[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome to the Short Term Show. The show about short term rentals and long term wealth with real property owners hosting real properties who are crushing it in the vacation and short term rental space.
And here's your host, Avery Carle.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Hey y'. All. Welcome back to another episode of the Short Term Show. I'm your host, Avery Carle. Today we have a really cool guest. His name is Ari Rastagar. He has built a multi billion dollar real estate investment firm that he started with 3, $500. He has been called by Forbes the oracle of Austin in the real estate world.
So you got to be doing something right to get a moniker like that.
So, Ari, how's it going?
[00:00:56] Speaker C: Thanks, Avery.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: So let's just start out pretty basic. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into real estate investing.
[00:01:05] Speaker C: Sure. I'm an attorney by trade and, you know, so much of real estate is contracts, I guess, but I kind of fell into it. Like when I was in law school, I bought a single family home and ended up building a single house and kind of getting a little bit of entree into real estate and took a little bit of a windy path into entertainment. And the person that was financing our entertainment business is a very decorated financier on Wall Street.
And after though a huge ice storm crushed one of the two of the parties in Dallas, and then Legionnaires disease messed up the other party that was supposed to be at the Playboy Mansion in la.
I found myself picking up the, kind of picking up the pieces of the demolition, so to speak, of that business and to rebuild it ended up becoming. Becoming real estate.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: Okay, so how did you go from. I mean, I want to hear, I want to hear about the breakdown of the previous business and how that ended up being real estate, because I feel like a lot of people think they want to get into real estate investing, but they don't.
They can never kind of quite figure it out. They think they're just gonna buy something and it's gonna make a ton of money and they're never gonna have to do anything again.
[00:02:26] Speaker C: Yeah, that couldn't be further from the truth. You know, I think, I think real estate is deceptively simple on its face. And I think that's.
People jump in and think, like you said, they're gonna buy a house, they're gonna rent it out, they're all of a sudden gonna make a gazillion dollars. And you know, being. Being a sophisticated real estate investor, understanding risk is the most important thing before you do anything and, you know, we manage money for public pension plans, insurance companies. We have hundreds of accredited investors. We've invested in 38 cities, 13 states, seven different asset classes.
And, and that's the one big takeaway is, you know, before, you know, I think in my younger years of being an entrepreneur, we focused a lot on how much money we could make.
And now we think about what are all the ways that we could lose money. And when we do make money, we're focused on how we can make our investors money. And that, you know, that only comes, I think, you know, with time, where that exuberance becomes tempered and you start following, you know, math and data and financial analysis versus just maybe exuberance or excitement or, you know, feeling that this is the right thing to do per se.
All of that kind of gets, kind of gets worked out with time. As you can see, I have a little more gray hair than I once did. And I think that all comes with dealing with the stresses that involve running these properties. Because so much. There's nothing passive about passive income in real estate. If anything, it's active management and managing all the things that go into the repairs, the maintenance, and the value add that goes into it. And I think short term rentals, as a general rule, can be extremely difficult for that reason because of the turnover. You have somebody come in, you have to manage the guest check in, you have to have cleaning crews clean them. Just make sure you're adhering to best practices and then what that income looks like and how it's taxed. There's so many different pieces that go into it. Clearly, if it's done right can be a great business.
But with all of that, you know, turnover of tenancy and the gaps in between it, having the right crews, the right consultants to make sure that it's done at a very, very high level. And really managing expenses of, you know, if you're using Airbnb or using VRBO or what the fees that they pull out looks like. And I think a lot of times people jump in and don't fully appreciate all of the expenses and the mechanics of how that it looks real nice when you say we get, you know, $500 a night, but when look at how all of that whittles down and then what you're left over is call it net income and then you have to pay the tax man, it doesn't look as sexy at the end of it until you start to hit scale.
[00:05:21] Speaker B: Right, right. And I agree with that. You know, a lot of people say single family Long term rental investing is dead. But if I need to have that like a couple hundred single families and they, I mean once they don't work, if you only have a handful, but once you get them at scale, they work really, really well. And it's just, you know, it's not an overnight thing. Whether it's long term rentals or short term rentals, you, you really do have to, it's a long term investment and you have to keep adding to it. And it's not just a, okay, I'm going to buy one thing and now I'm rich.
