Josh Dobson - Mortgage Dad & Social Media Star
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE ON:
As the real estate and lending market had changed, Josh Dobson knew he needed to adapt. While much of his mortgage business came from real estate agent referrals, he needed to pivot and get straight to the consumer. Insert @MortgageDadOf3. Through trial and error and adjusting his message to resonate with the consumer, and not seeing significant results for almost 18 months, Josh has now built a social media following of 115,000 on Instagram and 63,000 on Tiktok! He's dancing, he's educating, he's providing EDUTAINMENT! In addition to being a lender, Josh has also invested in single-family and small multi-family homes around his area of Modesto, CA. He bought his first house and turned it into a rental, and repeated that step a couple of times. Josh shares how he's helping consumers through his Highway To Home program so that each person has a path laid out to begin their journey of homeownership to help them build future wealth.
In this episode, you will be able to:
- The simple steps that Josh took to grow his real estate investment portfolio in the Modesto, CA area
- Discover how to build an engaged and loyal social media following that can help grow your real estate business.
- The lessons Josh learned to grow his social media following after not seeing results for the first year and a half
- Uncover the secret to creating authentic and relatable content that resonates with your audience.
- Stay up-to-date on current market conditions to make informed decisions about homeownership and investing.
- How Josh is using his Highway To Home program to educate buyers and help this build out a plan to achieve homeownership
The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:05 - Introduction
00:01:21 - Josh's Background in Real Estate
00:05:46 - Shifting Gears to Social Media
00:13:12 - The Importance of Holding on to Investments
00:14:24 - Building a Real Estate Portfolio
00:16:28 - Authenticity in Social Media
00:18:57 - The Power of Edutainment
00:20:31 - Quality Over Quantity in Social Media
00:25:58 - Creating Engaging Content for Customers
00:27:23 - Thoughts on the Housing Market and Mortgages
00:32:15 - The Power of Education and Planting Seeds
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Read the full transcript here:
Mike Swenson
Welcome to the REL Freedom show, where we inspire you to pursue your passion to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson.
Josh Dobson
Let's get some REL Freedom together.
Mike Swenson
Welcome, everybody, to REL Freedom. We're talking about building time and financial of freedom through opportunities in real estate. And here we are. We're coming up on the end of 2023, as of the recording of this episode, and lending has been a hot button topic. Interest rates have changed. The housing markets change. There's a lot happening out there. And so I want to talk to Josh Dobson today a little bit about lending, a little bit about his personal journey, investing in real estate, and then two, a little bit about social media. How I found Josh or was introduced to Josh is actually on TikTok, and so his handle is mortgage dad of three. So I assume you're done having kids because otherwise you'd have to re change the brand. So you kind of are locked in with that brand. But mortgage dad of three, as of right now, almost 63,000 followers on TikTok. Congratulations on that. Excited to hear you share and excited to have you on the show. So welcome, Josh.
Josh Dobson
Hey, thank you for having me.
Mike Swenson
Why don't you just share a little bit about your background, how you got into real estate, how you got into the mortgage side, and we'll go from there.
