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David:
This is the BiggerPockets Podcast show, 850.
What’s going on everyone? This is David Greene, your host of the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast, the biggest, the best, the baddest real estate podcast on the planet. Today we are joined by two of my friends in the multifamily space, Andrew Cushman and Matt Faircloth. We’re going to be talking about red flags that every investor should watch out for. This is particularly important in today’s market. Andrew, Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt:
David, thank you so much for having us today.

Andrew:
Yep. Good to be here as always.

David:
And before we get into today’s show, I’ve got a quick tip for all of you loyal listeners. Sponsors are everywhere and they are looking to get your money. If you’re finding a sponsor that’s advertising on social media or even dating profiles, that might be a red flag that you want to look out for. Today’s show, we’re going to go over seven other red flags to be aware of. Let’s get into it.
Why are we doing this show right now? Well, we’re seeing operators in the news getting arrested on charges of investment fraud, and my gut tells me that as the market gets tougher, it’s going to be like the tide going out and you’re going to see who’s been swimming naked the entire time. Today’s show will be about something that has even happened with our previous guests.
Now we vet our guests to the best of our abilities, but we have had former guests on this podcast that have gotten into hot water, and that is why this type of show is so important. This whole incident is a reminder that no industry is immune to criminal behavior and BiggerPockets will continue to stress to our audience that they do their own due diligence when investing. Now maybe you’re thinking this would never happen to me, but it’s more common than you think. And as my co-host, Rob Abasolo has said, though he’s not on today’s show, “An investment fund is structured exactly like a Ponzi scheme and it turns into one if it’s mismanaged.” On that topic, Andrew, I believe you have a story that supports that.

Andrew:
Well, so back in 2005, we all like to think we’re smart and we can dig into things and we know what we’re doing, but the reality is we all make mistakes, right? Look at Chernobyl or the Hindenburg or almost any Nicolas Cage movie. Somehow that stuff still happens. So this was essentially a syndication. It was a little bit different spin. It was a group that was developing real estate out in North Carolina and they did have a couple of assets, but what they were doing is they were coming saying, “Hey, we’re selling shares, free Ipo. We’re going to build all this stuff and then we’re going to go public and you’re going to make seven to 10 times on your investment.” So, one mistake I made, I didn’t do my own due diligence. My boss at my employer at the time went and did some, and I’m like, “Well, he knows what he is doing, so I’ll invest also.”
I did a shallow look at what the sponsor was doing. Said, “Okay, it seems like they have an asset here.” Didn’t really dig into, well, where’s the money going? How’s it being used? And then there were some red flags or things that didn’t quite seem right that I overlooked because of FOMO, right? Fear Of Missing Out. And essentially greed, right? Like, dude, I can 10X my money by just investing it with these guys. And so, for example, one of those things that I found and I should have just said, “Nope, I’m out”, is a little bit of research. I found that they already had shares trading on the pink sheets, and I asked them, I was like, “Wait a second. How are you going public if you already have shares out?” And they gave me some bogus explanation. I should have said at that point, “I’m out.”
But I said, “Well, you know what? Actually this just sounds good. It’s too much of a great opportunity.” And so I invested, ended up losing 90% of our investment. I invested and then they were paying dividends and there were some more red flags. And the day before I was going to call and request my money back, the SEC swooped in, froze everything. Three years of special servicer later? We ended up, like I said, I think we got like 10% back or something like that. So it can happen to anybody. There are pretty sophisticated guys out there who can pull the wool over almost anybody’s eyes. Look at Bernie Madoff. He did it for how many decades? So don’t feel bad if it happened to you. It either has happened to all of us or probably will, but we’re going to talk about a number of things that we can do to try to prevent or minimize that.

David:
Thank you, Andrew. Today we are going to cover the biggest red flags to look out for to keep you and your investments safe, after this quick break.
All right, welcome back. We’re here with Andrew Cushman and Matt Faircloth. Andrew is my partner in multifamily investing and Matt is the author of Raising Private Capital, a book with BiggerPockets. Let’s give a quick shout out there, Matt, where do they go to get that book on the BiggerPockets platform?

