Podcast 108. A Simple Way to Manage REI Portfolio Financials with Mathias Korder and Saad Dar

Average Joe Finances:
0:00

Hey, how's it going everybody. Welcome back to the average Joe finances podcast. I'm your host, Mike Cavaggioni. And today's awesome. Guests are Mattias Korder and Saad Dar they're with base lane and we're gonna talk about what they do and how they make life easier for real estate investors and just anybody in general, when it comes to finances in the technical space. And, I'm really excited to have this conversation with the two of them today. We talked a little bit offline before we got this party started and, they're two genuine individuals doing really awesome things. Mattias and Saad welcome to the show.

Saad Dar:
0:32

Thank you. Great to be here.

Mathias Korder:
0:34

All right. Pleasure. Be good. Thank you for having us.

Average Joe Finances:
0:36

Fantastic. Hey, I'd like to hit both of you with this first question, cuz it's something we ask everybody that comes on the show and we'd like to know about you and your story and how this all got started for you. Mattias, if you can go first, tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.

Mathias Korder:
0:49

Yeah. Thank you so much. My, my career started in New York city. I graduated from college. Outside of New York and then as, moving to the city, looking for opportunities. And I started working at a large investment bank, called Morgan Stanley. And this is in the boom of kind of the banking years before the financial crisis. Spending of four years working at Morgan Stanley, they really learned about investing, learned about, how to manage risk, how to assess risk, how to diversify your portfolio, just being in an investment bank and actually going through the whole financial crisis was an amazing initial school to learn really how to invest. From there, I went to business school, really looking to do something else, ended up working, after business school at a company called the Boston consulting. And, I was quite lucky that as a consultant, I was really focused on financial service, but very much intersection of financial service and technology. And I spent a lot of time helping some of the largest financial service companies in the United States build out new technology. And that's actually where actually the initial idea to baselane get started, as we were helping, one of the largest credit card issues in the United States, think about building out a depository product. For their existing kind of SMB customers. There was all these different customer types and everyone had a very different. Problem when it came to their financial services, whether you were an e-commerce business or some sort of service provider, or whether you were an investor in real estate, right? All investors of real estate need, banking products, they need, some sort of bookkeeping to be able to do taxes. They need to like brand all these kind of things were very evident in what landlord need that was different. That wasn. It wasn't part of their bank. And so we essentially, left BCG to, to start with baselane is, and, now we're two years into that journey.

Average Joe Finances:
2:17

Awesome. Fantastic. That's great. And I wanna go a little bit more into that. I took some notes and, but I want Saad to go ahead and tell us, his story and how he got connected with you and how this all got started for him too. And then we'll get into a little bit more of that, but this is, some really good stuff. I already got some great notes just from your intro. So fantastic. So Saad, if you could please introduce yourself.

Saad Dar:
2:34

Yeah. My background starts, in financial accounting and, and reporting. So I'm a former CPA. My first job outta college was being an auditor for Pricewaterhouse Coopers in New York. And, I like to say I was one of the few people that knew what a credit default swap was back in 2007, right around the market crash, cuz that's what we were doing, working on private equity and hedge fund financial statements and preparing those financial statements. And we were in the, kind of the midst of the crisis, that took place, which I really love to watch over and over again in the big short, if you've seen that . So my first, the first five years of my career were in financial services related to financial reporting and, operations and risk, mostly in what we call the alternative investment space. So that includes real estate, private equity investment, by large hedge funds and asset manager. From there. I pursued my MBA, at duke and post MBA. I also was at the Boston consulting group for about four years, like Mattias and really, at BCG you get the full breadth of, not only understanding how to problem solve for large companies and how to help them grow, but also a large part of that became how do you integrate technology to deliver value to customer? And so one of the things that I did when I was at BCG that really got me excited about FinTech was helping build a cryptocurrency payment platform called backed, which is actually a public company. Now it's in the market today. And, that actually led me to lead BCG and join clad. And plad is a B2B data aggregator. If you haven't heard about it, it's one of the largest, fintechs out there today. 13 billion valuation as of last year. And, I spent a couple of years at plan doing business develop. In the enterprise space. And while I was at plat, I actually didn't know Mattias and our other co-founder Tobin. I met them through a friend of mine when I was in Atlanta. I was talking about my real estate investing. So about five years ago, I got started in real estate investing, I know you talking about your journey a little bit. And, that was really through my, my not selling my first home and renting it when I moved from Brooklyn to New Jersey. And so I actually had started investing in Philadelphia more, full time. With another partner of mine. I was talking to my friend, Chris G in, Atlanta and he mentioned, Hey, there's these two guys Tobin also BCG alumni working on this really awesome, startup called baseline. I met them about a year before I joined in last October. And so we started talking in, loved what they were building because as a landlord, I saw many of the problems like firsthand. I was a landlord. I was using Excel. I was a landlord. I didn't really have a, I didn't even know what my numbers were. I didn't know what my ROI was on my units. I was just going with it, going with the flow. And I got really excited about what they were building. And, yeah, a couple of months later I joined the company and, really part of this is I'm building a tool for me so I can actually leverage it from my day to day real estate.

