Be the Solution with Maria Quattrone

What if the “how” isn’t the hurdle, but your ego is?

• Maria Quattrone • Season 1 • Episode 341

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What if your clients didn’t need you in the room to feel fully served? We sit down with Guillermo Salas—born and raised in Philly, now raising four kids in Madrid—to unpack how he moved abroad, kept his real estate business thriving, and actually got closer to the life he wanted. The surprise isn’t that remote real estate works; it’s that leading with transparency and well-documented systems can grow your business while you live where you feel most alive.

Guillermo walks us through the pivotal lessons from COVID that shattered the myth of mandatory face time and opened the door to video-first service, no-attendance closings, and on-demand showing assistants. We explore the power of authenticity as a differentiator, the ego trap that keeps agents glued to tasks others can do, and the concrete SOPs that make “boots on the ground” reliable and repeatable. From time-zone routines that reserve afternoons for U.S. calls to morning rhythms built around family, we map a workday that respects both clients and life.

We also get practical about visas, first-week logistics, and why you shouldn’t move to your vacation. Spain won for language immersion, culture, and cost of living—but the family still pivoted from a sleepy coastal town to Madrid’s energy to match their actual needs. On the business side, Guillermo shares how global referrals, virtual brokerages, revenue share, and stock can stack durable wealth on top of deal income. We talk financial literacy for agents, lowering fixed costs, and turning expertise into products—courses, coaching, and playbooks—that travel anywhere.

If you’ve felt the pull to live abroad or simply design a saner, more option-rich version of your career, this conversation gives you the blueprint: systems over heroics, honesty over posturing, and multiple income streams over endless hustle. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs a nudge, and leave a review to tell us where you’d build your life if the “how” stopped holding you back.

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Website: MQrealesate.com
Office number: 215- 607-3535

Maria Quattrone:

All right, so today I'm excited. Be the Solution Podcast. And on the podcast this morning, we have Guillermo Salas. And Guillermo is somebody that I've known for many years. Haven't seen him or talked to him in a while, but go back to at one point Guillermo had a Remax broker, a brokerage here in Philadelphia. And so I'm excited to talk to him because now him and his wife and family, uh, his wife Danielle and family now live in Spain and still continue to run a team, sell real estate here in Philadelphia. And so I my quote for you today, Guillermo, is this is I make quotes specifically for my guest on my this quote is for you. Where there is a will, there is a way.

Guillermo Salas:

Absolutely. And it's true, it really is. People ask me all the time, like, how are you doing this? And what I I've coached because I also coach, like the how is what stops people, right? Oftentimes we have these dreams, and then you start thinking about how am I going to accomplish that? And we just stop. You know, COVID was a thing, it was tough for everybody, but the silver lining was it taught us that I could do this already, right? Like we all did it. We already did it. We've already experienced how to sell remotely. And we came out that experience, we were closer with our family. I didn't want to go back and not spend that quality time with our kids. We had always dreamed about traveling around the world um and taking a year off. Now, COVID did teach us that there's no way I wanted to homeschool my kids. Like that was something I didn't want to do. So the backup plan was hey, I wanted them to learn Spanish as well. Let's go to Spain. It was supposed to be one year, one year turned into two after the second year. We sold everything other than our investment properties in the US, and we've now made uh Spain our home for the last four almost four and a half years. Okay, so let's go back for a second. So was so COVID was the uh instigator of this move. Well, yeah, I mean it's it was always our dream, right? To to like live abroad, travel. We love traveling, like that's that's one of the things we make money so we can go travel and see the world. Um if you know anything about me, uh that's what we do. We just came back from three weeks in Sicily, yeah. And now, you know, I'm I'm like, well, how can I stay there for longer? Italy and wherever. So you this was your dream. Your dream was to live abroad. It is, and to travel the world and see, listen, we have we have you know one life, and I want to see the most of this beautiful world that we have. And uh we all we had the conversation. Like, I love Philadelphia, born and raised, go eagles, all that stuff. But I was always like, why do we live here? Like, you know, it's the cold is cold, it's humid. Like, I want to see what the world has to offer. And we had this idea, but like I said earlier, the how, like, how do how do I move abroad when I've got a brokerage, how I've got a team, all my real estate