Matt:
What’s up brother? Good to be here. They can go to biggerpockets.com/rpc to get a copy of that book and if they buy it from BiggerPockets, they get a bunch of bolt-on bonuses, including another small ebook that I wrote on buying apartment buildings and a 90-minute interview with my SEC attorney. So people should watch that. Just get the book just for that interview because that interview would help people avoid a lot of the mistakes we’re going to talk about today.

David:
All right, speaking of those mistakes, let’s get right into it here. All right, when they’re vetting a sponsor on a deal, Matt, briefly describe what a sponsor is and then let’s talk about what they should do. When it comes to looking internally.

Matt:
The sponsor is the syndicator in raising private capital. I talk about the deal provider. That’s the person bringing the opportunity. They’re likely putting in plenty of sweat, contacts, resources, their market knowledge, all the doingness and all the, a lot of time as well. All that stuff put together into a big package. They’re bringing the deal, the opportunity and the intuition, the know-how, the drive, all of that. So that’s the deal provider. That is the sponsor, the syndicator, they have all kinds of different names. General partner, sponsor, syndicator, opportunity provider, all these things all fall into the same guise and they’re providing the opportunity to the people that are going to invest in the deal as limited partners or cash providers.

Andrew:
And going back to some of the things that I mentioned in my story about when I lost money, keep in mind it’s not just the sponsor. The first thing to do is to look at yourself internally because whether it’s a prince from Nigeria or a sponsor with ill intent, they’re praying off human emotions. So what are some of the things I mentioned? Fear of missing out, right? A bad sponsor is looking for somebody who has a fear of missing out, not getting the great returns, everyone else is doing this. Number two, are you investing because you’re following a celebrity? You don’t really know who they are, you haven’t met them, you don’t know anyone else who’s worked with them, but hey, they got a TV show or whatever, or really flashy social media. Are you investing solely because of that? It’s not automatic red flag that they have those things, but internally that’s not good if that is the sole reason that you are investing.
Another one, too, is just are you being greedy? A lot of times we’ll talk to investors and they’re looking at four different investments like, well, this one says it returns 8% and this one says 12%, so I’m automatically just going to invest with a guy who’s promising 12%. That’s greed because just because an investment says 12% doesn’t mean you’re actually going to get it. So take the time to dive in and make sure that you aren’t just being attracted via essentially what is greed. And we are all subject to this to whatever is promising the highest return. Because generally the highest it is, the more risk that might be buried in there and you need to take time to dive into that. Matt, do you have something you want to add?

Matt:
What I want to say is the way that a sponsor plays into all those things altogether is they’re going to provide you with an opportunity, just as Andrew talked about earlier, that is really, really high above the norm rates of return. Seven X in Andrew’s case, right? But you got to get in right now because we’re almost sold out, right? So it’s going to be really, really high rates of return to create the FOMO, really, really high rates of return to create that greed. And also you got to wire the money right now and I’ve been subject to these kinds of things myself and it’s always been above the norm rates of return and I need the money immediately. So you don’t have really have time to vet it, think about it, any of those things. So that’s when you see those things, investors, listeners, just put the brakes on, run the other way. Time will start to allow these things to unfold. And if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

Andrew:
And another thing that I would add before we dive into some of the actual red flags is keep in mind there’s multiple ways a sponsor can fail. It’s not all fraud. Unfortunately there are some fraudulent actors out there and we’re going to try to help everyone listening and ourselves to avoid those. But there’s fraud. Also there’s incompetence, whether that’s lack of experience, lack of knowledge, the wrong partners. There is incompetence.
And then unfortunately there is also just bad luck. And I know some operators who are of decades in the business, truly put their investors’ interests before anybody else’s and they’ve had a situation where a fire destroyed half the property, their insurance tripled, there was a shooting and all of a sudden the property’s in trouble. So be careful not to broad brush everybody with the same color. Just keep in mind there’s multiple ways to fail and part of what you’re trying to do with these red flags is to hopefully root out all of these and give yourself the best chance of successfully investing as an LP.

David:
All right, so we had five red flags we are going to cover in today’s show, but in just the last few days, events have unfurled that have led to two more being included. So we’re going to be going over seven red flags in today’s show. We’re going to get through these as quick as we can with as much value as we could possibly bring. All right, so, number one, the first red flag, the sponsor has a different partner for every deal.

