Good evening, I'm Harold Pacius, we're on the air again with another edition of Pacius on the News, and tonight we have a very, very interesting guy, Dan Brennan, who is the head of main housing. I always knew it as main housing authority, but it's the state agency that tries to help us solve our housing problems. Dan, welcome. Well, thank you very much. It's an honor to be here. I appreciate you reaching out.  You come all the way down from Winslow, Maine, to be honest. I hope that you'll have a pleasant evening after this in Portland. I am sure, yes. So joy the great city of Portland. So Dan, as I said, runs the main housing authority, and all of us, you, me, we read in the newspaper every day about the housing crisis in Maine, and it takes many, many different forms from, you know, you go by the park and you see a lot of homeless people, and that's part of the housing crisis, because they have no place to live. That's a segment of the crisis.  It's terrible. That's part of the housing crisis. You read about people who say, you know, we're trying to buy our first home, and prices are so high, with nothing available, we can't find anything. That's part of the housing crisis. And most of it, I'll ask my guest if he agrees with this, but of course, you know, after all these years, I have my own opinions. But most of it relates to something called supply and demand. That is exactly the issue. Over the years, over the last several decades, we simply haven't built enough housing units, let alone affordable housing units, but we simply have not built enough housing units for the population that needs housing. And that's not just in Maine. That's all around the country. So what we're experiencing in Maine, and you captured it very well by the different pockets of the crisis, it's as bad as it's ever been. It's as challenging as it's ever been. But we have a state housing authority, we have a plan, we've got hundreds and hundreds of people working on this, and we've also have support from our state and federal leaders that are helping us along the way. So I'm an optimist, I'm a hopeful guy, but we work very hard to tackle each one of those issues as best we can each and every day. So I think the news here, this is patience on the news, is going to be the plan. Before we get to the plan, I want to introduce you to Dan a little bit. So Dan, like 45% of the rest of the people in this state, you originally came from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I did. I was born in the town of Brinkrey, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, and lived there for the first nine years of my life. And then my family, my dad, mom, we moved down to Cape Cod, and I grew up on Cape Cod in the town of Sandwich, graduated high school from there. So I was very fortunate to grow up on the Cape. It's a great place, my brother is still there, and I love the Cape, but it gets a little claustrophobic. Particularly in the summertime, huh? Yeah. When you're 17, 18 years old, and you've been doing that, you want to get away. I was familiar enough with the Boston area, and I've been there, done that. So I wanted to go as far away as I possibly could. And I ended up in Orinomane and had the best four years of my life in Orinomane, getting a bachelor's degree at the University of Maine. And of course, with that came the good fortune of marrying a girl from Maine. You've made you permanent, right? Well, I don't know how those rules work, but no, I've been very lucky. I love the state of Maine. I've fallen in love with the state of Maine, and it's in my heart and it's in my soul. And so I love to go back and visit Boston. I love to go back and visit the Cape. But this is where my life's work is and will remain so. So you've been with the Maine State Housing for a long time now. I celebrated my 30th year this past April. Really? Yeah. And so you've held a variety of positions there. Now you're the boss. Yeah. I came out of the banking world. I actually worked right here in downtown Portland, working for a Maine national bank, working in their internal audit department, so you get a sense of how banks work. And it was very unstable employment back then, and I needed something a little more stable. So I ended up landing this job at Maine State Housing Authority in 1993, because they were looking to start an internal audit function. Maine State Housing Authority is a bank. It's an affordable housing bank that was created in 1969. And its primary purpose is to provide financing for people who are trying to buy their first home, and also to developers building apartments.  Which governor made you the director? Paula Page. Back in 2018, our previous director had retired, and the governor had made an appointment and politics played out, and the legislature and the governor couldn't get along on that nominee. A good man would have been fine, but about an hour after that decision was made by the legislature, I got a call from the governor's office, and he asked me to come over and talk to him about the job, and I did, and I decided to do it, and once I did that, it felt right. It felt very comfortable. And so the current governor, you worked for Paula Page for a number of years, and the current governor for the last four and a half years, one's the Republican, one's the Democrat, but they tell me you're neither Democrat nor Republican. I am proudly neither a member of the Republican nor the Democratic Party, and that's by choice. I love this country, I love our state, and I do follow politics very closely, but I personally am not a member of either party, and I don't, and so I'm not being a political guy, I don't want my agency to be political either, because what I found is that Democrats and Republicans want to solve affordable housing problems, and I want to work with them. So I let the politics play out, and when they play out and all is said and done, obviously I interact with politicians of both parties willingly, try and help them make the best decisions that they feel they need to make, and once those decisions are made, and funding decisions are made, our job is to spend that and help the main people. And do you get, so do you get, I know you deal with the legislature all the time, in the governor's office, and that's part of the job, but let's get back, it's a bank, so I don't think people think of your agency as a bank, why do you say it's a bank? So we're a bank because we're partly a bank, a two and a half billion dollar bank, so that would make us about the fourth or fifth largest bank in the state of Maine, and we're also an administrator of many federal programs where the government pays us a fee and we help people out and we can talk about that a bit. The bank side is, most banks run by depositors coming and depositing money into the bank, so the bank has money to lend out and help people do their thing. Our type of bank, we borrow money by selling tax exempt bonds on Wall Street, and the legislature gave us that authority. So we're able to raise money by borrowing it from bondholders, and we can typically raise that money at a lower interest rate than community or commercial banks. We can then lend that money out at a lower interest rate to people who are making lower incomes for first time home buyers, or we can use that money and other subsidies we get from the federal government to help developers lower their cost of debt for the apartments that they are building, and therefore they can charge a lower rent. The rent levels are set by the federal government. The income levels are set by the federal government. So we work in our own unique world, which is a construct that plays out in all 50 states. We're a housing finance agency. So if I were a young person, I read about these young couples that want to get a house and so forth, interest rates are pretty high, prices of the houses are high. So I need to get a loan. How would I end up connecting with main housing? Sure. Well, first of all, we have a great website, mainhousing.org. There's a whole host of information on that website. But what they would do is they would contact one of about 40 different banks or mortgage companies that we work with. We do not lend directly to first time home buyers. We purchase mortgages that other organizations make. So people would go to their bank or their mortgage company, and that bank or mortgage company would offer them our loan product at our rate, which right now is 5.5%, which is much lower than the market rate, which is up around six and a half or seven. And they would make the loan to the home buyer, close the loan, and then they would turn and actually sell it to us, and we would buy it from them. Would you service the loan? We have a... Servicing contractor? We have a servicing contractor, which happens to be the Rhode Island Housing Agency, because that's a line of business that they're good at, and they uniquely got into that servicing business. Servicing loans is very complicated, but right now Rhode Island Housing Services all those loans for the people in need. So, in my example, if I went to the bank and I said, look, there's a $350,000 home I want to buy. I just got the contract, I made a down payment. I need to finance this. Like a bank, I mean, that bank would say, okay, well, you've got to put down a certain amount of equity. You've got to have some equity. Well, it depends on the type of mortgage product. We work with a lot of mortgage insurance companies and agencies, one of them being the Federal Housing Administration, the Veterans Administration, and some of those products don't require any down payment. And if you're going to come to Maine Housing, we'll also offer you a $5,000 grant for down payment assistance and closing cost assistance. Okay. Let's say I'm a veteran and I'm told that I don't need a down payment on a particular program that I applied under and the $350,000, I get from the bank, but then they sell the loan to you. Exactly. Okay. So the $350,000 might be a little high and we're usually right around $200, $250,000. Again we're statewide. I was going to say, that statewide is important because you don't find too many, the $350,000 around here, but you go to Rooster County, every house is under $350,000. And that's part of what we're trying to do as we talked about our plan. One of our plans is we need to build, we need to have the state of Maine, whether it be through Maine Housing or the private market, build more affordable, build homes cheaper, which is really hard to do in this environment right now. So some of the monies we get from the state and federal government, in this case the state government through Governor Mills and the legislature, we'll give a housing developer a grant of up to $60,000 or $70,000 per home that they build so that they can then lower the price of that home making it more affordable to that first time home buyer that we just talked about. Do you pay attention to spreading it out geographically around the state? Very much so. The lenders that we use are statewide. What we find is a majority of our loans are outside the Cumberland County area. I think just for what you just said, that the pricing is just so, so high that a lot of our loans are along the western coast part of Maine or up in the central and northern part of Maine. On our website at mainhousing.org we've got a production dashboard where people can go on and actually see where loans are made and it's really helpful to people who analyze housing trends in Maine and analyze what we do. We care very much about making sure that there's geographic distribution of our product throughout the entire state. I find