sales are local here. And again, so did the the COVID piece was like, all right, well, we're we're we're locked up in the last place we owned was over there in Moorestown, New Jersey. Like, we're here in Jersey, we're still selling real estate. I'm not seeing clients face to face. We're finding where there's a will, there's a way, like you said, and we were able to figure out all right, there is this, there's a path here, there's something we got here. And when the doors start opening up, we didn't want to go backwards. And so we've proven it. Like to I stopped counting for a while, but at one point in time, I did the calculation. I've closed over 550 transactions since I've been abroad. And customers, you know, all the things that you think would be an issue. Uh, yeah, that first year, I didn't I wasn't really upfront about the fact that I was abroad. I think that I was living in a different country. As soon as I sort of embraced it, more business team, right? I now you're right, you're walking in, you know, in your authenti authenticity, and authenticity attracts it, doesn't it doesn't dispel so right? So you're authentic, you're being the solution, and you people attract your people are attractive regardless, it doesn't matter as long as you're in your authenticity. I did. I mean, and the reality is a lot of the things that we do as real estate agents don't require physical presence as much as we feel like they they need to be or or that they were in the past, which is video makes a lot of things easier. Um, I am with an organization for the very few things that actually require physical presence. Um, I just need to put a couple things in place. So I'm with an organization that that is broad enough that I can have uh people available whatever period of time to go maybe do a video screening. Uh nobody attends closings anymore. At least I I don't, and none of my clients do. We haven't since COVID. I mean before. So when you Maria, when you start thinking about like what do you actually physically got be present for? You really don't. I I agree with you. Yeah, I you really don't need to be present because I do 95% of my listing appointments on the phone. I don't even do the Zoom. Well, well, that's and but like present mean I mean physically present. You have to be present. Like I'm in my clients' world, I'm serving them, I'm super responsive. Like, I gotta tell you, when I tell my my clients that I'm in Spain, they're like, it's the conversation where real estate just ends. They're like, Cool, tell me how how are you doing this? This is so cool. You're living your life, your dreams. It's never been a negative. And I've actually talked about this on other podcasts. The one listing that I've lost is the one where I actually felt insecure about it, got on a plane, flew back to Philly because it was like a two and a half million dollar list in the middle of Center City, and it's the only one that I've lost over this time period. Why they make they must have smelled insecurity on me, like, oh my god, you can't service this from abroad, or or and that's the only one that I've lost. All the other ones are like, you know, I just lean into it. I'm like, this is who I am. And like you said, if you're authentic, the people that want to work with you in this manner will lean in. The ones that don't, I was never meant to work with them anyway. And so that's okay, right? How did you um so you have boots on the ground here? So people can do the tours, like it's the same thing. If you have a listing and you have a buyer, buyer's probably going to be represented by somebody else in your organization, I would imagine. Yep, I refer it out, and I mean, I either refer it out or or have a showing assistant, right? There's all different ways you can do that. I've got a we have I have uh I call them listing assistants, so I'll send one of my listing partners, uh send them to get paperwork signed for people that need to sign in person that I'll come into the office or not docu-signed. And I pay them a flat fee, I pay $500, and everybody's happy. It really is. It's it's one of the things that throughout throughout the course of my career, I've created systems and processes and documented them. And in fact, I I'm very close to creating a course to teach other people to do this because in my organization, I've now had somebody who traveled and wanted to do this and has done this from Morocco, has done it from Portugal. I have one who's leaving in November to do this in Thailand. And it really is like everything else. If it's you're authentic, you have a system behind it. We talked about a showing assistant. I have a whole system behind it, like, hey, how that person interacts with our client, how they show the house, the questions that they ask, how they report back to me. And they're just, you know, the really the reality is we feel like clients need us, and that's just the ego. They don't need Yermo. And frankly, they don't need Maria. That's correct. They need what they want is what the customer service or the the the experience that you represent, right? And I can duplicate the system, they need your system. You build a system, they need the system, they're buying the system. Yeah, they're buying the experience, and I can