Average Joe Finances:
5:11

Yeah, that's fantastic. So building a tool for you that's useful to everybody else, right? That's something that, that I can definitely respect. And it's also similar to my mission with average show finances, right? I'm sitting here interviewing industry experts, like the two of you and learning from you guys while being able to share that with my audience for everyone else. So everybody gets to benefit from it, which is really awesome. Now I wanna rewind back cuz you guys are both talking about, the way base lane started right. Was to fill a need right. In, in, in the FinTech space for, just different aspects of banking, rent collection, like tracking your taxes, tracking expenses and everything. So how does baseline actually work? Like how does it, track everything? How do you like what's the basics when it comes to baselane?

Mathias Korder:
5:54

Yep. So I think, to answer that question, I'll go back to what the problem is that we saw. We saw that most real estate investors, individual landlords, they were interconnecting all sorts of tools that weren't made for that customer. They weren't made for an investor. They were made for either individuals or small businesses. But as there's so many specific needs that, a real estate investor has there's a specific tax code. It's all very, it's all very unique and. Essentially we have gone and built. Our core tool is a banking platform. That's really built across the way that investors use banking. So many times, investors need to open up multiple bank accounts for every single LLC, or they may have, corporation or they may even have, bankings individuals where you can go and open on our platform as many banks as you want. And then inside of those bank accounts, you can go actually open up segregated sub account. So you can have a sub-account for, two units. If you, if one of those was properties was a duplex, you could open up one for security deposits, you could open up another, say account for savings. And so you can create a structure on banking that's really around the way that your portfolio is built. And then from there, that's all interconnected into an automated bookkeeping tool. So all the transactions from the bank. Or book flowing directly into the bookkeeping tool. A lot of it is automated cuz as you start to, you can actually go and allocate and tag any transaction that comes into a specific bank out to a specific property. And so already a lot of your booking starts to get automated for you. And then from there's a whole, cash flow and income statement view as well, so that you can actually in real time assess, what your net operating income is, right? What, your expense ratio is for, utilities, month over. So you can actually plug in and directly see in a live ledger, how your finances are actually performing for your properties. And of course, attach to. We've built an automated rent collection tool, right? You wanna be able to have everything in one spot and then we're building out a fantastic marketplace, with insurance, and lending products as well, really thinking about being this proactive engine that's working in the background for you to help you find, the best offers for, insurance and help you think about what's the right time to, to either do or refinance it or actually, get an initial, purchase loan. Yeah. So there's

Average Joe Finances:
7:51

fantastic. There's a lot there. Making it like a one stop shop, a hundred percent, one stop

Mathias Korder:
7:56

shop, but also automating a lot of things so that you can actually forget about all the busy work that you're doing. And imagine, when you're doing your bookkeeping, have a lot of it automated, having a lot of insights and data, so you can make the best decisions and hopefully save you money and time in that process.

Saad Dar:
8:10

I would add to that, that, I always go back to the end user and really it's about the individual, right? I'm an example, and you can relate to, to it as well as an investor, but really how many people out there are trying to, get passive income because they either want to retire early, generate passive income or build generational wealth and all, and or all of the above. And if you look at that, there's millions of people trying to do that. If I look at YouTube today and how many people watched dad or dad, that, that channel. You could just tell that there's a lot of demand out there for this. And for us, what we're trying to do here is really make it easy and simple for the average person to be able to get an opportunity to invest in real estate and not make it so scary and hard because anything related to finances is very stressful. It's one of the number one causes of stress. At least in the us. And so for us, what we wanna do is break down that customer journey from whether you're just thinking about it and you wanna learn educationally, what is it that we should be doing and how do I get started to, okay, now I've got a deal. I'm gonna collect rent. What do I do with this to, okay, now I want to get my second property. Now I want to get my third property and so on. And so our vision is to be able to build this all in one product. That through technology makes it very easy and simple for anybody to participate in real estate. And that's what I'm most excited about, because like really, it can be as complicated as you want, and that can actually prevent financial access that can withhold this opportunity from many individuals and we wanna make it so that it's accessible to everybody

Average Joe Finances:
9:47

That's fantastic. And, I even like how, when you're talking about it, you're making this, so that it's a product that is for the average person. And that's what we're called average Joe finances. Absolutely love that. I want to rewind back a little bit to what, Mattias was saying about the, how it's a banking platform. So I had a question about, the bank accounts that an individual would open through baseline. An actual account with base lane or are they opening like a local bank account? And it's all tied into base lane and, you're able to track it from base lane. Like how does that work?

Mathias Korder:
10:18

Yeah, so the answer is actually both. So we have a partnership with a bank. In Virginia and we, operate those bank accounts as base lanes. So when you open up an account on our platform, it is a baseline branded bank account. It's a basely debit card. But at the same time, we know that many investors at the moment may not need to open bank account base lane, but they want it just interconnect their existing. Accounts or credit cards onto the platform. So they can do that as well. So using actually plaid, which is the place that the study stores we in, we interconnect all of that directly onto the platform. So you can have baseline bank accounts plus external accounts on the platform.

Average Joe Finances:
10:50

Okay, fantastic. And then the other thing you were talking about was how you can see like a live ledger, right? You can see, the rents that are coming in, you can see what your ROI is, your return on investment now, can. Can you just create random reports, like for the different items that you need or is it, do you have to go and like really mess around with it to try to finagle and get the report that you need? Or is it as simple as Hey, I need to see what my return on investment is and you you generate that report.

