In this episode of Anderson Business Advisors, Toby Mathis, Esq, speaks with Sherri and Frank Candelario, real estate investors who have turned the shady addiction recovery housing industry on its ear. Sherri and Frank became involved in the industry after their adopted daughter Kate developed substance abuse issues.
Frank and Sherri started Kate’s House Foundation, and have trained 1000s of people to duplicate the Kate’s House Model of Level II Medically Assisted Treatment homes in great neighborhoods like theirs in the Seattle area.
We’ve discussed opportunities like this in other episodes – this is a niche segment of real estate investing that can be both profitable and an incredible way to help individuals who are struggling get back on their feet.
Highlights/Topics:
- An adopted daughter from Russia with substance abuse issues
- The shady underbelly of the addiction recovery industry
- Bucking the 50-year system of shared housing
- Discovering value in the people society has discarded
- Government grants funneled to the Candelarias for their excellent housing
- Becoming Federal contractors
- Medication and shared housing
- Preventing young adults from going to prison
- Being able to buy real estate after you obtain a government contract
- Focusing on recovery housing and drug courts
- Amazing non-profit donations to the Kate’s House Foundation
- A goal of housing in every state in the country
- February 2024 bus tour of their homes
- Reach out to Sherri and Frank and take their course to learn how to do what they do
Resources:
Anderson Business Advisors LinkedIn
Full Episode Transcript:
Toby: All right guys. Welcome back to the Anderson Business Advisors podcast. I’m Toby Mathis, and I’m joined today by Frank and Sherri Candelario, who are just two awesome clients that I’ve known forever. They do a fantastic job in the area of shared housing. First off, welcome Frank and Sherri.
Sherri: Hey, Toby. Nice to be here.
Frank: It’s always good to see you. We’ve been hanging out for a long, long time. We go way back.
Toby: Yeah, and the really cool thing—I’ll get out your guys’ way so you can tell your story but—Frank and Sherri have found a niche—they always say niches make riches—in shared housing. It has a very strong public component, meaning that it’s purpose-driven investing, but I can say from looking at tax returns and also working with a lot of folks in this area that it is also very lucrative.
I want to allow Frank and Sherri to explain what they do. How they got into it and just give us that who they are, that little thumbnail sketch of who you guys are.
Sherri: I am the parent of multiple children, but one I adopted from Russia completely affected everything I was to do with my future. Her name is Maria Katerine. Kate had the perfect childhood with me once I brought her home to the US, but when she was in her teens, she fell to her genetics and into substance use disorder addiction.
Ironically, I have a doctorate in pharmacology from the University of Washington Medical School and am a published author on how to block the effects of opioids in the body. My work was seminal in some of how we use Naloxone, Naltrexone, and Narcan today. Now I’m a single mom with a young daughter who’s a drug addict and I think I know a lot about this area only to find out I knew nothing.
I took her to multiple treatment programs, at least a dozen, and I would honestly say I was naive when the hospital said, take her to a recovery home, take her to a clean and sober home, take her to an nonsurgical home, whatever needs to be done. You’re working full-time. She needs to be with people practicing her skills.
What I found out is the dirty underbelly of the industry. They would take my money, they would put her out in 15 minutes for all kinds of transgressions from walking home with a gentleman from the bus stop to not doing her chores, to being 10 minutes late for a meeting, and she would disappear. Even though we were close, she didn’t want me to judge her. She didn’t want to feel the shame, which she never would’ve.
What happened is all of that cycle of recovery and homelessness and being disposed of meant that Kate’s young life was ruined. We started at 18. She’s 28 and things are different than they would’ve been had she had quality recovery housing. Frank and I said, we can do better.
We realized this industry had been there for 50 years and a tenet of the industry is, (1) No medication. My training told me that medication was critical for success with substance use disorder, alcoholism, or mental health issues. (2) If you do something wrong, it’s a behavioral issue, so you must leave right now. (3) To get into the house, the members of the house had to vote you in and they could vote you out.