this particularly interesting because I was brought up in a household where this business was conducted. My father, who was a Greek immigrant, came to this country when he was nine years old with his parents. That ended up by pure luck in a nice job with the Prudential Insurance Company. I don't know whether the folks here are interested in this story, but I am so, bear with me for a minute. He was a Newark, he was a young man, he had a job in Newark where their headquarters is, and they became a mortgage loan appraiser. Then they sent him out to the field and one of the places he was was New Haven, Connecticut, where I was born. In 1939, they got contacted by the insurance commissioners of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. They said to the Prudential, you sell a lot of life insurance policies in these three states and you don't make any residential loans in these states. We're telling you right now, we want you to make loans. My parents moved to Maine and his job was to go around to all these small banks in the three state area and buy residential loans. Then later they added commercial loans. That's what he did. When I was a kid I would go with him. He'd go to these houses and he'd have his tape measure and his camera and do his appraisals and so forth. I know a little bit about this, but in those days all I remember is a kid, FHA, FHA insured. That's the Federal Housing Administration. They did federally what you do too here. We're buying the loans. The folks that are ensuring the loans are largest insurers, U.S. rural development. They ensure 50 to 60 percent of our loans and you're right, we're serving as a very similar to the Prudential where we're actually buying those loans. Backcoming out of President Johnson's great society in the late 1960s found the start of these housing finance agencies around the country. Many state legislatures started putting them together and putting them in legislation and creating them for the express purpose of being a place where lower income individuals within any state can get access to capital so that they can buy their first home. The capital that you have, you raise through bond issues. The loans are insured, which means that me, as a bond holder, I have a little bit more comfort that this is an insured loan. Exactly. And that helps the credit. And so I say, okay, I'm going to buy main housing bonds because I think it's a low risk. These are insured, these loans. They're not going to go belly up because the loans are insured. And the financial stability that we have built over the last 50 years, bonds are issued out of a thing called a bond resolution. And that bond resolution, every time you sell bonds, and we sell them four or five times a year on the single family side for anywhere from 40 to 50 million at a time. And each and every one of those bond sales that we do has to be rated by Moody's and Standard & Poor's in Wall Street. They're rating agencies. In those rating agencies, take a look at main housing and they say, okay, you've been in business of 50 years. You've got this loan portfolio. We're going to give you a rating, but we're going to base that rating on how strong are you. And they put various financial stress tests to say, if everybody stopped paying their mortgage all at once, would you still be able to survive as an organization in scenarios like that? Our bond rating is a double A plus double A, which is in financial terms very, very strong. You've heard of triple A bond. We're just below a triple A bond. And that gives us the financial strength because, as you said that, we're essentially negotiating with bond buyers to say, we want to get the lowest possible rate on our bonds so that we can pass on those savings to our customers. And that's how that all works. So you raise that money from bondholders. And one of your programs is to help people buy a house. How much money has main housing got invested in housing in this state? Well, I can tell you that we have $1.6 billion worth of bonds outstanding. We have about 11,000 single family loans right now in our portfolio. Since our inception, and we did our very first bond sale in 1972, $8.86 billion. So in terms of the money that we have borrowed and invested back into Maine, $2.5 billion in assets, most of that is in those mortgages. So we are a substantial financial organization that is specifically designed to help the lowest income people in the state, not only buy their homes, but also provide money to developers to build more apartments because we also need more rental apartments in the state. So with the single family homes, you're helping the buyer buy it. With the rental apartments, you're subsidizing it in a way which I want you to explain, to help people be able to rent an apartment. And you're dealing mostly with the people who need to be in the affordable category. In the unlimited market, they need affordable help. Exactly. Short history on federal investment and affordable housing going back into the 40, 50, 60, 70s. The federal government directly would invest in the construction and creation of affordable housing. And they did that through USDA Rural Development Program, had a program where a developer could build an apartment building and they get a 50-year, 1% mortgage. And then a rental assistance contract to help those folks pay their rent would be put right on top of that building. Same building. Same building. So the people living in that apartment would only pay 30% of their income towards their rent. That still exists here in Maine today. There are several hundred Rural Development projects with those contracts still in place. Public housing. Public housing authorities, about 25 different public housing authorities around the state. And they created and they actually own public housing. Works very similarly where the people living in those homes only have to pay 30% of their income towards their rent. HUD did the Section 8 project-based program up until 1983. So you have, between those three programs, you have thousands of units in Maine that exist today that are subsidized by the federal government for people at 30% of income or below. That production largely stopped in the mid-1980s. And the government pivoted, the federal government pivoted and created a different way to go about creating affordable housing. And they did that through a program called the Low Income Housing Tax Credit. They turned to the tax code and they offered tax credits as the vehicle to attract developers to build affordable housing. But they increased the income limits up to 50% and 60% of area median income. So we're not necessarily hitting the 30%. So what we saw there was the people that were being served were a little bit higher income and the volume went down dramatically. So you go through the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s to today. The number of affordable apartments that have been created is a fraction of what it used to be and that's why we have the demand supply problem. This Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, the way it works is Maine Housing will allocate the credit to the developer. The developer can't really use the credit, but they sell it to an investor. So this tax credit actually goes to a private company. So if I want to be an investor in a development company and in a project, they say, okay, you invest $50,000 in this project and you'll get tax credits and there's a market for the tax credits. There is a market for the tax credits. They're basically sold through syndicators. So here in Maine, a company called Ever North, formerly known as the Northern New England Housing Investment Fund, they've rebranded and now they're called Ever North, right here in Portland, Maine. They go around to various companies and organizations that are looking for tax credits to offset their tax liabilities and they pool together investment funds. Developers come to me, my organization, for these tax credits and the developers then are connected with the syndicator who has the investment and cash. Well, let's take a $10 million building. With one of these types of credits, the developer could get about $7 million worth of cash to meet the $10 million required. They only need- From guys that say, I'll invest $50 million because I want the tax credits. Yes. And that tax credit lasts for 10 years. So that $7 million comes in, the developer then using some, we might look at, remember, the rents are going to be restricted down by the federal government, the revenue that they can drive is lower.  Maybe they can only afford a million and a half loan on a $10 million building. But all those people are going to be served. So now they have a million and a half that they need to find. That's where the state government and federal government have invested in us and we have those subsidies. So that's how it works. It's very, very complicated. And I hope I- It is complicated, but I think the audience should understand. You've kept it understandable. So the tax incentive program now is bearing most of the burden and providing you most of your tools to get things built. The U.S. Treasury Department is our affordable housing supplier in the country. There are two types of credit, one which will yield that $7 million for a $10 million building, and that's capped. We only have so much of that to spend. But there's a lower cost credit that when we call a 9 percent, when we call a 4 percent. The 4 percent program is unlimited. So the federal government is basically saying to the states, we're going to forego tax revenue on these tax credits for you to go ahead and build affordable housing. But in Maine, because rents in general in Maine are lower than they are the rest of the country, you need another subsidy source. You need another pot of money that you can loan at 0 percent with no repayment to help that developer cover all the costs that he or she may be incurring in the development of the project. We provide that money, that is the fuel that allows Maine Housing to increase the size of our pipeline, which we've done in the last five years. We used to be able to do about 200 units a year, 200 new units with all the tools that we have. Right now we have over 3,500 units in our pipeline. In 2023, we have 1,000 units that are either going to be completed this year and online, many right here in Portland, or start construction in 2023, or complete in 2023, another 1,000. There's another 1,500 units behind that that are in our pipeline that are going to start construction. Telling me that right now in this program, you are going to produce for this state 3,500 apartment units? Over the next, say, starting right now, some which might be done tomorrow, and some which will be 2025, 2026. Okay. But in the next three or four years? But we've got to keep going, right? We've got to keep going. We can't stop there. So that's why I talked about the legislative session that's going on right now, and I've been using the term potentially historic, because the legislature is actually looking and the governor put into her budget $80 million of this subsidy money for us at Maine Housing to help developers do another 3,500 affordable apartments. All throughout the state of Maine, $80 million in the budget. We've never seen that level of investment, not only from a governor, but the legislature set up a joint select committee on housing, and that committee has endorsed this approach as well. They've done wonderful work. That committee's both parties, huh? Both parties. And they've done wonderful work, really hard work, and their joint select committee, so they're going to continue