[00:05:55] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's that there's a lot of wisdom in what you said. Like for example, on one of our properties, you know, we can, you know, we can build, it's a master plan community that we bought those agricultural land and went through a comprehensive rezoning case. Now we can build a thousand single family homes in addition to the elementary school and commercial space and you know, a thousand plus multi units. Fine. But within that, you know, within that thousand home kind of area, you know, we're doing a few hundred houses of build for rent and in fact we're using some really interesting innovative processes with 3D printing and, and robotics and AI, which is another discussion. But to your point, you know, when you have a certain amount of single family home rentals and so much of the call it, the ease is more about the systems and the processes in place with how you actually manage them. I think whether how you collect payment, having a crew that you can, that can go and do the maintenance and do all the calls and things like that.
And when you hit scale, not unlike a multifamily complex, that the closer the proximity is for those houses for the build for rent or the single family rental, however you do it, but the proximity to them also matters. So if you have 30 houses that are within a certain neighborhood, the ease of the operational prowess, because that's where people really get killed, is how they're actually operated. But as you hit scale to your point, as you end up having more and more of them, I think the ease of operations becomes simpler. I wouldn't say easy, but more simple because you have all those relationships with the people that can help you run them. You have your CPA that's collecting, looking at the money, you have bill pay, you have all these other things in place and that takes time to build. So so much of this business is about building the back end processes to manage them and run them and market them and et cetera. And I think that takes a certain amount of time where we very EAS look at it, say, oh, this is a house. Well, behind that house is all of these other things that you don't necessarily see. But once you start getting into it and running it, you realize all of the stuff that sits behind the curtain, that once that's built and you can start to scale, then it becomes really, really fun.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: Thank you for listening. We sincerely hope that you find value in this podcast.
We would love it if you would use our team to purchase your next vacation home.
We sell houses in all of the best vacation markets in America and we want to earn your business.
Reach out to us
[email protected] stsconsultation.com that's theshortermshop.com
[00:08:59] Speaker B: it does, it does become fun. And short term rentals specifically are very fun in my opinion. And you mentioned you have quite a bit of short term rental experience. So can you kind of shed a little bit of light on what your experience has been with short term rentals specifically?
[00:09:14] Speaker C: I think, I think good and bad. I think, you know, when I really, when I started in this business, you know, there's a lot of, you know, companies like Sonder is a, is a great example that really came in, wanted to do, you know, rent huge, you know, parcels of individual units even before development had happened. And I think they clearly got over their skis in that and we had done some stuff with them that didn't work out.
And so again, understanding hospitality, which the hospitality business itself, you know, has a lot of similarities clearly to short term rentals and, and the way that you actually run a hotel and all the staffing needs that go into, run into a hotel and the way you can provide service, you know, to, to your nightly tenants, you know, I guess for lack of a better or your guests, whatever phraseology that you want to use, you know, there's a big reason why hotels have big staffs, you know, because there's all these needs that come up, whether you know, the room service turning over, you know, turning over the, the laundry and all these other things that happen. And when you don't have those things on site, it poses a bunch of different problems. So again, back to the point of it looks deceptively simple of having that short term, you know, rental piece of how you lay out the, the individual unit, whether from a design standpoint and the goodies you put in the fridge and all of those things, you know, although it doesn't, you know, it sounds kind of boring, but how you maintain that at a very, very high level to give an incredible experience for your customer, which is often only there one night. So when you have a longer term, or two nights, when you have a longer term tenant, as a landlord, you have a longer term opportunity to really give great customer service to a client. And with, with ones that are only there, that are more transient, you have a much shorter term opportunity to give them a world class experience. And that experience is what will garner repeat customers, give you great reviews and all these other things. And so when you only have a short window to really wow, to wow a customer, it can be very binary. It can be they had this wildly great experience and it was incredible and they give you this great review, but if somehow the operational side wasn't up to par for that one day, they could have a really bad experience. So, so all of these things need to go into the ultimate point of, of any type of real estate, which is about people and how you're serving people and how you're creating, you know, this incredible experience. So I think so much of any of this has to do with how that experience, when we were running some of our short term rentals, we didn't understand this stuff early on, you know, and so a lot of our customers didn't get a great experience. And we felt it in the reviews, we felt it, you know, interpret in, in terms of hitting revenue. And then once we figured it out on some of our smaller apartment complexes, it ended up being a phenomenal business. Right. So I think again, so much of this business is how the operators deal with obsessing over a customer experience. And I think when you really are obsessing over your customers, and I think that might be a fundamental premise of any type of business, certainly real estate, but since you have this shorter opportunity to wow them, that creates a different set of challenges for how that's actually done. But to your point, once you get it right, the business is incredibly lucrative. It's incredibly fulfilling. You get to see all these wonderful stories of families that come to stay for the night and share their experiences in that city, in that town. And it can be very, very fulfilling and very lucrative.