We said we’re going to take our retirement funds and went to see Anderson Advisors. The year was about 2015 and said we’re going to risk everything we have on the really shady industry and make it better.
Frank: Wow, and then there’s a component of the guy who had no experience in this world. Sherri and I got married in 2014, all of a sudden I started learning about Kate and her fight. Sherri and I have no experience in dealing with illegal drugs ourselves, so this was a world that was a mystery, but the more we learned about it, the more we realized how a billion dollar industry, kind of underground industry, was preying upon the poor.
It had no regulation, it had no standards, it had no policing of any kind. Just people would say I’m the cleanest, sober house and they’d get taxpayer money to house people. The more we looked into this, we realized, Sherri, this is not helping people who are trying to get recovery in some of these clean, sober houses. It just so happened that we were both unemployed shortly after we were married.
We both had long, great, wonderful careers, but for some reason someone had a different purpose for us. We sat there and said, what should we do now? I had a little experience in real estate investing. I had a duplex and we had nothing to do, so we went to one of these gurus and paid a lot of money to learn real estate. All of a sudden we started, the more we looked into the recovery housing industry—no standards, no regulation, nothing—we said, Sherri, this is a billion dollar industry.
It reminds me of other great successful people. I studied Richard Branson. Richard Branson didn’t create a lot, but he sure would identify businesses that could use improvement. He’d go in and turn that thing very profitable. Sherri and I both agreed, Sherri, let’s go ahead and buy a house and create our own model of shared housing or recovery housing.
Sherri: We bought a house in a regular neighborhood. It was a former daycare center. We thought they’re used to cars coming and going and we only took a three day class, so we didn’t know a lot about rehab, but we took the pickaxe to the walls ourselves and rehabbed it ourselves.
Frank: It was a mess.
Sherri: By the time it was done six months later, we had a masterpiece and we had been talking to the Veterans Administration the entire time. They said we’ll fill that house. Our house was done. We had hard money loans. We called the VA and they said nobody wants to come. They don’t want shared rooms.
We knew that was the only way we could make it cash flow, so we had a discussion with a gentleman who sought us out. We did not know that this well-spoken man was housing for women in work release who had felonies related to drug offenses. He said I have vouchers. You can put two people per bedroom and you can put 10 people in this house.
We looked at our big financial hole, we looked at our payments, we looked at each other and said, we don’t know a lot about incarceration, but okay. What we found was these were the greatest residents on the planet. They’d done all the hard work. They’d been to therapy.
Frank: They earned early release.
Sherri: They wanted to work and then they started calling their friends in the prison system. Before we knew it, we had three homes in expensive Seattle. They were completely full. We did all kinds of creative financing and we said my gosh, we’re actually making money. We’re making triple rent. We’re saving lives and we’re bucking the system.
Of course, when you buck a system that’s entrenched for 50 years, people come after you. We just decided we’re going to get involved in the government. We’re going to change the laws in the state of Washington. We’re going to shut down these homes that you’re paying vouchers for. Our homes are beautiful and great neighborhoods. These people have broken windows. We can do better.
Frank: Imagine taxpayer money. The generosity of the taxpayers in the state of Washington paying money to house people to get them their lives better, change it, get them off and going, redo their life, get their children back. It’s a beautiful story, but the fly in the ointment is they would be paying Frank and Sherri taxpayer money for our beautiful homes in safe neighborhoods. What a radical idea.
They’d also use the same taxpayer money to pay the person a few blocks away who had a slum. They’re slum lords. It just wasn’t right. It was amazing, but the whole thing for us changed the magical day. We were saying maybe we can make $300 or $400 cash flow on this house after all the expenses. Maybe we’ll get a Boeing engineer and his husband, wife, two kids and a dog.
When that Jesuit priest, who is now the housing specialist for the Department of Corrections, knocked on the door and said hey, I want to talk to you. I want to see if you’d be interested in housing our people and we said, well, who the heck are your people? These felons came out of prison. I was like because America has an attitude and I had the same attitude, Toby.
