Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I'm Joe Siegel, founder and CEO of Aspire Legal Solutions, and Myland Trustee, the largest and fastest growing land trust company in Florida. Our passion is helping people aspire to a better life.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: One of the many ways we do.
[00:00:13] Speaker A: That is by helping them remain anonymous when it comes to their real estate holdings as they build their wealth. But it also extends to everyone else we touch each day. We're fortunate to work with some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the country who share our mission of aspiring to a better life. And we hope others will benefit from hearing their journeys, tips, strategies and tactics to get there.
[00:00:35] Speaker C: We're also seeing a lot now here in central Florida with the land deals because there's so much land that's being sold. The whole state of Florida is being sold. It feels like before the fraudsters, they were more scared, but now they actually jump on a Zoom camera and try to do remote online closings. And we actually do not hire outside notaries. That's one way that we try to stop fraud.
[00:00:58] Speaker A: That's Katie McGinnis, founder and CEO of new Beginnings title company. Katie started her agency with a shoestring budget at the start of the pandemic in 2020. Through innovation, technology and processes, plus encouragement from her family and friends, they've thrived in the face of adversity while navigating the treacherous waters of title insurance and closings in Florida.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Hey, everybody, welcome to trust this. Today we're going to talk about something different. We'll talk about some tactics and strategies, and in particular in the title world, title closing world. I was in that world for about 26 years before I got out at the end of 2022. Hallelu. I'm so glad I'm out of it. But Katie McGinnis with new beginnings title, who is here with us today, she is still in the thick of it all day, every day. So I want to welcome Katie today to the trust, this podcast where we're going to talk about title tactics and strategies and what's going on in the title world and what she's seeing out there. And welcome, Katie. How are you doing today?
[00:02:06] Speaker C: I'm good, Joe. Thank you so much for having me today.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: It's a pleasure to have you here.
Why don't we start with how did you tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into title? What was your journey to end up where you are today?
[00:02:20] Speaker C: Well, I actually was working in the restaurant world while I was going to college, and one of my friends from high school, his dad owned a title company and he said, why don't you go be a receptionist so that way you can do your classes and it's not such a stressful job.
Come to find out, it was a really stressful job.
But I started as a receptionist.
I don't know, I was really into it. So I ended up getting my title license, finishing school, and then going into title. I worked for somebody for several years and I just decided to try to open my own. And here I am today.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Wonderful. That's a big leap, to open your own.
What was it that made you have that entrepreneurial seizure to say, I can do this by myself and I'll be great at it. What was that one thing that did that for you?
[00:03:12] Speaker C: Probably my parents. My dad owned his own business. My stepfather owned his own business.
I was working for somebody and I was pretty much running the company because I was doing all the marketing and the closings and all of that. So I said, let me try to do this on my own. The worst thing that can happen is it doesn't work right. So at 28, I actually decided to start my own title company, which was really hard because I had to give up my entire life, but it worked out. So I'd rather work for myself than somebody else.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: There you go. It is tough. It is tough.
I went out on my own in 2004 and opened a title company. Little did I know that I was doing that right at the start of the hottest period of real estate ever known. And it worked out very well for about four years.
You could do no wrong back in title back then, and then all of a sudden you realized everything you did was wrong for four years and you really got whacked with it. But what are you finding as a business owner right now is your biggest challenge.
[00:04:24] Speaker C: Really just keeping up with all of the changes. Every day there's something new.
You have to keep up with all the laws entitled to make sure that now you have to put witnesses addresses on all the deeds. So it's just really keeping up with that and then finding new ways to market to new clients because everything is now digital, so I'd say that's probably the biggest struggle.
[00:04:49] Speaker B: So marketing and keeping up with the law changes. I know for me it seemed like every day we got an email blast from our underwriter of, you cannot close with this person or this address. And it was always this huge list. And after a while I got to the point where I'm sitting there going, I can't keep up with all these addresses all over the state of Florida and all these names.
Are you seeing an uptick in fraud. Are you guys having to be more careful about that?
[00:05:23] Speaker C: Yes. So that is a really big challenge right now because we do do a lot of business down south, and that's where most of the fraud happens. We're also seeing a lot now here in central Florida with the land deals because there's so much land that's being sold. The whole state of Florida is being sold, it feels like. But before the fraudsters, they were more scared, but now they actually jump on a Zoom camera and try to do remote online closings. So the other day, it's funny we're talking about this. I just had one, and we actually do not hire outside notaries. That's one way that we try to stop fraud. We had one, one time with a client, and the notary was actually fraudulent, too. And good thing we caught it right before we funded it. But that was a rule we put in place. No more outside notaries. So we do our own remote online closings here in house. And we actually had one the other day, and the lady jumped on it, and she was holding her ID up, or the passport, and the id was actually an Asian lady, and this lady was Nigerian, so it didn't even match the id whatsoever. And when we kept telling her, that is not you, she just sat there on the camera like nothing.
