Cost Segregation Studies with The Depreciation Doctor

Roger Burnett (00:00.816)
Okay, this one.

Every time I get super pumped when I know the person behind the topic, like I know Jeff Hiatt, and man, this one's gonna be fun because Jeff's got a special skill set that doesn't necessarily quite what we're used to here at the Capital Shift because Stuarts are used to me introducing operators to them that represent an asset class that maybe Stuart might wanna

think about investing in, but today I decided that I needed to bring all of the Stuarts to the Doctor. And we're gonna introduce Stuart to the doctor because Jeff Hiatt, as the depreciation doctor, actually has a very unique skill set. So Jeff, before we get into introducing yourself and your credentials and why everybody

Needs to know why they should pay attention to the depreciation, Doctor. Let me tell you about Stewart. You know a little bit about Stewart, but let me let me represent the patient for you in a moment. Patient Stewart has some he's got some environmental factors and some symptoms, Doctor. And he makes lots of money. So he's he's very flush with money.

So money's not really the the issue here, but lots of stock exposure, like significant investments in the stock market, but maybe even more importantly, and more on their mind, Stewart often gets stock RSUs from their employers, which is actual stock. So there's a lot of volatility in the stock market, and that creates a lot of volatility for them. they're paying so much in taxes. my God.

Roger Burnett (02:00.092)
Jeff, doctor, it's it if there's pain, that's like, you know, when you ask what level of pain, that's like a 10. I'm in tell level 10 tax pain. So they're stressed out by by every market swing. And like if the company misses earnings, like, my God, that's terrible. We're constantly checking the stock portfolio to see how we did today, right? So they're totally stressed out. Totally stressed out. But they're also very smart.

Stuart's very smart. And so I'm gonna do the research someday, doctor. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go out there onto the clods or the Gemini in this instance, maybe the Grok, who knows? Meta, who knows? Like Mis. But I'm going on one of the things and I'm gonna go talk about my symptoms because I'm smart and it'll tell me what to do. And then eventually someday I'll just not have any of these problems anymore. So that's Stuart. You're the doctor.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (02:53.966)
Yeah.

Roger Burnett (02:59.186)
Let's talk about your experience, what you do, and then how that's going to apply to all of these other asset classes and operators that we are gonna continue to interview at the Capital Shift. Jeff Hiatt, ladies and gentlemen.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (03:15.608)
Thank you very much. What a what an intro. What a what a what a great pream I'll call it a preamble there. So thank you very much for that, Roger. That's very nice of you.

Roger Burnett (03:24.253)
Heck yeah.

Setting the table, buddy. We're setting the table.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (03:30.41)
Right, right. This is great. So well for y for your patient well first of all I gotta call out that we have matching ceilings, which is just insane, but it's kinda funny. So s slight difference, but both tin ceilings. So anyway. f for good old Stuart, my question would be to that person.

Roger Burnett (03:41.596)
Yeah.

Roger Burnett (03:47.678)
You batcha.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (03:57.923)
The risk that you've everything you've described is our risk components and just going to be attributes of owning something that you don't control. I mean, ultimately, many of these folks are going to be employees at g XYZ company, whatever that company happens to be, but when it when the rubber hits the road, they don't control the outcome. So

what I would say to them, what if there was an asset out there? What if there was an asset class out there that wasn't as volatile, you know, because X, Y, or Z happens to company A A B C and all of a sudden, you know, there were there were some fast food restaurants a number of probably now a couple of decades ago, but they had an E. coli outbreak.

And it hurt the entire national brand. Now, you know, that puts people that own stock in that company at risk. Typically, and and there's a saying out there, so I'm gonna pause what I was just the path I was going down. I'm gonna pause that for a second and say there's a saying that goes, if you're a hammer, everything is a nail. Okay? So to me

Roger Burnett (05:23.214)
Mm-hmm. Sure.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (05:27.306)
I'm a hammer on real estate and taxes. So I'm gonna relate stuff to real estate and taxes. Okay, so from in my opinion, which this is not the doctor's opinion, this is Jeff's opinion, real estate is such an unbelievable asset. What else can you buy in the market? If I wanted to go out and buy the whatever the

Roger Burnett (05:28.432)
Mm-hmm.

Roger Burnett (05:42.142)
Okay.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (05:56.249)
company that Stuart works for, whatever company that is, if I wanted to go buy shares in that company and I wanted to buy a million dollars worth of shares today, Roger, how much money would I have to come up with?

Roger Burnett (06:10.182)
A multiple of a million dollars.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (06:12.346)
A million a million bucks. I would have to come up with a million to buy that, forgetting about margin and all that. But for the most part, I'm gonna have to come up with a million bucks. But what if I wanted to buy a million dollar property? How much do I have to come up with? Maybe maybe as low as pardon me.

Roger Burnett (06:27.954)
Yes.

Significantly less. Significantly less.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (06:35.638)
You know, it could be depending on what you're buying and when you're buying it and all that, probably twenty to thirty percent. So now I can buy the million dollar asset and I get to buy it for a lot less down, I get all kinds of tax benefits. I get the appreciation. It's very unlikely if you do a good job buying the property on the way in, meaning you're not buying some place that is

Ready to fall down, it's very unlikely for it to go to zero. But the folks that had that stock in the E. coli company, you know, their stock didn't go to zero, but man, it took a hit and it took years to come back. With real estate, I would my position would be you don't have that same amount of risk. Because again, if you're buying it right going in, then it's probably not going to go down as dramatically. It could

Roger Burnett (07:06.408)
Sure.

Roger Burnett (07:20.318)
Sure, sure.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (07:34.617)
Take a hit for a while, but it will typically come back. You get the tax benefits, you get the appreciation over time. you get then potentially, depending on where you're buying, you've got the ability to go visit that property, which now gives you if you're buying it in a place that you want to be in, i.e., maybe you live up north, like you know, Roger, you're in Michigan, I'm in New Hampshire. Maybe, you know, we want to buy a place as an investment property in a sunny place.

Roger Burnett (07:37.51)
Yeah.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (08:03.264)
And so that gives us the ability to travel there to check on our investment. And that gives us deductions. Again, I'm the hammer and the nail. So I'm looking for the tax angles all the time, which are legitimate. You know, I'm not going out on some limb that's aggressive as anything. I'm staying right in the middle of the road here. But if you own assets in another part of the country and you want to check on them, that could be part of your rationale for own you know.

taking deductions for that trip.