Before I really got into this business, I just had a real negative attitude. Felons, drug addicts, I don’t care about them. Last people in the world. But you know what we’ve learned in the last eight years? There are so many people I admire so much because they got themselves into a pit and they’ve dug themselves out and they’ve earned early release. They’ve gone to treatment. But you have that thing on your back and society keeps knocking you down mostly because you don’t have a good, safe place to get your life together.
Anyway, when the Jesuit priest who was a housing specialist for the Department of Corrections said we’ll give you $500, I misinterpreted it. I thought, $500 a bedroom. I go, we’ll make a little bit. He says, no, you don’t understand. In the recovery housing industry, it’s common practice to have two beds in each bedroom because you need accountability. You don’t want individuals with a door that you can lock. All of a sudden, those six bedrooms of ours just turned into a gold mine.
Sherri: We didn’t mind buying homes. We were like cashing out IRAs. We created a QRP with Anderson. We got two credit cards and wrote big checks against our credit cards. We were buying real estate because we had people wanting to live with us. To this day, the need is huge.
Within six months, their Second Chance Act of 2007 had provided a million dollar grant to Washington State. We’re six months in the business and that money was being funneled to us because of the quality of our homes.
Toby: Let’s break this down real quick. You’re a real estate investor in the for-profit realm, which we’ll touch on here in a second. You’re in the for-profit realm and all of a sudden you realize I could rent my house for, let’s just say $3000 a month and I’ll be okay. I’ll make a little bit of money. In this case, you’re making $500 a bed times 12 beds?
Sherri: Yeah, I think we had 12, so there was $6000, so we were making double rent. I think our house payment, even at that time, even with utilities, brought it up to about $2400. We were making enough cash flow to qualify for more mortgages.
Toby: Who’s paying for this? Is this the you’re going to individuals in their private paying or is this government money that’s being paid to you whether the bed is empty or filled?
Sherri: It is the government. It is the state and being pioneers in the industry, we’ve watched funding. Now the federal government is sending millions of dollars to the states for recovery housing because of the Fentanyl crisis. They’re grabbing the dollars. We’ve recently become registered to be federal contractors to put together housing throughout the country for veterans. The money is flowing because we’ve got a housing crisis.
Toby: I know you and I have had this discussion, probably $5–$7 million units underbuilt in the country. Let’s go back to this real quick. The government is literally paying. Are these municipalities? Is this a nonprofit that’s paying you? Is this a Department of Corrections? Who’s paying you and how big of a list is it?
If I’m listening to this right now and I’m going, that sounds great, but you have to jump through a lot of hoops, I’m sure. How big of a list is it? Do you have people literally saying hey, I have a hundred people here that need to be housed. Can you please get housing for them?
Sherri: To get the Department of Corrections funding, we just had to put our name on a piece of paper and a bank account. That was it.
Frank: That was paid by the county, county funds?
Sherri: No, that was state funds. To get drug court funding, we did a contract and they pay whether the beds are filled or not, and we’re in our sixth year of that. We recently did a veteran’s court. On Monday we met with the Forensic HARPS program in Washington. They basically have federal money and we’re not talking about minimal amounts of money. We’re talking about $1200 per bed.
We have 60 beds right now easily and they are talking about $300 move-in fees. They said you can have a $200 application fee. If you want to walk in the door with $2000 per person, we’re fine with that. We have it in our budget, and that’s because we have quality housing.
Frank: There are two things I want to say. There is a thing I call fee inflation. We started at $500 a bed, and back then we were buying houses for $300,000. Eight years later, the houses are more expensive. Once you get a reputation, let’s face it, our reputation comes from our success. For instance, recently we had a big drug court graduation. The great majority of them came from our house and even though there are dozens of houses that also house people.
Sherri: Four out of five.
Frank: What happens is people realize that because of our business model and our model, we buy beautiful homes and put them in safe neighborhoods. We have a good neighbor policy where our neighbors actually love us because we’re helping America’s biggest problem, but we don’t allow any visitors and we screen people who we get. We get people who are serious about success.