Mathias Korder:
11:15

Yeah. So they're actually, live on the dashboard. So you will have, essentially a cashflow view, which is a graphical view, of cashflow across months. You can filter that down to see a specific month, and then you can double click into. Looking at just all the different types of, expense categories or, if you wanna look at, revenue coming in, then you can actually look at an income statement view by property across multiple months. You can look at that at a portfolio view. And then there's another dashboard that allows you to see, specific metrics. As you mentioned, let's say, cash on cash return or net operating income, cap rate, for, properties and for your portfolio.

Average Joe Finances:
11:48

Okay, then how about this? How about for multi-family investors that are limited partners, and, they get their K one S at the, beginning of the year, for tax season. Is there a way to import that data? So you can have everything all in one spot. So for me, I'm in a couple different syndications, as limited partners. I get different K one S so as I get these K one S in, and I'm getting this data and I'm trying to do my taxes right. Is there a way to import all of that. So I can have everything in one place.

Mathias Korder:
12:14

As of now, we don't have any kind of import function. The way that data is coming in is through, a bank account ledger, whether it's the baseline bank account ledger or it's the connected account ledger. But that is something that we do have in our medium term roadmaps enable different ways of inputting information, right? Whether it's in a, in Excel format or, other formats that are, we see a lot of folks that work with, property managers, and they're receiving a PDF or an Excel, every quarter or every month. And they wanna be able to bring that into the platform. So that is something that we do have on the medium term roadmap.

Average Joe Finances:
12:42

Okay, fantastic. Okay. And this is more of a personal question for me, right? So if I was to use baseline, just for my business with average Joe finances, so I have virtual assistance and everything and when I go and I pay them, so I use Upwork, is there a way to make it? I know every transaction that's going to Upwork. I can have that labeled as an expense to virtual assistance. So like when I'm doing my taxes and everything, I can see how much I'm spending on contractors and things like that.

Mathias Korder:
13:06

A hundred percent. I imagine you're paying that on some sort of card, right? Credit card. Through a bank account. So yeah, exactly. So we, right now we have attached to our bank account. We have obviously a whole card platform. We have physical cards live and we're actually launching soon our virtual card platform. And with that, you would essentially just, with a click of a button. Activate a new virtual card. When you activate that new virtual card, you actually select what property and also what category you would like to attach that spent to you. Don't have to do that. You can just say, okay, I'm not gonna attach it to specific property. I'm not gonna attach to a specific category, but if you do that, it starts to automate that, right? So every time there's a transaction on that card, it's already tagged into the transaction ledger. And of course, we're also doing rule based, automatization so that, once you start tagging. Categories once we can actually then use that for the future. So you don't have to be constantly having to tag that same transaction type.

Average Joe Finances:
13:52

Awesome. I like that. So it's not just for real estate investors. This is something that any business owner can use for their business to really track their expenses all in one spot. So that's where I wanted to get at with that because, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool.

Mathias Korder:
14:04

There's a lot of, Customization we've built at making it more geared for the real estate investor. Obviously the categories we have are very closely linked to, the scheduling tax code, rent collection, all of the metrics we have are very real estate focused things, but of course there is opportunity, outside of just a real estate investor with this part.

Average Joe Finances:
14:19

Awesome. I want, I wanna go back over to Saad real quick. Cause I got some questions for you. I need to give you a little mic time here, about, just in general, like when you were talking about your background, so you were all over the place, so you got linked up with the guys from base lane in Atlanta, but you're base outta New York and you were investing in Philly. So you're all over the place, man. So how did you wind up starting to, invest in real estate in Philly?

Saad Dar:
14:42

Great question. So my journey to Philly's, I'm from New York originally and I moved to New Jersey about five, six years ago. We had our first kid and we moved to New Jersey of course. And funny enough, there's my partner in real estate is also an ex CG guy. And we used to work together and we teamed up and decided to start investing. Our original plan was to start in New Jersey because we both lived in New Jersey. But we still realize that for new investors coming in, the cost of capital, the capital requirements in New Jersey is much, much higher because things are just more expensive in the areas that are attracted. So we did a lot of research, like consultants. We ran our market analysis for the us. We figured out what the kind of cities we wanted to target. And, obviously like proximity to where we live was one of the factors. So we found Philly through that analysis where we decided that. It was only an hour and a half away. And there was an attractive market, especially with all the student housing opportunities in Philly. If you're familiar with Philadelphia, there's a lot of underdevelopment in many pockets. And, what we like to look at the rent to all in investment ratio is very attractive. So for those that know the 1% rule or the 2% rule from bigger pockets, we follow the 1% rule, to a. It has to hit the 1% rule at a minimum. And that's what we found in Philly. We could be at 1.2, 5% or 1.5%. But what that means is if you get, get a thousand dollars a month in rent, you're all an investment for that. A thousand dollars is a hundred K, which is amazing. And that, that ensures that you cash fuel at a very healthy clip. That's how, I started investing in Philly. So it's been about two and a half years. We have five, multi-unit in Philly. We only do multi units. So it's about 10 doors. And, right now we're scaling that business. We buy one property a quarter. So this year we'll almost double our portfolio in Philadelphia. So that's how I got into real estate investing. And that's during that time, when I was just starting is when I met Tobin and I got very excited because it was, we were also managing the property. So not only do we buy and rent the units out, we don't do outsourcing of property manager. We do property management in house. And, we had a dire need for all the tools that we've been talking about here. So that's what got me excited about, coming to baseline and building that for everybody.