So they're getting a lot more confidence, I guess you can say.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Very much so. I had a lady years ago who showed up at my office, and we knew it was going to be fraud because we did some investigation. Things weren't smelling right. And we did some investigation before she showed up. She showed up and she was supposed to be an 82 year old woman, and she was really probably in her 40s, but she put powder in her hair to make it look white. I mean, it was that bad.
I looked at her license, I looked at her, and I said, this is not you. And she said, yeah, it is. I said, no, it's not. And I sort of touched her hair just like that.
I said, you can leave now. I'll call the police, and they will come and make you leave for trying to commit bank fraud. So it does happen. And in fact, the last year I was open, we had one of those land deals where it was a fraudulent seller. And then this past week, we received a copy of a deed that had. That I and my law firm had prepared this deed for this piece of land somewhere. And as soon as I looked at it, I could tell it was not us because it wasn't the font that we use. And so we told him it was somebody who had copied one of our deeds. But the lawyer representing the true owner said, the witnesses don't exist. The notary doesn't exist.
This person who signed it is definitely not the true owner of the property. And I had to sign an affidavit just saying I did not prepare that deed. I had nothing to do with it. Have no idea who these people are. So it is becoming extremely rampant. So that's always been one of our over the past year, if you're buying vacant land, be careful.
[00:08:23] Speaker C: Yeah, be very careful.
[00:08:26] Speaker B: The one we had that we had closed, the people showed up, and they were measuring, and the man next door was out putting up a no trespassing sign, and they said, why are you putting up a no trespassing sign on our lot? And he said, it's not your lot. You didn't buy it. You're the fifth couple that stopped this week to measure this lot. It's my lot. It was my LLC. I still own it. Your deeds are all bad.
But it was a group. They sold it five times that week.
It was awful.
[00:08:58] Speaker C: It is crazy. We've had so many. I mean, luckily, we've stopped all of them. We haven't had any actually close. But I'm just like, it's all land deals, which is crazy. But then we also had a listing where the listing agent was fraudulent, and that's never happened. So.
Yeah. And they actually put it on Zillow. And the owner had no idea that his house was on Zillow.
[00:09:22] Speaker B: Now, I've heard of that happening with rentals quite often where they're. They're renting out vacant houses, and people don't realize that their house is being rented. And we actually get that as trustee a lot. We get that phone call a lot from people saying, hey, I'm trying to rent your house. And I gave $9,000 to this guy, and now I can't get in the house. And I'm going, who is. No, that person has nothing to do with this. But selling it as a listing agent, that's crazy. I never would have expected to hear that. Yeah, that takes a gut.
[00:09:56] Speaker C: We've become like detectives, really, in our industry, right.
You have to do so much to make sure it's the right person, and it's just become kind of scary.
[00:10:06] Speaker B: And I guess that. What kind of training do title agents now have to take? Annually? And what kind of things do you do monthly? Weekly? To just keep up with everything that's going on?
[00:10:20] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, really, we just take it kind of case by case. Everybody that works for me has been entitled for so long, they know what to look for. But we actually just got a new software program called Closing Lock, and it basically sent out to the client right away. They have to upload their ids, their passports, and right away it runs through a system and it catches it. So we have to pay extra for that. But it's very much worth it because before we work on this entire file just to find out that closing it's fraud. So now it'll stop it. It looks at the IP and address, all that stuff where they're typing everything in from. So it's a good system.
[00:11:01] Speaker B: I'd heard of closing lock, but it came along after I'd already closed up shop, so I didn't really know what it did. That's really neat. We'd use some software for wire instructions. Wire instructions was always a big thing.
I know a lot of people get angry because they're thinking, well, I sent you my wiring instructions, now you're calling me again, or, I've tried to wire to you, and why did you send me this email with new wiring instructions when you told me you would never change your wiring instructions? Have you had any of that kind of activity?