Josh Dobson
I graduated college in 2004. When I graduated college, I took a year off before I was going to go to law school because that was my big dream. In that year, I decided to come work for the family. So at the time, my stepfather and my mother were in mortgage lending. I had a lot of experience in real estate. Prior to that. My grandparents were real estate agents for longer than I was alive. So I grew up spending summers helping her stuff on envelopes, walk neighborhoods, and kind of get a feel for the real estate side of things. So when I got into mortgage lending, this was circa 2003, 2004, the market was pretty crazy. We saw a lot of people buying houses. This is the subprime era, so it was kind of interesting. Didn't get really a lot of the information or at least the experience that was needed for this market because it was so easy for people to get home loans. But it was a great experience. I enjoyed it. I realized that I could make a career out of it. And so I actually chose not to go to law school. I had taken my LSATs. I had applied and gotten accepted at a couple of different law schools. So my journey started with choosing not to become a lawyer. And put myself in more college student loan debt. And that's kind of where my journey started. And it was a great experience because I got to work with my family, I got to work closely with my grandparents as real estate agents. And so we went through the 2008 housing crash. Obviously, once that happened, I had to learn more about mortgage lending as far as calculating income, reviewing tax returns, helping self employed borrowers. So it was a lot of scraping by and getting kind of your hands dirty in the market. And I learned a lot after 2008 about mortgage lending, what goes into it, how to be successful. I mean, I had grown up in a real estate family, so I knew the age old lenders talk to real estate agents. That's where you get your business. That's how you kind of work your way through tough times because refinances come and go because of interest rates, and we're experiencing that now. And so that was my journey for a long time. Obviously, when I got into lending and having a real estate family, I was encouraged to buy real estate right out of college. So in 2004, I bought my first home. I still own that property. It's a rental for me. So over the next 20 years, especially after 2010, 2011, we purchased quite a few of the rental properties that we currently own. We spent a lot of time on looking at two to four units here in the local area of Modesto because it's kind of an underserved area as far as it's a large city compared to most. However, the demographics, you have a lower income spectrum, people who necessarily can't afford to buy a house or qualify for a house. So there's a lot of renters. So it was a great market for me to learn kind of residential real estate investment. And so we built our portfolio over the past 20 years. And while doing that, obviously, I stuck to lending and we had a great time, especially with about two or three years ago, with rates in the threes and twos percent, we were refinancing everybody. We were helping everybody buy a house. You had affordable mortgages. It was a great time. And just as I started to see, the market started to shift, because again, I went through 2008. So I learned a lot about 2008 and the housing crash. You can see how markets are shifting. We saw a shift in the market, which was, we knew rates were going to start going up. We knew that the market was going to dry up. As far as real estate, it's going to be very difficult for people to buy and sell homes. A lot of the people who owned a home prior to the increase in interest rates, were going to experience the golden handcuff scenario. They love their interest rate. They're not going to be able to, or they're not going to want to buy and sell or move up or move down because of how wonderful their interest rate is. They're not going to find a housing payment like that again. And so I knew that it was going to be kind of a famine situation here locally in our area, which that was where I spend a lot of my time and my effort working with real estate agents. So we kind of chose to shift gears and try to move to top of funnel. So instead of being the loan officer that's reaching out to real estate agents, asking for business, trying to earn business, I decided I would find another way to get to the consumer a little bit earlier on in the situation and kind of control my own destiny as far as the lead flow. So we went after social media, we saw a huge opportunity with it, and I put myself out there. We spent a good year and a half before we really saw anything start to come back to us as far as our time and investment. But as we continue to learn the algorithm, kind of learn the pain points of the consumer, so that when we're talking on video, we're talking directly to the consumer who may not own a house or who may not think that they have the ability to buy a house. We were able to reach them with our messaging, kind of dispel a lot of the myths surrounding mortgages because there's a lot of mortgage loan officers out there who have spent the last six years reading guidelines, but just kind of saying this is the rule. But unfortunately, what they don't realize or they weren't explaining was that was an overlay. So I think that was one of the biggest pain points that we noticed really early on was discussing overlays and helping people understand the difference between the guidelines from lender to lender, but also the base guidelines. So what Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, what FHA, what VA say versus what the last lender they talked to telling them they needed a 640 credit score to buy a house. So we really focused our energies on creating content centered around that and helping the consumer understand that homeownership is a little bit easier than what they were told when they first tried to buy a house. But then also we expanded it. We created a program called the highway to Home program. The program isn't a loan in itself. Actually what it is, is we take an opportunity with clients when we take their application, we do a soft credit pull, and we guide them. So we will prepare them for homeownership. We will create budgets. We will give them step by step advice on how to improve their credit score specifically for them purchasing a home, which is something a little bit different, because a lot of lenders, they'll get the credit report and it's either good or bad, and they'll say yes or no. Instead of saying no, we provide the client a basic timeline as to how long it should take to get to the point where they can qualify and the steps that they need to take in order to get there. We've started adding different things as far as Budgeting and preparing yourself for homeownership, like paying your mortgage payment, if it's more than what your rent payment is, ahead of time, so that you can learn to budget for it and prepare yourself, also saving while you're doing that to help your situation when you do actually get to the point where you can qualify for a house. So, I mean, that's kind of been the journey so far, and it's been pretty fun.