Average Joe Finances:
16:47

Yeah, it sounds like base. Lane's a good platform. If you wanna, DIY when it comes to the property management and everything. So even being in New Jersey and having your properties in Philly, have you found that this has helped you be able to manage everything and not have to outsource? Cuz you said you don't outsource your property management. So how have you found, I guess the ways to get around. Not having to hire outside management and being able to do it yourself while still living in New Jersey.

Saad Dar:
17:13

It's a bit growth hacky, I would say. And many DIY landlords are very creative, so there's always a couple of key functions, right? That you give to property managers, for example, the financial and accounting, which is like rent collection and bookkeeping and so on. So I've been able to like onboard onto baseline and my tenants. So I collect rent through base lane that pulls it into the ledger where I can then kind of tag categories of spend or rent and then revenue expenses, and then track, how much money we're making net cash flow, for example, on the unit, very simple, but that's a quick example of what we do there. Then the other part is listing a property and things like that. That is something that we're gonna be building onto baseline, but right now, we use other tools to do property listing. And, we don't have that much activity where we need like third party, real estate agents or other people to do that for us. So me and my partner will go to Philly once a month, for example. And if we have a new listing, we will host it on a Saturday and rent out the unit that day. And then last big part is, basically construction. We have things like that. And so we, this is a relationship business, as so we have. Spent a lot of time made a lot of mistakes and are very lucky to have really good. I would say partners in our construction side, on the maintenance side on the work to be done, whether it's a big project or a small repair. So we've spent a lot of time and energy investing into those relationships. So whenever we have an issue, we have people to go to. And so that's how we are able to scale it and do it from a distance basically.

Average Joe Finances:
18:37

Yeah, fantastic. Now going back to what base lane is itself, right? So it's pretty much, like we said, like a one stop shop for, if you're a real estate investor, you've got everything you need all in one spot. Now you said you're. You're teamed up with a bank in Virginia, but you said you're also bringing in lenders here in the future. Are you guys talking about that right now? So if, like you were saying before, like if you have construction or something, you have to do some renovations on a property, would you be able to go in through base lane and, apply for, different I, or even hard money loans if you need it? Yeah. For things that.

Saad Dar:
19:09

Absolutely. So I always think about the landlord journey, like I said, and how can we make it easy at every single step? So if you are, you have a property and you need to rent it out and start collecting rent, new bookkeeping, we have all the features. If you need a bank account, we have that feature. If you need property insurance, whether it's a new property or you're doing a renewal, we have a partnership with a, company called Obie. Where we are able to provide landlords insurance in three to four minutes. And this is really amazing. Like their technology is some of the best that I've seen. And I actually just got four of my properties reinsured through OB this last, quarter and they have some of the best rates. So for us, what we've done is we've built OB into the platform. So if you added your property and you added some information, when the property was bought and how much you pay for insurance, et cetera, We'll set up reminders for you automatically to say, Hey, listen, your renewal is coming up. You should get another insurance quote, which we should do every year anyway, as good practice. And, or we can get you that through an instant estimate, which takes 60 seconds literally. Or if you answer like another trend questions, they can give you a phone quote within three minutes and you can then pay for it and be done, or you can ask them questions and so on. So that's one example of a financial product that we plugged. The second product that we plugged in so far is a option for, lending. So right now we have a private money lender relationship with a company called Lendy, which is also a very tech forward, lending platform. And, I have a great relationship with their CEO and they are very thoughtful and white glove service to all customers that come their way, which is why we like them, lend is also integrated into baseline. So if you like to get a loan, you go to the loan section. You answer some basic information, which takes maybe like a minute and you will get real time pricing within, 30 seconds. Again, very convenient plugged into our platform. And from there, if you wanna go forward, if you wanna just take that quote and shop around, you can, and then lend us, you will follow up with you. So we're being very thoughtful about how we build this. We don't wanna be a company where we just generate a bunch of leads and send you like 10 lenders that are calling you and trying to chase you down. I really hate that experience. What we're trying to do is be thoughtful, use technology and bring the best products forward. So Lendy is a loan originator. So they're more like a private money lender. They have short term, lending like a bridge loan. If you need a cash out refi as well a traditional 30 year or 20 year loan. So they have all those products. Next on our roadmap is to integrate what I call more of a, traditional lender, which is, usually a 30 year fixed product, which is more of a conforming loan. What that means is many of our investors are landlords that are owning one to four properties on our platform today. And so if you like in early in your career of investing, most likely you are using a traditional lender. Somebody that uses Fann and Fred Mac, that's like your Wells Fargo, chase bank, your local bank and so on. And, I think you may know, like many investors know that they can get up to 10 mortgages on that regular conforming loan before moving into private money hard. And so we're, soon to be launching a, partner that will provide that option as well, inside the baseline platform. And as you can imagine, what we're, what I'm really excited about is we're gonna continue building this. So we will add other things that landlords need, like renter's insurance, the ability to boost your credit for your tenants, and eventually many more features that, really both landlords and tennis need. So this is just the beginning.