teach people how to do that experience, right? Absolutely. I 100% agree with all of that. Yeah, it's like when they think when you think they need you, like Irma or Maria, that's 100% ego talking. That means you're not trusting somebody else in your organization that you built for 20 years to do what you do, and then shame on you. Yeah, well, and the other part of this Maria that's really, really important to and is passionate. I've actually my wife and I have created another company around it called Expat Living. Is you know, um, I'm 50 now, about to be 51 in January. My my mom passed away at 52, and my mom and dad had talked about traveling the world their entire lives, and they never got that. You know, tomorrow's never promised. That's that's my quote. And uh, you know, we so often push off the things that we truly, truly want to do and accomplish in life for this promise down the road, and and that you don't have that promise. And so that's for the people out there that that this is part of their dream, they wish they could do it. One, you got to do it now, you got to take action, right? And number two, the the other thing that keeps people back beyond is is the sometimes it's sort of the thought that like I can't afford this or I can't do this. Well, you you can make income abroad, and two, when you're making income in a high sort of dollar market like the US or like the UK or like Canada, and you're spending those dollars in a low-cost environment like a Costa Rica, Panama, parts of Spain, man, retirement is so much easier, or it gets a lot closer, and your and your standard of living goes up way high. So, for all those reasons, I'm super passionate about what we're doing and how we're doing this, and and then committed myself to teach other people how to do it because a lot of people want to do it, but just they're afraid on how to, you know, they don't know how the how. And like I said, the how to it's like it's like where do you start, right? It's yeah, yeah, it sounds great, but where do you start? I thought I'm like, you know what? I said, let's go to Italy or wherever, but in this case, Italy, let's do a month and then let's do another month in 2026. Let's do two months, two full months and work, like regular work. Yeah, live, right? Yeah, like live and work. You know, the the cost of living is so much high, even if we just rent it. We're renting a like a booking.com, right? An apartment. It's not it's more money, right? For that, because it's like vacationing, but we're not vacationing. But still, the cost of living is less. The cost of food, the type of food that you get to eat, they're killing us slowly here in US. I mean, you're talking by talk with me. In fact, that's why we said we started X Patters. I'm sick of this for all the reasons that you're just saying. It's not just it's living the dream, living your full life, but yeah, health-wise, I was like, you know, we're running this rat race and in this hamster wheel, and like we're eating fast food 24-7 because we got, you know, for those of you that don't know me, though, I have four children. The oldest is 17, the youngest is 11, and we were all at different activities, and we're just in this grind of like activities and eating bad food. So, yeah, that they they move abroad. And listen, I don't want this to be a thing, like I love the US. It's my country, there's so many great things about it. This is the right path for me, right? I get no judgment for anybody who doesn't want to live this life, but one of the factors that I factored, many of the factors, like safety for my kids, right? We they were probably gonna go into sort of neighborhoods that I didn't feel comfortable with anymore that I grew up in for school. Number two is the food. Like I can actually read the ingredients here. And you know, we started before we even got on the on this call. My son's gonna go to university next year. Like, he's gonna save hundreds of thousands of dollars. He's gonna go to university here in the EU, most likely, or even the UK. And it's life-changing money in terms of what he's gonna be able to save, and he's not sacrificing level education. So, again, there's so many different factors that go into this health, spending more time with your family, live in that dream. I believe for me, it's super important to raise global citizens and just experience the world and experience different cultures, and actually informs my my business practices at a deeper and better level. And I feel like I can actually support my clients better because of it. So I could go on and on and on why this why this sort of lifestyle makes sense and why I made the choice. How did you end up in Spain? So Spain was it's funny, I thought my my favorite country in Europe was was Italy, and it is one of my favorites. Like we went there on a honeymoon uh right before COVID. We did sort of like what you were talking about, Maria. We like we would go, we started out like going on vacation for first two, three weeks, then became a month. August became our month because it's sort of a little slower, it wasn't like dead business, but it was slower business, slow, yeah, right. And so that's why we go the and the first week is two weeks in September, and then when I come back, it picks