Hey, real estate rock stars. This is Aaron and Mucci Stegi. Welcome back to the show. Today I get to interview Mike Hills. I just talked to Mike briefly, but I'm going to get to know him with you guys right now. Mike, how's it going? I'm It's going great, Aaron.

I appreciate you having me.

And to all the listeners, thanks for listening.

Yeah.

Where do you live?

Denver, Colorado, headquarters of our company and been here a little over 20 years now.

Awesome.

What company is that?

So Atlas Real Estate.

We are a vertically integrated

real estate company. I'm our managing broker in nine of our 14 states. And yeah, just real estate all

day, every day. In 14 states, that's wild to be the managing broker in nine of them. I haven't talked

to very many people that have a brokerage that big,

that many places. That's definitely something that we will get to over the show. We'll talk

about that. We'll talk about growth. That's obviously a different sort of operation than what

we've had. When did you get into real estate? So I bought my first rental two and a half months out of college.

So graduated college early June, 2001, bought my first property two and a half months later.

So September 1st, owned that property for roughly 19 years and, you know, change, but only live there for 18 months.

I'm what, what you would call a house hacker today,

but back then I was just called crazy because the house, the millennials hadn't made up the term house hacking. So for those millennials listening, thank you. Don't let people tell you didn't contribute because you at least contributed that. And, uh, yeah, I've been in real estate ever since, started with Atlas as the second employee, uh, roughly 12 years ago and been here ever since.

Cool. So you started as an investor, an accidental investor. You like, you bought a house, fresh out of college, bought a house, rented some rooms out to some buddies to help pay the mortgage. Well, and, and yes, but I was intentional. I did it on purpose. So I would say one of my mentors growing up was my best friend's father who he was an accidental

landlord. What he had done was actually when I was in college, he had acquired maybe seven or eight

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