Mathias Korder:
22:30

Yep. And maybe just to add one element to that, that, that Saad touched on. It's good practice to go and see what your insurance every year, let us do that for you. Let us actually proactively in the background say, Hey Mike, I found you a savings opportunity of $400. If you move to this insurance product, or, Hey Mike, you know what, that duplex that you have in Philly. It's a great opportunity to actually refinance in the next couple months because rates are at the, at where are they at? We know, what you're paying today. And so all of that stuff that, just requires time and, many times crunching numbers in Excel document. And many folks haven't done that before. Let us be the guide to help you get that done and actually, save you money in the process. One

Saad Dar:
23:09

example I actually would share is, we have a customer in Seattle that I talked to a lot and, he's very savvy. He's growing his portfolio one by one. I think he has three or four units right now. And what he did was he used baseline. So we have a Zillow plugin for tracking and market value real time. So you can see like your properties worth 500,000, 600,000. And you can also, input how much your mortgage balance is. So of course, if you know how much the market value is and your balance on your loan, how much equity, is in that house. So example is if you have a 500 K market value and you owe $300,000 on the loan, that means you have $200,000 in equity. Now, a savvy real estate investor might say, Hey, okay, I'm gonna try to figure out if I. Take out, a HeLOCK a home equity line of credit or some sort of financing on that equity and go use that to fund my next deal. So that's exactly what he was doing. I hadn't even done that on base for myself. So he showed me that view and he like, okay, like basically just showed me that now I have 200 K equity. Now I'm gonna go and get a loan on this so I can get a down payment for my next deal. So those are the kind of things we wanna unlock for everybody who's coming on basically.

Average Joe Finances:
24:11

Yeah, that's fantastic. So it truly is like a one stop shop for a real estate investor. I love it now. I wanted to ask you a, just follow up on, on what OB is itself is OB like an insurance broker or is OB the actual insurance company itself?

Saad Dar:
24:23

That's a great question. So OB is, I would also call them a FinTech slash PropTech, company that is really an innovator in a space. They're both they're. They are an insurance broker, as well as an insurance, originator. And they like many, credible insurance, companies out there have double a rating, et cetera. And yeah, it depends on what the right fit is for the customer. So if you say here's my address, I'm looking for an insurance policy for this. They will shop it for you and try to get you the best rate. And they would, that means going out to the market and checking with their, marketplace of underwriters. If somebody can provide a policy and, or OBS in house origination, and based on that, they'll give you some options and then you can choose which option you want to go with. And, the amazing thing is you can pay for it and get a PDF to send to your lender literally within three minutes. And so anybody who's stuck in a kind of a closing situation and the lender says, Hey, where's the insurance coverage you can get on there, get it done, PDF over. You can always talk to their experts. If you have more questions,

Average Joe Finances:
25:28

that's good. It's fast and simple solution, to, to a complex problem. The way I'm looking at this is, by having everything right there at your fingertips, it. It makes things a little bit easier because Mattus was saying before, when you're sitting here and you're looking at potentially, refinancing, maybe doing a bridge loan or something like that, and you're trying to, do cash out refinances and pull money out, sitting down and having to crunch those numbers and figure it out yourself while running it through an Excel sheet. Can get very complicated, but the biggest thing is how time consuming it is and where it sounds like you have a platform here where you could just log in and say, I've got this much value on this property. I've got this much equity. And I want to go and do something with it. It's pretty much all right there, your fingertips. And it does it for you. So that's a good tool to have in your toolbelt.

Mathias Korder:
26:12

Over 50% of new landlords or millennials. And so all of a sudden you have this whole new generation that is very tech savvy, right? They're investing on Coinbase and Robin hood and all sorts of tools and doing it very easily, but okay. Now all of a sudden they wanna invest in real estate and they're like, what's the platform that help me get there. And we very much see our platform. A coach many times when I speak to investors, I say, everyone tells me I need to mentor someone to help me get started. Show me the guidelines, introduce me to the right broker. We really want to be that coach, but through. Show you what's the best way to structure your properties in banking, best way to collect rent the best way to, do bookkeeping the best way to file taxes and do it in a very efficient manner and obviously give you the insights to do so in the most, effective way as well.

