybe he was a little right, it doesn't sound very nice. But from a strictly an economic perspective, it may not be bad for many businesses to have trials from periods of time just to go ahead and in some ways improve their operations.
Next. A crisis always brings out a lot of buying opportunities. We saw this in the 2007 Great Recession. Here's what happens, you're a mom-and-pop, you own the park [inaudible 00:41:57] you don't put a lot of effort in. Right? Everyone has seen these parks, mom-and-pop live in the house next door and I don't know where they're located, but they don't look at the park because the park could use so much TLC and they drive by it every day and they don't even see it, they just don't even care. They're basically just living for the weekend, collecting the rents, not worrying about it. When you have a crisis happen, it weighs on them, it makes them a little concerned. They say, "Do I really want to own this thing anymore? It's not that much fun. It's looking kind of unpleasant, the news is kind of scaring me. You know what? I think I'll just going to go ahead and sell the thing."
That's what happened with the Great Recession, Depression. Not that they were really in this, they had no debt, they could have lost half the population in the park and still been fine, but it depressed them. Remember that a lot of these park owners, they're getting kind of older in age and they want to go have some fun, they want to retire, they want to go down to a beach somewhere. They want to go on a vacation. Some of them just want to play with the grandkids all the time. Some of them are sick of living in the park or next to the park, it's worn out, worn out of the same people, worn out with people who are all the time hitting them up, wanting to borrow money or not pay rent. So, a good crisis is a good time to break loose a lot of new sellers.
I have no doubt there will be a lot of sellers that come out of COVID-19, not because they were personally impacted and materially impacted, they didn't get sick, they just got depressed and it tipped them over the top because they were already kind of marginal in the park anyway, now they think, "Ugh, what the heck? I think I'll go ahead and sell it." Also, it may create buying opportunities for those who had parks and now don't know how to manage or hit their targets and therefore can't keep their loans going, which means you may see the uptake in part REO. It can come either as a default because they didn't make the payments or what's called term default, they couldn't find a replacement for the loan.
So once again, if we mirror 2007 we may have some more buying opportunities. Now, the opportunities on REO after 2007 what happened there was, people over paid and then the bank became spooked and they couldn't make their payments and the banks would just take them back. So, we'll see how that plays out on the REO. I know as far as moms and pops wanting to sell out, that's a given REO's, you can't really control or estimate that. So it may happen, possibly, we don't know.
Also, we know there will be a stronger demand for affordable housing. So every time we have a crisis, and I know it sounds horrible and people say, "Gee, that's just not good at all." But it's a fact of life, we are a contrarian investment. So, we are basically, one of the few things out there that does better when times are bad, and that's just a fact. That's one of the reasons most people invest in our sector anyway, is they want that hatch. They want a piece of something that does well in bad times, because they may have things that do great in good times, like their own single family dwelling, but they all like the idea of contrarian investment.
Also, definitely going to have, just like in 2007, you're going to have migration away from failed real estate sectors to Mobile Home Parks and that's going to create more capital. People will want to invest in Mobile Home Parks, maybe you start up a fund or a partnership to get investors together. Well, there'll be more people out there wanting to put money in Mobile Home Parks because Mobile Home Parks do well, this COVID will definitely scare them. Also as our industry because we're high profile, there'll be more debt available from lenders, because lenders will say, "Wait, wow, Mobile Home Parks did great, but man, all those retail centers we finance, those went by bust, the hotels went bust, a whole lot of sectors let us down, we're not going to invest in those anymore, we want to put it in the Mobile Home Parks, the new affordable housing."
Next, you're going to have higher rents. Now, I have been preaching about higher rents for the longest time and criticized for just about as long. I won't waste a lot of time giving my same stale arguments, although most people realize they're 100% true, but it's a simple fact of life that our industry has suffered from mom-and-pop quantitative easing for nearly a half a century. If you simply go and find any old book on Mobile Home Park construction or running back from the '50s or the '60s you'll see the average rent in those parks was $50 a month. That's the number you see in there over and over again, $50 a month. If inflation adjust, $50 a month and the date on that book on Google, what are you going to find? Yes, you're going to find this in today's dollars, that's around $500 a month, that's where we should be right now.