to exist after this first session of the legislature is over, and we're going to continue to work with them. But there's a level of investment going on right now in affordable housing from our state leaders that we've never seen before, and we're very grateful for it. But we know that we can take this money and apply it and make good things happen to help this supply and demand problem over time equal out. Once you equal that out, then rental rates may come down, affordability may get easier. As supply grows, and demand diminishes a little because of more supply, hopefully that will have an ameliorating effect on prices. That's the plan, that's the strategy, yes. So we've covered housing, you know, loans, people, particularly first time buyers. We've talked about affordable apartments. Many of the people, when they think of the housing crisis, they think of driving through deering oaks and seeing tents and so forth. That's another prong of the housing crisis, isn't it? It absolutely is. And it breaks my heart just coming here tonight and coming into Portland. And my heart breaks for every individual that's out there. We have been working with homeless advocates, practitioners in homeless shelters, state and local officials for many, many years to come up with a strategy of how to help the situation. When the pandemic broke out and we were all on Zoom and had to do our legislative hearings on Zoom, previous to becoming director, I had been in a position where I was very close to overseeing the work of the homeless shelters in Maine. I've been to every single one of them. And they were overwhelmed, they were overwhelmed before the pandemic. And they were structured in such a way, not only here in Portland, but let's get as many people into a small space as we can out of the elements. And then in the morning, they're going to go out onto the street and then they come back at five o'clock. It just wasn't a very strategic way to go about. So the pandemic hit. We had to separate people. You couldn't be next to another person. So we very quickly stood up, helped stand up with the help of the university system and nonprofits, Preble Street here in Portland, the city of Portland, shelters. We did one at the University of Southern Maine at Sullivan Gym. And what we found is when you separate people just by a little bit and give them a little bit of privacy, it's a little more humane. It's a little bit better way to go about housing. We've talked about housing first, and we've talked about the approach of housing first, of getting services to people who have had the ability to have a good night's sleep, cup of coffee, and a shower. They're in a much better place to be able to address the problems and issues that led to their homelessness. Fantastic. What is housing first? You mentioned housing first. So housing first is a national best practice on how to deal with chronic homelessness. And what that means is that there is no barrier to getting a housing unit for someone who is chronically homeless. Get them their housing first. And the way we... You've got to have the housing. Right. And so the way we do that is we're a bank. It's an apartment building. We do that all the time. So we can finance a housing first project. We've done three of them here in Portland. We can also provide, because of some other federal resources we have in the term of the housing vouchers, we can provide the cost to operate the property for the owner by giving a voucher to the person living there, and their rent will be paid. Let me get an example for the folks here. So you've done it three times here, and we're talking about people that are really in hopeless situations on the street, giving them a place to live and services, which one without the other doesn't work very well. It doesn't. The problem that we've had is that we've never had a dedicated funding service, I'm sorry, a dedicated funding source for services. And right now in our legislature, LD2 is the name of the bill, is a housing first bill sponsored by Speaker of the House Talbot Ross. Right now as we speak. Right now as we speak. Yeah. The governor has also endorsed this and put it into our budget, again let the politics play out of how that all comes, but there's a very high likelihood that a dedicated revenue stream has been identified that already exists, that was going to the state's general fund is going to come to service providers through the Department of Health and Human Services to provide services. So we need about 10 more of these. We need 10 to 12 more of these.  The dedicated revenue stream is a tax that already exists, it's the real estate transfer tax that produces a lot of money in our budget, goes into the general fund. So it's there, it's been coming in for years. Real estate transfer, all these people, they come up from New York and buy a big house and buy a harbor, they pay a real estate transfer tax, and that money is going to be used for Housing First. It is. It's the dedicated revenue stream for services, the missing piece of the puzzle. Once that's in place, we will be able to work with housing developers here in Portland, in in Bangor, Lewiston, wherever developer wants to put a Housing First project, and they will have the comfort. And the investors, remember, these are tax credit deals too. The investors are going to have comfort that the building will operate and be functional and be successful, because we've got three examples of them here in Portland. We know it works. Well, one of them, I think, is Logan Place. That was the first one. Yes. That was the first one. It was down near St. John Street, below the main medical center. And I think it was for women only, wasn't it? Well, we've done Logan Place. We've done Florence House, which is off St. John Street, similar neighborhood, not too far away from one another. Is that for women only? Florence House is for women only. It's very unique, where it's a shelter on the first floor, and it's permanent apartments on the second floor. It's a wonderful model. And then Houston Commons was the third one that was most recently done. Do you mean housing helped the developer build the building by providing the tax credits? Tax credits and the housing, actually, I stand corrected, Portland Housing Authority stepped up with the housing vouchers. So Portland Housing Authority was very important in that building. But yes, that's how that works. And now the service providers are going to have a dedicated revenue stream that they know is going to be there that will be able to do maybe 10 more of these projects over the next five to seven years. And the services, including detox, all kinds of things, right? It's a 24-7, 365, round-the-clock care for the individuals in that building. Remember, these folks are experiencing a tremendous amount of trauma in their lives. Yeah, and many of them are mentally ill, and many of them are abused drugs and are addicted and so forth. So the services are designed to stop this circle of trouble. It's to erase the demons, and we've seen it happen. You've seen it happen. We have seen cases where individuals were on the street and just not in just miserable. When they come into a housing first property, first of all, they're not going to the emergency room every other day. They're not going to interacting with law enforcement. There's a very high success rate of individuals going into these. And then before you know it, in some cases, going to school, getting a job, reconnecting, reuniting with family, just a number of success stories out of housing first. And that's why this is so important and such a huge historic thing that's happening right now. Well, what you're saying is that success is measurable. I mean, you can measure the effectiveness of this housing first program by just looking at statistics regarding police calls, ambulance calls. Yes, exactly. And you know, statistics also plays a big part in the other part of the solution that we're deploying, which is, I talked about talking to the Legislative Committee on Zoom, and I just said, you know, we've got to come up with a better way here with our homeless shelters around the state. We just have to come up with a better way. And over the last couple of years, we have been working on a homeless system redesign where we're taking the state of Maine, not we, Maine Housing, but the statewide homeless council, the state's continuum of care. These are two large organizational bodies that have been set up for many years in Maine to tackle the issue of homelessness. The practitioners and the advocates got together and we have identified broken up the state of Maine into nine hubs. And those nine hubs are geographically all represent the entire state. But the hubs are very specifically designed around the idea of let's take care of the folks that are homeless that are in our own communities, and let's try and mitigate the number of people that are going from all over the state into Portland, all over the state to Bangor, up in the county, all going to Presquile. And let's try and help each one of these communities work together to come up with a solution so that the solution on homelessness is shared more equally, more equitably around the state. And then come into the same urban centers so that that would mean, for instance, I just used an example, Rumpford. So would that mean that you would, you would, part of the plan would be thinking about actually constructing such a facility in Rumpford? What that would do is the folks in Rumpford, the folks in Oxford County, the folks in Farmington, that geographic area, main housing has funded a full-time position in an organization each one of these hubs to be a hub coordinator. The hub coordinator's job is to look around that hub and say, what are my resources here? What do I currently have? Farmington has resources, Rumpford has resources, and what's missing? Let's get the educators at the table. There's so many homeless youth in our schools. Let's identify them. Let's talk with our first responders. Let that community come together because they have their geographic area. Yeah, but what do they need? They need a housing first. They may need a housing first. They may decide, you know what, we don't have the resources to support a housing first, but maybe what we need is more navigators. So a navigator is a person who is connecting with an individual to help solve that particular person's housing problem wherever they, maybe their couch surface. That's not part of your agency. Oh, yes. It is? We're at the forefront of helping support and provide funding to each one of these hubs. Okay, so let's go to the example of, let's say maybe there's enough critical mass so that between Farmington and Rumpford, a housing first facility where they get all the services and off the street and everything makes some sense. First thing you need is a private developer. That's correct. You need private enterprise to say, okay, we can do this. We can get a return and we can get investors and we're going to do this. You need a private developer and or the host of developers we currently work with which might be non-profit organizations, housing authorities, community action agencies. So the housing developer could be a for-profit or non-profit? That's correct. Okay. And for the most part we find that the non-profits are the ones that we work with. There are some really, really good for-profits as well. But we work very closely with the state's community action agencies to help deliver all of the services that we, all the other types of federal funding that we have. We work very closely with the main association of public housing directors, all the public housing agencies. And then there are other small non-profits that exist in each area of the state. The homeless shelters in our state, many of whom have done housing development before. Tedford Shelter and Brunswick has done some housing development. Knopscott Community Health Center up in Bangor has done some development. So we're there to help support whatever organization or group in that region wants to tackle their homeless situation. And the way, one of the key things is in each one of these regions is to get what's called a by-name list. Let's not just- Get the what? It's called a by-name list. Let's find out exactly who by-name each one of these individuals are. And let's do a deeper dive into collecting information about who they are, where they came from, and what their needs are. And have that consolidated because we need a better data management system collectively throughout the state. So one of the things about the, one of the goals of this homeless system redesign is better quality data. So we know what we're dealing with. And the goal is to get to what's called functional zero. You want to get the functional zero, which is homelessness. It's never going to go away. People will always have a homeless. But you want that homeless situation to be as short as it possibly can be. And you want to have more people exit the system in a given period of time than come into the system. And if you've done that, you've achieved functional zero.  