With the support of our neighbors and being in a safe neighborhood, people succeed because what happened to many people in this world prior is if you have temptation right outside your door, it’s pretty hard. The key is now some of our highest contracts and I have a saying once you go to a government contract, you don’t want to go back because they just keep on going. Every year they say we’re going to up the contract.
Toby: There’s no vacancy. They’re paying you for the bed, period. Whether there’s somebody in them or not, you’re getting a much higher premium. The reason that this is such a big need is because, like Oxford house, there is no drug policy. You can’t even have an ibuprofen, I don’t think in those places. They’ll toss you on the street and that’s what you encountered with Kate. Is that she would go […] and they would find a reason to throw you out.
Sherri: She’s perfectly fine. She had PTSD from being an orphan in Russia till she was six, and she’s fine on medication for her PTSD, but they wouldn’t allow it in the house so she would unravel.
Toby: You have somebody that’s got depression or medical condition or anything else. They can’t go to those places, but that was the alternative. They tossed them on the street.
Sherri: They toss them on the street in the middle of the night. She got voted out one night at two in the morning because they were waiting for the manager to come home. She’s a 5’2’’ tiny young girl, and off she went. It’s terrifying.
One of these days I know I’ll have her back in my life and I’ve been waiting a very long time. In the meantime, we decided we took in people from the Department of Corrections. We said, let’s stop people from going to prison. That’s what drug court is. They have a team of therapists. People always ask us how do you watch all these people? We don’t. We’re 2500 miles away.
Frank: We are housing specialists. We provide the house for the agencies that want to fill it with their clients.
Sherri: They actually will take their client, go shopping, buy food, put them in the house, and oversee their therapy. If we have a problem, I’ve got an errant woman right now who likes to keep her TV loud. She’s 67. She feels entitled, except it’s 11:30 at night. When I shared that with the HARPS specialist, she said […] our client, you can’t do that. If you do it again, we’re taking the TV. They do all of that behavior modification.
What we find is when we decided we were going to prevent young adults from going to prison for a felony related to drug use. They were the foster adults. They were the kids who lost housing at age 18. They were the kids who were in homes where there was domestic violence or parents were using drugs. They had bad stories. Our houses are filled with those young adults right now. I was up in Seattle Sunday and just seeing young bright faces doing well. They were all saying thank you for letting us live here.
Toby: Because they’re in an actual house. They’re not in a […] house. I used to go to the halfway houses and I worked with the guardianship firm, so I know all about them. You wouldn’t want to live there. You’d want to want to drive by it, not drive to it. In this case, because you’re a private investor, you’re able to go and say we’re going to flip the script on this and we’re going to be very […] and we’re going to go get one of these contracts.
If it’s a big institution and they have thousands of beds, they may give two cents about what’s going on inside those places and the people, but you said you had 60 beds in Seattle right now. That sounds to me like that’s $60,000 a month coming in.
Sherri: It will be because two of the houses are new this month and they’re getting ready to be filled immediately, and we have contracts for them already. We wait till we get a contract before we fill it. One is with Feds court and then we picked up the agreement Monday with the HARPS program. Then of course we have 32 beds that are maintained by King County Drug Court.
What was interesting is whenever there is a negative event or one of the government contracts have in another housing group, they want to bring them to us because we just don’t have that.
Frank: It’s so awesome to be an investor and only buy the house after you’ve already got the business.
Toby: You got a waiting list. You guys have a waiting list. How long is the waiting list? Could you house people tomorrow if you had the resources and the housing?
Frank: What happened just recently is we bought two houses last month. We were quick to paint and furnish them beautifully, and we’re trying to get them filled up literally weeks after we get the contract.
Sherri: We had a contract on the one house, but the woman on Monday said I have 60 clients I’m paying for. I’d like to move all 60 to you. She talks about the horror stories that go on today where there’s drug use in the house because it reflects on the agencies.