Roger Burnett (08:36.956)
I feel compelled to share with the crowd. those of you who are following Roger and Melissa Burnett's story closely at all, you will know that we purchased a home in Sedona at the end of 2025. And thanks to Jeff and his team at MSC, we've been able to realize a pretty significant tax savings. So when I'm talking to folks about this, it's from a learned

perspective and I'm actually inviting the person who taught me to come tea talk to all of you about how the doctor treats his patients in ways that then can alleviate your symptoms. So you've got some background in this we don't want to send anybody out to AI to go figure out who Jeff Hyatt is. You wanna talk about like all those letters behind your name and everything that goes along with all of that.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (09:33.027)
Well, I you know, I wish there were more letters behind my names, but they're not, because to me that was gonna take extra time away from doing business. So, bottom line is our firm has been doing cost segregation studies since nineteen ninety-six. That's when it first came out. and it was like this weird, nichey thing back then, because the first court case came out in ninety-six, but it

Roger Burnett (09:38.728)
Sure.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (10:00.854)
had transpired beginning in 86 under the Tax Reform Act of 86. I won't get into all the details because I don't want people, I don't want stewards to hang up on this call or or disc disconnect from this call. But the bottom line is we've been doing it since 96. I joined the firm in 99. I was basically the third person in prior to me joining it was an engineer and a CPA only. And w I was doing work for folks that owned

Dunkin' Donuts and Domino's Pizza and Taco Bells. And we ended up doing five or ten projects a year for them. And then in 02, we got referred in to the folks that had just around the Boston area bought a big defense contractor facility in a sale lease back. The the tenant was gonna stay on, they had previously owned it, they sold it to the buyers, and

Roger Burnett (10:36.636)
Mm-hmm.

Roger Burnett (10:50.726)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (10:57.836)
They the buyers were gonna hold it while the tenant moved to another facility a few years later. They had to build it, but the sellers wanted to get it off their books. Okay, great. So we did that cost seg, save those buyers about four million bucks of income tax. And their CPA saw the results and said, my gosh, this is incredible. You have to do a seminar for the Mass Society of CPAs. And in

Roger Burnett (11:20.507)
Yeah.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (11:27.362)
February of 03, we did a seminar, had about 85 CPAs come, and we went from doing five or ten projects a year to doing a couple of hundred. And that was three of us back then. You know, fast forward to today, we do 1,500 to 1600 studies a year. We have 38 employees, we have six offices throughout the country. So we can get to most places pretty quickly. and so that's that's kind of what we do.

Because we've now done 28,000 studies, part of our value proposition is to provide accurate, as accurate as possible, but conservative, estimates of tax benefit before you spend a nickel. And that's what we did with you and Melissa Roger. We, you know, we gave you an estimate, we said, hey, this is what we know for sure we can hit, but it's likely we're gonna do better than that. And we came in nicely above what we projected.

Roger Burnett (12:08.56)
Yeah. Yeah.

Roger Burnett (12:21.682)
Nicely above. Not to mention that the additional opportunity that your expertise has created for us to allow us yet another opportunity for a tax event at the same address. Just because we've decided to make improvements to the property. So really, really, really clutch to know just when you're s even when you're structuring a transaction like we were, to know that.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (12:23.874)
Still.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (12:33.88)
Right. Be because

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (12:38.85)
Bingo.

Roger Burnett (12:50.098)
When you're doing your write up and analysis of the deal, you could make a decision, a really uninformed decision, because you've not added this consideration into the calculations. Yeah.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (13:07.982)
yeah. I mean, do you want me to get into that? That part of it is that more detail than you want to get into or how do you how do you

Roger Burnett (13:11.516)
Well, let's do this. Here's here's what I think is gonna make the most sense, right? And it you know, it's been fun for me to think about like how you and I were gonna do this episode because w there's so many different ways for us to want to be able to to to talk to the the to the to the stewards about this, right? So let's just bring the compass up and let let's talk about this a little bit because

Ordinarily, what I'd be doing, Jeff, is I would be hitting the operator and saying, Tell me how you, Mr. Self-Storage, Mr. Mobile Home Park, Mr. TripleNet Lease, you know, these are the operators that we've brought on, and these are the questions we're asking them. Like, how do you match up in this scoring matrix? Okay. So, Jeff, you're in this unique position of being able to see across asset classes.

So to me, I think it'd be real fun for you to just sort of take the Stuarts through, like, okay, if you have the symptoms we just talked about, how does this scoring legend make sense for Stuart? And then where would you be pointing them asset class-wise if they were considering these four compass points?

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (14:28.046)
Okay. Do you want so do you wanna ask me about the particular ones or do you want me to just randomly ramble or how do you want that to go?

Roger Burnett (14:36.838)
Well, let's let's do it this way. The one we know that's obviously clear. And maybe this is the best way to talk about it, Jeff. All right. So Jeff, here's what you and I know about investors. Stuart's might not even know this yet, but we're just gonna tell Stewart now so that when they're watching this episode, maybe they'll rewatch it later when they realize like, my God, they were right. So their primary problem is tax. Period. Okay. So we're gonna start with the prism of tax.

And I'm gonna allow you to pontificate on each of the different asset classes and how you perceive them to perform in that category. I'd even, if you want to try to rank, like if you feel like there's top three, that would be the most, that would make the most sense if someone was really interested. But here's the kicker. And this is what I want you to be thinking about. The investors will come back after we've solved the tax problem and go, but I want some income.

Or I'm really like it's a long play. This capital is a long, it's got long play upside to it. So I'm looking for an equity multiple in addition to tax. Like so usually there's like the primary, but then we've got a secondary. So I think it gives you a chance to sort of address the primary, obviously. But then if you feel like there's nuance in that asset class, that also applies to one of the other compass points.

Feel free to touch on those as well. Does that make sense? Cool. All right. So Steward's big dang tax problem, Doc, what are we doing?