I mean, huge, huge. Huge. Yes. You know, when I think about it, because I'm old, when I was growing up, I think I might have been telling you this story, but it was either you or somebody else. I played, when I was in high school, American Legion Baseball in Maine. And every year, I played for the South Portland team. And we were good. And we would go to the state tournament, one of the teams in the state tournament, every year. And the state tournament was held at the Veterans Hospital in Togus. And the reason it was held there is there were a lot of long-term residents of the veterans home. Since the 1950s, only 10 years or less after World War II. So there was a large number of veterans who would, you know, PTSD, whatever you call it, and that were there at the Veterans Zone. There were long-term patients there receiving mental health treatment. And we stayed there. We ate our meals there. We didn't stay. We stayed somewhere else. We ate all our meals there. We were around there. We knew some of the guys that would come to the ball games. And these people in a clean place, they got three meals a day. They got doctors examined. They got doctors making sure, nurses making sure they took their pills. I thought that was humane. But people said, no, that's not humane to institutionalize people. Now they're on the street. Yeah. I think I'm not a mental health expert, but my observation is maybe the pendulum swung too far in the other direction. Now I think there are cases that there was inhumane treatment, no question, in Maine and elsewhere around folks battling with mental illness, substance abuse disorder. And then the shift went right on to the communities, but the services didn't flow with them. The services didn't flow with them. Now when you talk about housing first, this bill that's being considered by the legislature, housing first, that is swinging it back toward services that were provided in institutionally. Yes. I think that's a bit of the strategy there. Now we also talk very closely with Maine's hospitals, particularly those that have mental health facilities, the Maine Behavioral Health Association, about what their housing needs are because they've got patients that are in their facilities that are really ready to go. They're really ready to move on and out of there. But there's no place for them to go. And therefore, is there a partnership that Maine Housing can have with a housing developer and someone who's been in a hospital? And we've been able to achieve some of those types of properties as well. The work that developer Kevin Bunker did right here in Portland on Freedom Place, a magical place for women with substance abuse disorder, more dignity, more privacy, more ability to move on with one's life. So Maine Housing wants to be active not only in helping people buy their homes and people getting apartments, but also helping the homeless community and the homeless providers serve homeless people who are experiencing homeless better. We haven't even talked about helping people heat their homes and keep themselves warm in the winter, which we also do. So we're an organization that takes a lot of pride in coming to work every day helping the people of Maine that need so much help.  Yeah, so the bank stuff is over here. The other part of our agency is we're a federal administrator for the federal government on a number of programs, including home weatherization, the LIHEAP program, weatherization assistance program from the Department of Energy. We help remediate lead paint from people's homes. We help people repair their homes. Maine has one of the highest home ownership rates with one of the lowest incomes, meaning there's an, and the oldest housing stock. So there's a lot of homeowners that are poor that are living in substandard homes. They need their homes repaired. Yeah, so I need, so I'm living in substandard stock, let's say, and some down in Maine and I don't have much money and my place is falling apart, I call you people up and you help me? You would call your local community action agency. Okay, I call my community action and then, and they get in touch with you? They're under contract to us.  What are you going to do for me? Well, they're going to send out an inspector to your home, they're going to assess the situation and they're going to put you in touch with contractors now. There are wait lists, there isn't nearly enough, but the community action agencies will go out to a person's home, assess the situation, determine a solution. If the heating system needs to be replaced, there are funds for that. We're trying to put as many heat pumps in electric heat pumps in people's homes as we can to help the energy situation. I'm a member of the Maine's Climate Council, and we're very much involved in green energy and keeping, you know, doing the right thing in building and constructing homes. So we're very, very active in that grant administration side, helping people pay their rent through Section 8 vouchers, which are vouchers that people go around the state to private landlords with. Okay, so you're going to pass the term whenever. What I'm sensing here is that we all see the homeless population, they're on the street, they're right in front of us, and we all, so we're all conscious of it. And as you say, they'll never be solved, they'll always, forever, there will be homeless people, there always have been and there always will be, but the idea is to rein it in and to provide services and to make it diminish the homeless population. I'm hopeful that we can solve chronic homelessness. I'm hopeful that with these tools that were being given by the legislature, that we can solve the chronic homeless where we see so many people on the streets, and tents, and chronically out there. If you can do it, why can't they do it in San Francisco? Well... California Home Housing Finance Agency. Yeah, I talked to my counterparts, we're all trying to do the same thing. The idea of housing first. Housing first is active in California in San Francisco. It's just the, at that point, you talk about the overall society of the haves and have-nots, that's bigger than Maine Housing, but the number of people in need is overwhelming. Well, here we go back to the hopeful part, so we're in a state that's a little bit more manageable than California. So I sensed from you some real optimism. I didn't anticipate this, that there'd be some significant changes in housing in Maine. You know, we help hundreds, if not thousands of people every single day. Our agency does, and the partners around the state that work with us, our community action agencies and public housing authorities and nonprofits that we work with, we are solving people's housing problems every single day, and we're succeeding. The visual part is there. What the people watching this program look at, they don't see the measurable change. There's still much more to go. You know, oftentimes someone will come into a homeless shelter and they'll get counted and they'll be tracked, and the statistic will be taken, and then they'll succeed and they disappear. Right? We're not tracking them anymore, because they've succeeded. They're out in society. So they're not a statistic anymore? They're not a statistic anymore. And so there are, I don't want to diminish the level of the problem. It's significant. But the solutions that are in place right now, when we can help one person get into their first home, we've succeeded, when we can help one person get out of a homeless shelter into their apartment, we've done, we've succeeded for that particular family. Sources are the successes that we have to keep looking at as well, but we can't take our eye off the larger strategy we've been talking about tonight, and really focusing in on continuing to use what is the best practice. And by the best practice, you're talking about how we treat them or what services it? The best practice that is out there for their particular situation. So we really focus in on what are the best practices we can use. Housing first is a best practice in the issue of chronic homelessness. Using our tax-exempt bonding abilities and being very creative about how we manage our bond portfolio is a best practice to make sure that we can get as many people into their homes as we can. Moving out to Maine's landlords, as we've been doing, to incent them to rent to a person with a Section 8 voucher where they might have reservations about that. Well, let's help with some down payment assistance. Let's give a bonus to a new landlord that wants to help someone who hasn't helped before. Let's assure that landlord that if it goes bad and your unit gets damaged, we'll be there for you. That's a best practice in helping landlords. So we look around our lines of business. We try and identify best practices and go down those paths. What you're doing is you're energizing and motivating in many cases the free market system. People who are participating, capitalists. You know, Theodore White was a great author long gone now, but he covered all of the great events of the World for Life magazine from the mid-1930s until 1970. And he covered it all. And he wrote a book in which he talked about what he learned by observing all these things. And he said the greatest thing he ever saw was the Marshall Plan. Very few people ran it, but it was all about capital and using capital. And it taught him that there are only two ways that we move people, change things. And he says it's either he observed at the end of a bayonet or by kind of greasing them palms a little bit. Those are the two ways. The second part is a capitalist system. And he says it works. We're going to wrap it up. This has been terrific. I've really enjoyed this and I've learned a lot. And I think you do a great job for your agency by explaining it as you have to the public. I really do. You're doing a terrific job. As I said earlier, it's an honor to have you reach out to me and have me on here, give me the opportunity to talk about what we do. Thank you very much. And the honor is from the people that are watching, not me. I'm in a locator. Anyway, thanks for coming. Thank you.