Average Joe Finances:
26:55

That's fantastic because I'm a firm believer in, education. Getting a coach getting mentored. I, I do all of that stuff myself, because I would not be where I'm at today, if it wasn't for the people that helped me get here. And, that's one of the things that I love about the real estate investing community is I would say probably 97% of the people I met are just genuine, really good people that are willing to help. There's just a very small percentage of people out there that are, they can go another way, generally just good people. And, that's one of the things I love about the community itself. Just the real estate investing community. Going back to, baseline as a platform, right? Cause we're talk, you were talking about how, millennials today. Not even just millennials, even the next generation after that, every everybody's now on coin base, Robin hood, or like weeble or M one finance, like there's so many different ways to invest on these different platforms, but you don't really see too many things where you can do that with real estate. Unless you're gonna go invest in a REIT. or in a real estate fund or something like that, where it's a little more hands off and you don't have too much, ownership in anything in there, except for it being more of a paper asset instead of being a real asset. And that's the difference between real estate versus the stock market, right? A paper asset versus a real tangible asset, and even investing in a re. It's more of a paper asset. If you invest in gold on the stock market, you don't actually own the gold. You own a piece of paper that says you're entitled to some of that gold, right? So there, there's a huge difference between having gold buried in your backyard versus having, an electronic document or something showing that you own, you have some type of, ownership in it. So I think this is, this kind of gets down to the root thing that we were talking about earlier and, Talking about sod too, with your background, being a CPA, previously. And, one of the things that you had mentioned, and it's funny because we call real estate investing an alternative investment, right? If it's not your typical 401k Roth IRA or anything like that, it, anything outside of that norm. Is called an alternative investment. But when you look at the returns you get in real estate, versus some of the returns you would get just sitting in a 401k. The difference can be night and day. If you're investing right. And you have access to that money right now, you have access to those assets right now. You don't have to wait. And you can keep building and building upon that. So I just wanted to point that I think it's funny that we call real estate and an alternative, a, alternative investing when, for a lot of people, it's the main way that we, we find our road, our path to wealth.

Saad Dar:
29:21

Yeah. I think this is absolutely like true. And I, I don't know if you listen to Robert Kiosaki rich dad, poor dad, or any of those kind of speakers. That talk about this in the history of the United States, this concept of 401k, for example, as a retirement vehicle, now that has become the standard, not the alternative. And the entire system is incentivizing you to put money into the stock market and to save it for a rainy day, save it for one you're 65 and older, and you'll notice that the traditional financial vehicles, but also the education system. Is not really priming you to retire early. We talked about that before, right? Like how come we retire in 40? It's not priming you to own property. It's not priming you to be like smart with how you spend your money. It's saying Hey, put your money away a 401k. We'll give you tax incentive for that too. And so the entire system is focused and built around this and that's the last 30, 40, 50 years of the United States. And, I have my views on this, but really everything is about wall street, making more money at the end of the day. But if you talk to the billionaire and multimillionaire, real estate investors who made it, they didn't necessarily park money in a 401k. They said, okay, I'm gonna go and build my portfolio and I'm gonna leverage my portfolio and the equity that I build in that portfolio and the cash that I generate to buy more deals. And that's how I'm gonna retire and build my wealth. I think that's what, really the opportunity is here for people to realize, you have many options, but this real estate asset class in the past has been very difficult to get into. It's also very scary. Look, I'm a financial professional. had my MBA, even me. I was very scared to put even a hundred K of my own cash into this a couple of years ago. And really, I think what we're trying to do is write content and make products that are so simple and easy and give examples so that people can see that it's actually not an alternative investment. It might be your primary vehicle to financial independence, not your secondary vehicle to financial independence.

Average Joe Finances:
31:23

Yeah, absolutely. real, estate's not for somebody who's like a hundred percent risk adverse. You could be risk adverse and still invest in real estate and do it safely, but in just like any other investing platform or any other way that you would invest, there's always risk when you invest, no matter what you invest in, there's always risk. You can have your 401k sitting fat and happy, and then the stock market tanks, like right before you're retiring and oh, now you can't retire cuz you have to wait for it to recover. So there's always a risk, no matter what you go into now, I'm not knocking. What's that called

Saad Dar:
31:52

you, but have you seen the John Stewart, the problem with John Stewart show recently the new one that made? No. No. Okay. So I saw like a YouTube clip on it cause they were pushing it and he did an analysis of the impact for example, that a platform like Robinhood has had on creating generational wealth or more wealth for the average American. And do you do either of you want to guess what the result is?

Average Joe Finances:
32:16

It's probably not that high

Mathias Korder:
32:18

gonna be afraid of it. Be very wrong.

Saad Dar:
32:19

It's actually gotten worse. In theory, Robin, it was supposed to unleash the opportunities that all these wall street folks had, that the individual didn't have, but what's actually happened is that we've got a lot of Under prepared and maybe not even as much educated individuals, trading options and all these risky asset classes on Robin hood for free, which is not really free by the way. And losing money that net. So yeah, there might be some anomalies of one person that, that said, oh, I made $30,000. That's probably one guy you didn't tell you about his losses. Whereas real estate is not a get rich scheme. It's not a overnight get rich plan, but if you do it for 10 years consistently, and some of us know that it delivers. And so I think that's the, that's the comparison somebody has to do when they're starting out. In fact, we just wrote a pro landlord ebook guide for potential folks that are coming to our website. And one of the first things in there is about what is your goal? And like, why are you trying to do this in the first place? So you ground yourself and you know that you have a target. And then we talk about how to come up with a plan for, implementing that, that.

Average Joe Finances:
33:19

Absolutely know your why know why you're doing this right? But where I am comfortable. Is investing in real estate because I know what I'm getting back out of it, cuz this is the bread and butter for me. At least it, it works. And I know again, like you said, it's not a get rich quick thing, but consistency in real estate, you will build wealth that you'll look back, 10 years ago when you first started and say, wow, I started there and now I'm a multimillionaire, and you can do it. In, in just two and a half years, I've done some pretty awesome things in real estate, that I'm super excited about. And. Judging off of what we've talked about today so have you, and just that two year period to the point where you've got 10 doors now, cash flowing and, it's something now it's mailbox money. I love it. You don't even have to do much with it. Sure. You've got some things with tenants and things like that, but nothing too crazy. And it's totally, it's guaranteed, it's guaranteed.