up. Yep, so that's where we would literally take off the month of August and try different places, and we had tried California, Costa Rica, uh Italy, and then Spain was the last place, and we just fell in love with it. Obviously, a lot of people know me. I'm Puerto Rican, and so I wanted my kids to speak Spanish. Um, I didn't speak Spanish very well, and so it was a personal journey for me. Like I needed to, we had tried a couple of different things, and immersion was the thing we hadn't tried. And so I actually put our kids in uh public school in the southern coasts of Spain in a small little pueblo that nobody spoke English barely, and they became fluent within a couple months. So that was a big driver for me for them to learn Spanish, for me to really uh get over this mental fear and hurdle of not speaking Spanish uh as well as I wanted to. And with a name like Yero, man, like you don't speak Spanish, it's it's embarrassing. So it's okay. Now you speak Spanish, yeah. So yeah, now we do, and it's actually our kids are starting to learn French. So it's interesting, it's really cool seeing them. You're in southern Spain. No, now I'm in Madrid. So the first year we were in southern Spain. We thought it was what you think. Like you you go, we had this beautiful house which was so cheap on a cliff, overlooking the Mediterranean, and it sort of was a story of why you don't move to where you vacation. So, like it was great for the first few months, but then it was just a little slow place for us for where we were in our life. The kids, you know, we all have four teenagers practically now. They were bored, and my wife was bored, and so we moved to Madrid, and we love, love, love Madrid. Absolutely. I missed the water because that's that's my connection to nature. I love to fish, I love to be in the water, but I get that in other ways. For instance, we spent a month in Scotland just now in August, uh, and the year before we went to Ireland. And how did you circumvent the whole uh visa and all that? So we didn't circumvent it. My wife did, God bless her, she researched it all. She figured out what visa we could move over initially that has changed, and and it's a process. So, like we figured out how to do the different types of visas. Again, that's why we created this company called Expat Living, because people don't know this stuff. And while the information is out there, especially with the you know, with AI being prevalent everywhere now, it's great. How do you do it? Like, how do you take all this information, compile it in a way that actually you can get from step A to step uh Z in a way that doesn't, you know, make all the mistakes that we made. We made a bunch of mistakes along the way. In fact, when we landed, we landed on a day that was a holiday. There was no food, there was everything was closed down, we couldn't didn't have internet, like all these things that you don't think about. People think about like, all right, how do I get my visa and let me find some cool sexy house that I can live in, right? But there's so much involved in terms of moving in terms of logistics that we felt compelled, like, all right, we don't want people to have the experience that we did. We're gonna help them along the pay uh along the way. So we've got some workshops, some classes, and um and some one-on-one uh services that we provide people who want to make this move, and it's global, right? It's not just in Europe, we also cover South America, um, and North America people want to go the other way as well. Yeah, that's great. Fantastic. That's really fantastic. I applied for my citizenship, so dual citizenship, that's also an avenue that people can do. And I just hired an attorney. I did it the you know, they just send once in a while I get an email saying, do this, and then I do it, and it takes two months for whatever I had to do to come back to me, and then I send it away, send it to them, and so it's almost a year. November will be a year I applied, and it's a two-year process. Yeah, so that's something that people can do as well. Absolutely. So, like if you're if you're Latino like like I am, you can in Spain, if you live here two years, then you can actually um with a couple other hurdles, you can get dual citizenship or citizenship relatively easy. It's like a four to five minutes, four to five month process once you've hit the the different hurdles and the and the requirements. And if you get EU citizenship and travel all around EU and work there, and it's like it's gosh, it's so cool. But then a lot of these countries in the in the Europe have these things where like you can work towards that citizenship piece, and it just more opportunity, more options. I agree, you know what I say? I like to have options. Yep, and it's not like I got like chastitized on social media the other day because I wrote something about Italy and how great it is, and this guy said, you know, I'm the problem, I should leave America. I'm like you know me, Ryan Stuman. That's who wrote it. He's a jerk, yeah. And listen, I I think that's a challenge that we have in our society right now. It's not just black or white, right? It's it's these far extremes. Just because I like parts of this doesn't mean I dislike this, right? I love parts