This is the car hacking village at Defcon 30 where you can hack Teslas, go-karts, trucks. Let's go check out one of the first contests getting set up right now. So we just sat down. This looks absolutely fascinating, but I have no idea what I'm looking at. Thanks, Silk. This half right here is our Nerf Dart Challenge, which we've been running with the car hacking village since virtual mode. So this used to be in my basement and now it's actually here at Defcon. It was also at Gercon. Yeah. This year, because we now have disclosed that you can transmit onto trucks wirelessly, the contestants have to use SDRs to make them launch. Previously, we gave them diagnostic adapters. And if you can send the right signal, the right J2497 signal, I'm gonna do it because I have the demo right here. Woo! Right? So this is a trailer brake controller that we've turned upside down. It's actually getting fed compressed air, which is a supply line and a control line. So this is simulating the truck driver with their foot on the brake and air pressure supplied. And then we send a solenoid test command, which chuffs air and launches our darts. Hold on. I wanna make sense of what you just said, because while this is just like darts going up in the air, one, freaking cool. But you're, one of the things you said earlier was this is wirelessly, so trucks have wireless access points in them that you can connect to, and then you can send commands into it. And this command, while this is just like shooting off nerf guards, what could you do with this type of command? Yeah, I mean, we're gonna talk about that on Saturday, track one, 4PM. Okay. But all the diagnostic features of these trailer brake controllers is all over this J2497 interface. Now, you said they have wireless access points. Brand new truck technology sometimes does. It's kind of a bad idea. The really unfortunate thing of what we're disclosing here is that this is power line communications technology that is susceptible to transmission. Oh my goodness. So you can actually induce messages on the power line bus. And they did not intend that, but you can do it. So this year, we're just giving people an SMA connector and they have to send the right signal because if they tried to do it over the air around here in Defconn's RF environment. Yeah, it's kind of like you're so much in the air. It's amazing that our mics are even going to the camera right now. So you're giving out the SDR connector? Yeah, it's an SMA connector for software-defined radio. So this is an FL2K, which is a USB dongle you can actually transmit with. Okay. So you wire the transmit to that. How would they go about learning some of this? Or is this the place to learn? If I've never done any of this before, can I learn all of that here? So we've done a few talks over the years about hacking trucks and how J2497 is put together. My colleague Chris Poor at AIS has put together code that we just published. It's a GNU radio module that can transmit this stuff. We have mitigation technology that we've published. So pretty much everything we've got is on GitHub and should be Google-able. Okay. Or I'll be here to answer questions. Awesome, thank you so much. And we are in the car hacking village at Defconn 30. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time. Absolutely. And as always, hack on.


Hey, Bolo buddies. Thanks for watching. All right, you guys it is time for this is my Bolo And what is this is my Bolo that is where I invite my Bolo buddies YouTube members to Make a 60 second or less video Sharing a Bolo with you guys an item to be on the lookout for an item You can hopefully in the future buy low and sell high in this video They are gonna tell you where they got it what they paid for it and what it sold for it's not me telling you They're gonna tell you these channels are amazing. Be sure to go down to the description and click on those channels and subscribe But before we get started, I'm gonna show you my Bolo This is my Bolo How incredible is this and you may have seen this in a past video It took a little while to sell. I bought it over the summer at a garage sale. I had no clue what it was But I was able to figure it out.  So it's just the handle and I sold this for $100 best offer and the buyer paid shipping. So they were all in for a hundred and twenty dollars and forty six cents And I paid drum roll $2 at a garage sale. All right, you guys, let's check out these bolos. Hey, Bolo buddies. Thanks for watching Amazing, right? All right, let's get started Hey, Bolo buddies. My name is Abigail. I have a youtube channel where I go sourcing Do a little bit of vlogging and I always do a big haul at the end So you should catch at least one because they're a lot of fun And today I'm coming to you with a my Bolo So I had stopped at this antique mall and I saw this lady who was working on her case And in the case she had this little medallion and right away I was really interested in it. It looked like cement to me and it looked like Julia Caesar Very Greek And the minute she told me that she had bought it from a lady who had had brought a bunch of stuff back from France I automatically said I will buy that I listed it. It wasn't even listed a week and it sold for 74 dollars on Etsy Hey guys, I am literally in my eBay closet right now And before I forget I wanted to do This is my Bolo All right, so this is my Bolo. I found this Lisa Frank Buzz the bumblebee at the bends was the last thing I came across and I picked it up and I was like, oh my gosh, it's Lisa Frank so I bought them and I put them on auction and obviously it did really great So thanks for watching. My channel is stellar seller Sam on youtube And it'd be great if you guys would give me a follow And do not forget to pick up that Lisa Frank plush See ya Hi everybody, I'm Catfilling Thrifty and I'm a full-time reseller here in Albuquerque, New Mexico But born and raised in Ohio. They're not here a long time though I saw an eBay posh market McCarty and I go as Catfilling Thrifty on all three platforms They're enough about me. We're here to talk about my Bolo, which is Cutco So I buy a lot of my stuff on online auctions here locally as well as physical options And I spotted this box on one of the online ones. It was full of utensils dirty grimy Put a bit in I think was 20 bucks one it brought the box home And sure enough they were Cutco as well as the hanger was in there and a couple other Cutco items My husband kindly cleaned these up the handles turned out beautiful I cleaned up the stainless steel on them and I listed them for $98 and they sold it a couple weeks And I got the price I was asking for So if you don't know about Cutco keep an eye out. I've sold a lot of that I even sold a broken knife for about $24 not too long ago And I hope this gave you some information and I do buy a lot of stuff from Dundatella butthole, you know and from options for you both on what not and on YouTube and I buy things from Bolo buddies and of course Courtney as always Thank you so much for all you do for everybody. You are awesome and you're special Thanks everybody. Have a great day Hi everyone. I'm Sarah also known as childhood finds on YouTube and eBay and Pretty much everything else Today my Bolo is this antique pie crust frame I got this for free from my mother-in-law, but I have sold others in the past This one is a It's a 10 by 16 that it would fit and it's likely 1880s to 1920s roughly And I sold it for 175 dollars. It sold in about 12 hours The big thing when you look at pie crust, you're going to look at these corners These are hand sculpted out of a material called gesso And it starts with a just basic wooden frame and then they would sculpt this onto it So this is more than just a frame. It's a piece of art and this is my Bolo. Hi Bolo buddies It's Windy from Nina's jewels. My Bolo for the month of February is window cleans Believe it or not, these inexpensive items sell really well We pick these up doing retail arbitrage And we get them on clearance like 75 or 90 off and then we sell them throughout the year at full price So we just make a few dollars on each sale, but the money is in volume on these We discovered this by accident when picking these up on clearance one time And we're surprised at how well they sold. They were just kind of flying out of our store The next time we saw them at a clearance sale at a retail store We picked them up again and they sold just as well So we started picking them up every time we saw them on clearance and also in the Goodwill bins And they have always sold well for us. So there's just a tip for you guys there Something to look out for when you're shopping. Check out our youtube channel Nina's jewels and check us out on ebay Instagram and facebook. Hey Bolo buddies. I am Zandra also known as piece of scrap on ebay and youtube I'm here with my Bolo and it is a Luz specialties baby infant dress Now this does have the inner lining full of lace and ruffles I picked these up at a church sale for less than one dollar. They were part of a bag sale And they sold for hundreds of dollars I listed the dresses separately and they sold to the same buyer within one week of listing After running sold comparisons, I priced them high at over 500 dollars each And yes one sold for 315 dollars and the other one sold for 450 plus shipping Again, I'm zandra piece of scrap on youtube subscribed for more what sold on ebay Hi again, my name is rebel and i'm the rebel reseller and today I wanted to share a this is my Bolo I was pleasantly surprised this morning when I woke up to a sale on posh mark Um, if you don't know me, I sell a whole lot of plush, but usually it's bread and butter But last night this sold on posh mark Um for 135 dollars. It is a funko five nights at freddy purple nightmare bonnie rabbit plush from 2016 Thanks Hello, everybody. My name is sandra. The name of my youtube channel is the funky pickle thrifter My bolo is jewelry. I'm going to put some of my most recent sales on the screen for you to have a look at I buy jewelry in the wild mostly at yard sales and thrift stores I don't usually pay more than a dollar or two. We talk about jewelry a lot on my channel So if you want to sell jewelry and you're really not sure what to look for I hope you come over and check it out All right. Thank you so much. Thanks corny for the opportunity. I appreciate it. I hope to see you over there. Cheers Hey guys, my name is tanya and I'm just a girl that makes a living thrift and and my bolo for y'all this time is Hair conditioner if you have ever colored your own hair It always comes with a conditioner to put in your hair afterwards I know that the l'oreal conditioners are A bolo my last set of five is going out today So here it is right here. I have sold all the other ones that I've had On ebay. I sold one lot of five for 32 98 I sold a lot of four for 25 And on poshmark. I sold five lots of five At 28 dollars each. So I only paid Nine dollars for all of those and I turned that nine dollars into 198 bucks if you want to see some more bolos come hang out on my channel double t's treasures We'll see you there. Have a great day y'all Hey everyone, my name is crystal. My youtube channel is vintage booth pro where I talk about all things good and bad about having a vintage booth Um, so hop over and join me if you've ever thought about it or if you have one And I would love to hear your thoughts, but I also have an online store mostly on ebay Um, I do cross list sometimes, but I'm not that great at it But this one I didn't even have time to cross list. Um, I found this at goodwill It is a very big bag by the brand free people I found it in the travel section at my local goodwill Um, you know where the suitcases are that's where I found it was 799 I posted