Mike Swenson
Well, it's interesting. You talked about getting started right before. I also graduated college in four. I worked for a nonprofit at the time, and we got our first house in six. And at that time, we had a first mortgage and a second mortgage. I can't remember if we did zero down or 1%, whatever it was. And I think my rate was maybe six and a half or six and three quarters on the first, and then the second was eight plus. And so I didn't know anything at the time. It was like, oh, try to get a house as soon as I can. Okay, we qualify for the house. Let's get it. And so then I remember getting a good deal because it was a townhouse complex that was built two years before we got it. And so I was like, I'm getting a two year old property. We actually got it for a little bit less than what they purchased it for. So I thought we were getting a good deal and then watched it go all the way down and all my neighbors foreclose, short sale and all that. And that's how we got our start as landlords, because we decided to rent it out since we were underwater. It's like, okay, we could stay here for the next ten years or go rent it out. We did that. We bought a short sale. And so what you're talking about educating people, buying their first property, that's really important. And like you said, going top of the funnel, answering those questions that they have out there because there's so much information, so much that you don't know who to believe or what's right, what's wrong. You tend to hear the doom and gloom and being able to show people a path of like, here's how you can do this is really important. And so congrats on getting out there, getting in front and building a great following that you're in control of now in the future because they're dialed into you and your message.
Josh Dobson
Yeah. Thank you.
Mike Swenson
So you had mentioned about getting your first property at the age of 24. You obviously were exposed to real estate, seen the opportunity to build wealth, talk through kind of those first couple of steps for you. Was it just get that first property and now you're in and kind of build from there? Did you have any goals around that or talk about what you were thinking here as you were picking up those first few properties?
Josh Dobson
Yeah, it's funny, right? Because you kind of mentioned it. We really don't know what we're doing when we first get into it and we kind of learn as we go. I just knew that, like I said, my grandparents had kind of taught me that it's important to own real estate, to build wealth. At the time, they had owned like 16 or 20 different properties. So it was one of those things. It was a foregone conclusion that I was going to buy a property and do it quickly. So when I bought that first house, I had a lot of guidance from them. So when we were looking at it, it was pretty expensive, considering what was going on. And I think what they helped me understand when I bought the first house, it's a three bedroom, one bath house. So it was never going to be for my forever home. It was a stepping stone. And I think that's where I try to help people understand that when they're starting their journey in homeownership, is that that first house doesn't necessarily have to be your forever home. You do need to look at it from a perspective of, hey, I'm buying this house. And if I hold onto it long term, this is a great investment. So when we were looking at homes, it was really important that we found the right size. So I think it was 1800 square foot, three bedroom, one bath house in a decent neighborhood, not a great neighborhood. But my grandparents taught me, like, look at it from this perspective. If you buy this house and you hold on to it, you should be able to rent it for more than what you're paying on your mortgage. So you don't ever have to touch the mortgage again. And you're right. Well, I think I actually ended up putting 20% down on mine, but the rate was like six and a half percent on a 30 year fix. And so we did the calculations on it. The rents would cover the mortgage if I ever decided to move out and buy a new house. So when that time came and it was time to find another home, it was shortly after, just like you, right? The short sales started happening. We saw some better prices on homes. So what my wife and I did at that point was we decided, hey, look, we're going to hold onto this as an investment property. We're going to put the minimum