Andrew:
So you’ll notice this is really popular the last few years, is you would see these sponsors and it would be like, they’d be like the Oprah Winfrey of syndication. You get to be a GP and then you get to be a GP and you’re a GP. Everyone look under your seats. They’re an equity. And the reason that this is and can be a problem is a lot of times what that represented was just someone grabbing any partner they could to get a deal done. And as all of you know, partnerships have a high risk of blowing up and not working. So then the question becomes when it hits the fan, and we get into the market environment that we’re in now, where the Fed has raised rates over 500 basis points, insurance is doubling or tripling, vacancies going up a little bit, etc. When things get difficult, who’s in charge?
Which partner is it? If a sponsor has six different partners for six different deals, who’s going to contribute the half a million to save this deal? Who’s going to step in in place of the property management company that’s maybe not doing so well? If one partner declares bankruptcy and is just like, “That’s it, we’re out,” and I’ve actually seen this happen in the last six months, then what? Right? Because now you’ve got half of a partnership. So that is definitely a red flag.
Now again, it’s not something where you’re automatically out because on the flip side of this, there’s what you call fund of fund investors where it’s very experienced professionals who will raise money and then from maybe let’s say 50 LPs and then go invest with another sponsor. In that situation, if you’re someone who’s raising that kind of fund, what you’re doing is you are relying on their expertise that they have done all this due diligence and that they have picked the right sponsor and that they’ve done all of this vetting. So don’t confuse the two. It’s okay to invest with someone who’s raising for another sponsor, but you just realize that you are relying on their due diligence and in fact that if you’re a busy doctor, you don’t have time to do all of this, you are going to invest with that fund, then you’re relying on them to do that. And picking the right fund to fund capital raiser can be a great and safe way to invest. Just make sure you dive into it. Matt, anything you want to add?

Matt:
When things are going well, these folks look brilliant. We see people that met at a conference one week and the next week they’re doing deals together, right? And that’s okay sometimes, but also I believe in building businesses together. So maybe it’s okay for people that just met to do a deal, but you should see a plan beyond that. If you’re going to consider investing in something where it’s a couple of operators first time doing business together, it flags. If they’ve all got different email address domains, right? Or if they all have different websites and everything like that. Or if you see them on, I’ve seen sponsors promoting multiple deals at once with different teams and things like that. So that’s really, to Andrew’s point, all well and good, if things are going well. When things start to not go so well, that’s when you’re really going to see the tide go out and see who’s naked, right?
I think that you want to see companies that are building brands, building businesses, building something that’s going to be doing deals over and over again. That should make you comfortable. It’s okay for people to bop around a little bit first and then they should really kind of drop anchor and find a home.

David:
And the logo on this red flag to highlight here is that most people get into trouble when they’re picking a spartner because they are trying to delegate the due diligence. “Oh, you did a deal with him? Oh, I know this person. Oh, Logan Paul is selling that NFT? Okay, I’m going to buy that one because I know Logan Paul.” No you don’t. In fact, the reason Logan Paul makes the podcast is probably just because people like you will buy stuff without due diligence and he can convert the Kardashians have made an empire doing this. Is Kylie Jenner’s makeup better than anyone else’s makeup? No. But Kylie Jenner’s makeup is well-known because it’s her name on it.

Andrew:
I like it.

David:
That’s good. So remember that due diligence is not an area that you want to delegate or give up on it. It is sometimes laziness. I myself have had deals where I tried it out with somebody. Didn’t go well. That’s not a person I want to partner with anymore. But guess what? That person went out there and did a bunch of deals with other people saying he was my partner. And unfortunately other people got into bad deals because he said I did a deal with David Greene. That was a consequence I was not expecting when I did that first deal with him. And now I have to be super careful. Maybe I just don’t partner with anyone anymore. I don’t want my audience to get exposed to, “Oh, you did a deal with David? Well then I can trust you.” And it actually wasn’t the case. I was just trying it out to see if they were a good operator. All right.