Instead, our industry average is about 280, we're about 50% of what the prices are in today's dollars, based on what these things were back in the 1960s. That's absolutely absurd. Why are we like that? We're not like that for any market force. We're not like that because we are an inferior product to apartments. No, we're a superior product to apartments. Class B and class C apartments cannot compete with Mobile Home Parks. Why? No one knocking on your walls and ceilings, having your own yard, parking by your front door and having a nice stable sense of community. Apartments offer none of these items. That doesn't even include the idea that you can be a homeowner and own your own home. So there's no reason we have to be so much lower than apartments, yet that is the rent that we've been in because mom-and-pop's never raised the rents. Then often the new buyer after mom-and-pop is too timid to raise the rents to where they should be based on the economic reality of people liking the product.
Every time we have a crash like this, it in some ways resets the ballots on what the prices should be. Since most people want to have their rents in line with apartments, what they do then is, they just go ahead and raise the rent, as the apartments go up, they go up. So once again, with this crisis, you're going to have more people who move into apartments and more people who want to live in Mobile Home Parks. It's basically just simply supply and demand, and we have so much room in our rents just to be where we're supposed to be.
I have no interest in gouging rents, no interest in going beyond where we're supposed to be, but can anyone explain to me why our rents today are 50% of the 1960s rents in today's dollars? The answer is, you can. The only reason that exists is that mom-and-pops never raised the rents with inflation, and then today when we simply try to catch up with inflation, we get endless criticism. But there's no doubt that this current crisis will once again lead to higher rents.
Finally, when you have a crisis, it gives you the ability to reflect and remove everything that is not productive for your business. You know, back when I had my billboard in business, I had a dinner once with one of my landowners, a very fascinating guy. He owns one of the largest fence companies in Dallas-Fort Worth, he sold every kind of fence, barbed wire, wooden, everything. They didn't have vinyl back then, but this guy sold miles and miles of fencing. He had a gigantic distribution company doing fencing. So I had dinner with this guy, he had dinner with me because when he was going to sign the 30 year lease for a billboard, he wanted to know who he was signing a 30 year lease with. It's the only time I ever met with him, ate with him or anything.
But he it made a real impression on me because he told me how he survived prior recessions and depressions and he told me that there was a crash once, I remember if it was in the '70s or the '80s or when it was, it almost putting him out of business. He almost lost everything. So he told me he was sitting at his desk thinking how this might be the end of his fence company, and he opened the desk drawer and he looked at the desk drawer and he pulled everything out and put it on his desk and he only put things back in the drawer that he actually used and he found that drawer had been stuffed with broken things, broken pens, broken pencils, broken tape measures, you name it, and he threw all that stuff in the trash. Then he looked at the top of his desk and he started getting rid of it again, everything that wasn't any good, anything that was broken, anything that was just taking up space.
Then he literally did that through the whole company. He just went through every product that couldn't sell, he threw it away, he canceled orders. He said, "No, I can't sell your fence, you fence and people don't like it, I've only been ordering it because I was trying to be nice. But now that we're in a recession, I can't afford to keep it on anymore." His staff, he looked at the people who were selling, he'd say, "Okay, well you've been selling great, but Hey Larry, you haven't sold your quota in seven years, so I can't keep you around anymore because you know we're in a recession now." He credited this new attitude towards cleansing the business of everything that wasn't productive for his survival.
Sometimes again, we have a crisis and this kind of hearkens back to J. Paul Getty. It's not a bad thing from time to time, to have a crisis to help you identify what's essential to you, but what's not essential. So maybe right now while you're at home during COVID-19, if you're in isolation or at home working, it's probably the time to reflect on life and just say to yourself, "What do I want in my life? What should I be doing? What could I do better?" If it's buying a Mobile Home Park, "How do I actually do that?" If you already own a Mobile Home Park, "What can I do to do better with my Mobile Home Park?" So maybe it's a good thing many of us are at home, maybe it's a good time we're not doing our regular routine, not going to the movies, not going out to dinner. because maybe this gives you one of the most important things in life, and that's the ability to do a little more thinking.
Now, what are the next risks on the horizon? So if COVID-19 came out of nowhere, so what else is there out there that we need to worry about? Well, I think and I've said that the bigger crisis going on potentially than COVID-19, which is right out in front of everyone, but no one is apparently noticing, most people are not, is the oil and gas price collapse. So if there's another catastrophe coming, I think it's already here, it's just, it hasn't gotten its place in the sun yet. Oil and gas prices have gone from what? $50, $60 a barrel down to about $20 right now, 22, 24. So when I saw that, I hadn't been paying attention because it happened at the same time as COVID-19, so when I saw that first article about the oil or gas price collapse, I was completely unaware. I thought oil and gas are still really like $60 a barrel.
