This was touched on a few pages ago, but the answer to the valuation of MTO was Petes logic vs mine. Pete is a very literal person, he is not into hypothetical things in any way. Moving To Orlando has put about 100 million dollars worth of homes under contract and most have closed but some are still being built. Our take home money that Pete and I split in 2020 was roughly 500k and then 2021 was roughly 1M. MTO didn't get it's first sale until June of 2020 so he counts that as half a year, so if we had been going the first half, then we would've made 1M then too. So the company makes a million dollars per year, so the value is $1M and he wants $1M. Of course this means my half is seen as $0, which is what he generally believed.
While I did explain to him that our success was a huge part because of Pete the Great and Powerful's influence into all realms of society, I also explained that the economy and housing was in a very weird transition that will likely not happen again soon and that every single person in real estate was saying how unusual everything was and that we can't base our business on this vacuum that 2020/2021 was. He didn't believe me of course and stuck to his guns.
Ultimately, Petes mindset is always about traffic and views because that feeds his ego but it also is the way hes always done business. My way is the opposite and that customers are more important than clicks. In most of 2021, Pete wanted me to no longer appear on Moving To Orlando shows, but I struck a deal where he and I would alternate as hosts so we just didn't have to be on each others shows. His first show was about Disney Annual Passes, it got 48K views and was one of the highest viewed videos we ever had and it brought in 5 leads and 1 of them bought a home. The home was $420,000 at 2% commission so Petes split was $4200. My (not first but just one I did) episode was a home tour of a 1.4 million dollar home in Margaritaville and it did about 7k views and Pete deemed it a huge failure and I got yelled at because ONE person in the comments said the house was too expensive and that I shouldn't show expensive homes like that. Someone called me and bought that house with me as their realtor from those 7k people. That was a 3% commission so Pete took home $21,000 from that videos existence. Plus we got other people who reached out about Margaritaville and I sold 3 of those people townhomes around 400,000 each as new builds and those were 7% commission to the realtor, so that was an additional $42,000 for him (which he won't even get now because he sold his half of the company and didn't retroactive things under contract, so Ruben gets the 42k part now). His video made him $4200, mine made him $63,000, but mine didn't get as many views so it was a bad decision.
The travel agency makes a lot of money based on volume, but it also has to pay for everything. Everyone's salary comes out of that, plus the commission for the agents themselves. Moving To Orlando had very little overhead cost and it was a mistake that he didn't put more effort into that product because it actually reached a new audience that didn't know the DIS and it made so much money for so little direct costs. Im making my videos right now and they get a few hundred views each, which is way lower than I got with MTO, but people are still reaching out to buy houses because you only need 1 person to buy from a video for it to be worth it, so it doesn't matter as much about the views with that product compared to The DIS and Dreams because you need a ton of eyes on it to make the ad space money and to funnel people to Dreams. I think he just couldn't get past the views numbers being lower than what he wanted and he saw that as failure.
Also Pete isn't a racist, he just sucks. Nobody ever 'applied' that was of color because there were never any jobs that were advertised in any normal capacity. Everyone (except Deni) was hired in the whole time I was there based on a chance meeting a good vibes from Pete. Deni was hired in a normal way because Corey was supposed to be taking over and wanted to start having a real hiring process and that was the first time of getting to do that and he was totally over that. Pete only gave final approval, but I do not believe anyone of color even interviewed for that position.