Matt:
David, one more thing to throw on the back of it, is a thing that a lot of the cool kids were doing in an up economy was raising capital for lots of opportunities. And since I’m the author of Raising Profit Capital, I should comment on that briefly, right? That was something that happens. A lot of people just all raise half a million for this person’s deal and then I’ll raise a million for that person’s deal over there. That’s all fine in an up economy. But what the problem with that is, as we’ve said before, that if the deal starts going south, the capital raiser that you liked and trusted has no control over the real on goings in the deal. And so when you’re getting in with a fund of funds that maybe is putting a lot more juice, a lot more opportunities into operators, maybe that’s okay. But if you’re investing with a capital raiser that’s contributing a small portion to the capital stack for a real estate deal, I would be wary because the capital raiser you’re working with, your relationship as the investor really doesn’t have any sway.
And I’m already starting to see deals like this fall apart, Andrew. I’ve had capital raisers call me up to say, “Hey, I raised a million for this deal where there was a $15 million equity piece and they’re now talking about giving back the keys to the bank and this capital raiser doesn’t really have any control for these people that put millions of dollars of their hard-earned money into the deal, there’s really nothing they could do because they’re in minority control of the opportunity.” So I would be very leery of sub subcapital raisers in this changing market

David:
And that’s a question that should be asked. Is this your deal or are you raising money for somebody else’s deal? ‘Cos if you think about the fact that money can change hands three or four different degrees here, I raise money to give it to this person who then gives it to this person who then gives it to this person and then puts it in the deal. You’ve got a lot of distance from personal responsibility and nobody is going to be vetting it exactly. It’s like a copy of a copy of a copy. It can easily come out really, really fuzzy.
All right, red flag number two, the sponsor or the seller suggests anything suspicious like inflating the proof of funds, not disclosing material facts, et cetera. Andrew?

Andrew:
Well this one really is kind of a gut intuition thing, right? If somebody is telling you to do something or that they’re doing something that seems unethical or suspicious or maybe something you wouldn’t do, like don’t tell the bank, don’t tell the other investors, we’re going to swap these signature pages at the last second. Those are some things that you want to look out for. And this one, it’s hard to give a list of the 27 tips to avoid. This really boils down to using your gut, right? You hear that a lot. Trust your gut, trust your instinct. If it’s something you wouldn’t do or you wouldn’t want your mom to know you were doing, that might be your good litmus test right there.

Matt:
Great point there. I mean the problem is that an LP might not see a lot of the things that are happening behind the scenes, but you got to go with your gut and sometimes if things look a little bit suspicious then they could very well be, right? I would say that if you’re looking to be an LP in someone’s deal, you have the right to ask for things like the contract of sale on the property. You have the right to ask for a lot of the documents that went back and forth between the buyer and the seller on the deal. And if the sponsor is not willing to give you full transparency and give you copies of the agreement of sale, the appraisal, the this or that, they should have actually those documents very easily. And if they won’t give you those things, then maybe there’s a little bit of smoke and you should look for the fire.

David:
All right, red flag number three, no successful track record in the business. This one has been extra common the last couple years with the market being incredibly easy to succeed in. Andrew, what do people need to look out for here?

Andrew:
Think of it this way. If you are on a flight, right, and it’s like, “This is your captain speaking, thank you for flying Syndication Airlines. It’s been noted there’s some turbulence between here and our destination today, but the good news is your captain and copilot covered this in flight school and speaking of flight school, we just graduated yesterday, so we really appreciate you joining us on our first flight. Tray tables and seat backs up. Let’s get rolling.” You hear that you’re going to want to get off that flight and it’s the similar thing if you’re investing in any syndication or sponsorship. If there is no track record whatsoever, it doesn’t, again, doesn’t mean they’re fraudulent, doesn’t mean they’re incompetent. It just, they don’t have the experience, right? And then with that said, none of us would get started if people didn’t trust the inexperienced.
There’s a point where every single investor out there did their first deal. However, how that can be mitigated and what you want to look for is, is that inexperienced person partnering with somebody who is experienced? And it could be a literal partnership, it could be a mentorship, it could be maybe someone who’s really experienced is putting money into the deal. Is the new person putting money into the deal? And then also track record and experience does not always have to be direct. It’s kind of a catch 22, right? It’s like, well, when people who are applying for a job, it’s like, well, you have to have experience to get this job, but you can’t get experience because you don’t get the job. So track record can be somebody who maybe excelled in another occupation for 10 years and has just a stellar reputation for being honest and hardworking.
Or maybe they ran an incredible flipping business for 10 years and made it into a seven figure business and now they’re going to start going into self storage, right? So again, if I was investing with that person, I would be like, “Okay, I like this person’s work ethic and their business skills. If it’s their first deal in another asset class, I might want to see a mentor or some kind of more experienced partner.” But I would still consider investing with them even though they’re technically not experienced. So what you’re looking for is either the direct experience or making sure that the person is partnering with somebody who truly has experience. A lot of the deals that are going bad right now are the ones where somebody went to a bootcamp and in the last couple of years ran out, just went straight into buying 200 units, had no experience managing it, operating it or anything like that and doesn’t have anybody to fall back on, now that things are getting difficult and then those deals are having trouble. So that is why you’re looking for experience.