Saad Dar:
34:09

So I talked to one of my, one of our customers at baseline 30 year old, young man, I think he was in the Midwest. And he was really lucky because he had a coach, he had a father-in-law who was a pro real estate investor. And he's I'm on unit number four, I'm 30. And I was like, whoa. And he is yeah, my here's my 10 year plan. This is why I joined base plane. Now I'm starting to collect on it. He was telling the kind of feedback on the tool, which is he was happy with things. And I was sitting there thinking man, like I wish when I was 30, I was at this level. Now, what I'm excited about is we're trying to get the word out so that people who are in their twenties and maybe even their teens can get started earlier saved, start being smart with your money in the beginning, get a down payment together and buy your first deal. Earlier you do it the better it's always, the time in the market, not how not timing the market. Exactly. And so that, that's what really gets me excited is ushering in this era of younger, real estate investors. In fact, on baseline, the average age group is 25 to 35.

Average Joe Finances:
35:05

I love that. That's super important because when you sit here and you look at, just financial literacy in general in America, and this is something we talk about a lot. And right now, as we're recording this, where at the end of April, which was financial literacy month, but, You look back, you look at what they teach kids in school. They don't teach them any type of financial literacy whatsoever. And even when you go to college, you have to elect to take those classes. There's not any, it's not really set in a curriculum unless you're going down that route. So it's important that, there's these different avenues to educate people. So I really love what you guys are doing. That's what I'm doing with average, Joe finances is I want to get this information out there. I want to educate people so they can make these decisions. To move on and do something better for themselves. So I wanna get into, a round of questions that I like to ask everybody it's called the final round. It's four kind of hard-hitting questions that are gonna, , pull some stuff outta you guys and, let us know and let the listeners know what you guys are all about and what you guys are doing. So if you guys are ready, we'll go ahead and get, started in. Okay. First question I'll set it up over to Matts here because we've, we're going back and forth. And I like, I like how this has been working. You guys aren't interrupting each other. It's awesome. Sometimes it's really tough to interview two people at once, but you guys are making this look like a cake walk. The first question is what's the biggest mistake you've ever made.

Mathias Korder:
36:20

It's definitely a tough question. I say it's a mistake. I, it was the biggest mistake, but, I spent maybe, 12 years of my career not building anything, I was providing services to others. And I think, the day that I started building something, creating something, it was just different energy, I think it's really nice to look back and say, look, I've created this, whether it's portfolio real estate that you own, or I've built this fantastic product to help people do this. I think that's fantastic. And I think, Morgan Stanley and BCG fantastic places to, to learn, and very smart people and great people that work there. But. I never felt that I was creating something. And so I wish I had gone to be a creator or entrepreneur earlier in my life.

Average Joe Finances:
36:57

Yeah. That's fantastic. It's a lot of times we look back at things like that and say, ah, wish I would've did that, it, everything happens for a reason, at least I believe, and look at where, look at where you are now and what you're doing now. And the mission that you guys have with baseline it's absolutely. Okay, cool. The next question I like to ask this, go over to you. Sod is, what is something that you've learned that you wish you knew when you first started,

Saad Dar:
37:18

Related to real estate or anything?

Average Joe Finances:
37:20

So yeah, related to real estate investing and just personal finances in general..

Saad Dar:
37:25

I want one of the few things I wished I knew earlier was the power of. Cash out refinancing. And what that means is, so I employ the BRRRR method for anybody that, invested real estate will know that, but it's basically by, rehab rent, refinance repeat basically. And, the beauty of that approach is I can recycle my cash. I don't have to keep putting cash in every year, to do more deal. And I didn't really know that, honestly. And I only found out through a lady that I met randomly when I was hunting down deals in New Jersey five years ago. And she took me by the hand and walked me through it for, I don't know why she liked me, but she did. And, that's when I started thinking about this. And a more serious, more like full time way of investing. So for me learning some of those tips and tricks early, would've helped me get, hopefully ideally faster to real estate, but we are where we are. So yeah, if I knew that and the power of taking one kind of bucket of cash and being able to invest it, improve that deal and then recycle that cash, I think it could have been further along my.

Average Joe Finances:
38:25

Okay. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. And, for those of you that are listening right now that are just getting started, really take a listen to what they're saying here. Okay. Because that is something that if, if you know the power of, somebody that's been doing this for a little bit and they're successful and they look back at the things that they wish they would've done. Guess what. This is your opportunity to not do that and do what they wish that they would've done and, not make any of those mistakes or anything like that. That's the whole point of what we're trying to put out here. So that's fantastic. Okay. Mattias back over to you, do you have any tips or tricks that you would recommend to someone that is just getting started today? And I'm talking about somebody who. Was maybe in debt or had student loans or something, paid it off and now they're like, Hey, I'm ready to start investing. What should I do?