[00:13:03] Speaker B: I'd be really interested to hear your opinion on this.
My personal experience with a private equity firm that failed horrendously at vacation rentals. So we were hired by a big fund, I would say about two years ago. They bought, I think 10 vacation rentals. Five of them were in the Smoky Mountains, five of them were down here in the Destin, Florida area.
And they bought, they did not buy with us. So I will talk about the mistakes that their agent made or that they made with choosing an agent. They bought, they paid cash over asking at a time in the market when you did not have to do that anymore. So it was in coming off of
[00:13:51] Speaker C: 2022, I think, I think you already nailed one of the first problems. You already found one of the first problems.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: Yes, that was the main problem. The other problem is they got, I think they were focused too much on the numbers and not at all on the experience.
So here's two. We, they hired us both in the Smokies and down here they did zero due diligence. They just said, oh, numbers work. So in the Smokies they bought what they thought was a five bedroom property.
But in the Smoky Mountains in that particular MLS area, you have to list the property number of bedrooms according to what the septic system is rated for. So that listing agent and the buyer's agent that they hired, neither one of the listing agent misrepresented or made a mistake and did not realize which you're supposed to have it attached, that it was only a two bedroom septic. So their agent did not have them do that due diligence. And then when we came to list it, we had to tell them, hey guys, we're really sorry about this, but you have a two bedroom for the sake of, of listing, not a five bedroom. So that didn't go well.
And then down here, this is what, where I think like the biggest, second biggest mistake they looked at, okay, we want five bedrooms, five bedroom property makes this amount. Let's go find the cheapest five bedroom we can with zero nuance, zero context. So what they bought was a five bedroom, but it was a 50. It was a 1500 square foot three bedroom with a two story garage that had a one bedroom up top and a one bedroom on the bottom. So it wasn't like, okay, my family's coming to rent a five bedroom house and we're all together here in the house. It was like two. Somebody's out here in this apartment, somebody's out here in that apartment. And they could not fathom why it did not make the money that other five bedrooms were.
And then they really didn't like when we couldn't get it sold because they wanted the price they paid for it. The market had changed. They paid cash over asking. They did not get a deal. They bought the wrong thing, they had the wrong manager and they would not allow us to disclose what their rental income was.
So Anyway, we got fired. They lost their asses.
And everybody. A lot of mom and pop, smaller operators get so worried about private equity getting in. And I'm like, guys, they will. At some point somebody's gonna figure out how to do it. But I think we're kind of far off because this was kind of a big fund that I'd heard of before they hired us. So I'd love to hear your opinion on that and how private equity might actually be successful in the single family vacation rental space.