Matt:
Just to, on top of that, Andrew, I agree. The only thing I would say in addition is that it’s one thing to cite that I’ve got this mentor or cite that I’ve got this experienced person sitting over top of me and we were actually, a brief story. We were selling an apartment building a couple of years ago in North Carolina and we had a bidder that pointed to a mentor that said, “Well, I’m working with this person as my mentor,” and it gave me a lot of comfort, but then I realized after a little bit further investigation, that mentor wasn’t at risk on the deal. All they were, were just sitting over top of the student. The student really just took the mentor’s class and was allowed to point to the mentor as their advisor, but the mentor wasn’t going on the debt as a sponsor. The mentor really wasn’t engaged and a at-risk sponsor, meaning the reputation wasn’t there to lose if the deal fell apart.
So if you’re going to be investing with someone that points to someone above them that taught them everything they know and is going to be bringing a lot of their expertise to the deal, just make sure that that person with the experience is also at risk, so to speak in the deal.

Andrew:
I should stop and clarify that. We’re not throwing all boot camps under the bus. So the education that BiggerPockets does and that Matt’s involved in is the right kind of good education. What we’re talking about is some of the big flashy ones that you’ll see all over social media, on billboards, where it’s more about the excitement of just getting out and doing a deal and not necessarily, well, it’s like the dog who finally catches the car and then doesn’t know what to do with it. That’s what’s happened with a lot of these multifamily deals in the last few years is you have somebody that is doing, I mean their heart is in the right place, right? They tried to get the education, they took action, they raised money, but they don’t have the expertise or the partners to fall back on now that things are getting difficult.

Matt:
So to clarify, Andrew, when you take the BiggerPockets Multifamily Bootcamp, you’re not allowed to say that Matt Faircloth and the Derosa Group are your business partners for every deal that you do. But we do teach quite a bit, but we’re not everybody’s business partner for the BiggerPockets Bootcamp. We have to draw the line somewhere.

Andrew:
Exactly. And candidly, it’s not on the Bootcamp. The responsibility for this is on the individual, right? Again, it’s like, you can’t sue Harvard if you get out and you can’t get a job, right? That’s on you. It’s not necessarily the Bootcamp. Again, it’s just the person who just got an education and ran out and just bought 200 units without building the team and the resources and the bench that’s required to do this successfully.

Matt:
I agree.

David:
And that’s a good point there. And there’s analogy here where maybe you look at partnering with someone is like betting on a fighter. Well, you can lose your money if the fighter throws the fight. That’s someone operating outside of integrity, doing something illegal, but that’s not the only way you lose. You might just bet on a terrible fighter and they just go out there and get beat. Either way, you lose your money. So don’t assume it’s only getting ripped off by illegal activities or unscrupulous behavior. It can also just be a bad operator. Now on the topic of bad operating, that leads us to our next red flag, which is lack of focus. Is this investment their core area of expertise or just one of 27 different things they do and they’re a part-time operator, not a smooth operator. Andrew, what do people need to look out for here?