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (16:06.807)
Right. Perfect.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (16:14.766)
Okay, there's there's a couple of ways and a couple of things to a couple of ways to address it, a couple of considerations to have. Okay, without changing anything you've given me to play with there, okay, the probably in my understanding of good old Stuart is that they work for that person, let's say one person of a couple.

works for a given company and there's lots of stock floating around. Because of that, and let's say the other let's say if there is a spouse, the other spouse has maybe works at the same company or works elsewhere, W-2 or 1099 job. Probably the cleanest

Roger Burnett (16:47.55)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (17:05.288)
thing for them to do under this scenario. If they if they heard what I was saying about, hey, how else can you leverage and buy a million dollar property for a heck of a lot less? You know, what else can you do with it? Probably the cleanest thing to do would be to do short-term rental. And, you know, we know folks that are specialists in that space and they help people get into short-term rentals. Okay, great. What's the deal there? Because there's talk on the internet

All over social media, what they say is the short-term rental loophole, the short-term rental, you know, fix or whatever, they they they the folks on social media talk about things to get clicks, of course. I mean, that's what social media is all about. And so if if the person hearing the message

Roger Burnett (17:54.653)
Right.

Right.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (18:02.22)
hear something and they're and they're thinking, I got a tax problem and and now there's this loophole. They listen in because they go, Wow, there's there's something out there that I don't know about, that nobody really knows about. The IRS hasn't even figured it out yet. But it's not a loophole. I don't call it that when I refer to it. It's not, it's not a loophole. It's part of the tax code for Pete's sake. But it sounds s sexier to say it's a loophole. So people click. But

Roger Burnett (18:18.6)
No, it is not.

Roger Burnett (18:28.19)
Sure. Sure. Yeah.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (18:31.01)
The deal is it's I call it the short-term rental advantage. And what you need to understand there is a couple of things. Short-term rentals, a lot of people, okay, and I'll I'll give you a scenario in short-term rental. Roger and Melissa go out and they buy two properties, they're side by side. They were built by the same builder.

The exact same time, so let's say 15 years ago, but Roger and Melissa are buying it, buying them both, and they pay the exact same for both properties. But one, for whatever reason, they're gonna rent out long term. Maybe they've got a buddy who wants to rent that place and he just wants to be in that neighborhood. Okay, great. So they rent to that person long long term, meaning

Let's say a year lease at a time. Okay, great. Well, that becomes a 27 and a half year residential rental property. But the very same building that's identical to it right next door that they bought the same day and they paid the exact same price for it, they're gonna rent that one out short-term rental because for whatever reason there's some thing that they want to do that they call a cool short-term rental opportunity.

And so they do that one short-term rental. And you go, okay, what's the diff? They're the same building, they're gonna have the same depreciable life. No. They're because it's short-term rental, it's 39-year life. So it's treated in the tax code not like residential rental, which is the only asset class out there. Residential rental is the only asset class out there that has a shorter life than 39 years. Why is that?

Roger Burnett (20:22.739)
Right.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (20:24.386)
Because the apartment rental lobby in DC is very, very strong. And they were able to prevail to the legislature and the IRS and all of that that people that rent out apartments should get a faster life than people renting out office buildings or restaurants or any other asset class. So everything else is 39 years except residential rentals.

I say that because that's going to become a part of the conversation here in a moment. You go from there, okay, it's 39 years because it's treated like a hotel. Because a hotel, for the most part, oftentimes, depending on who's owning it and how it's being managed, is going to be what they consider an active trader business. Okay. So a short-term rental, when it's being managed by Stuart and

the spouse and or they get to claim it against their the losses from that property from that short-term rental they get to claim the losses against not only the income from the short-term rental but also any excess losses spill over and wipe out income tax on their day job income. So that becomes a really nice tool and advantage, quote unquote loophole.

is that they're getting to use the losses from the short-term rental not only against income from the property, but also from their day job income. As opposed to going back to the other property that's right next door, for Roger and Melissa, the losses created via cost seg on that property would wipe out the income tax on.

that property's income, but it would not spill over and wipe out Roger and Melissa's day job.

Roger Burnett (22:24.37)
Yeah.

Roger Burnett (22:31.752)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (22:32.686)
Because it's called passive. So for apartments, you're talking about passive income. For anything else in this scenario with short term rental, it's going to be considered active. That's a beautiful thing about that. There's also some other nuance that if Roger and Melissa decided to spend 50 grand fixing up both bathrooms. So now they're going to spend 100 grand, 50 grand on the apartment, 50 grand on the

short-term rental to fix up the bathrooms. Make them super deluxe. Add spas, add whatever the heck goes into fancy bathrooms, you're spending that 50 grand on both of them. For the apartment, that 50 grand is going to become a 27 and a half year asset class.

But for the short-term rental, that 50 grand falls in what they call QIP qualified improvement property, which has a 15-year life, which becomes immediately depreciable under bonus depreciation. So now you've gotten a second grab on the benefit of short-term rental, is that you're calling it QIP for that improvement, and now you get to take that deduction immediately. The third

on now this would apply to both is that if the cost seg was done properly on the apartment and the next door short-term rental, we've identified the values within the bathroom. We put values where most providers out there ignore anything that has a long life because it doesn't help Roger and Melissa today take write-offs. So they ignore it. But we don't because my partners are CPAs.

So they kind of get the overall big picture. So we put values on the bathrooms. So that down the road when Roger and Melissa decide to gut that bathroom and throw it in a dumpster for both properties, they put the new money in now because our report identified the value of the first bathroom and it's in a dumpster. Roger and Melissa get to take another bite at the tax apple and take abandonment losses on the items in the dumpster from the bathroom.

Roger Burnett (24:53.8)
So just as a quick aside for you paid Voyager members, one of the next upcoming decision desk live teardowns is going to be us walking through what we're expecting from Jeff's literally talking about the project that we're doing in Sedona right now. He's talking about a live project. So we've got an analysis going right now on what that might entail from

a benefit perspective and I can assure you the cost investment versus the benefit is there's it's a no-brainer. So it's really more a matter of us being able to explain this in greater detail in future pieces of content so that if you really want to learn this inside out, there's ways because we've gone ahead and done the work to be able to afford the community the opportunity to get a peek at what that looks like, right? So you've crushed

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (25:29.326)
Mm-hmm.

Roger Burnett (25:52.626)
this thing. The the only one that you and I both know, and I'll just layer this in for a moment because this is this is a a key segue, I think, for you. So I had Tom Rowan on and we were talking about this exact topic, the short term rental advantage. And what Tom Tom wanted to remind the stewards out there is that you are actually buying a hospitality business when you do a short term rental.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (26:13.066)
Thank you.