of Spain. There's parts that I don't love as much, but it fits my lifestyle for what I want and the and the things that I want for my family. It doesn't mean that I don't like the US, I love the US, I travel back very often. Uh, I miss my family, I miss my friends. There's definitely downsides of living abroad, but when you do it, there is a lot of there's also a lot of upsides, otherwise, yeah. There's the absolutely I'm doing this because the upsides outweigh the downsides, right? And then it's not say I'm never gonna come back, who knows, right? As even though I I speak Spanish way better than I did before, it's still my second language, and there's moments where I'm like, man, I I wish I could uh express myself the way I could in in English, right? And I've said it many times, like I'll I can speak on stage in English, I can't speak on stage yet in Spanish, right? And and and have a conversations that way. Well, something to work towards, exactly. Yeah, right. So, how do you do your days? Like, how do you break up your day since it's your six hours difference, right? Six hours, right? Six hour difference, yeah. So I was like, Well, I'm curious what you what how you do it. I was thinking I would get up, do a couple hours of work that doesn't require people, and then I would work from like two to seven or something. Yeah, it's so it's funny. I'm in a weird spot right now because we're we I've I mentioned that company expat living quite a bit. We're launching and growing that thing, so I'm spending more time working on that. But before that, it was yeah, in the morning, I was sort of just relaxing, right? I because what happens is because of the six-hour time difference, I didn't want to be working from eight o'clock, nine o'clock, seven o'clock my time all the way to seven, eight, nine in the that's ridiculous, yeah. Right. So, I mean, that's not that's not the lifestyle you're going for. So I would I would get up, I walk my kids to school, I go out and have coffee and breakfast with my wife or a friend. I picked up this hobby, it's a sport here in Spain called paddle. And so I would go play that or work out. And then sometime early afternoon, I might do the work, like you said, that doesn't require physical presence. Like I don't need to be on a Zoom or a meeting with anybody, just knock that stuff out. Then my meetings, I I just set the expectation that I'm gonna have meetings in the morning time in US time, right? So from my time 2 p.m. to about 6 p.m. is when I actually would have my meetings, and I still have my nights off. So the thing with Spain is people eat later, they socialize later, they start their mornings later. So it's been it's been very relaxing. Um, I have all my calls and and all those things, sort of in that time period from 2 p.m. my time to about 5, 6 p.m. And then after that, it's it's family time and I'm I'm enjoying time with them. So it's not not, you know, that doesn't mean there's not days where I might have a call that has to probably be like 11 p.m. my time, but it's very rare. Like I can count probably on my two hands over the course of those those years that I've actually done that. Yeah, that makes sense. That's what I was thinking. I'm I think Yeah, no, it's it's great. You know, the the other the other piece of this is we are a global economy, right? Every other industry is global, and and that's part of like the opportunity for me is I now get to network and expand my business globally. So before I just had uh, you know, I had a real estate team, a real estate office in like one little neighborhood in Philly. Now I've got a global organization, I've got people all across the US, I've got people here in Spain and Portugal, and I refer business out. And and do you know here there are some new construction communities where all you have to do is refer in the buyer and you get a 10% commission? Like, how beautiful is that? Like just in Spain, in Spain, yeah. So it's just more opportunity, more growth. And for me, you mentioned I mentioned the hamster wheel, like that's the problem with our industry. Like you're only as good as your last sale, right? And so yeah, the move for me also had a component of like how do I build my influence, how do I build my my network broadly enough so that I don't necessarily have to rely on sales forever. And I'm building multiple streams of income, one of them, which is hugely passive, by just networking and finding other agents that are like-minded across the globe. Yeah, absolutely. It's uh there definitely is that that hamster wheel. I was thinking, I think about that all the time. Like I talk about it all the time, like constantly. Well, I mean, I talked about the passion about my you know, my mom passing away, but look here, this is another passion of my like our industry is broken, right? Agents, what who's teaching them financial literacy? Who's teaching them like, hey, great, you sold a bunch of houses, where's that money going to? Like, where's your 401k? What what are you saving for retirement? And are you gonna be that person who is like walking up those stairs until you're 90? And listen, if you're passionate about selling real estate and you want to do 290, God bless you, right? But again, it's about options. You can do