down payment on our next house. So I think we bought a five bedroom, three bath house for pennies on the dollar. I think I bought it from as much as I bought the three bedroom, one bath house for. We put the minimum down payment down and we bought our next home. We turned that property into a rental. And like I said, we've kept it the whole time. And I think for me, it was a great experience. Yes, it was difficult because, again, the property was underwater. Even though I put 20% down, I knew it was underwater. But for me, and I think this is where a lot of people get lost in the numbers. They look at it as, hey, it's underwater. I'm just going to walk away from it because I've lost all my money. That's the attitude that you have. If you're buying stocks and you sell low and you lose your money, you're only setting yourself up for failure. If you can hold on to the property and you can make it work financially, as long as you hold it on long enough, it's going to turn around. So I think when we bought that house, it was 250,000. It's currently worth 380,000. I don't think that's really what the value of the home is. I don't think it should ever sell for 380,000, but that's what it's worth on the market. Even if the market were to pull back, obviously that home is still worth way more than what I paid for it. And it's a great investment because I think I'm about six years away from paying off the mortgage. Most likely, I'm probably not going to pay it off. I'll probably refinance it, do a little bit of a cash out. Once we see rates drop again, a little bit, and try to reinvest some of that money into another piece of real estate, because that's basically what we've done throughout the last, I want to say it's 13 years, every house that we've moved to, we've kept the previous home as a rental, and that's kind of how we've built our real estate.
Mike Swenson
Portfolio personally, that's an awesome strategy for people to think two steps ahead. So for people just getting started, I remember we were two years after I graduated, before we got our first house, but I remember I had a buddy that got his first house right after graduation, and it was in a great first time homeowner market. And if you have that mindset of I want to live here, does it work for me starting out and is it in a place that I could turn it into a rental? Yeah, that's a fantastic strategy because you're building the equity, you can leverage that equity to get the next property, and then, like you said, you're in control, you don't have to refinance. It's whenever it makes sense for you. If you want to pull out that equity, go get another property. You want to pull that out, pay off something else, you're really in control of that. And just one property after the next, after the next is a fantastic strategy that's not super complex. You don't have to worry too much. It's just buy a house, buy a house, buy a house, turn the previous one into a rental and boom, you've got a couple of rentals and you're three, four houses in.
Josh Dobson
Yeah, and I think that was for me, it always seems so daunting to be able to purchase an investment property because saving up the 20 or 25% down and then using that money, because it's hard to part with some of that money when you've saved up that much. So it's been a great way for me to be able to build a real estate portfolio without having a large down payment, because each time it's a new primary residence, just converting the old one. I mean, obviously we've picked up a couple of different properties between now and then where we bought them as investment properties, but for the most part, our real estate portfolio was built just around buying a new primary residence and not selling the previous one.
Mike Swenson
Yeah, very simple. People can understand that. You don't have to spend hours and hours and months and months analyzing how to invest, deal calculators this and that. It's just simple. Buy the house, rent the house, buy the house, rent the house. Well, let's chat a little bit about, because I know folks are probably interested in building a social media following. So you had mentioned taking a year and a half being purposeful with content, going top of the funnel, but talk a little bit about developing that. Maybe advice for people that are out there looking to somewhere in the real estate space, build a following. How would they do that? How would you recommend going about that?