it online for 75 dollars and I took an offer for 62 dollars It was listed. Um, maybe two days. So That's my below for the month. I would love for you to join me over on my youtube channel and um, thank you Courtney Hey there. I'm danielle. I like to sell vintage stuff on the internet and I have a youtube channel all about it I say hello to my sale of the week you guys I wanted you to see it before I get it shipped out here I'm working on it right this moment But I picked this up for 75 dollars at an indoor sale about a month ago and just sold it yesterday for 450 bucks It's got inlay all the way around in the wood Really super sharp. It's got a couple flaws on it But overall this piece is really beautiful And I couldn't be happier to be sending it out to new york tomorrow Hey, it's ronda with got junk in our trunk and I've got another volo for you I've been doing a whole lot of cleaning out lately. I've got one 10 by 20 storage left out of six when I Took my thrift store and put it into storage when I closed it a couple of years ago As you can see, I've got a whole lot of things that are going on and I've been moving things around Some things are in my garage as far as a death pile And so I've been finding a lot of things in there that I knew were in there, but I hadn't had listed I listed this item right here and I sold it for 150 dollars A lot of these are made a little bit differently, but this is macho man randy savage for those of you that are not wrestling fans Um, he did kind of a promotional for them And they just kind of took off on it and did all different type of containers And a lot of them will list for anywhere from like 100 dollars to 300 a piece Depends on how limited the run was or anything like that. I actually sold this one to a friend of mine So I gave him a friends and family discount Again, this is my volo Look for them out there. You never know when a store might be breaking down. I actually got this one from a map cub See you later Happy junking Hey volo buddies. This is jody from toy addict and this is my volo. This Is richie Richie was made by the migo toy corporation in the 70s And he's basically an action figure of your creepy uncle He's got flocked hair and sideburns And he has a bunch of really interesting outfits like this one. That's called fantastic fringe That's a fringe vest. I also found Two other outfits of his I found wild and woolly and snow king All the outfits have interesting titles. He has 12 outfits to choose from I have a video over on my channel that shows you all of his outfits And talks about the doll and a little bit of what to look for for richie So you can find them when you're out there searching I bought these for $10 each and I sold the first two for 65 each and this one is listed for the same price Go to my channel and check that out if you get a chance. Thanks for watching guys And thank you Courtney. Bye Hi everybody. This is amber from picker money flipper eBay and youtube and my two cool finds are a howler's brother long sleeve pearl snap shirt Paid $5 for it. It sold for $70 and $7.95 to ship my next school item My husband bought these phillips and p3 players bought a whole box for 15 13 sold for a total of 605 dollars $50 average sale Thanks for coming Hi everyone, this is live from hayland vintage and I want to take a minute to introduce myself real quick I usually sell vintage items, but if I find something that I can flip for a profit pretty quickly You bet I'm gonna pick it up But I do also want to say that I do have a youtube channel. So please check it out I am trying to get to my first thousand subscribers. I would really appreciate that I also do live sales both on instagram and on youtube So please check those out if you can and with that being said, I want to real quick show you my bolo's So my first bolo is this sash I did pick up two of these from my goodwill. They were 4.99 The first one sold within 48 hours For $98. I did have it listed for 112 and I took an offer The other thing I want to say is don't pass up those yarn buckets I bought one for 11.99 and I made 107. Those are my bolo's. Thank you Hi guys farm girl scavenger here with my bolo And just wanted to tell Courtney. Thank you. I will also put this video on my channel My bolo for february is stickers I have a video on stickers if you go to my channel. I'll put a link up there But I sold and I'm going to show you right here The first one I sold was a vintage 1984 hallmark sticker holographic rainbow heart and it's sold for $17.07 all in. Oh boy, I didn't plan this very well My second one is sandy lion Sandy lion prismatic stickers and it was a lot and I sold them for $28.70 all in And my third one is sandy lion mother of pearl stickers And it was a lot And I sold them for $33.47 But what I want you to know is I sold all of these stickers within 18 hours of listing them The sandy lion ones I sold within four hours the next ones within 11 hours and the next one Less than less than 12 hours. So stickers are my bolo There's the link to the video Farm girl scavenger Thank you so much for watching and have a great day Bye Hello, this is here. We're flipping it good. My bolo today are cleats So football cleats soccer cleats baseball cleats all cleats they sell really well Um, every time you go to the discounted store check for cleats research the price. So, um Right now they're selling like crazy. These are soccer cleats. I found them. I found them at a discounted store I found them at Ross See so And I paid $19.99 for these they just sold on poshmark for 130 plus shipping So these are elite in this case. These are soccer if you see acc That means it's an elite soccer cleat and It's one of the high tiers for Nike. So yeah cleats. They sell really well. So Yeah, see you guys Hey, Courtney. It's mary here with the merchants and I have a bolo for you You're looking at antique cracker jack toys. I got a whole baggie of them The snack bag size at a local auction and I had probably 50 at the time and this is all I have left over the last Year or so they have sold between $7 and $20 a piece. I wanted to show you what to look out for So this guy right here is one from the 1920s. He has a metal eyelet here They are celluloid some of them Like this dog will have the plastic On it instead of the metal ring And these two just sold this one sold for seven something and this one sold for eight something. I believe Sometimes we can miss these because if they are in the bottom of The bins they might be hard to find so keep your eyes out because they're good money if you can get a bunch of them They're easy to ship easy to store easy to list Which one's your favorite? Hi, everybody. My name is Jerry and I'm the Jersey Shore thrifter This is my bolo before I show it to you. However, gotta tell you the story because that's what I do My wife and I were in a state sale privately run a lot of good finds at that estate sale The person whose house it was collected license plates among many other things and also was a member of the local elks club So consequently I found a pair of these license plates The New Jersey shorter please version of license plate is no longer put out by the state As far as I know, I think it's discontinued in any case That variation of license plates in New Jersey holds some value And of course vanity plates always do so I figured well the elks Somebody's gonna want this so I picked up both them. I paid paid a dollar for each one And I listed them both on ebay and mccarrie Facebook marketplace locally of course because I figured the local elks club might be interested Turns out a woman who I met when I was playing pickleball Is the head of the local elks chapter? So I got to talking with her. I told her what I had I showed her the pictures And she bought one put it up in the wall at the elks club sold it for $50 got cash for it I kind of considered a facebook marketplace sale even though it wasn't done through facebook In any case it pays to tell people what you do sometimes actually really does pay Hello, hello, hello. Hi everyone tea auctions for you for those of you that don't know me I am a fellow reseller. I sell on ebay poshmark whatnot mccarrie A little bit on that's even and I do youtube auctions And I do that with my friend out of telebotelino So come over and see us one of these days when we decide to go live Anyway, Courtney, thank you so much as always for doing this for us And here is my bolo And this guys when you're out there and you're in the wild looking for stuff Go ahead and find this department 56 times tower special edition Gives that this was complete and tested but it was open and pre-owned And it worked and it was awesome. I almost decided to keep it for myself But we got 195 plus shipping on this And it was awesome. Thank you guys. Have a great day. Thanks, Courtney All right, bolo buddies. So I was at the Goodwill Benz all day today And I just got home and I went to the post office and I picked up some packages Number one is an item that I got from ronda got junk in our trunk. It's something that I purchased from her Um, it is so so cute and I just had to have it. So I'm going to show you guys that The next um thing I'm going to show you are three items that I bought from Rachel Strickland did a whatnot auction for autism and I purchased three items over there So I'm going to show you what I bought All right, I have an unboxing here of a little item that I purchased from got junk in our trunk And she's one of my moderators and I just wanted to go over and support her ebay store and I bought this cute little And it is made in poland. Is it not the cutest softest little thing you've ever seen? Oh my goodness. I love it. So I'm working on putting up shelves Well, I need my husband to do it for me and then I'm gonna put this up on my shelf But I just thought it was so cute and it looks like she sent me a little goodie extra It says the wooden one is a whistle. You can keep it or sell it So she sent me a little gift here And it is a wood owl and it's a whistle How cool is that? It's a whistle It's a whistle. Have you ever seen such thing made in Thailand? That's vintage also Oh ronda, you didn't have to do that, but I really appreciate it. It's super super cute. Thank you so much If you guys have ever seen an owl whistle, I love it Very cool. So here are my two new additions to my owl collection All right, so the first item I bought is this incredible Dorothy Wizard of Oz Handmade blanket. Oh my goodness. It is incredible. So this is the back And then look how cool it is and she said it's retired fabric But I just I loved it and I had to have it and this comes from Mimi's treasures And she is over on instagram and I will link her down below But she has a link tree. So I I will either put her link tree down below or I will put her Um instagram and you guys can go find her, but she Sells Wizard of Oz items. So if you're looking for something incredible like this, definitely check her out Okay, this is the next beauty that I purchased. This is a hand made art piece from Mackpac reselling that is her youtube channel and her daughter made this and it has glitter and paint And it's signed right here. So I picked this up As my second item that I'm going to show you today and I've got one more to show you guys so all of the funds for this went to autism and um Collins on the move is who it went to and she I can't remember the name of the actual foundation But you guys can check that out Collins on the move. She's on instagram and youtube But um just an amazing fundraiser rachel. I think Ended up making about five thousand dollars For it. So just incredible and the last item I got Was made by scott the cha ching king and if you're not following him on youtube, you need to follow him as well So Mackpac reselling on youtube cha ching king on youtube and Mimi's treasures on instagram And I will link all of them down below So scott made this out of wood From a tree I don't remember all the details and then I think he like Pounded this out hammered it. Is that the word? But look how beautiful it is It's just incredible. He didn't sign it scott. You didn't sign it. What are you doing, man? But anyway, if you guys are new to reselling definitely check out scott the cha ching king He's got a lot of videos that help people that are brand new to ebay But he is also a mega bowlo finder.  She's new to youtube. So go show her some love with a sub And Mimi's treasures over on instagram. Look at this beautiful quilt just great little treasures. I picked up To support autism Thank you guys so much for being here. Thank you for watching. What did you think about these bolos? I just love this series because Bolo buddies members get to come on and they get to show you their personalities And that is my favorite part is getting to see them do the talking Now now that you've seen them all and you have seen their bolos Please go down into the description and click on their youtube channels and give them a sub They are all fantastic and amazing And their ebay stores are linked down below Also, if you want to click on the little heart you can follow them and you will get updates when they list new items And if they send out a coupon to their followers, you will also get that Thank you guys so much for being here. If you like this style of video, let me know down in the comments and Thanks for watching