[00:11:35] Speaker C: Luckily, we haven't had anybody really break into our emails and try to duplicate our wiring instructions. We don't keep the last four digits on our account. The wiring instructions we make people have to call in and check them. We also don't really accept wiring instructions via email. We call and get them over the phone, or we get them at closing for the sellers. So we haven't really had any problems with the wiring instructions, I will say. But that is another thing that we're putting into this new software. We're going to upload it where people actually have to go into it and get it themselves, but they still have to call. And they do get kind of angry when they have to call, but it's literally to protect them, right?
[00:12:17] Speaker B: No. We had a gentleman one time that he was buying a house for cash, and he had already sent us his earnest money deposit. And then he got an email and it looked like it came from one of our processors. It had her full signature block on it and everything, and it was around Covid. It said, hey, because of COVID we've had to change our banking information, send it here now. And it had a completely different company name and everything. So fortunately, the guy had copied our signature block so well that it still had the warnings about, we don't change our wiring instructions or anything. So he called. He said, why did you change your wiring instructions? And we said, we didn't. And then he said, well, somebody's hacked into your email. And we said, no, they're watching your email. And he had a Gmail account. They were watching his, and they knew exactly when to insert themselves. It was about two days before closing, and they had watched the settlement statements, so they knew how much money he needed to send. And they said, wire this amount here instead. Unfortunately, he called and stopped it before it happened. But if he had not paid attention and called, he would have lost over half a million dollars, and it would not have been our fault.
He would have just lost that money, which, unfortunately is most of the time, that's the case. It's not that they've hacked the title company, because we went through a lot of training. We have all kinds of insurance and safeguards on our systems to ensure that they're not going to get into us, but they get into the user, the buyer, and the seller all the time and play around with their stuff.
[00:13:56] Speaker C: I've heard when I worked for a prior title company, they did have some wire fraud where it was the same incidents. They got into the realtor's Gmail account and changed everything. So I think I'm so paranoid. We tell everybody our wire instructions do not change. Make sure that you're not wiring to any account. And also at closing, we tell them it's the same instructions from the beginning. So if you still have those, save those. If not, we're going to resend them. But you still have to call and verify at the office.
[00:14:29] Speaker B: That's a good tip for any title agent to not put those last digits on your account for several reasons. And one of the biggest reasons is we used to put them on ours and they were out all over the place. And suddenly one day we started getting all these checks, trying to go through our escrow account, that somebody had taken our wire instructions and created fake checks. They were going out on Craigslist and buying, like, boats. And it may be a $2,000 boat, but they'd send them $2,500 and say, oh, well, just go to Western Union and enter this number and send me that $500 back right now. And then our check would bounce. And then the people were calling us, screaming at us, saying, hey, your check bounced. We're going, who are you?
[00:15:11] Speaker C: Yeah, that's happened to me.
[00:15:14] Speaker B: Yeah, that has happened.
[00:15:18] Speaker C: But even with checks in the mail, that happened with a commission check. Somebody actually stole the check out of the mail and duplicated it and changed the name on it. But luckily we have positive pay, so I was able to catch it in time.
But that's one of the main reasons I wanted to even take the number off of the wiring instructions, because people can take those and they can pay bills with them.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And you mentioned something positive. Tell me about positive pay. We had it on our accounts, too, but a lot of people new in title or even new in business, they don't understand what positive pay is with your bank and why it's so important to have it.
[00:15:54] Speaker C: Yeah. So positive pay is literally at the end of the day, at 05:00 we upload every check that we cut into a system, and those are the only checks that will be allowed to be cashed. So it's basically just a system that looks to see what was uploaded, and if there's any checks that weren't uploaded, they will not be able to get cached.
Well, every morning I have to log on at 09:00 and if there's any exceptions, review the check, approve or deny. So it really is a saving grace when it comes to people trying to create their own checks and cash them, because it stops it, which is really nice.
[00:16:33] Speaker B: Yeah. Another thing that we used, too, was a ZBA account, a zero balance account, and it was only for wire ins, so the money would come in and then immediately sweep over to our actual escrow account. So we never gave out that number. After a while, we didn't even ever give out our actual account number. And then the ZBA account had a rule on it at the bank that they were never, ever allowed to cash a check or any other activity on that account. So even if someone did get in, they could never wire anything out because it never had any money in it. And if they ever wrote a check on it, the bank would just get it and toss it because they go, well, this is not a real account because it can't have check activity on it.
And this is the thing, I think a lot of people don't appreciate how much goes in to being a title agent. They think, and I used to hear this from realtors more than anybody, well, all you're doing is creating some documents and sitting down and sign them with me. So what's the problem?