Josh Dobson
It's crazy because I think I've had about ten or twelve of these interviews and every time it's the same thing. Right. You have to be authentic. I think what a lot of people don't realize is that when they're on social media, they're either trying to be something they're not and they're not authentic when they're talking and when they're being in front of the camera. And I think it's really important to understand that whoever you are, however you talk, whatever you are comfortable with. I mean, if you're comfortable with being a goofball, be a goofball. If you're more of the I'm a presenter and I have a polished message and that's how I'm going to present. More like a newscaster, then great, do that. But at the end of the day, it's about being authentic. Because when you are who you are in front of the camera, the person on the other end of the phone or device is going to connect with you if they're going to connect with you, because that's who you are. But if you are some fake person, if what you're doing doesn't feel natural and it's not authentic, the people on the other side of the device are going to know that and they're going to feel that and they're just not going to engage you, they're not going to reach out to you, they're not going to really connect with you. And I think I learned that about a year and a half in. I spent a lot of time doing the talking head videos where I was just telling people about guidelines and updates and doing that sort of stuff. And it was all informative and educational. But I realized that it's really important that you really need to entertain as well because I think COVID really taught me that was people are going, they were sitting on their TikTok, they were sitting on their Instagram, they were sitting on their Facebook. Whatever the social media accounts that they really enjoy being on, they're scrolling through trying to find entertainment because they were stuck inside. They couldn't do the things that they were used to doing. And so they were looking for a little bit of entertainment. So I'm completely comfortable being a complete goofball. I have no problem with the haters when they come on and they comment about my poor dancing skills. But for me, part of the brand, right? I just have fun, right? And having fun, it conveys that energy through the video. And that other person on the other side can feel that. And so they get to experience who you are and so they can connect with you on a more personal level. And as we started to do more of the edutainment and I was a little bit more comfortable with just being who I am. Being a goofball, I realized that the people that were watching when they were commenting or reaching back out and engaging with me, it was amazing because they felt like they knew who I was. They were completely comfortable sharing everything with me because they had gotten used to or feeling like they knew who I was. They knew that I was comfortable in my skin, that I wasn't judgmental, that I was going to be helpful. It was all these different things that really helped me connect with the consumer on the other side. And I think that's really what's the most important about social media, is just being comfortable in your own skin, being authentic. Because at the end of the day, the people that are going to engage with you and who are going to connect with you are the people who would engage and connect with you on a day to day basis out in the real world. And that's what's really important, because you want those people to engage you. You don't want people engaging you because you're not who you are. If you're not authentic, you're going to get different people who are engaging you, and those people engaging you may not mesh well with you and your personality, and it may not be a good fit. So I feel like as I've learned that, and I've learned kind of the different messaging and what's important about the videos and what's not important, it's helped with our following, our engagement. I think what's also important, and people need to realize this and maybe think about this a little bit more, the vanity metric, so the likes, the comments and the followers is not important. I know quite a few influencers who have very few followers, but they get a ton of engagement. They get people commenting and people actually messaging them because they've found a message that hits well with the customer that they're trying to reach. So we don't focus on the likes, we don't focus on the followers. For us, we really focus on the messaging and what kind of engagement we get back. So instead of looking at how many followers you have or how many likes you got on a video, because I know there's a lot of people on there who are trying to coach people how to be influencers or social media experts, and they're focused on the, oh, you're stuck at 200 views. Don't worry about the 200 views. If you only have 200 views, but you have 200 people engaging you and contacting you, that's the more important number, right? BecausE at the end of the day, it's a numbers game. We need people to contact us, apply, figure out how to become a homeowner, work with you to become a homeowner. And that's what's the most important part about social media. It's less about the views and the likes. It's more about who and how much you are being engaged.
Mike Swenson
Because at the end of the day, you might have the number of followers you have. But if it doesn't result in any mortgage applications, then what's the point of doing it? Unless you want to fill your own ego. But at the same point, you're in this for the business to be able to get business. So what does your schedule look like then, around content creation or getting ideas? Maybe some nuts and bolts for people that want to build that. How do you structure your day or your week or your month to create that content and get it out there?