[00:16:39] Speaker C: Well, I think, I think there's a lot of stuff to unpack in what you said. I think at the beginning, so much of what any investor should do, certainly in real estate, is focus on your entrance strategy as opposed to your exit strategy, right. So if you're, if you're entering, one of the only things you can really control in a real estate deal at the beginning is what you pay, you know, what's your basis. And so if you're going into something, you know, one of the, one of the primate strategies is buying at what's called a discount to replacement cost, and that's a bunch of jargon, but saying that there's an existing home and it would cost $500,000 to build it brand new if you could buy something that's well suited, well maintained for $250,000, you're inherently walking in with a certain cushion of what your purchase price was of something you can control. So immediately, if somebody's overpaying for something at the beginning without knowing anything else, without some extraordinary possibility either to rezone it, maybe they're overpaying for a house, but they think they can build a skyscraper there. So it's overpaying as if it was a house. But if you change the usage, which is something that we do very often, it would actually be very inexpensive and a great value buy if you're going to build something much taller. I'm just using an example. So you're keeping the same use and you're not, and you don't have any nuanced opportunity for scalability. If you're overpaying, you know, that's already a big risk to say the least. And, and so, and again, there could be oper. There could be reasons that you would overpay an instance to hit scale. There could be some unique location instance you should could know that it's growing. So they're overpaying on its face is not necessarily bad. But overpaying if you don't have any other reason is not very not Very smart, quite frankly. And I think the other part about real estate is understanding local markets because real estate is a local game. Okay. And there's so much to be said about walking the property. In my experience of if you're buying something and you know, it looks good on paper, it's very easy to sit up, you know, in your ivory tower and look at something on an Excel spreadsheet versus going there and really having boots on the ground. So I've always been a huge proponent of investing in areas that, you know, I was born in Austin, Texas, I was raised in Dallas, I went to law school in San Antonio. And so much of our portfolio now is up and down that I35 corridor that we, we live in. It's home, you know, so not to say we know everything about everything, but you know, but we, we feel like we understand the market better than others and you know, investors from all over the world come to us for these particular markets and I'd like to believe because we have subject matter expertise. So if you want to be investing in, you know, in Wyoming, I wouldn't call me, if you know what I mean, that's. There's much people that are much smarter than me, much more capable in Wyoming or in the Smokies, as you said, that know you. So you know, Steve Jobs used to say, you know, don't you, we don't hire smart people to tell them what to do. We hire smart people to tell us what to do. So in this instance, if you were going to enter and focus on your entrance strategy because your exit is a promise at best, you know, or a hope at best that if you can control those metrics going in and control your cost or have the discipline to walk away if you can't get with that within that basis. And I think this is just showing prime examples of pitfalls that any investor in real estate can really learn from is what are you paying first and foremost? Do you have local market expertise at the entrance before you get yourself into a situation?
Are you using leverage prudently? Like in an instance where instead of paying all cash, you know, are interest rates favorable to where you can minimize your, your capital outlay, you can use non recourse financing potentially so that you're using less cash to potentially increase your leveraged returns and by using local market experts. And we do this in, in even smaller markets, like if we're going, you know, in Kyle, Texas as an example, we own this 318 acre site. You know, when we were first doing it, we have Local people that are Kyle experts that are on the council or had been on the council to really help us navigate those specific neighborhood nuances. So it's not just, oh, Austin.
No. Well, Austin has the Mueller district. There's East Austin, there's Westlake Hill, there's Lake Travis, there's Spicewood. And we've come to find that as you walk these neighborhoods, or certainly you're buying single family homes, there could be some local politics just in the HOA that you might not know. So getting to know the people on your block, on, in your corridor and having them give you the subject matter expertise.
I think the way you explained this was just a great recipe for what not to do. And I think it can be applied to any type of real estate investing. Before you buy something in there, if you're in New York, you know, and you're buying in Austin, you better find someone that knows Austin and then even distill it down further where that Austin person will say, you know what? I know someone in the Mueller district that used to, that lives in that neighborhood. And then continue to get that boots on the ground knowledge. And then, yes, have your Excel spreadsheet, have all that analysis done, all that market research, sure. But you need to marry mathematics with the humanity of that extra area and then start to uncover those little nuances which will either uncover, you know, a sewer that you should say I should run for the hills, or it could, you know, uncover a little diamond mine that you didn't know that was, that was there. But either way, this is part of what I would say is fundamental due diligence and you know, and not try to uncover these issues later on. But private equity as a general rule comes and extracts value overall, you would think much better than individuals because of their access to data, because of their act, their team. And so just saying, private equity in general is too loose of a term, I think. But in a perfect world, in a perfect world, private equity has been able to historically uncover value in businesses, create scaling businesses, create an opportunity before going public, but typically at a much larger scale.
And so I think that if private equity starts to get very smart about short term rentals, I think, I think there could be some value there. But 10 units without due diligence, without an effective entry strategy, without local market partners, without local market operators, I don't care who you are, that doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: Thank you for joining us. Here at the Short Term Shop we help real estate investors like you buy and sell vacation homes we operate in over 20 true vacation markets across the United States.