Andrew:
Again, this is another one where it’s not an automatic no, it’s just something to dig into. There are a lot of sponsors and syndicators out there that, for example, have done 10,000 units of storage or 10,000 mobile home communities and they’ve gone an inch wide and a mile deep on that asset class. And odds are when things get tough, they’re going to know how to handle it. They’re going to know how to steer the asset through tough times. What seemed to get prolific in the last few years is we had a lot of groups that their thing they were best at was raising money. And then the problem became, man, I got all this money raised, what do I do with it? Okay, well I’m going to go over here and I’m going to invest in this and I’m going to put this in here and you know what? I got this stuff in Venezuela that I heard has just great returns.
And so all of a sudden you’ve got a sponsor who has got, like you said, 27 different asset classes. And so again, the reason that’s a red flag is because you need to ask yourself, well, are they an expert in any one of them? Now there is the situation where they have partnered with an expert in one of those, and then what you need to do is you need to find out who that partner is and then go do due diligence and vet that partner. And if that partner is an expert in that asset class, then you might want to go for it. That might be fine. But what you want to be careful of is, if it was just Andrew and I’m in self storage and I’m in mobile homes, I’m in apartments, I’m in a crypto farm, all this different stuff, I’m probably not really good at any of those. So that’s what you’re looking for.

Matt:
To add on to that, Andrew, is that if I’m involved in a lot of different things, I don’t have the time availability that I might need to turn the asset around. There are times, and you and I have both been here in our careers that we need to go and put ourselves on an airplane and go get boots on the ground at the asset to go and address a specific issue, whatever that may be. If you’re working with an operator that everybody in the operations team has a day job. Or as you said, they’re involved in a crypto farm and a self storage facility and a resort and they’re too busy with those are the things that they can’t put the time into the multifamily asset. The multifamily assets could just languish a bit from the attention.
We looked at buying a multifamily asset in the southeast recently that was owned by a consortium of doctors. None of them were full-time active. They all were trying to own this thing passively thinking they could just buy the apartment building and wish the property manager the best and tell the property manager where to send the checks when they’re ready, right? So all well and good, but sometimes there is the need for daytime availability and if they operator you’re working with doesn’t have that, that they can’t just go parachute them into the property and get in the face of a contractor or go and look at the property manager dead in the eye and find out what’s going on, you might not be in the best boat.

David:
In Pillars of Wealth I talk about one of the mindsets to avoid if you want to become wealthy, which is what is the easiest, shortest, fastest way to make a bunch of money. It’s people looking for the downhill road. And in this space when they hear about Matt, Andrew, some other multifamily operator raising money and making a bunch of money with it, there’s a lot of people that go, “Ooh, that looks easy, I want to do that.” So they start saying, “How can I raise money and then give it to someone else to go invest?” Or, “How can I raise money and throw it in a deal? How hard can it be?” And so the person investing, they don’t know the difference between a person who’s done this for 10 years, 15 years, really the captain that’s seen the stormy seas or the person that’s only sailed in the harbor, which would be like the last eight to 10 years of rents increasing and cap rates decreasing, and almost every single thing that could go right in multifamily has gone right, and everyone’s doing well.
So you start to hear this confirmation bias of, well, they’re doing it and they’re doing it and everyone’s doing well, so what’s the risk? And maybe you even put some money into a deal and it goes well. So you’re like, “Well, I’ll put more money in the next one. I’ll put more money in the next one,” not knowing why it’s working out. So just those are elements of human nature you want to be aware of so that maybe you sniff out if something doesn’t seem right, versus what you’re saying here, Andrew, is you’re looking for the operator that has done this for a period of time and they’re doing this full-time. They have seen the things that go wrong and they know when A happens we have to do B. They’ve got some clever solutions in mind versus someone who doesn’t have the experience that won’t.
All right, the next red flag is a sponsor that is new to that market or MSA. Why is this something that people should look out for?

