Because you guys don’t see this. Until you announce it and we open. When I buy, a $1 million piece of land or maybe $0.5 piece of land it’s not material. I don’t put out press releases over these small things, but we have a lot on our plate right now. We’re ready for more on the right — of the right kind of deals. I mean, I’ve been talking with a couple of owners and like look they’re like I want 4 times or I want 4.5 times and I’m like well you’ve got a 3 times unit. I’m sorry. I can’t pay you 4.5 times for a 3 times unit. If you want to give me some better terms, you want to carry more paper. You want 65% cash down. That raises my cost. I’m going to pay you less. One way or the other, it balances out. Now if you want to take, if you want to take the finance portion of what I’m willing to pay for your free cash flow, and carry the paper, sure I’ll be happy to give you that.
You carry more paper. I’ll give you another point of interest, but you don’t take any of my cash from me. I go in there and generate the income from their particular location to pay for it, then yes, I’m willing to give them a little better multiple. But when they increase my risk factor, I’m in a market that I’m — it’s not a major market or I’m not extremely comfortable with the market, I’m going to pay less for it. And we’ve targeted guys said, well, I don’t want to sell my club to anybody else. I said what you’re really saying is, nobody else wants to buy your club for this price. And I can’t buy for that price, either. This is the price I will pay, call me when you’re ready. And I guarantee you, one day we’ll get that call. We’re probably paying with — it’s not that we’re paying the top price, because people offer them more money.
What we are paying with is reputation. We’re paying with — we’ve never missed a payment. In 30 years, we made every payment to a seller we’ve ever promised to make. We made every payment through COVID, to 90% of our seller finance notes and the only ones we didn’t pay were because they said, hey, don’t pay me. I know you guys are settling right now, don’t pay me. If you guys have been good to me, take three months of payments and just to firm. We’ll work it out later. And so we were able to do those types of things. But — and so that’s what we are the preferred buyer, because they know they’re going to get paid. People offer them more money but they want less cash down. They want — they offer them higher interest rates but they’re never going to get their money.
Plus they also know that when we take over their club, we’re not going to run their club into the ground. We’re going to remodel. We’re going to build. If they ever did get it back from us, it would be in better shape than it was the day they gave it to us, whereas, they sell to these other — if they sell somebody else who’s carrying so much paper in their cabinet, they may be struggling and they — as they go and they may not — not only they not pay the payment but they’re going to run their clubs into the ground as well. And so that’s what we’re using as our past reputation in how we do business and they can call any owner if there’s none out there listening looking to sell their club, I mean, you can call anybody we bought clubs from, no one that I know of we’ll say a bad thing or has ever said a bad thing about us on how we do business and how we treat you and how we work with you through anything that comes up.