Roger Burnett (26:22.298)
And if you don't have someone within your family that can meet the objective of managing that well and managing it property, properly one, you don't get the actual hours necessary, which is a whole separate topic that we'll just kind of like if people want to know, we can give them ways to figure that piece of it out and more real-wise content covers sort of the hours qualifying need. But more importantly, buy a short-term rental and mismanage it and watch how much it costs you.

So knowing that, doctor, that that's a side effect of that remedy for this tax problem, what might be some other tax efficient asset classes that Stuarts might want to know about that don't necessarily have that same symptom or side effect, but maybe have some other side effects that come along with those?

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (27:20.014)
Okay, so

We've been doing this long enough. So I've been deep in the real estate space, and my wife and I are also real estate investors. So we own a bunch of apartment doors, you know, some directly, some with partners through syndications and all of that stuff. We own industrial, we own sh self-storage, we own a car wash, we own all kinds of different stuff. Okay. so I would say that over time.

Because you know, I've been in this business for so long, we've seen kind of the rise and fall, the the ebbs and flows of different asset classes. At one point, office was the hot thing. Everybody was buying office, and that's where the money was flooding into. And I would say to you and your stewards here that we are a lagging economic indicator, meaning we don't

Roger Burnett (28:02.856)
Sure, sure.

For sure.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (28:21.654)
You know, a mortgage person sees stuff coming in before it becomes hot. They they see all of a sudden all of these deals are coming in for office or apartment or hotel, whatever the asset class is. So they're on the front end. We're on the back end, meaning we don't hear about stuff until the deal is closed and usually until our real estate investor wakes up on March 10th and goes, crap, I gotta talk to my accountant.

Roger Burnett (28:47.902)
Okay.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (28:51.618)
And tell him I bought that building last year. And on March 10th, we find out and via the CPA, Fred just bought this hotel or Fred just bought this whatever. So I would say we're lagging, but you know, right now the hotter.

Topics are gonna be residential, meaning normal apartment type facilities, whether that's single family residential or duplex or you know quads or you know anything bigger. those are hot. office is is down, you know, because there's a lot of

post COVID vacancy and that still is shaking itself out of the world of what that's gonna look like. you know in certain states there's talk of

rent caps and so some municipalities are talking about converting these vacant office buildings into residential but that is such a beast in and of itself like how does that become viable like to add 50 or you know 30 bathrooms on a floor and and I mean you gotta buy that building so cheap that

Roger Burnett (29:59.518)
Yeah.

Roger Burnett (30:03.345)
Right.

Right.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (30:19.68)
It's insane. Yeah, I don't know how and then and then cat you know, throw onto that the conversation about rent control and it becomes almost I d I don't know where that goes. So anyway, residential is is a hotter topic right now because it is very viable. Now, I I'll I'll tell you a story and it it's it's kind of an interesting little th

Roger Burnett (30:30.545)
Yeah.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (30:49.344)
Gem. I had a client who was a very, very successful surgeon, a brain surgeon actually. So very successful. He made four to five million bucks a year in brain surgery. And he took his excess dough and he would buy bigger industrial properties.

commercial industrial warehouse kind of stuff. Nothing that had lots of tenants calling him all the time. It was commercial stuff. And all was good with the world. And we did his COSEG work probably six, seven years ago. And we did four or five of the big buildings he had. And he was making about a mil a year in income from those properties. On top of his four to five mil a year

From his day job of brain surgery. All is good. A couple years go by after we've done the cost seg, we delivered great results for him. He was thrilled, his accountant was thrilled. We came to the dance with him through his accountant, so it couldn't have been better. Then he calls me up about

Two years ago, two and a half years ago, and he is irate. He's like, I think you guys are doing this Coseg thing wrong. What are you doing? I should be real estate professional. I should have I should be able to take this against my day job income, and you're not letting me do that, and I think you're doing this wrong, and blah blah blah. And he was all over me. And I was like, I'm gonna change his name. I was like, Fred,

you know, our results won't change if you're a real estate professional or not a real estate professional. Our results are gonna stay the same. The question is, what is your accountant, how do they apply this to your tax return? So let's get your accountant on a Zoom call. And we so we did. We scheduled it, got the accountant on. And so I let Roger, excuse me, Fred, go ahead and s say his stuff. And

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (32:59.188)
So the accountant said back to him, So, Fred, the scenario you're painting here is that you're gonna sit down with the IRS and tell them that your primary job is real estate management and real estate investment, and you make 800 to a million bucks a year doing that.

Roger Burnett (33:14.472)
Yeah.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (33:21.682)
And this thing you call brain surgery, where you make four to five million, is just kind of a side hustle, is what you're gonna say to the IRS with a straight face. And Fred said at that point, he kind of like danced around. He was like, Well, well, well, when you put it that way, no, probably not. So

It went away, but he had he he star he had started, and I forgot to mention this earlier, he had started with, I've been doing a lot of research. I've been doing a lot of research. And I said, Okay, Fred, you know, now that we've covered this, what kind of research have you been doing? And he goes, I'll send you the Facebook link. I'll get it to you. You can look at it. And I was like, Are you kidding me? This guy is getting his advice off

Roger Burnett (33:55.144)
Sure. Yeah.

Roger Burnett (34:06.514)
There you go. There you go.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (34:12.79)
brain surgeon is getting his advice from some dude on Facebook and I I it's gotta be true. It's gotta be. So but

Roger Burnett (34:17.032)
Saw it on the internet, Jeff.

I saw it on the internet. It's gotta be true. And and and I think that's good advice for the, you know, if we said that one of Stuart's symptoms is this, you know, inability to move to action because of exactly what you just described. I'm I'm too smart. I will figure this out eventually. And so you lose out on all the opportunity that you could have had with the income that you have today because eventually you were gonna figure it out.

So

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (34:50.776)
Well, but here's here's the great thing though. Here here is ultimately the deal. what our friend Fred did was he began to hand off the management to his spouse. And so his spouse became the real estate professional. And because the spouse spent enough time being the real estate professional, then income that

Roger Burnett (35:08.508)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (35:20.19)
Well, the deductions from the cost say go to wipe out not only the income from the property first, but then goes to wipe out the married filing jointly couple's information. And so it it wipes out the tax on his income as well, because married filing jointly real estate professional. There are some distinctions and and hurdles you gotta get over for that, but it is something that worked.