Matt:
So David, in the multifamily bootcamp, one of the main core strengths that we talk about you need to have on your team is market knowledge. We call it the market hunter. And the reason for that is that there’s such unfair advantage you can create for yourself as an operator if you get to know a market like no one else. You get to know the brokers, the good property managers, the bad property managers, the property managers that everybody knows. If you’re from out of town, that’s the property manager you use. But if you really know the market, you use the other property management company. You get to know who the acceptable vendors are in the market, who the good roofer is, who the not so great roofer is. All those things. Those happen through market infiltration. If you are new to a market, you’re not going to have all those great contacts.
And so it’s okay to invest with an operator if it’s their first time in the market, but you do want a little bit more due diligence and ask them, who did you select as your property management company and why? What else do they manage in the market? Because the PM company when we did our first deal in Winston-Salem, for example, Winston-Salem, North Carolina? That PM company was the one that introduced us to the roofer that we ought to talk to. And the roofer then said, “No, no, don’t call that other roofer because they’ve really messed up a few of our other properties, right?” So you want to know who they’re relying on to help them infiltrate the market. And a lot of times it’s a PM company or maybe a fellow other real estate investor that’s on the operations team on the company, but whatever it is, make sure that they’ve got some good boots on the ground that’s helping them infiltrate very quickly.

David:
I love that and here’s why. In my own experience, when I’m new to a market, I don’t know it that well or new to an asset class or new to anything, I don’t like rushing into it. I have this analogy that when I was in the police academy that we were learning how to drive the cars on a course and basically they set up all these cones and you have to drive it in under a certain period of time and it was very difficult. They don’t give you that much time and if you hit even one cone, they say that’s hitting a pedestrian. So you fail immediately if you just touch a cone, at all. So people made two different mistakes. They would either drive it too fast and run over the cones or they would drive it too slow and not make the time.
And I think at the first run, like 70% of our class failed. It was really hard. The only way you could do this was you had to study the course and anticipate when I’m in turn A I know what turn B is going to be. So you’re actually thinking at least one step ahead. Ideally you want to think two or three steps ahead. So when you’re in a sharp turn, you’re not just staring at what you’re doing, you’re like, “All right, I’m about to come out of this. I need to get on the accelerator for half a second, build up some speed because I’m not going to break for a minute and there’s a straightaway coming and I need to be bringing speed into the straightaway, right?” So what I would do is drive very slow until I learned what to expect and then when I was anticipating the next step, I would go a little bit faster and I would just run that back and forth until I could do the whole thing quickly.
Moral of the story here is when you’re new to a market or new to a strategy or new to anything, you don’t want to smash on the accelerator. That is what raising money is, it’s hitting nos. You go way faster when you raise other people’s money than yourself.
So when you’re putting together a team or an area, when you get a great contractor, a great property manager, and I know it’s the same for you guys, you start thinking, oh boy, I could do more. Now that I finally have this person, I could scale, I could have two projects at one time, I could take down a deal I normally wouldn’t have been able to before because there’s some more margin here. That only happens when you find the property manager that you trust, the contractor that you trust, a marketing system, all of these pieces give you the confidence to go quicker. So I think that’s great advice. If you’re talking to the sponsor, you want to ask, what do you think about turn three? And if they’re like, “I don’t know, I just wait until I get to turn three before I do turn three.” That’s a red flag. You definitely don’t want to go down that path. What do you guys think about that analogy?

Matt:
I love your analogies. That’s what I think.

Andrew:
I love that. I don’t think I can top that. The only thing I would add is, just be careful of the sponsor who is picking markets like they’re swiping on Tinder and just stopping on, “Oh, this one looks good on the surface, right?” Because odds are, they don’t have the depth and the resources. The two most successful types of sponsors that I’ve come across over the years and when it comes to market selection are either the huge national guys who’ve got maybe 10/20/30,000 units and they have the resources to go into a new market with power and understand it and bring in their own management and just really take it on big time all at once or, and these are the guys that most of us and the listeners are going to know, is the sponsors that live in and invest in one market and have been doing it for a long time.
I know sponsors in San Antonio and Atlanta and Houston. They literally know every block and street and which one you should invest in and which one you shouldn’t. And if I’m giving out money, I’m going to go with someone like that.

Matt:
The only comment I have here is I love David and Andrew’s analogies and I listen to this show so that I can laugh at the phenomenal analogies they come up with and making real estate relate everything to driving courses, to Tinder, to basketball, to everything else that I hear about. So, that’s my thoughts on the matter.