Anybody can do this. Anybody could sit down and do this. They don't understand that level of security that the title company, being in the middle of the transaction, is providing to everybody.
And that know, one of the things that just absolutely irked me for decades here in Florida especially, that it just wasn't appreciated. The danger that you were in and the amount of money that you make on an average, your. Your average per closing fee, what you're going to make versus the risk you have overall is insane.
And what you can charge, because the market in Florida especially, they're always pushing your fees down.
Everybody's always like, well, I can do it for 200. I'll do it for 100. It's like a race to the bottom. It would drive me crazy when we.
[00:18:35] Speaker C: Get that, because we do get that sometimes where they're like, my title agent will do it for $200. I'm always like, you know what? Just go to your title agent.
Because there's no way in heck that I'm going to do $200 when we're doing all of those due diligence and everything that goes into it.
All these software programs cost money.
[00:18:54] Speaker B: Yeah. No. When I closed, we were spending over 75,000 a year just on software subscriptions.
[00:19:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:19:05] Speaker B: And then let's talk about insurance. What kind of insurance do title agents carry?
[00:19:11] Speaker C: Yeah. The on e policies, the cyber policies.
Right now, I think I'm paying almost 15,000 a year just in insurances. And then if you actually have to use the insurance, then it goes up.
Luckily, we have not had to use it. But then again, every year that your volume goes up, the insurance goes up, too.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: Yes, cyber insurance.
A lot of people don't understand the fidelity insurance that we had to carry, because your eno insurance covers you if you make a mistake. But if an employee steals money or someone steals money, that's not covered by your eno coverage. So you have to have a fidelity policy, which is basically crime coverage, that if you're a victim of crime, it'll take care of it, and banking fees, everything.
It's so expensive to be entitled. I know what it's like.
And employee wages were going very expensive as well.
How are you doing on finding your employees? How is that going?
[00:20:19] Speaker C: So I have been blessed, I will tell you.
I have worked with my employees probably for the past ten years at various companies, and it took me a long time to pull them from where they were. But after they saw that we were doing well, this company is on the up. We're growing. They kind of just came to me and said they're ready to work for me. So, luckily, everybody that works at my company I've known for a very long time. They've been entitled for a very long time.
One of my processors I literally took with me from my old job when I started my new one and trained her from the bottom up. So I don't really like to go out and try to find new people.
I like to keep it because it's like a family environment. We all get along. Everybody is so dedicated to getting the deals closed. I hate to say it, there's not really work hours. They work so late. I'm telling them to go home, put it away. So they look out for me, I look out for them. And I'm just really blessed, to be honest with my staff.
[00:21:26] Speaker B: What are some of the trends you're seeing in closings lately? What are some of the things that you're seeing most often?
Maybe with real estate investors or just regular residential or commercial closings?
[00:21:38] Speaker C: Yeah, so we focus really on the investment side of closings here at new beginnings. Of course, we do commercial and we do residential.
But since we went the route of working mainly with investors, we're seeing a lot of seller finances, wraparound mortgages.
Of course, double closings, really just creative financing has became such a big thing now.
So the wraparound mortgages, we're seeing a lot of. It's been kind of crazy.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I was telling you before we started, my paralegal, she came to me yesterday and said, why are we seeing so many wraparound mortgages? And I was explaining to her, it's like, because these people have 2.5% interest rates and the interest rates now are seven or 8%. So if you can buy a property, it's a way of seller financing. You make your payment to the seller, the seller then pays the mortgage and they keep what's in the middle. They keep the extra overage.
Yeah. I knew wraparound mortgages and subject to closings were going to take off when interest rates started going up. I've just been doing this long enough. I knew it was coming.
It's different when you're doing the title on it, though, because you got to make sure you put the mortgage on the right spot in the title policy and all that good stuff.
[00:23:03] Speaker C: Yeah, it's definitely been a learning curve. But my one closer here, Thomas, is like the sub two guy.
So we've been getting so many new clients because of that, which is why we work directly with you to get all of the documents prepared.
[00:23:19] Speaker B: And yeah, the subject tos are huge. We do the documents for those. A lot of them go through land trust. So we are the trustee for very, very common. We're seeing a lot of those. Where do you guys do closings. Do you do them just in central Florida or all over the state?