Then I started to analyze what happens to the American oil and gas industry at $20 oil and I found that the price to break even on shale and fracking is somewhere between $30, $40 a barrel. Some of the things I read, some of the more scientific journals pegged that, it'd be [inaudible 00:52:48] $44 a barrel. Certainly you can't make any money at 20 or 24, so right now all of these companies in the U.S. that are making oil and gas, theoretically based on what I read, are really losing money. Every time they create a barrel of oil, they're losing $X per barrel, and there's a lot of oil and gas industry in some parts of America.
Now where I am here in Missouri, it's not a part of our life at all. I don't know if there's any oil and gas in Southeastern Missouri. I've never seen an oil [inaudible 00:53:19] or seen anyone in the oil industry where I am. But we all know in some areas like North Dakota and Louisiana, it's a big old deal. So if you're wondering, well what's the next thing I need to get worried about? That COVID may be lifted here at the end of this month, what do I need to worry about next? Well, you better start worrying about oil and gas and what the impact will be. Just like COVID, it'll be geographic. It's going to be a lot about where you're located at, its going to be a lot about what industry you're in.
But that one I find very alarming, because there are a lot of Mobile Home Parks in areas that are highly served by oil and gas. Now a lot of the markets we all recall from the past as being parts of oil and gas, those have changed over time. So, areas like Midland-Odessa, back in the 1980s in the last gas crash we had, they were not well diversified. There really wasn't much there, but oil and gas stuff. Today you got hotels and restaurants and the school district and all kinds of stuff. So those areas may be okay, but you just need to be thinking about that. So if you're in an oil and gas area, you really need to wonder what's going to happen. If you've been doing man camping in North Dakota investing, that could be a real problem for you because again, we don't really know the impact, but that's definitely the next risk I see out there, is the oil and gas.
Another one is this new permanent shift probably in retail and restaurant usage in demand. Again, who's it going to impact? It's just going to kill people in the strip center, in shopping center real estate aspect groups. Just kill them. I've talked to people who are those things, many of these people in these strip centers, they anticipate not a penny of rent in April or May and June, and many of their tenants are going to declare bankruptcy, and they won't ever get any more rent. They don't have that many tenants. In a Mobile Home Park, if I have 100 space Mobile Home Park and I've got 10 people in the Mobile Home Park in nonessential employment, all right, that means I'm getting paid by 90, so only 10% are in trouble. Of that 10%, I'm hoping that most of them through stimulus money and unemployment are going to pay me.
But imagine if you have a shopping center with only six tenants and all six stop paying you, what in the world do you do? Look at those giant department stores, they're all closed right now, whether it's Nordstrom's or Macy's. Let's assume that they stay up, can't afford to pay any rent, then what do you do? Look at Cheesecake factory, they almost immediately said when this whole thing hit, "Sorry everyone, we can't pay you the rent for April." So I see a real carnage that's going to happen there. Again, for those who are involved with those industries, that can be a real problem.
Another big shift I see is in this whole travel, airline and lodging segment, clearly I don't know if people are going to ever travel again like they did until there is some kind of cure, vaccine treatment for COVID-19. I think people are going to say, "I really would like to go to Paris, but I really don't want to die over that." People are going to say, "You know what, I really want to go to the Grand Canyon, but I don't want to take the flight." When people decline in the ideas of travel, what happens to all those lodging and airline companies? Like how do they pay the debt? There've been so many new hotels built in the U.S. over the last decade. I've been a big beneficiary, so when I go out driving and look at our Mobile Home Parks, in almost every city I go to in America now, there's a really nice inexpensive hotel. I love the Hyatt Place hotels, but even these new Fairfield's they've built, there's all these really nice newer hotels.
What happens to those things? Those things weren't modeled at 50% occupancy, not 10% like it is in some markets right now. How in the world is that going to work? Then the airline industry, what's going to happen with the airline industry? Who's going to go and replace the planes that get older with the full knowledge within the next flu that comes down the pipe, they shut everything down again. If you've got a Mobile Home Park in the areas that are heavy into that, if you have a Mobile Home Park in an area that's there's a lot of focus on travel, it can be a problem.