If you have more questions about buying and selling, join us every week for a live Q A at strike. That's strquestions.com.
[00:24:13] Speaker B: yeah, you mentioned Ivory Tower. Being up in the ivory tower and not walking the property. And I think this was like a pretty good case of that. I mean, just coming and looking at this one property in Destin one time, you would say, oh, well, nobody's. People who have enough people to need five bedrooms aren't going to want to rent this. They want to be all together on their family vacation, not have people out in other.
[00:24:38] Speaker C: I'll tell you, Avery, in my experience, and you know, I think we've done okay for our investors over the years, obviously there's room for improvement. But the things that you outlined are very basic things in our due diligence checklist. Okay, so the diligence checklist that we've created over mistake after mistake. My book is called the Gift of Failure, by the way, and it's by no means the great American novel. But, you know, the first line is, I hope you fail. I hope you fail a lot. And I think you learn a lot of these things from failing along the way. And I can raise my hand first and say that we failed a lot of these things, but over those failures and having some introspection, we've created, you know, a comprehensive due diligence list that includes everything that you. That you expressed. You know, having local partners, really assessing the price, walking the properties, boots on the ground, you know, these, these things that seem kind of commonsensical, but common sense is not always so common.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: Right.
[00:25:43] Speaker C: In some regard. But I think everything you said is something that we can all learn, we can all get better at. We can all figure out that the Excel spreadsheet there can be. You can take an Excel Magic and turn it into a 20x return just by a little toggle. And sometimes you get, you know, you get intoxicated on your Excel model, where you need to temper that with some realism and get to know, you know, you know, for example, what you call a bedroom in some markets must have a closet, or else it's not a bedroom, you know, or it has to have a window. And so what you call a bedroom also has legal implications. You know, there. So, so there's of. And again, that changes from local market state to state. Or so sometimes if you're, you know, in New York, what you call a bedroom, you know, could be a closet, but what you call a bedroom in, you know, Dallas, Texas might legally not be the same thing. So without that local market expertise, back to your point, you might be calling it a bedroom, when in fact, as a matter of law, it is not a bedroom, to your point, it's a closet or it's a garage.
You might need to have a window. And, and so I think really understanding the legal parameters and going back to that local market expertise, I think is absolutely invaluable for anybody getting into real estate. And I think this hands on approach and really, really understanding local market expertise, I think are such mission critical components that'll help anybody, whether doing short term rentals or buying an apartment complex or buying land or, you know, having great ambitions. But I think this is a great learning opportunity to have local market expertise.
[00:27:22] Speaker B: Yeah, 100% agree with that. Well, Ari, what have I asked you before we get to the final three questions of the show? What have I not asked that you feel like our audience of short term rental investors could benefit from learning from you?
[00:27:38] Speaker C: Well, that's, that's a kind question, I think.
I think we've covered some great stuff, but I think with short term rentals, I think that, as I said, it appears to be more simple than it is. So I think it's a great business.
But again, it's one of those that I think actually requires even more due diligence than let's say, buying an apartment complex. Because if you buy an apartment complex, there is seasoned property management firms that for decades and decades and decades and managed apartment complexes and they know how to do it. They have the right software to collect rents, you know, they have teams to do to run the operations. And so if you don't know as much in almost buying an apartment complex, there's a lot of really great subject matter experts in pretty much every market in the United States, to say the least. But really understanding the operational side of short term rentals, it's still relatively new and it doesn't have those seasoned operational risk controls that this kind of more nuanced type of investing has, which creates more risk, you know, much more risk, quite frankly. And so does that mean that it can't be worked out? Of course it can be worked out, but I think it requires sharper pencils, more patience, more temperament to really get it right, and much more due diligence, for lack of a better term, to really make sure you understand those numbers. Because it's not nearly as cookie cutter as multifamily investing has. Just as an example of a, of a very seasoned asset Class because so much of this business is about operations. And I know people maybe don't want to hear that. That doesn't sound as sexy as just jumping in. But once you do take the time, as you said, to get scale, to understand the operations, you can go make exponentially better returns.