[00:23:39] Speaker C: All over the state. So we have an office in Fort Lauderdale, St. Pete Lake, Nona, and then our main office is in Winter park. But since we have the remote online service in house, one of our employees actually does all of them. We're doing closings literally everywhere. So you can be in Key west and jump on your computer and do your closing. So it's helping, really. But we really focus in the central Florida area. I don't like to focus so much down south because, again, there's so much fraud that goes on, it's kind of a liability.
But Central Florida has been crazy growing Hialeah. We've been getting a lot of vacant land deals, so it's really everywhere. It's not really just one spot.
[00:24:26] Speaker B: Yeah, no, Florida. Florida is growing.
I think this week's newsletter is going to have a story about how southwest Florida is having some problems because of insurance going so expensive after Ian.
But I think Florida is going to continue to just grow. And people always want to move here. We just need a really good, cold winter up north again.
So they'll come down here some more, come back to, it's wild.
[00:24:55] Speaker C: I grew up in Daytona, but I moved to Orlando when I was 15, so just to see the growth here in Orlando has been insane. And my mom's lived here since I was seven, so I've been coming here for so long, I'm like, this is crazy. There's a new building downtown, almost like every other month, I feel like.
And then all the land, papka is completely getting built. Just. It's wild, but it's good for us.
[00:25:21] Speaker B: Crazy. Oh, yeah, no, it's really good for the title business and land trust business.
Going through business when you were opening, compared to now, what is something that you had to unlearn that you, five years ago thought, okay, this is the answer. This is how you do it. And now five years later, you're going, yeah, I was wrong. This is not how you do it.
[00:25:50] Speaker C: Really? My biggest thing was always, I didn't think that you needed to market to grow a business. I'm going to be completely honest. 2018, I opened my first title company. I was like, I can do a good job and people are going to bring me business. And it did work for a little bit, but then the pandemic happened.
So when I started this company in 2020, I literally had to unlearn that whole aspect of, well, if you do a good job, people will bring you business and I had to go out there, and I really had to learn a new way of marketing because we were in a pandemic. I couldn't go to events, I couldn't be face to face. So I had to learn this whole new way of social media, which I used to hate, but I had to teach myself, be on social media, show your face, tell everybody what you do. And that's really how I grew my business in 2020 was being out there. Everyone knew me as the title person out of not knowing who I was at all. So I'd really say marketing was one of the really big things. I had to go in that direction, just teach myself how to do it.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: Well, that took a lot of guts to open up a new business in the middle of a pandemic.
But you really started out remote first. I guess a lot of companies were in person based like we had been, and in a matter of days, we had to switch to, okay, now everybody has to have laptops working from home, and we can't work in the office anymore.
It was a big mind shift for us and very expensive switch for us technologically.
[00:27:33] Speaker C: That was the other thing. So I never really thought you had to spend so much money in marketing to grow the company. So I never wanted to spend money in marketing, but the second I actually hired my marketing rep, Kelly, and she implanted it in my brain, so we started doing our events and know a couple of years ago, and it really just made the company take off and grow. So everyone that thinks that you don't have to spend money to grow your company, they're wrong, because you do have to spend money to get yourself out there and do the marketing and be in front of the camera.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, I used to be in a coaching program, and their mantra was, never ever stop marketing. And this was for lawyers, never ever stop marketing. Because what will happen is you start out and you're like, okay, well, I don't have any business, so let me market, market, market. And then all of a sudden, you get all this business and you go, oh, I've got all this business. I can stop marketing.
So you stop marketing, and the business falls down and you come down. They called it porpoising. It's like the dolphins coming up out of the water. You're constantly doing that. And if you keep a nice, steady stream of marketing going, then the big thing at that point is you're really just focused on your operations, on the back end, your technology, and helping your operations.
That's a question I've got for you. What closing software? What platform do you use?
[00:28:58] Speaker C: We use eclosing.
[00:29:00] Speaker B: Eclosing?
[00:29:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:29:01] Speaker B: How do you like that?
[00:29:03] Speaker C: I like it. It's easy. It's user friendly. I've used it for past, like, seven years. So I like that it does have a pay by file where all these other software companies charge you so much money up front, and you have to pay them every single month, even if you don't have the volume that they expect you to have. So e closing has been easy.
Anytime that you have a problem, you call the hotline.
They help me. They do my reconciliations and positive pay and all of that stuff, too. So it's kind of like one platform for all of it.