that, or if you do this the right way and you build residual income, have mailbox money coming in, right? Then you have the choice to say, Hey, you know what? Maybe I don't want to continue to sell real estate to home 90. Maybe I'll travel and live in Greece or Italy or wherever that draws you, or or stay in the US and you know, if the beach is your thing, land on the beach, right? Whatever it is, whatever thing is, I don't think people really know what they want. Yeah, well, that that that's important, right? So I've said it for many years. People think they want money, but nobody wants money for money's sake. It's what the money will do for their life and and and the life lifestyle they want to live. And what the lifestyle is, and really how much do you really need? You need less if you live in certain places. Indeed. Indeed. Yeah, indeed. You know, I think there's something about uh we live well, well, well under our with well under our means. Okay, and we could live in some big fat $3 million house. We don't. We have a town my townhouse here in in graduate hospital. We have had this for like I don't I know I can't even believe we still live here, honestly. We've been here for like 13 years. I mean, it's not important. That's not important. There's other things like we love travel, you know, we love to travel, we like to be without restrictions, and we don't like to have we like having dead, and and uh there's there's uh something also uh mentally calming about that in the sense of you're not you don't there's not that stress, you know. No, it is, and listen, I've I've fallen into that trap over the course of my life where had the fancy car, the fancy house, and I've gotten rid of all that. Like I drive an you know, not not a fancy car anymore, or the place that we live is nice, but it's definitely below the level means. And and what I value, what I value for my family, and again, this is just a personal thing, is the travel piece. Like, I want experiences, I want experiences with my family, with my loved ones. That's why in this past year we've we spent a month in Scotland. We went to Dubai, uh, we've been to Ireland, we're gonna go to Bali, Bali in December. Like, that's where I spend my money. Is like, gosh, what a great experience to see all these different so wait. This year you've been to where have you been this year? Uh this year, gosh, we started in Dubai in February, then we've been to a couple of different beaches along the coast of Spain throughout the year. Uh, we were in Scotland. Uh, we were, I think Ireland was last year, and um be Bali by the end of this year in December. We have uh that's that's a lot of places. A lot of places. We'll travel probably wouldn't be able to do that if you were here. No, and and you know, again, for those of you who have families and and kids in school, there's a lot of vacation time in in Europe. So, like that that break from from December into January is huge. Um, you know, we we live in Spain, so holy week, Easter is like not just a couple days, it's two weeks. So there's a lot of time where we get to travel, and and again, that that made sense for us in terms of what we wanted to do. Um, there's there's more holidays in Europe than uh we never even knew about. Yeah. And everything it's crazy because everything shuts down. Yeah, and and because where we're at, family matters, right? The it's really like family-centric. Um, in fact, and not that it doesn't matter in other places that I've lived, but what I would say, one of the things I don't miss about the US is the first conversation you have with somebody, the first almost one of the first few questions that they ask you is they ask you what you do for a living. What you do, yeah. What do you what you do for a living, right? I've I've met people here and known them for months, even years. I have no idea what they do, nor do they have any idea what I do professionally, right? We've broken bread, our families have gone on vacation. Like it's it's the focus is just different. It's experiencing life, enjoyment life, and the things that for me matter more. Um, that doesn't mean I haven't given up, like I've like, I haven't given up my professional goals, right? I'm still that is a big part of of my aspiration and my my thrive for for excellence. But the family and experiencing sort of these things around the world and and it just matter just a little bit more. Um, and you could be rich in that as well, as well as money. That's just a mentality of UA people from the US. You know, they don't bring their kids to dinner a lot of them. Um in Italy, for example, like it's midnight and the kids are out still, like babies and strollers, like toddlers, three year olds, six year olds. They I mean the kids go everywhere. You go to restaurants, we've been to restaurants, and I remember in Abruzzo, the region, and they had. It was an like an out inside outdoor restaurant. So big outdoor space, beautiful garden, all this. And then over there, they had a little playground. Yep. Right there. Just did our podcast for our company this morning, and we talked about that. How we would have the parents would get together on the side of the beach, a little chiringuito, they call it little restaurants right off the beach. And