In fact, right before talking to you I was on the phone with the head of housing for Seattle. We were talking about going back eight years, and she said, you guys are just the best. That we know when somebody goes to you, they’ll be safe and they’ll do well. It’s real estate. They’re buying a nice single family home in a nice escalating neighborhood.
When we look at a home, we do data analytics. We could pick out a home anywhere in the US whether this is a good home, whether it hits our parameters. Is it near a bus stop? Does it have four to five bedrooms? Frank’s a big one on three bathrooms.
Frank: Three toilets at least. The key is if you set the nice house for functionality, it’s hugely successful. A lot of people, two beds, one bath or whatever, five bedrooms or seven. We’re experts at finding because we create community in these houses. That’s a big part of it.
We also look for appreciating neighborhoods. This is a business model. This is a business play. We’re proud of what we do, and we save and serve all the time. But it’s just been a heck of a ride going from just regular nice W-2 jobs.
Sherri: Well, unemployed.
Frank: Prior to that, we had great careers before that.
Toby: This all flows under shared housing though. There’s recovery housing, there’s drug court, there’s transitional housing for veterans, there’s transitional housing for orphans that are aging out of orphan care, like they hit 18 and they’re on the street. This is an opportunity to provide housing in a number of umbrellas, but you guys have really focused on recovery housing and the drug courts.
Sherri: Because it fits everybody. We found during the pandemic, they were pulling combat vets out of jail who were 76 year old Vietnam vets so they wouldn’t die, and they needed recovery housing because they had PTSD. That’s what got them there.
What we do is we follow the National Alliance Recovery Residence Standards as level two medically-assisted treatment homes, which means we are accredited by the state, affiliate of NARR, which we helped start and I still sit on the board, and it’s just a set of standards. It’s not hard, but it allows people to have medication. It allows them to be in a safe place. What I love about it is everybody fits in that umbrella.
Toby: Can anybody go out and get that NARR certification? Is that something where you could position yourself to where you could certify a home? Does it require anything special?
Frank: Absolutely. Listen, it’s just not that difficult. Here’s my favorite analogy. I used to be a camp director and about every two years, a bunch of guys with clipboards from the American Camping Association would come by and check our camp. Is it safe? Is it clean? Are kitchen refrigerator standards? Almost every business is used to some certification.
Recovery housing should also be that and it didn’t exist. The standards for recovery housing is not that difficult. It’s just common sense. It’s smoke alarms, carbon monoxide, handrails that go down stairs. People always think it’s a difficult thing to do, but it’s not.
I’ll tell you, if you are someone who’s in it just for the money, you probably won’t want to apply for that because you’ll have to do some paintings, some repairing.
Toby: It’s like Section 8. They’re going to come in every year. You’re going to have to get certified here. Here you’re actually certifying yourself though, to a certain extent.
Sherri: We are.
Frank: Self-managed, yeah.
Sherri: And there are about 25 documents that they require. They want to see your insurance policy. People always ask us, what does your insurance look like? It’s actually pretty easy. We have landlord fire policies. In Seattle they’re $500 a year because we take big deductibles, and sitting over all of that in most of the United States. If you have a nonprofit, which we do—kateshousefoundation.org—the Nonprofit Alliance provides transitional housing insurance, including for your board of directors, auto insurance, and it’s not an expensive policy, either. It actually will ensure the house and the $2 million liability. We’ve never had a claim.
Toby: I’m going to just touch on this because this is where somebody might add a layer of a nonprofit to go interact with the government agencies to get the grants to apply for grants. I know that one of our folks, Michelle, who works with you, was getting $75,000 a year grant money just to rehabilitate homes.
You’re doing that because you’re positioning yourself as a nonprofit, but at the end of the day, the rents are going to come to you in a for-profit realm where you could go out there and just decide you know what? I don’t want to jump through those hoops. I could just tie myself to a nonprofit that goes out and does it.
Probably what you’re doing with the Jesuits. They did all that so they had the vouchers, and now they’re giving them to you. You could also be a Jesuit. You could go out there and be the nonprofit that goes out and get it. Or you could be the person who just accepts the vouchers and house’s people in your homes.