[00:29:41] Speaker B: Well, I think that's what a lot of people, again, don't understand about the title side is just how much money and accounting you're responsible for. Bookkeeping. It's an inordinate amount of bookkeeping because, yeah, you may have your house account or your business operating account. Money comes in, money goes out. Now imagine you have a business operating account, but you're actually handling money for dozens of other people or hundreds of other people. So it's not your money. And you have to account file by file for every single penny that came in and went out on that file. And if you were short on the recording fees that's coming out of your pocket, usually it's a little bit of money. You're just like, throw in another $50 or whatever. If I forgot to put that on the settlement statements, my fault.
Yeah.
[00:30:42] Speaker C: And it's old check thing.
Every 90 days, you have to go through and rewrite checks and resend them out. And when you talk about the recording fees, if you have a penny overage, it has to go back to the person, like the buyer or the seller, whoever paid for the recording fees, and they don't ever cash those checks. So you're constantly cutting these checks every 90 days and begging people to cash them.
And then people start to get frustrated, and it's a lot.
[00:31:13] Speaker B: And we've hired accounting and bookkeeping people from regular business world, and they come in and they would work for us in the title agency, and they go, it's a penny, it's $0.20. Can't we just keep it? It's $2, it's $20, can't we just keep it? No, because we get audited every single year by our underwriter. And that's one of the things they look at, is, hey, according to the county, you paid this much to record it. According to your checks. You paid this much to record it. Where's the extra money? What happened to it?
And they will question you about that because you're not allowed to keep one penny of it. It drives you crazy. I'm still winding up the account we closed at the end of 2022, and I'm still trying to get the money out that the people just will not cash their checks.
[00:32:03] Speaker C: Crazy, right?
[00:32:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
We're getting ready to just cheat it all to the state. It's about $53,000 of a penny here, a penny there that we've now got to just cheat it to the state and account for every penny. That will be going up to the treasurer on that. It's not fun. What about this new foreign ownership thing? Have you guys got any new forms on that that you're having to deal with?
[00:32:32] Speaker C: Yeah, but we don't really deal with too many, to be honest. Most of our closings, they're in the states, but you can't deal with certain places. You're not allowed to do closings now for. I think China can't really remember.
[00:32:56] Speaker B: China, Iran, the Venezuela, Cuba and Korea, I think, are the big ones.
[00:33:06] Speaker C: Yeah. And they're making us get a document signed on every single.
You know, the people have to state that they aren't foreign and all that good stuff, so people don't really like that either. But unfortunately, it's something that the underwriters are making us do.
[00:33:21] Speaker B: Yeah, we also do it on the trust side, that we have our beneficiaries sign it when they sign the trust, saying that they're not barred. A foreigner that's not allowed to own property in those places, because I don't want to be a trustee for someone who's using a trust to try to hide their breaking that law. I mean, we'll see how that law goes if it's found constitutional or not. It very well could be. So for now, we have to comply with it until we figure it out.
[00:33:51] Speaker C: But, yeah, we don't really get too many foreign sellers or borrowers. I think when it comes to, like, I know Brazilians are really coming to Florida right now, but they kind of like to work with people that speak, so we haven't gotten that route yet.
[00:34:11] Speaker B: Yeah, that was another thing. We typically kept folks who were. Who. We always tried to have at least one native portuguese speaker and at least two or three who also spoke Spanish, because that's.
[00:34:21] Speaker C: Yes. So half of my staff, they do speak Spanish, but we are looking for that portuguese speaker. So if anyone knows anyone always looking, always looking.
[00:34:35] Speaker B: Well, one of the things our big mission, our passion is to help people aspire to a better life. So the last question I always ask all my guests is, who helped aspire you at some point to a better life?
[00:34:53] Speaker C: I guess my father. I love my dad. He really just told me that I need to go to school and work hard so that I don't have to. He was a single father raising three kids, so it wasn't exactly like we weren't rich.
So he kind of embraced that in me. Make sure you work hard, treat everybody with respect, and never treat anybody wrong and good things will come to you. So I think my dad is my biggest inspiration.
[00:35:28] Speaker B: Wonderful. Well, that's great to hear. And I'm glad it sounds like you guys are going gangbusters in a market that has been tough for a lot of title agents. A lot of title agents haven't made it. You started during a pandemic and have thrived. So good on you. I'm so happy to get to talk to you today about this. And folks, we'll put Katie's contact information down in the show notes. If you ever need a great title agent, especially for real estate investors in Florida, Katie's your lady.
[00:36:04] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this edition of trust this if you got something out of it, please press like and subscribe and give us a five star review to help us reach others who can benefit from this series. Until next time, keep keep aspiring to a better life.