Roger Burnett (35:45.534)
For sure. Well, and I mean the Burnett family. That I Roger is the real estate professional. Melissa is the Googler. We we are the very embodiment of that which you speak. And you know, my business is managing our real estate investments and then running in the real wise community. So between and amongst them, I'm getting more well more than the five hundred hours that are necessary. So it works out pretty good. So Jeff, let me ask you this from a doctor's perspective.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (36:10.958)
Yeah, that's great.

Roger Burnett (36:15.442)
recently we've had on TJ with a debt fund and an equity fund. We've had we just had Tim Whitbridge on with mobile home parks. Arthur has been on with self-storage, particularly when it comes to opportunity zone. Tom's been on for triple net lease. So we've kind of run the gamut of

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (36:40.501)
Mm-hmm.

Roger Burnett (36:43.868)
The tax optimized asset classes. When I talk to you about that short list, knowing that we know that they're all of those come with some relative tax efficiency, are there any little nuggets of value that you want to attach to any of those asset classes that I just mentioned from the depreciation doctor's perspective?

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (37:07.79)
Sure, sure. the the great thing is, you know, self-storage can be a phenomenal asset class because you've got a lot of stuff inside of the building that is just needed to be there for running of the business. and and that, you know, those any accoutrements that go along with the self-storage business can go into a faster life.

Roger Burnett (37:27.23)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (37:37.827)
That can be phenomenal. And it's really, really phenomenal when you can take an old building and renovate it and make it self-storage. We've we've seen phenomenal results when somebody takes let's say an older, let's say Kmart building or older, you know, vacated any any retail. Hey, thank you. any retail out there.

Roger Burnett (37:55.315)
Mm-hmm.

Roger Burnett (37:59.396)
Any retail.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (38:04.466)
that they can make self-storage because you've already got the structure and now so much of it going in is going to go into that faster life. So that's a smoking deal. triple net leases are good because typically the the accoutrements that come in that building are already there. You as the buyer are not having to let's say put them all in there, and you could take accelerated depreciation on a lot of those items. So Tom Rowan's

scenario is very good as well with TripleNet properties. We do them all the time. TJ with you know Steel Point, they do a great job with putting together a lot of residential stuff typically is what I've seen them focused on. And it works very well there for the typical 27 and a half year apartment properties. So all of these can be really really good.

it just depends. If you're buying something that is, I'll say, really, really

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (39:09.634)
baseline the minimum, you know, low I'll say low value, then it it's harder to get better results. But as you get bigger numbers in there and more improvements, the cost segment reallocations become even better than two. if does that make sense? And did I answer your question?

Roger Burnett (39:10.814)
Sure.

Roger Burnett (39:33.426)
Yeah, for sure. All right. So so all right. So we got what what if you were so you're writing me prescriptions right now, you're writing Stuart prescriptions, right? You take a whole dose of self-storage and you can you know, so what would you say, Stuart, avoid under all conditions, do not do this. What what are you would you caution people against?

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (40:00.907)
Okay. So again, hammer nail kind of thing. what

Roger Burnett (40:05.106)
Yeah.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (40:09.902)
People can do, they can often get into this, I'm gonna call it trap or treadmill, of they buy a property, they pretty it up, they call it fixing and flip. Probably Stuart already knows that phrase. So you're fixing and flipping, and you're fixing and flipping. If you're doing the fix and flips and you do cost seg on them, typically the cost seg won't work for fix and flips because

It's treated like inventory, it's not treated as an asset for you to depreciate. So that's number one. But let's say you're in that phase of always fixing and flipping. Well, if you end up retaining some of those, that's great. Just remember at the time you sell, the best outcome is probably going to be a 1031, where you go ahead and defer the gain on that and you end up doing the 1031. and

If you've already done the cost seg, you've extracted the tax benefit out of it today, and then it rolls into the next property too. And potentially, depending on what you're buying, and you hit the 1031 requirements, you're going to get the the ability to do a cost seg on the acquired property as well. So that can work out nicely. the time you wouldn't want to do it is if Stuart has a situation where they've got losses and they're

And probably by your definition of Stuart in the beginning, this is not going to be the case. But you know, assuming it was a possible thing, if they're not paying much tax, it probably doesn't make sense to do this. my scenario, the cost seg thing. Because if they're not paying tax, they don't need the losses that we create. And what we try to steer people away from is using the losses now, let's say.

in a lower tax bracket year versus waiting until down the road. If they've got a partner, you know, a business partner, and they're they know for sure they're going to be buying out that partner, then they probably want to wait on doing the cost seg until they own it completely versus doing it if they were 50-50 partners and they do it today, then the benefit is going to get split 50-50.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (42:34.328)
But if they know the partner is departing, then hold off on the cost seg until it's going to become all their benefit down the road.

Roger Burnett (42:42.258)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (42:44.044)
I'm trying to think of other other things that would negate you know, it it when it's really good to do is if somebody owns a property and they're gonna theoretically hold it for a while, one of the conversation points, especially now going back to our friend Stuart, if they're thinking of their overall estate generational wealth kind of thing, they might be thinking, okay, we're gonna do this,

you know, this plan and we gotta start to parse up the assets and put them in different trusts and get them out of our names and all this other stuff. Depending on what is going on and how they're trying to do it, there can be a play where they do the cost seg on the building they own today. They get they extract the value from that transaction, some from the cost seg out of the building they own now.

They get that. And then five or seven or ten years later, they pass on. And now that property goes from generation one to generation two. Generation two gets what they call a step up in basis. And all of that recapture that would have otherwise come into play with a cost seg if they didn't do a 1031 evaporates.

Roger Burnett (43:55.219)
Right.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (44:11.34)
So it can be a really good plan for generation one to extract the tax benefit today. And then down the road, if that property is gonna go to generation two, bam, it goes there, they get the step up, it's been five or seven or ten years, they get to do a a cost seg on that property as well. So that can be a really smoking tool there.

Roger Burnett (44:16.818)
Mm-hmm.

Roger Burnett (44:33.711)
Ladies and gentlemen in the listener crowd, when you sign up for the paid Voyager paid sponsorship of the program, you get bonus information. We're not even Jeff, you teasing folks because we know that there's ways for us to like this is the one place where this is math and we can show you the math. So

Now as we sort of wrap it up and say that's it, that's all, that's everything, and we'll move into the page section, before we do that piece, is there ways that you would like for folks to try to find you out there so that if they want to learn more about your big brain and how you go about doing all the things that you do, how can they find you?