Josh Dobson
What we have is a content calendar. It breaks it down into, I think it's like six or seven macro kind of ideas with three or four micro underneath. So what that does is, as we're plugging in, what we feel like is important as far as the content is concerned. It will break it out and it will schedule each thing. So we have a content calendar that gives us one topic for every day. So that's our base. We try to do two videos per day. So the morning looks like, hey, wake up, do a little bit of research. So we'll watch a little bit of either TikTok or Instagram, see what's trending, see what's hot, see what people are using, what's getting engagement so that we can kind of tweak that and put our own messaging around it to push it out there the way we need to. And then post the morning video. And then I spend probably about an hour every day replying to comments, replying to messages, and then engaging other videos. And I think for me, that was the most important thing. I do a lot of research on social media. Right. Call it research doing the scrolling through Gary Vee became very popular. And if they go back and watch some of his earlier stuff, what he explains is how he got so big on YouTube and the way he talks about it. He explains, look, I was on YouTube and I was on other people's videos looking for questions in the comment section. And in those questions, I would help answer those questions and they would then follow me because I answered their question. And I think that's the one piece that a lot of people who are on social media miss is the engagement. They don't spend enough time engaging with the customer or the consumer. So obviously, I reply to all of my comments on social media. I reply to all my direct messages. But like I said, I do. While I'm doing my research and looking for videos that are successful in engagement, I'm also checking out the comments to see what kind of comments they're getting. Because again, each video brings in a certain clientele and a certain question. And when you see those questions, if that's what you're looking for, then great, you can go take that idea, make it your own, and you're going to get that kind of engagement in your video. So I'll answer questions in comment sections for other influencers. A lot of those influencers don't ever comment back. So they post the video, they get a ton of comments, never reply to the comments. And those are people that I follow so that I can go and jump in the comment section, answer those questions and that pulls those people over onto my page because I've answered their questions and they're like, hey, wait a minute. This guy knows what he's talking about. Maybe he has some content that might help me. And obviously I know he's going to engage me. So if I have questions, I can ask him and he's going to answer them. So that was something I learned early on watching some YouTube videos from Gary Vee. So that was important for us. But then the hour or so of engaging, commenting and messaging, then we'll record, we do like a lot of group recording. So we'll record what we call evergreen content, which is content that you can post anytime, anywhere. It doesn't matter. It's going to be informational and people are going to appreciate it because it's answering questions that they might have had or missed that might have been put out there. But then we'll also do some of the trending audios, the trending dances or trending videos. But we kind of group those videos together. So we'll do record maybe two or three times a week and do as many of the videos as we can. We'll save those in our draft and then we edit them and publish them as we go along. And there's not really a rhyme or reason for kind of when or how we post the information. Typically what we do is, like I said, we're kind of studying what's getting engagement, what's getting a lot of feedback. And so we try to put our content centered around that stuff that's engaging those customers. Obviously, with the amount of engagement I do with consumers every day, spending a lot of time talking to people about their pain points, what they're going through, I have a really good pulse on what the average consumer is experiencing right now in the market. And so a lot of my ideas behind content and messaging is centered around those pain points, trying to address those and help people understand how they can overcome them, what they need to do or what we can do to help them get to that point.
Mike Swenson
Well, it's interesting, too. I mean, you mentioned it took a year and a half before you really started to see the results, which I think is important for people to understand. It's going to take time. But I love the mindset. I hear that a lot from people of I want more followers, but it's like, yeah, if you're not willing to give comments, give value on other people, you can't just expect for people to come follow you without helping others out. Same thing. When I hear people about wanting to get more reviews, it's like, well, how many reviews have you given to people? Oh, none. But you want to get more reviews. And so it's kind of like that give first mentality and then you'll receive back after that. And so that's great, being able to help out. And yeah, you're fishing in other ponds. Then by going in places where the algorithm maybe won't find them by you posting there, it now gives you a chance to get some different exposure. So great tips.
Josh Dobson
Thank you.
Mike Swenson
So kind of wrapping up here, we haven't really gotten into the actual lending piece. So what are some thoughts that you have as it relates to the housing market, to the mortgages, the rates today? What's something you might be able to share with people listening?