there's a playground right there. The kids would go play on the playground or on the beach, and the parents are sort of just eating and drinking and enjoying each other's company all together. And the kids would come in and the kids and the parents would flow out. It is just a a complete family experience. And we have our dog here. We brought from the US, so it's not just the kids, we got the we got our pets as well. Oh, I wonder how we're gonna get our cats with we had to bring them. Yeah, so there is a um definitely I would encourage you to talk to Danielle if this is something you're gonna do. It sounds like you don't get you get into citizenship, but like we we studied all the different airlines that take care of like moving over the pets. There's a process, all the paperwork. We have more paperwork bringing our dog over than for the kids and our family. Um I know it's a process, yeah. I know. I read I read about it. At least the cats can come on the plane, so they can yes, yeah, yeah. We we had to put our dog underneath, and there are definitely some airlines that treat um pets better and are safer for pets. So definitely if anybody's thinking about doing that, reach out to us. We're happy to share recommendations. Yeah, I think you know, we live in a global world, it's great, you know. Real estate, I would say real estate's a vehicle to live the life of your dreams. Use it the way that you want. Agreed, agreed, and uh the way that you want, learn how to be a listing broker, right? Because it's all listings, listings, listings. I mean, that's all do. I didn't even believe I had I did a talk yesterday at uh aeronome country club about listings. So then I I pulled up my information and I was like, but did 269 appointments this year and 140 listings taken. I'm like it's a lot of listings. There's a lot of listings. I guess I'll end up with 200, but you know, they all not all you need a lot because they're all not gonna sell. People aren't cooperative, they say they are, they're not. I cancel them or withdraw them. I mean, you know, and then the other ones sell, but sometimes they don't all sell. Yeah, it doesn't matter how good I am if the people aren't cooperative. There's a bunch of nuts out there. There are, and and what I would say is real estate can get you wherever you want. I would I would package it with some other some other stuff to just to diversify your portfolio, right? Like I've owned a bunch of real estate. We we had a large real estate portfolio. Um, I've actually gotten rid of most of it because the liability, the the the just sort of tired of running it, the capital requirements to do it. I've now I think people really need to things talking about like what's your expertise digitizing it and using that to create a stream of income and sell that that knowledge base, the knowledge base, the knowledge base created a Yarmo. I created a 90-day listing accelerator, yeah, right. People need help getting that out there, but I create whether it's creed, coaching courses, some uh ebooks, whatever that like you can do that from anywhere in the world, so that's absolutely part of this lifestyle that that that we're we're embarking on and have embarked on is have that, and then you know, the other piece of it, and I hope you don't mind me talking about this. I I have revenue share, right? For me, how's that going? It's going great, like you know, I've got uh about 70 agents world worldwide globally, and it's you know, they close deals. I get a small piece of it, and I get to help them grow their organization, and it's you know, I help them grow theirs. And if you can live more cheaply on ten thousand dollars a month or fifteen thousand dollars a month or five thousand dollars a month, whatever it is, that's just a couple of agents that you need to do and partner with them in a real meaningful way so that if you decide and wake up in the morning and decide I don't want to sell any more real estate, you have options. So this is all about options, right? All about options, it really is. And I tell you, I tell people all the time like I I was the number one commercial agent of one of the brands that I worked at previously, and I got one of those loose sight, like nice little things that is now some trash pile. I have no idea what it's at. But when I my first year at EXP, they gave me $80,000 in stock, and that's my 401k. So I'm not saying like, listen, I I I believe in our in our in our company, but go get compensated in the way that you deserve to be compensated so you can live the life you want to live. I got a question for you. I would like your opinion if you would want to answer it. Sure. So compass buys anywhere real estate. Yeah, I I think it's great for what they're trying to accomplish. So I think there's this whole divide in the industry about sort of private listings. Well, yeah, we got a lot more agents that makes that more possible, right? For those of you watching my podcast, I'm just not a big believer in sort of the traditional brokerage model anymore. And I see the brokerage model being a loss leader for the other revenue streams that do make the money, mortgage and title. So I I believe that the virtual brokerage model is where everybody needs to move to ultimately. The the costs associated with but they're not that they're they're not that, but they're also not they've got a lot of debt, they're not and like how are they even but first of all? 1.6 billion dollars seems cheap to me. Yeah, does that seem cheap? Well, when you when you're using stocks all these brands, you you can you can create whatever valuation you want when you're you were trading stock for it, right? It's it just it doesn't appeal to me. It's not the model that I want. Like, I I just don't believe in a model, it's not the model that I would want for my business where I'm not getting stock, I'm not getting ref share, I'm not getting all these tools and high splits and and and a cap, right? Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. But from a standpoint of like just industry-wise, they say they're not gonna cipher off the brands, but how does that make sense? Like eventually they will, like everybody else does, right? Yeah, I mean, I I was an MA attorney before this, so I've seen acquisitions, and what I can tell you is most acquisitions fail because of of the integration, and so they have to say they're not going to change things. Of course, but it wasn't working the way it was, it never happens though, it'll be slow and it'll it'll creep, right? There's um two to three years, yeah. There's we'll be back on we'll be on this podcast and then we'll again and again because I like to have people back on, right? I like to see the journey of my guests, and I like to do you know, this podcast is about developing relationships too with people, absolutely, yeah. So, yeah, no, what are your thoughts about it? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Uh, I don't like compass, you know me. I mean, kind of, you know me a little bit. Anyway, I'm very direct and straight shooter, and I wear my heart on my sleeve, and I don't really like them. I don't like him, the CEO. I'm gonna tell you why I don't like him. I heard him speak and in gotta be in New York probably seven years, maybe longer. Talk about the agent, the superpower agent. And then he talked about what I didn't believe him. Like, I don't trust him. I think he's arrogant in the way that he speaks to people, and there was a whole thing with him and oh, who was it? Maybe Gary Keller. I think they had a big fight on stage. Not like a fight, but a debate, and it was heated. That's so that's how I feel. There's maybe some stuff behind there that we don't know, but I I when I I look at just the business model, you know. I was at KW before. I don't get it. I know people like the marketing, and but for the dollars that you could save under a different platform, you can go invest your your own marketing and and deliver on that stuff. It's interesting. Like I think the move is what they needed to do in light of where things stand and how things are changing. I've done a couple of webinars and talked about like the operating expense that that we run under versus a company like that runs our under. You just can't compete. And so if you can't compete from an operating expense and profitability, you're gonna have to try and do something else to do it to compete. And we're just gonna keep on doing our thing, what we do, and we're I love it. I love it. And and so tell us about um the new are you launching a course or is it coaching? What is it about the expat community you're doing? Yeah, so we're we're teaching people how to move abroad without making all the mistakes that we made. And so uh the courses are out there. You can check on expatliven.com. Uh that's l-i-v-in, not without without the G. And L I V I N expat yeah, expatlive l-i-v-in.com. And we've got three different offerings, we've got a variety of offerings, but we got the the courses like everybody does with uh sort of do-it-yourself. But we I just don't think do it yourself works anymore. So all of it has some component of of do it with you. And uh it's a 12-piece course where we take you, most people again talk think about the beginning part of it, like what's my visa, what apartment or house am I going to get? But there's a a whole long process. In fact, we created a method, we call it the expat method, that takes you from the beginning all to end so that you're thriving once you move abroad. The move is only one part of it. It's once you get there, how do you thrive and actually live in the in that environment? Um, so we have that, we have do it with you, eight-week workshops that we do together. And then for those people who just like, man, I don't I don't want to figure this out on my own, just do it for me. We have that offering as well. And we have a uh private community that people can go in and support each other and lots of tools and resources and free guides. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah. And then surely I will be creating for you real estate agents a course on how to do what I did with every step along the way. Like, how do I sell real estate abroad if I want to do that? That's awesome. Great stuff. Really great to have you on. Oh, thank you so much for inviting me. Certainly, Guillermo, you are being the solution. So thank you for bringing your great energy this morning. It's really good to see you. And uh we got to do this. Likewise, thank you for having me.