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (45:24.43)
thank you so much for that, Roger. the yeah, so I'm out there on the social media thing.

Roger Burnett (45:25.608)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (45:32.623)
Instagram, all those d depreciation doctor. I think on so my daughter who spent seven years in the Coast Guard came out and she's was our 38th employee. She's helping me get into this social media realm. her name is also Melissa. But I think on TikTok I'm Depreciation Doct. I think I ran out of spaces for that tagline. but you know I'm all over the place.

Roger Burnett (45:46.46)
Mm-hmm.

Roger Burnett (45:56.382)
Okay.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (46:00.331)
My email address is is JDH at costsegstudies dot com if you want to reach out. We do offer for Rogers

Colleagues, Stuart's here, will offer a complimentary assessment whether that's for buildings you currently own or buildings you're looking to acquire. we can give you that complimentary estimate of tax benefit before anybody spends a nickel. So, and it's not one of these you just plug it in and four minutes later somebody's offering you, here's your cost seg, it's done already. Well, that's an IRS

Roger Burnett (46:12.67)
Sure, yeah.

Roger Burnett (46:37.756)
Yeah. Yeah. We don't we don't we're we're not we're not we're not advocating for the the virtual the you know people don't go to the place like what are we even talking about? So that's cool. Jeff, dude, as always, you you crushed it just like always. All right, so now now is now just the Voyagers are hanging out. The Voyagers they they pay me five hundred bucks a year and we give extra stuff, right? So

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (46:38.826)
audit waiting to happen. So

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (46:50.358)
Right. Exactly.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (47:06.232)
Awesome.

Roger Burnett (47:07.112)
How, how, so the first thing that Stewards always ask me, like when we talk about our short term rental, right? So our social circles are following us online and they're like, hey, you guys got bought that house in Sedona, that looks really sweet. Tell me more about this tax it, right? So we immediately have to like try to articulate what we've done and what the benefit was. And you should see the reaction on the faces of the people. They literally think that we're lying through that.

So I know as the person who's now completed the process that has confidence that I've done enough to guard against this, but why what is it about the way that we do with people like Jeff at MSC that guards us the most we possibly can be guarded against being audited? Like, what's the explanation?

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (48:04.024)
So th so there's a couple of things going on there. We've been doing it since the beginning of the industry. We were a it we're part of the overall association called the

It's also called Tax Dorks, but it's the American Society of Cost Segregation Professionals, ASCSP. And one of our partners is the president of that association currently. So she's smoking in terms of knowledge and sh what she does. She really knows this stuff at a at a level that's way beyond even what I know. And I'm I'm pretty good with this stuff. Ashley Sullivan goes way beyond what I've got. So

Roger Burnett (48:17.278)
Yeah.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (48:44.842)
With that knowledge, it you can you can't prevent an audit, but what you can do is have in place things that will enable you to maintain the deductions that you've claimed. Part of that is you want to make sure that you've done actual site visits. You don't want this virtual site visit thing because the IRS says specifically you need to have a quality study done by

qualified professionals with doing actual site visits. Because the IRS cannot confirm was that was that virtual site visit done at 123 Main Street or was it done at 456 Main Street or was it done in an AI studio? And because the IRS cannot confirm any of the above

They say virtual site visits are out and disallowed. And then what will happen, and people don't get this, is that it's not going to be they hit send on the e-file, and 15 minutes later they get notified, hey, you're getting audited. It's not that. It's going to be two or three or four years later. And then you're getting whacked because now you didn't pay those taxes three years ago, and you've got penalties.

Roger Burnett (49:54.152)
No.

Roger Burnett (49:57.864)
Right.

Roger Burnett (50:03.442)
Right. Yep.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (50:06.602)
And you've got interest that's been compounding at some ungodly rate like 18 to 22 percent.

Roger Burnett (50:11.73)
Yeah, it's you're getting the book thrown at you is literally what everybody feels like. You're just getting the book thrown at you at that point, right?

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (50:17.902)
Right. And and I had one guy recently tell me he goes, well th this other company that's that's you know offering us that if we do get audited they'll come in and fix it then. And and I was like, so you think the IRS is just gonna let you get your hand caught in the cookie jar and say, okay, you go fix it now, bro. No, that's not allowed. Once you're under audit, you're s you're stuck there. So

That's that's kind of the scenario there. you want to have real free audit support if it's needed, because some of the folks out there on social media say, we've got free audit support. But if you actually read the engagement letters, they say they provide free audit support to the field agent, who is the first person on the door from the IRS. And she goes, Hey Roger, you've got a big deduction here. What happened? And you're gonna say, we did a cost seg. She'll say, can you send it? And you will.

Roger Burnett (51:03.644)
Mm.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (51:14.518)
And then she's gonna say, thank you for sending this. We're gonna have the IRS engineers look everything over and they'll get back to you with questions. And there went your free audit support. Now you're on the hook under their contract for three to six hundred bucks an hour. We don't play that game. Ours is real free audit support. those are the those are the bigger things. and the fact that our reports do deliver every single item in the building, not just the accelerated ones.

Roger Burnett (51:28.594)
Yeah, see?

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (51:42.818)
Which is how, going back to our conversation about those bathrooms in the apartment versus the short term rental, how you get to take the write-offs when those bathrooms end up in the dumpster down the road.

Roger Burnett (51:54.622)
Okay. So I'll I you know I'm the jokester in the family. So obviously, like to me, the way I answer the question, just so you know, and you gave a very articulate answer to how I would just say, like, well, I just pay the people that usually are bought by the people who make way more money than me. And I pray that they're making smart choices and that I by picking those people too, that I have less of a chance of getting in trouble.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (51:56.898)
So those are the two things that

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (52:24.535)
Right.

Roger Burnett (52:24.648)
That that that's literally like to me, what we're trying to present to the Stewarts is like, don't go try to figure this crap out for yourself. Because if you come to appreciate the operators that I'm introducing into the ecosystem, then you can build an element of trust that says, All right, I've interacted with a handful of these people and I keep getting good experiences.