But the more time you take to educate yourself, learn, watching people like yourself learning from the mistakes from others, I think that's great time spent, especially if you really feel passionate about this asset class, there's certainly value there. But I would really take the time to understand all that, get a great cpa, really carve into those numbers and stress test it. And that's, you know, so when you look at your Excel spreadsheet, it's easy to turn it one way and say we make a gazillion dollars. But you can also turn it the other way and say, hey, here are all the things that could go wrong. And then having little plans of action of what that looks like, keeping more capital reserves in place, getting a great debt broker to have accretive financing on each one of them and just really taking your, taking your time. So when you do jump in, you're ready, you're prepared, and when those things inevitably go wrong, you have a strategy around how to deal with them. You can overcome the challenge and then you can start to hit scale and then you can reap all the rewards of doing good homework on the front end.
[00:30:39] Speaker B: Awesome. All very good advice. So you're about to give some more advice because our final three questions of the show, two of the three are advice based. So first question, what advice would you give 20 year old Ari if you knew then what you know now?
[00:30:54] Speaker C: Oh geez.
I would.
There's a lot.
One I would read, think and grow rich more, more often.
And I would spend the time to, to really think about what I wanted to do and work on my mental health. I would work on my physical health. And I know that might not be specifically geared towards business, but as a 20 year old, when I don't have children, when I don't have other responsibilities, I would take the time to build myself as my most important asset. So I have not only mental resilience, I have physical resilience. I focus on my own health and wellness to the point where when I was ready to follow my dreams, follow my passions, I have the physical and mental infrastructure to withstand the inevitable storms, the inevitable headwinds that come into being an entrepreneur versus being depleted, being tired and not caring for my mental health enough to be able to Go through the obstacles that it takes to be an entrepreneur.
[00:32:05] Speaker B: Really great advice. Number two. What advice would you give a new short term rental investor who's looking to get started today? And he kind of already hit a lot of that. So.
[00:32:13] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I, I would, I would really get. If you're getting into short term rentals and you have that entrepreneurial spirit, I would get a great cpa. I would get a great, great person that has a different personality type than you, that sees the world through.
You know, entrepreneurs are, you know, explosive and they're bold and, which is fantastic. But having somebody to temper that enthusiasm to really carve into the numbers before you put risk capital out I think is a very worthy case. It's worth having putting out a little bit of cash to do that so that you can understand the different pitfalls. You can understand the tax implications, are using an llc, you know, what venue is that in? Are you, you know, buying it individually and really educate yourself on all the structural nuances before you put risk capital out or other people's money even worse.
[00:33:08] Speaker B: Okay, also good advice. And last question. What's your favorite book that's impacted your mindset?
[00:33:14] Speaker C: I think I, I hit on it. I, I think Think and Grow Rich is probably at the top of the list. And I say that on a lot of these calls or a lot of these, of these podcasts for that reason. It's, you know, it's tried and true. Mr. Napoleon Hill worked for Andrew Carnegie. You know, he studied with some of the richest people in the history of this country, from John D. Rockefeller to Henry Ford. And the list goes on and really distilled a very concise breakdown of, you know, you know, what it takes mentally to really become an entrepreneur and really follow your dreams. Because so much of this game is in between your two ears and having the psychological and mental resilience to deal with all the things that go wrong in this process. No matter what you're doing, when you're building something great, whether you're an athlete, whether you're going to school, whether you're a parent, and I focus so much on that mental game because once you get the mental game right and then you gain something specialized knowledge that's in the field, and I think he architects that very, very well. It's worth the $4 on, on Amazon at the very least. I don't think anybody will regret reading that book if, if they have the ambitions to go out and build a meaningful life.
[00:34:25] Speaker B: Great book.
And that is it for our episode. If our listeners want to find you, follow you on social media. How can they do that?
[00:34:34] Speaker C: Sure, you can go to Rastagar on Instagram or Rastagar Property. Our team is very active on LinkedIn on YouTube.
You can go to our website at rastergarcapital.com and get a bunch of information. We have active investments for accredited investors and institutions alike in various parts of commercial real estate investing. And we put out a lot of material. Hopefully, that adds value to people, like doing this episode with you. Hopefully the people watching it had something that they can take along their journey that helped them along the way. But I think you can find us pretty easily if you try.
[00:35:18] Speaker B: All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Ari and listeners. I will catch you next week.
[00:35:29] Speaker C: Sam.