In today's video, we're going to cover 15 of the best selling products that you can add to your Shopify store. Not only that, we're also going to cover how you can source new and trending products so you can always be a step ahead of the competition. My name is Mario without a DS and if you like videos on how to start and scale your dropshipping business, then make sure to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on any future content. Now let's run that intro really fast and let's get started. Now the question is, how do you locate these products? How do you know which products are trending and which ones could potentially do well? Well, there's a few different ways that we're able to do this. Let's go ahead and cover a few of them now. One of the best methods that you can use in order to start finding these winning products is the AutoDS product research tool. As a leading all-in-one dropshipping solution, you can rest assured that AutoDS's product research tool is made specifically for this purpose. It's made to be able to help you find trending and winning products. This tool has tons of handy features and filters to help you find the product that's right for your particular business. You can go ahead and filter where it ships to, the currency, where it ships from, the price range, the supplier, the category. There's a lot of different things that you can choose just to make sure that you can find what's right for you. Another great way to find these best sellers is by checking out our blog over at the AutoDS website or checking out our YouTube playlists here. Whether you're reading our blog or watching our videos, you can rest assured that these are always going to be updated so you can stay up to date with the latest trends. Another thing you can do is just go to your supplier's website and start checking out their best sellers. See what's selling the most, what's selling the best, and what people are really raving about. Just as a quick example, we can go over to the Amazon website and look up here where it says best sellers. Once we click on there, we're going to get a huge list of different products that are currently trending. Another option that you have is the AliExpress drop shipping center. With the product research center, you can filter different metrics like how many sales a particular item has gotten and price ranges. Google Trends is also another fantastic option for your product research because it shows you what people have actually been searching up online. Google Trends gives you a bunch of different metrics that you can analyze to see what's really selling and what people are searching for. Just make sure that you use relevant keywords. You can also put on your detective hat and start spying on the competition. There's a bunch of different tools that you can use to do this, one of them being the Koala Inspector. By using this tool to spy on your competition, you can actually get to see a bunch of different metrics on their Shopify store. You can see their sales, their suppliers, their products and a few other things. If you want any more information on any of the methods that I just covered in order to be able to start finding winning products, make sure to check out the description down below. The link to the article will be down there. Also, if you want a cheat sheet with all of these different products listed, make sure to leave a comment down below requesting it and I'll leave you a link to it. OK, so now that we know how to locate these products, let's go ahead and start listing the 15 best selling products that you can add to your drop shipping store. Now, to start off our countdown, we have the IPL Hair Removal Device. What this device does is it helps remove hair safely from a person's body. It can be used for both men and women, and it also helps minimize hair growth later on. It's crazy because I've seen this device everywhere. It's been coming up on my Facebook ads, on my Instagram ads. It's nonstop. Now, for this, let's actually check out a quick example on how much it costs to source, how much it's selling for and a potential profit. So the average selling price for this device is $249 with a source price of $43.58. Now, that gives us a potential profit of over $200. That's really good. That's a really good profit. Now, let's quickly take a look at their Facebook ad so that we can see how they're marketing it. As you can tell, it's being marketed with a five-star review and a customer's positive testimonial. They give you a picture that quickly shows you how it works, and on the left, it also shows you Kiss Shaving Goodbye. So you automatically know just by looking at it that what this product does is remove body hair. Also down in the details, you can see the website, the fact that it has a five stars because people love to see four or five stars. It gives them a sense of comfort when purchasing when they know that other people are actually liking the product. It also shows free shipping, and you have a clear call to action saying shop now. The Facebook post has over 800 likes, which means a lot of people are actually liking this product or the ad itself, and it even has two shares. So people are actually interacting with this post and liking it. Now, if you look at the seller's website, the first thing that you can see all the way at the top is the fact that they advertise their free shipping and a discount code for $50 off. Aside from that, it's a fairly clean page. It has very professional photos, a good product title, and it has easy navigation. Now, the only thing that I would add to this is just giving it a few different variations. The one thing that I don't see on here is different variations, such as colors and maybe a few different styles. People have different preferences, so giving them different options to choose from can help increase the potential to make a sale. Now, let's quickly look over the supplier's website over at AliExpress. This is actually where we found the product, and you can see it's selling between $9.10 all the way up to $39.62. They also have a store coupon for $5 off, so you can make an extra $5 on profit. Now, another thing that the supplier is showing on their website is different variations. As you saw on the seller's website, they only had the one white one, but here you can see they also have a pink and a black one and a couple of different styles. They also have different variations for wall plugs. When you're adding these products to your Shopify store, you really wanna make sure you get all of the variations so you can have something for everyone. Ultimately, when you're sourcing from your suppliers and importing these products into your store, you wanna make sure that you optimize practically everything. When we have everything optimized, it really helps us come off as more trustworthy and professional. Also, having optimized keywords can help us rank higher on search engines, such as Google. The next product that we're gonna talk about in this list is the TV or monitor wall mount. These are really helpful when you're trying to save space on either your cabinets or your tables. Now, these come in a lot of different variations. Primarily some can tilt, some can turn, some are meant to be able to hold heavier TVs, some are for lighter TVs, smaller TVs, bigger TVs. The possibilities for these are absolutely endless. So you wanna make sure that when you're sourcing these products, you really take that into account so that you can have something for every TV or monitor. Typically, the wall mounts work with almost any kind of wall, whether it be wood, concrete, or even glass. Quick tip, when you are selling these, you do have the potential to be able to upsell them with different accessories. You can sell them with either screws to be able to mount different things onto there, or different accessories that can help keep cables out of sight. Depending on their features, different wall mounts can range between 20 all the way up to $300. The third product on our list is gonna be the backless strapless bra. This is a very popular undergarment product amongst women because it allows them to wear certain garments, certain dresses, t-shirts, whatever it may be, without having to show their bra straps. These come in a lot of different variations, whether it be different sizes, different colors, and different application methods. Also, different materials. These bras can range anywhere between 10 all the way up to $82. Up next on our fourth spot, we have the office chair back cushion. If you're sitting all day, you know how uncomfortable that can get. These cushions really make sitting all day a lot more comfortable, have back support, and help with proper posture. These come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and styles, such as gel, lumbar cushions, memory foam, and a few more. These cushions can range anywhere between $8 all the way up to $106. In our fifth spot, we have seat cushions. Similar to the back cushions, these are more for your butt. These can really make it a lot more comfortable when you're sitting in a hard surface for long periods of time, and they come in a lot of different options. Just like a back cushion, a seat cushion comes in a lot of different styles and materials, some of the most popular being the gel and the memory foam. Seat cushions can also be used on almost any kind of seat, whether it be a bench or a chair, and they can range from as little as $0.05 all the way up to $1,330. That is a huge price range. Now, remember that you can always upsell and increase your average order value by offering things like cushion covers. Now, lighting up our number six spot, we have LED submersible lights. These lights are fantastic because they can be used in practically anything. They can be used anywhere from your front yard to your house, your room, your pool, or an aquarium. These types of lights come in a variety of colors, sizes, and styles. Typically, they're also waterproof and battery operated, while some of them are USB powered. Now, if you thought the seat cushions have a wide price range, these can start at 19 cents, all the way