One would expect that I can start to gravitate towards trusting the recommendations that are being given. Right. And and to me, what makes the community great is like I fully expect Jeff Hyatt to stick around and be a part of this community so that if anybody wants to know more about it, regardless of whether you go find Jeff or not, Jeff's here. So if you want to know more, ping Jeff. Be hey Jeff, like I want to talk to you about this, right? And

And that's supposed to be what the power of the community is because here's the other thing I wanna ask you.

You know, you and I go and we go to the boardroom quarterlies and we sit in front of these people who are operating, you know, really successful businesses. and

Roger Burnett (53:44.168)
When I first started at Boardroom two and a half years ago, the attitude in the room was a lot different than it is today. And there's socioeconomic and political forces that are creating uncertainty in investing across the board, really. What what's your take on that topic? Like what are you seeing right now from your vantage point when it comes to that?

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (54:10.966)
In terms of like tax laws and things like that or

Roger Burnett (54:12.274)
Like does it does it seem like like deals are still flying around and everybody like there's not much caution or is there like no people are underwriting stuff like crazier, harder than they've ever done? Like w what are you seeing as a reaction to like just the market condition right now?

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (54:31.224)
Well as I mentioned before, we're lagging. So the transactions we're doing today for our let's say pipeline are s items that closed some time ago. So interestingly enough, I'm hearing more and more from folks in the boardroom and other direct communication channels, i.e., where we're going to the end user.

Roger Burnett (54:43.763)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (54:59.402)
And presenting in front of them that deals don't pencil. That's the classic line. Deals don't pencil. And you're right, there is more of that out there that people are saying things just don't pencil right now. Now that's usually said by somebody that's focused on one asset class. Because if they're only on one asset class and it's the prices are going up and up and up, then bam, all of a sudden they're in a situation where they're going,

you know, we can't buy this apartment because it doesn't work at this point. but if they were to shift their focus to some other asset class, it could work. You know, deals could still happen. We're that, you know, that's when we're going direct to the end user, like a bo like the boardroom, as opposed to when we are c getting opportunities in from CPA firms, which is our typical way to market is through CPAs and they say, Hey Jeff.

Roger Burnett (55:32.776)
Right. Right.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (55:58.243)
This guy just bought this. You know, the accountant's not commenting on does it pencil or not? They're just saying the guy bought it, the deal is done. Do the Cossack. do the Cossack and shut up, Jeff. So yeah, it yeah, yeah, that's yeah. So anyway, but one of the funny parts of the tax code is it's always said, not always, it's recently been said that.

Roger Burnett (56:03.9)
Sure. Already been bought, yeah.

Roger Burnett (56:10.216)
Do your job. Just do your job.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (56:27.5)
These tax law changes about bringing bonus back in at a hundred percent is now permanent. Well, it's it's permanent until the next administration comes along and says, that ain't permanent anymore. We're gonna undo that permanent thing. And so it's a good thing that it's now at least got some runway in front of it, but it can always change, and that's the way the tax laws are. So

Roger Burnett (56:41.58)
right.

Roger Burnett (56:52.859)
Yeah. And and

Wise of Jeff to put the caution. Well, I'm gonna cut that out and put it up at the front because the only certainty is this legislation is not permanent. It's just how long it lasts until they get the political will to undo it. And that could be one administration, it could be five. Who knows? Right? Like and

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (57:07.724)
Right. Yeah, yeah, and if you want to put that up front, that's cool too.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (57:20.15)
Right.

Roger Burnett (57:22.416)
And far be it from us to sit on the sidelines while we're waiting for them to decide when that's going to happen because so much opportunity exists in the meantime that we need not say well, you know, it probably will end sometime.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (57:36.025)
Yes, so what? It's here today. And and and the cool thing is with it is that even if you bought the pro that's one thing we didn't talk about, and maybe this is for the the the what do you call them, Voyager? the Voyagers, or whatever wherever you want to put it, you can step back in time. So you might have some stewards out there that already own properties and they're going, my gosh, how did I miss this? How did my accountant miss this? Well

Roger Burnett (57:37.032)
So what? So what? Right.

Roger Burnett (57:49.372)
In the edit. The Voyagers, yeah.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (58:05.688)
They can go back without amending and grab the deductions they could have taken in the past. So that's part of what we offer there. On that note, what happens is if they bought the property in 2018, they still get to go back to 18 and grab the 100% bonus that was in place then. The way it was set up initially was that bonus was going to stair step down or sunset.

as the tax folks call it, it was going to stair step down beginning at the end of 22. So from 17 through 22, it was 100%. Then it was going to go down to 80, then 60, then 40. Well, in tw end of 23, there was a movement afoot to bring it back to 100%. And it made it through the House, but it never made it through the Senate. And then in October of 23, all of the

Roger Burnett (58:43.026)
Yeah. Right.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (59:05.066)
election rhetoric heated up and nobody was playing nice in the sandbox down in D C so it just stayed and then it went from sixty to forty in the beginning of twenty five, but then Trump bought it back at a hundred last July, about a year ago, almost today. So

Roger Burnett (59:23.762)
Yeah, right. Well I you know.

Here's maybe this is the first time I've said this on the program, but if you hang around with me, you'll hear me talk about it a lot. And I think you can echo this for me because this is something that you and I both witness. I don't care about your damn politics, frankly, because the people in the room that you and I hang around in where all the money moves around, they don't care about politics. What they care about is how to win given the current situation.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (59:59.193)
That's ultimately the deal.

Roger Burnett (59:59.4)
Period. Period. So the only thing that we all know is that the situation is always changing. And so you constantly have to be recalibrating around what winning looks like in the new environment. Not waiting for the environment to suit your objective, because it doesn't work out that way almost ever. Now, here's what's even more interesting though, Jeff, and you and I both know this. For a hot minute, you could be an idiot.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:00:21.834)
Excellent right.

Roger Burnett (01:00:29.22)
And still make your investments make money for you in real estate. What really has changed is that's not the play right now. You have to be smart, you have to be savvy, and you actually have to know your numbers. Because if you don't know your numbers, then you don't really know how much or how little you're losing.

And if you don't know how much or how little you're losing, you don't know that you need to pivot, you don't know that you need to evolve, you don't know anything. And if it is a more difficult environment for investing, which I agree it is, it there's actually better returns right now than almost any other time I've been investing, but you just have to work harder to find them. Right? And so and I mean you

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:00:55.054)
You're right.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:01:19.992)
You're right.