Sherri: The nonprofit I think is incredible. I was just able to get six brand new, beautiful Dell computers, 256 megs, 16 gigs of ram, and beautiful monitors for the price of shipping. I’m serious because we’re a nonprofit. They only work with nonprofits. We’ve worked with them before. They provided free internet service for us.
Some of our students, because we also teach what we do, have gone to Walmart and picked up Walmart grants, Target grants, Home Depot grants, and Lowe’s grants. The nonprofit is just amazing. We have just a small donation tab on our website and recently one of our neighbors sent $50. We don’t really solicit very much, but it was like the neighbors were saying hey, I’m here for you. We just found that to be very special.
Microsoft Corporation. We had a young lady come in and she didn’t do well. I sent her feedback to her mom with a letter saying she didn’t do well because mom had to come get her. Three months later her mom said by the way, I work for Microsoft and I’ve put Kate’s House Foundation in to be one of our partners for donations. They said we’re not going to turn that one down.
Frank: All that was like icing on the cake when we started it—because I used to work for nonprofits, I used to be a camp director—I don’t want to have to rely on endowments or grants because you’re always struggling. We really didn’t pursue it for a long time because our cash flow was so fantastic we didn’t need it. All of a sudden when you’re doing very, very well, Toby, and then all of a sudden grants come your way, $100,000 this, $75,000 that, it’s sweet.
Sherri: We got $125,000 from the State of Washington just to start a new recovery home.
Frank: All this just allows us to serve more people. Every day we get up and it’s important for anyone who listens to this. The reason we do this is so we can serve more people. The need is great.
Toby: If you’re somebody listening to this out there and you came in and you said shared housing is interesting. Now you’re hearing about recovery housing, and now you’re actually hearing that there are grants and other things, if you put yourself in a position that you look like they want you to look, which is a nonprofit and they’ll award grants. You have lots of folks that do it.
How does somebody learn how to do this with you guys? How do they reach you if they need to get more information? And this is something that you do teach, right?
Sherri: We do teach it and we actually have our class available online, which a lot of people purchase that way. One of the things we always tell people, if you buy it online, the next time we do a Zoom class, you can come to that as our guest. At frankandsherri.com are all of our educational materials.
The other thing we’re doing is we’re working with investors. When investors are supplying a down payment for a home, which is how we purchased two very expensive homes in Seattle last month, we put their life story in the home.
We put a poster and their philosophy, so it’s Kate’s house, but it’s an honor of. We had one woman, in particular, who wanted to open up a home, but she recently discovered her cancer has come back and she has to be in treatment. She said I don’t want to wait. I’ll give you the IRA funds to start the home. It’s going to be a veteran’s home in her honor because she’s a vet.
We’ve realized that a lot of people want a legacy. Right now we’re raising money for a mother and child home because we find a lot of mothers and kids are losing all in divorce. They’re losing all because dad has the addiction and they have to go. There’s a huge need and it doesn’t exist.
How we like to put it is there are 3000 credited homes in the US and 300,000 people who get out of treatment each year. It’s a huge market. The money’s fast. The government has recognized it by the amount of funding that’s available. Having a brand where you care about people, because we do and we tell everybody you’re where we’d like Kate to be, the kind of experience we wish he would’ve had.
Toby: It sounds like you guys have taken some of that personal pain and turned it into a personal positive, and are going out and helping a lot of folks. I personally know a lot of folks that have come your way, who have implemented the same types of strategies. Here’s the punchline, they actually make more money. If you do this type of stuff, you’ll make more.
What we’re seeing with shared housing on average is probably a 100% increase on your net operating income. You’re doubling your net operating income. Yes, you got to jump through some more hoops. Yes, you’re going to be doing recovery housing, but on an average across the board, what we’re seeing is probably that.
Then in some cases, if you’re going into recovery housing, you might see even more icing on the cake in the form of grants and other things that’s just free money. It’s just because you’re willing to go into that area.
Sherri: Talk about your rehabs. Frank’s a real estate broker, too. Talk about the advantages of that.