Mathias Korder:
39:10

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. I think that's the exact same mission that, that we're trying to solve. And so I think, the first thing is find an area that you, that you like. You think that has, potential appreciation, start doing some research, start looking at, what properties are available, start looking at, what, how much people are charging for rent, like become an expert in a little area, right? You live nearby and go for it. I think starting that at first step to seeing what's out there. Is the most important piece. And, I think once you're you say, okay, look, I'm ready to do this. It doesn't. I think most people are scared. They feel, it takes a lot of money to start investing in real estate and it doesn't right. You can find a great property, rates are still, quite attractive. And so I think it, it's the first step of going out there and saying it, this is an area I love, I believe in this areas of these reasons. And I'm gonna go find property to start buying there.

Average Joe Finances:
39:56

Okay. Fantastic. All right. And then I have one more question and this is gonna be for both of you. Okay. I'll go with you, first Saad. So we're going back and forth. But do you have a favorite business investing or real estate related book or podcast or both?

Saad Dar:
40:08

Great question. My favorite is David Linhall, multifamily millions. This has gotta be one of the core fundamental books that multifamily real estate. I have it, I've shared it with people who work at baseline . Anybody who works with me probably is gonna have to read that book. In terms of podcasts, I listen to many different things that range from bigger pockets, to, Joe fearless and so on. But, yeah, for me, like anything that is related to FinTech or real estate tech, I'm listening to, so that's on my Spotify and whenever I'm free, I'm driving still on. I'm listening to real estate cuz that's what I breed real estate day and night.

Average Joe Finances:
40:42

Yeah. I love it. There. There's not a time that I'm commuting somewhere that I don't have a podcast on. Coming through my speakers and I'm telling you right now, my kids hate it. But it's okay. It's okay. Cuz they're learning and I'm learning. So all right. Gonna tell you, so Mattias what about you?

Mathias Korder:
40:54

Yeah. It's, as you build a, a business and obviously starting from, a few people and growing this business, you always want to hear from other people that have built businesses and I love just to hear other founder stories and whether it's in technology or not. And so I think one of the best interviewers that interviews just fascinating founders is Reed Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn. And he has, it's a very popular podcast called master scale. But just listening to the early days of Airbnb, when, two founders were living in, I think San Francisco and they had their first two, host. In New York and one of the VC investors said, what are you doing in San Francisco? Go to New York and talk to your customers, figure out what's going on. And like a lot of the early things that Airbnb changed to become successful was like really listening into your customer. And so I just love listening to those stories. Cause I think it's, no, no one is born knowing how to start a business. You have to listen to people that have made mistakes. People that have been successful at it and you learn from them. So I love those stories. I think not Reed re Healthman is, does a fantastic job of really just going deep into. Uncovering the layers of what really was behind the success of lot of these companies.

Average Joe Finances:
41:58

That's great. So two, so awesome suggestions there. You guys definitely know what you're talking about and, and know what to listen to, to help keep you pumped and motivated to keep going. So that's fantastic. I love it. I, so I lied. I have one more question for you guys, cuz this is the most important question. So that was the final round. We're all done with that, but I've got one more question. And like I said, this one's super important because for the people that are listening to this show, they're saying, we really like what these guys from base lane are talking about. We wanna know more about them, so where can they find you guys? Where can they find out more about base lane? Where can they find you on social media or anything like that? Let us know.

Mathias Korder:
42:33

Yeah, it's very easy. So you go to base lane.com and that's B a S E L a N e.com. And you can open a free account in 10 seconds. The account is free. Once you're in it, our products are free, and check us out. You can open up a bank account, you connect a bank account, you can start doing your bookkeeping. You start collecting rent, you can get an automated quote to see if pretend you can save some money on insurance. There's a lot of things that you can do. And, obviously we're happy to also to provide demos, as you come onto to the product, on the bottom, right? There's a little kind of icon as you click on it. You can chat with our support team and actually there's a button there to actually schedule a demo of the product. I'd happy to jump on the call and actually through a video call, actually walk you through the product and how this can be helpful for you.

Saad Dar:
43:13

And I would say that, both of us are on LinkedIn. So if you look up baseline as the company, you'll find us there. Or you can look up our names. I'm sure we can add the links to the video. And if anybody wants to reach out to us directly, feel free to direct message in LinkedIn. I'm on there all the time. So if anybody ever wants to chat about real estate or baseline or any ideas you have even I'm totally open to that.

Average Joe Finances:
43:34

Yeah, that's great. And I'm definitely gonna make sure I have all those links in our show notes to make it easier for everybody so they can just copy and paste or click away and, find you guys and get connected and see what baseline's all about. Listen, coordinating something like this with, with two people that are in two different time zones while I'm in a different time zone as well. Was definitely, there was some hurdles there and we had to move this around a couple times, but I really appreciate your flexibility and taking the time to chat with me today. This was fantastic. I think we got a lot of great information. Just from this conversation, I've got some awesome notes. I really like what baseline is doing in your mission. I'm gonna look into it a little bit more myself. So I just wanna say again, thank you both for taking the time today to have this conversation with me.

Saad Dar:
44:15

Oh, thank you very much, Mike. All right. Thank you. It's our pleasure. We had a great time

Average Joe Finances:
44:19

and aloha.