up to $20,000. That's huge. That's a big, big price range. By setting competitive pricing, we can really stand up above our competition and start raking in some massive profits. Now, as a quick bonus tip, always try to upsell by offering a remote. Remotes are great for the lights that are gonna be underwater, so that way, they don't have to go in and actually change them whenever they wanna change the light or the intensity of the light. Now, in our number seven spot, we have belt buckles. Belt buckles are more of a fashion piece that help keep your belt together and your pants up. Belt buckles have a lot of different styles of closures, some of them being screws, a clamp, stitch, or a few others. These also come in a variety of materials such as titanium, stainless steel, carbon fiber, and a few others. They're actually really durable. And of course, they also come in a variety of colors. Having different colors is crucial because that means that they can be outfitted with different outfits. One thing I do wanna mention about these belt buckles though is whenever you're sourcing these products or looking for different variations, try to avoid items that closely resemble known brands or products. That can land you in a bit of trouble, so it's best to just avoid that altogether. The reason I bring this up with the belt buckles is because it's fashion and when it comes to fashion, there's a lot of copycats. Now, depending on the type of material and style that you're going with, these belt buckles can range anywhere between $5 all the way up to $700. In our number eight spot, we have measuring cups. These days with the current economic situation and how high inflation is, people are saying, forget the restaurants and they're all starting to cook at home. That's where these measuring cups come in. Measuring cups are perfect for homebodies, professional chefs and amateur chefs just learning how to cook. Now, these obviously aren't just limited to food. You can also use them to measure different types of liquids, detergents, bleaches, or whatever else you need. Also, a lot of the times these are sold in different sets. The different sets do include different volume capacities so you can go from selling a regular little measuring cup that goes up to maybe one cup, and you can sell that with a set that goes up to two, three, or four cups. They also come in a wide variation of different styles. You can get them as either glass cups or plastic spoons. The variations are endless. Prices for measuring cups can range between $3 all the way to $260 depending on the type of material and how many come in the set. Up next at our number nine spot, we have temporary tattoos. Temporary tattoos are a fantastic option for those that love the look of a tattoo but are ready for the lifelong commitment, the potential pain that the procedure can cause or the high price tag. Now, these tattoos come in a lot of different options. Some of the application options that they have are henna, press on decals, and airbrush. People typically get tattoos or temporary tattoos because they like the uniqueness of it. So always try to offer different styles, different sizes, different colors, some that are even black and white. There's a lot of different options that can come along with a temporary tattoo. Now, depending on the complexity of the design and a few other factors, temporary tattoos can range anywhere between $1 all the way up to about $510. Quick note, when you are selling the press on tattoo decals, always make sure to have different bundles so that way you can upsell and have a higher average order value. Now, in our number 10 spot, we have anti-snoring clips. I don't know about you, but me personally, I find snoring extremely annoying. These anti-snoring clips would have come in so handy when I was a kid.  These clips can help relieve loud snoring by enabling better air passage while somebody's sleeping. Trust me when I say, a lot of people's significant others will be very happy with this product. Now, for the safety of users, always make sure you get medical grade or washable pieces. These come in BPA-free as well as silicone. These are pretty much all universal sizing and start off at about 30 cents and can range up to anywhere above $60. In our number 11 spot, we have fitness watches. Fitness watches lately have been hugely popular due to the fact that they can be used for a wide variety of things. Primarily, they're used for tracking metrics such as how much you've walked, your heart rate, how many calories you've burned and a lot of other health metrics. The vast majority of these have a touchscreen and some even include GPS. There's a lot of different styles for every type of user out there. These come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, colors and features. Now, a quick tip, always try to offer one that has Bluetooth connectivity to your phone so that way it's easier to read certain metrics. Smart fitness watches can range anywhere between $100 up to $700. In our number 12 spot, we have neck massagers. Neck massagers are a fantastic option for those that have either stiff shoulders or neck strings that are caused by either improper posture or a few other different health concerns. Neck massagers can really help relieve stress and pain and the best part about them is the fact that you can wear them almost anywhere. You can wear them while you're walking or you can wear them as you're sitting. Now, these neck massagers are offered in a wide variety of sizes, styles and intensities to be able to accommodate for the different types of people. They have so many different types of neck massagers. They have massage pillows, massage guns, massage balls and a wide variety of others. Typically, when it comes to the power source, these can either be plugged into the wall or for the most part, you're gonna end up finding battery operated or rechargeable. Also, depending on its features, these products can range between $4 all the way up to $640. In our 13th spot, we have wireless phone chargers. Wireless phone chargers are a very popular item at the moment because people are always on their phones and their phone batteries are constantly dying. Having the convenience of just being able to put your phone on a platform rather than having to plug it in all the time to charge is fantastic. Now these days, a lot of wireless chargers can charge both an Android and an iPhone. So to optimize your sales, always make sure you clearly promote the compatibility of your products. And also to add a little personal touch, try offering different styles, variations, colors. People love that. Now these chargers also come with varying power capacities. So that can affect how fast the phone charges. It can either be a regular slow charge or a fast charge. So always make sure to clearly note that. Wireless chargers can start anywhere at $11 and go up to $100. Also to upsell these, people love to take their chargers pretty much anywhere they go, especially if they go somewhere for vacation. So try offering little carrying bags or pouches to be able to carry them in. In our number 14 spot, we have four head thermometers. With the rise of health concerns lately, having one of these around the house is actually pretty crucial. A lot of people wanna have these just in case anybody starts to feel sick, just to make sure that they don't have a fever or it could be anything worse. Typically these thermometers are battery operated, but you can find some rechargeable ones. These also come in a variety of colors and a few different shapes, but for best results and for best quality, you always wanna try to get the medical grade ones. Four head thermometers can start relatively cheap at just about 20 cents and can range up to $60. These have a very high market demand, especially in this day and age. So having one of these in your dropshipping store can really help you break in the profits. In our final spot at number three, we have bookends. If you're like me and you like reading a lot, having bookends is pretty important to be able to keep all your books organized, whether it be on a shelf, table, or your media center. Now the cool thing about bookends is they can be very decorative and very creative. Always try to offer artistic bookends because those are usually some of the more popular ones that sell. They also come in a wide variety of shapes, colors, sizes, and materials. These products can start anywhere between $3 all the way up to $135. Now that we know what products we wanna sell and how to be able to start finding those products, we wanna find out where we're gonna be able to purchase them from. So some of the best suppliers that we can choose from can include CJ Dropshipping, AliExpress, Bandgood, Wayfair, eBay. The list goes on. On that note, you don't wanna just choose one supplier. You wanna try to have multiple suppliers just in case there's any stock fluctuations. Let's say if you're working with CJ Dropshipping primarily and they run out of a certain product, you can go to somewhere else like let's say AliExpress or maybe even Wayfair and find the same product there. Having multiple suppliers can also help with fear delays and deliveries and having better pricing options. Okay, so now we have the best selling product that we wanna sell as well as the supplier that we're gonna get it from. Now, let's quickly import it into our store so that way we can start selling. One of the easiest ways to start adding these products to our stores would be by automatically importing them. Automatically importing products really saves a lot of time, especially if you're importing multiple products. Over at AutoDS, we offer four very useful and highly time-saving importing techniques. We have the option for single product uploading, bulk uploading using different links, bulk uploading using a CSV file, as well as the one-click importer. Let's talk a little bit about the one-click importer really fast. So for the one-click importer, the first thing that we have to do is simply just install a Chrome extension. Now, once we're on the product page of the product that we wanna import, you're gonna see this little import to AutoDS button. We have to just click on that. As you can see, after it clicked, it starts flashing, that means it's starting to import. Now, once the product import is done, all we have to do is go on over to our platform at AutoDS and then look over in the drafts tab. Once we click on that, you're gonna see that the first option we have there is the Mac Massager that we just imported from Amazon. Now, once we have it in our draft section, we can go ahead and click to edit and optimize everything that we need to, including the product title, the description, and everything else. Remember that optimizing all of your titles and your keywords is crucial so that way you can rank higher on your search engines like Google.  If you want any more information on any of the techniques, methods, products, or suppliers that I mentioned in this video, make sure to check out the description down below. We're gonna have the link to the article there. Also remember, if you want a cheat sheet with all these products listed, make sure to leave a comment down below requesting it and I'll leave you a link to get access. Once again, my name is Mario with AutoDS. If you enjoyed the information in this video today, make sure to leave a like and also make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on any future videos. Remember that we're here for you at AutoDS and we're here to help you succeed, so make sure you check out all the different resources that we have available to help you start scaling. Huge thank you to everyone for watching and I'll catch you all in the next video.