Frank: That’s a part of it. When we teach, we teach every aspect. Basically, our approach is this is who we were, this is who we are now doing extremely well. We want to educate, and then you can duplicate. That’s our strategy and it’s not rocket science.
Toby: There’s plenty of room in it. There’s a tremendous need and you’re going in and you satisfy somebody’s need, you should be rewarded.
Frank: There’s nothing like waking up to grateful people on a regular basis. I got my kids back. Thank you. I got my children back. I got back with my family. The people that we take in are desperately trying to get their life back together, get back with their families, but you’ll never do it if you are in a hostile environment, the same environment that got you in trouble in the first place. This radical idea of Sherri and I putting in beautiful, safe neighborhoods works.
The other quick thing that we do, I used to be a camp director, and when Johnny comes to camp during the summer, I can’t send him home for bad behavior. What do we do? If there’s something that’s not going right with an individual in a house, we just move them to a different house. We got so many houses, and if that doesn’t work, we move them to another.
We’ve had drug court graduates who sometimes have been to three different houses because we don’t want to give up on people, and it’s wonderful when your model is compassionate not punitive.
Sherri: That was it. Our first rule really was nobody gets kicked out in 15 minutes. Of course people ask, do you think people relapse? Of course they do. We’re taking young adults who are in the early stages of drug court. What happens is we call their grandma, we find their relative. When they apply, we’ve got those phone numbers. We’ve had people take people to hospitals because of the community in the house. People care for each other and I think that’s really important.
Our whole goal is to have a Kate’s house in every city in the country, and that came from one of our early residents. We’re doing it by being able to teach what we do by teaching shared housing.
Toby: Keep it up and anybody wants to get involved, frankandsherri.com. Is that what it is?
Sherri: frankandsherri.com or if you want to learn more about our nonprofit, that’s kateshousefoundation.org.
Frank: We’re going to have a huge convention on September 15th through 17th.
Sherri: It’s a bus tour and you get to see our homes.
Frank: The problem with this is people have a hard time conceptualizing that this is too good to be true. When you come to a bus tour and you actually walk through our houses and say for eight years, nine people have occupied this house, and it’s immaculate. The people are warm, they’re friendly, they’re grateful to be there. Also you see the neighborhood that accepts you.
If you want that experience, there’s nothing like being on the bus tour and walking through our houses, meeting our residents, meeting our employees.
Toby: This will sit in perpetuity in our podcast. I would say visit frankandsherri.com. Visit kateshousefoundation.org and learn more. I’ll put those in the show notes, too, so that you guys can link to it but thanks, Frank and Sherri for coming in. Thank you guys. Should I say Sherri and Frank to be fair?
Frank: That’s probably better.
Sherri: You’re wonderful. Thank you.
Frank: We are grateful to you for a lot of things and your whole Anderson organization.
Sherri: We really appreciate you because when we had a crazy idea saying, we’re going to change housing across America, you didn’t look at us like that’s a little big or a little lofty. You said how do we protect you? How do we make sure your assets are safe because of what you’re going to do? You were our first conversation and that’s what I love. You can’t have a big idea without having a bigger cheerleading section in the back picking up the pieces because you don’t know what you don’t know.
Toby: We all need advocates and we all need people that are rooting for us. Nowadays, boy, it seems a lot of people are rooting against other folks, but in this area in particular, I think we could do a lot of good. It requires private individuals like us. We don’t need governments doing it.
Frank: Classic example of the private sector doing a much better job than had been done.
Toby: Yup, and that’s what it is. You just turned it on and saw somebody. It takes bold action and somebody who says, this sucks. I’m going to do it better and start doing it. Ten years later you’re going to see, wow, we’ve made a huge impact. Ten years after that, it’s just going to be a magnitude of multiples above that and you’re doing it right. I’m rooting for you guys.
Sherri: Thank you, Toby.
Toby: We’ll get that out there. I just want to say thanks again for joining us. You guys have been listening to the Anderson Business Advisors podcast.