Josh Dobson
I mean, it's really important to understand that you really can't time the market. Being in real estate and building wealth is about time in the market, not timing it. And so I think it's really important to understand that, yeah, interest rates are high right now, making it a little bit less affordable to be able to buy a home. But when you start thinking about it in respect to, okay, well, what is my budget? What can I afford as a mortgage payment? Set that goal and to look at what you can do to get there. Right. If your budget is enough for you to be able to buy a house in this market, then you should be buying a house. If your budget is well below what the market and your market is for being able to afford a house, then obviously it's not a great, it's not a time for you to be buying a house. You need to start looking at other things as far as what you need to do to increase your budget or what you need to do to prepare for when that market does shift. Because markets go up and down. They're all cyclical. There's going to be a shift eventually, whether that's prices coming down or interest rates coming down or both. Right? So if you're just waiting for that to happen and you're not taking any actions to prepare yourself to be ready to buy when those happen, you're setting yourself up for failure. Because when you're not setting a goal and you're not planning, you are planning to fail. So it's really important to understand that if you really want to become a homeowner in the future, whether that's next year, the year after that, whatever it is, you need to have a plan. AnD I think that was the real Driving force behind our highway to home program is preparing people to become homeowners, not necessarily just getting approved or not getting approved. So what we try to encourage people is if you can create a plan with a timeline, right? So you don't know when interest rates are going to come down. You don't know if home prices or when home prices are going to come down, but you do know when you are going to be ready. And so if you're thinking, I'm going to buy a house in the next two years, great. Create a plan. And that's what the highway to home program is all about. We create a plan so that we can look at it. Okay? So in the next two years, here are the things that you need to do to improve your credit score to lower your financing charges. So even if interest rates stay the same, you're going to lower your finance charges by doing this with your credit scores. Now, if you want to qualify for a house, here's where you need to be. Do you have the income, what's your debt to income ratio? Do we need to lower some of your debt to qualify for what you feel comfortable paying. Knowing what your price point is because of what your budget is, gives you a gauge so that you know, hey, I'm waiting for home prices to come down because I know I need to be in this price range to be able to afford a house comfortably. So now you've got that number, and as you're watching home prices, all of a sudden you're looking at real estate. Hey, home prices finally hit the price point where I'm comfortable. I can think about buying a house. I'm ready. I have all my stuff. My credit is good. I have a plan. I saved for a down payment. This is one plug for me. The highway to Home program has a rewards program where you can earn points that you can redeem for a closing cost credit. Because we all know down payment and closing costs are some of the biggest hurdles for people in homeownership. So we've created the program where you are joining a rewards program and you actually get a closing cost credit by using the app and preparing for homeownership. And so what that does is know I've done all the things I need to do. I'm ready to go. Hey, Josh, let's get pre approved and I'll start shopping for a house. And that's kind of where that inspiration came from. But you really have to have a plan. And I think with a plan, you can make homeownership a reality.
Mike Swenson
Well, it's awesome to hear that you're helping to educate people. And I still remember I went to a first time homebuyer seminar like a year before I bought the first time. And it was so funny because I didn't know any other agents at the time, and I called that agent up because I had her business card. This is back when business cards were a lot more relevant. But I called her up and she's like, well, how did you hear about me? And I was like, oh, well, I went to your first time homebuyer seminar. You did? Twelve months ago. And she's like, oh, wow, okay. So I was one of those rare birds that came along where it's like you planted that seed a while ago and I had your business card and you were the only realtor I knew at the time and I called you up.
Josh Dobson
Yeah.
Mike Swenson
Well, thank you so much, Josh, for coming on, sharing about your investing story. Just talking about helping people build social media within the real estate space and then obviously on the lending side for people that want to learn more about you and be able to follow you. How can they do so at mortgage Data three?
Josh Dobson
Whatever social media you're on, you can look us up at mortgage Data three. That is where we're at. My email address is Josh at MortgageData Three. We keep it simple.
Mike Swenson
Well, thank you so much, Josh, for coming on and best of luck to you in the future. You, Sam.