Roger Burnett (01:01:23.922)
Please, like they don't want to hear it again. They're tired of hearing it from me. They they want to hear it from other people. Like it's it's just harder. That's all.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:01:25.784)
No, you're you're dropping bombs. That's the that's the deal.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:01:34.947)
Well, w one of the things that that I find is that if you're not in the entrepreneurial environment all the time, like I am, like you are, a lot of people end up, unfortunately, getting as it's everybody knows it.

the analysis paralysis. They're like waiting for, well, what about this? Well, what if, you know, what if the septic field is, you know, contaminated, you know, you know, whatever. You know, there there's always something that isn't perfect. And so people need to not allow that to don't let not perfect kill a deal.

Because maybe it's just you need there's a little money that needs to get thrown at it, but like you're s like we're talking about stewards with some dough and some assets behind them, maybe they can just throw some a little bit of money to it, fix the problem, whatever the imperfection they perceive, put in a better kitchen appliance ensemble, you know, whatever it is, you know.

Roger Burnett (01:02:46.382)
Hundred percent. Create value instead of trying to buy it. That's the difference.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:02:51.224)
Dude, because when you're buying the value, when you're buying the value, that means excuse me, when you're when you're paying a premium for everything to have already been done, the guy you're buying from is getting the dough, not you. It's so much better. And my wife and I do this all the time. If we can buy the property that needs the elbow grease, all the better. That's what you're doing in freaking Sedona, right?

Roger Burnett (01:03:01.576)
That's what you're talking about.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:03:20.682)
You're putting in the elbow grease. Yeah, it's a pain in the tail. Yeah, you got contractor calls. Yeah, you gotta I don't know if Arizona has ledge, but up in New England, there's always ledge. Contractor hit ledge. Okay, hit ledge. You gotta blast it or whatever you gotta do with it. So do you guys have ledge or you guys just have sand? I don't know. What's what's the soil like?

Roger Burnett (01:03:34.117)
Ha ha ha ha.

Roger Burnett (01:03:42.96)
It's just super hard red rock that they've got a they use the machine that was like the jackhammer into the ground to make the pool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it'd be great. It'd be great. Dude, I I I allow every boardroom member to just if you want to make a testimonial for boardroom, some people like to talk about their relationship with Kent.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:03:52.888)
Yeah, with on the big excavator thing. I wanna do that. I wanna use one of those sometime, but

Roger Burnett (01:04:11.944)
Some people like to talk about their relationships that they've built with other people in the boardroom, but we always like eventually I'll string everybody's answers to this question together and then I'll just give it to Kent and be like, Hey, this is what people think.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:04:25.824)
So go go do that now. Just go. So Roger, th right so you can edit that part of it out. Roger, thanks for asking about my interaction with the boardroom and all. it's been an incredible experience. I remember my first warm-up session that Kent does like the day before in Boston when I was there. And his he was basically saying,

Roger Burnett (01:04:26.696)
Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:04:55.726)
Hey, you know, you guys may be big shots in your own little fishing fishbowl, but you're gonna be in a big aquarium with lots of bigger fish. So don't be a butthead without using so much as language. And and and basically, you know, be intentional with everything that you do in the in the group. And it's been an amazing experience for me because we were doing very well in our

outreach efforts to get business in from CPAs, but we had kind of never really gone to the end user because we always had information coming in from the CPAs. And what the boardroom and in particular Brandon Birmingham through the boardroom helped coach me on was being able to bring that message that was just tailored to CPAs. I never recognized that we were missing a whole big market of

going to the end user. And my presentation, which was the CPA presentation to the real estate investor world, was giving them an ice cream headache and their brains were shutting down quickly. And so Brandon helped me really weave together a much more digestible presentation. And it's been amazing and I attribute that to the boardroom directly and it's it's opened up this whole new

avenue for us to go to market through continuing ed for real estate brokers and agents that we did not pursue before. and it's it's been a game changer for us. So we're I think we're right now probably approved in f fourteen or fifteen states and we're gonna probably pick up another five or six in the next couple of months. So

Roger Burnett (01:06:43.454)
My goodness. Right. what's the analogy? So MSC was a very heavily trafficked four-lane highway that now is a nine-lane turnpike. Right? Because you found more people to drive on your roads so you could build better roads to serve more people, because it was always a road to a destination. It was just

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:06:51.416)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:07:00.643)
Yeah.

Roger Burnett (01:07:13.112)
not enough people knew about what how to drive it, right? So what what a great way for you like most people doing a job, the stewards out there don't to to be able it's like opening a new enterprise account. Like that level of imp because the it's not just we call that mind share. You're getting mind share of the right realtors

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:07:16.62)
Right. That's it.

Roger Burnett (01:07:42.002)
Who understand that in an evolving market they have to change in order for them to stay relevant? And what better way to do that than to be able to tell somebody, hey, by the way, when you buy this thing, I'm gonna be able to probably figure out a way for you to get a fair amount of money back. Like, how does that not get someone's attention? I just don't understand. Like, yeah, no, I'm just gonna go with my cousin. Like, no, no, like not.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:07:58.968)
Tax.

Roger Burnett (01:08:10.534)
Not if that person has a brain in their head. And if they say they want to go with their cousin, let them. Let them. Because you're only looking for the realtors who are like, no, that makes total sense to me. And I understand why I would want to learn that. So that's super cool that you've been able and I you know, like I told you myself, like I watched it in fast forward, watched it which you went, you just like all of a sudden it was like, dang, Jeff, like that makes way more sense.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:08:16.354)
Right. You're right.

Roger Burnett (01:08:39.6)
It makes way more sense. So congratulations to you on that. And and what a what a testament to Brandon is sufficiently successful that he doesn't need to do that for anyone. And it's emblematic, I think, of kind of what the ethos is of that group is sort of like big personalities, yeah, but no big timers most of the time when it comes to how they we behave towards one another and

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:08:43.779)
Thank you.

Roger Burnett (01:09:07.934)
For that I'm incredibly grateful and I've been obviously incredibly grateful for getting to know you and reaping the benefit of your expertise and we fully intend to continue to support you financially while you support us financially. So all right, man. Yeah.

Jeff Hiatt Depreciation Doctor (01:09:23.833)
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. You guys have a nice weekend with the family and all, and I'll talk to you later.

Roger Burnett (01:09:32.574)
See it up. Yeah.