Finally, I think there's going to be a giant shift in casinos and sports or large scale social interaction, business models. We are already seeing the impact on that on one of our properties, we have a property up in Northern Michigan, they're one of the largest employers in the area, are casinos. Now, everyone who always thought that casinos were stable, but not right now, they're all shut down. Now, if that casino doesn't reopen, there's definitely going to be residents who will be impacted, if that casino does reopen, but traffic is not what it used to be, your residents may still be impacted. If someone was working in there as a waiter or a waitress and suddenly their business falls in half, that's really going to damage them economically. So I think there's a lot of risk in those kinds of venues, because again, we don't know what will happen.
We've now already seen an NBA season, it was basically canceled, baseball is canceled, people were hoping the NFL will go on. I don't have any confidence in that to be honest with you. I'm talking about COVID returning sometime in the winter, apparently going all the way around the world, it can be back again, which would hit right into the heart of the NFL season. So I don't know what will happen, but I know there will be a lot of dislocation from that.
I think the most important thing is you have to realize at this point in the movie, we're never going to get away from the risk of having a regular crisis in the U.S. on a continual basis. I've lived through so many myself all the way back into the '70s, think how many I've been through at this point. If COVID is number 23, I know I've been through at least, at least eight maybe 10, theoretically, if you count some of the sub recession, depressions that came off the main ones, but it's just a part of life. It's a part of American history. We're a nation that's been having crisis, whether it's economic or natural, since we were founded. It's just been on a continual basis. I left off on my list of crisis, I left off hurricanes. I didn't even include Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Ike, Katrina, those weren't even on my list. If you want to add those on, what is COVID-19 was? Like number 50 or something, but that's just a part of life.
You can't get that worked up over it. If you get that worked up over it, I don't know what you're going to do, because it just happens in regular cycles. Most of us got spoiled because other than a few hurricanes, the nation has the longest recovery I think in history. So since 2007 was our last problem and this is the year 2020, for 13 years we had nothing. We never had cycles like that before. Typically, we had a crisis on a much more regular basis. Typically, this would be our second crisis normally, but it's just part of what happens. So if this is just a part of what happens, it might be a good time to reflect on what should you do to not be at risk from the fact that things go sour, go South on a regular basis.
Now, we find our salvation in the Mobile Home Park industry because that's what we are best positioned for. We are a contrarian investment that seems to do well in bad times. That's just the facts. We have being in the affordable housing business, our greatest enemy is mass prosperity. If you could go back in history, that's what sank the industry to begin with, back in the 1970s, can be out of the '60s where the industry was so very hot, when Elvis Presley, lived in Mobile Home Parks and movies because they were cool and neato. He was in Speedway and it happened at the world's fair in 1963 and 1968 and you had Lucy and Ricky in the long, long trailer in 1951. We went from that glamorous product, that neato new products, to be hated by almost everyone because people all got richer and moved to suburbia and left all their Mobile Home Parks in the lurch, because their incomes went up and everything was going great.
So our industry is just typically worse at its best when things are bad. So another thing I think you're going to find from this recession as you did from 2007, is we are going to rise as an industry in respectability a little bit. Every time this happens, despite our bad reputation with most Americans, people start to appreciate affordable housing a little more and they start to appreciate non-subsidized affordable housing. Because remember that in one future crisis when the government starts running out of money, you know they're going to have to drop lots of those subsidies. Probably much of the housing subsidies. Again we're the only thing I've heard that can do affordable housing without any form of subsidy.
So we really think that overall COVID-19, the future crisis, whatever it may be, our industry, the Mobile Home Park, is becoming more of the Holy grail of contrarian investments, because we just simply seem to be impervious to a large scale dislocation. As I said many times, affordable housing is just the best investment options in the U.S. without question.
Now if you want more information on Mobile Home Park investing, we are going to have our first ever COVID-19 friendly virtual bootcamp next week. So it's Friday, Saturday, Sunday. It's April 17th through 19th. We've been asked to do it for now a decade, we've never done it, we've always done the live version. In fact, we were going to do the live version that weekend there in Nashville, but by popular requests because people wanted to get into the industry, they want to learn more about the industry, didn't want to wait till the next boot camp. After that we decided to go ahead and do a virtual boot camp. It's going to be identical to our live boot camp. Same topic, same manual, same PowerPoint, same discussions, Q&A throughout.
We're even doing the park walk, show you everything about Mobile Home Parks, how they're built, how to tell the good from the bad, what the IDEAL System is and all this many items. So if you want to attend that, then contact Brandon, because we'd love to have you. Again, we've never done it before and we'll probably never do it again. In April through 17th to 19th will be our next virtual bootcamp.