David:
Keep an eye out for BiggerPockets episode 851, which is how to improve your Tinder game while making money through real estate.
All right, the next red flag, other than trying to use Tinder to find love, that’s a red flag in and of itself, but the next red flag for real estate is going to be the sponsor only pushes one return metric. I love this one because this is a clear sign of deception when people are trying to pull your attention away from areas and into others. And before I turn it over to you, Andrew, I have another example for this.
My mom told me when she was a kid, she was in this group called 4-H where they raise animals and she had a pig and she would take the pig to a competition where it would be gauged on how good of a pig it was. I have no idea how this works, it’s a weird thing. But my mom said her pig had a lazy eye and a droopy face on one side of its face and she knew the minute that they see this really jacked up pig, I’m out. So what she did was every time the judge was starting to walk to that side of the pig, she would just point something else out or she would say, “Oh, I forgot to tell you about this.” Or she would start talking about herself. And actually she used it the entire timer and the judge never made it to that side of the pig and she ended up winning with a less than ideal animal. And that is something people do to deceive. So can you explain how this would look within a multifamily deal?

Andrew:
That’s a trend that we’ve seen in the last few years is, if anyone who’s been getting solicitations from sponsors, the last five years you’ve typically seen equity multiple, and I’ll explain what all these are, or internal rate of return IRR and then all of a sudden the last six to 12 months, all everyone’s talking about is AAR and oh, okay, sure. All right, sounds good. AAR, I like that, it says I’m going to make an average annual return of 18%. So I’m going to define these each really quickly and run through what you need to look for and then why the key thing to take away here, if you miss all the details, but the key thing to take away is when evaluating a sponsor in their investment, do not rely on any one of these metrics.
You need to know all four to determine if that investment is Number One, good for you. And Two, knowing all four will help you ferret out the different risks and levers that are being pulled to generate the returns. Because any one of these four is easily manipulated on a spreadsheet. And if all you look at is the one that’s being projected to look good, you might miss what’s showing up on the other factors that will reveal what’s going on.
So, internal rate of return, IRR, that is basically a way of looking at your compounded return over time. And then basically it says, “Hey, money today is worth more than money tomorrow.” The second one, AAR, that is average annual return. And that’s exactly what it sounds like. Just take your return, divide it by the time and that’s your average. So here’s the difference. Let’s say you have two investments. They’re both five years. You put $100,000 in and it’s a great investment. Five years later you get $200,000 out. For one of them, you get $10,000 in cash for every year and at the end you get $50,000 back.
The second one you get zero for five years and then you get $100,000 back. Which one’s the better investment? It’s the one that gave you $10,000 a year upfront and then $50,000 at the end. Well, if you evaluate those two investments with these two metrics, the IRR, internal rate of return is going to be higher for the one that gave you $10,000 a year because you got your money back sooner. And if the IRR on the second one where you had to wait five years to get anything, it’s going to be much lower. So what’s happened recently is that as cashflow has gotten more and more difficult to generate with new assets, everyone has switched to AAR to, I wouldn’t say hide the fact, but maybe not fully disclose the fact that almost the entire return is on the backend and that until you get there, not much is going to be happening.
So that is why you want to look at both IRR and AAR. The other two are cash on cash. I think most listeners are probably pretty familiar with that. It’s just does the investment generate 4% a year, 5%, 6%, 7%? The key thing here is to make sure that the cash on cash is actually being generated by the asset and is not just extra money that was raised up front to give it back to you and call it a distribution. That’s a whole ‘nother topic, but that’s something to look out for.
And then the fourth one is equity multiple. This is really just exactly what it sounds like. You put in your equity or your investment. How many times over is it going to be multiplied at the end of this thing? If you put in a hundred thousand and five years later you get a total of 200,000 back, your five-year equity multiple is a 2.0.
And so by looking at all four of these together, you can again determine if it fits your investment goals, but also figure out if and where the sponsor may be hiding something. And then again, it may not be intentional. They may be using, for example, really high leverage, like 80% or something in mezzanine debt or preferred equity to get a high IRR. If all you look at is the IRR, this is going to look exciting because it’s at 20%, but then you go look at these other three that I talked about and they’re not going to look so good because of that. Bottom line is look at all four of those together. Matt or David, anything you want to add or that I missed?

Matt:
I just want to say that first of all, thank you Andrew for summarizing those things because they get thrown around a lot and it’s assumed or maybe hoped that people don’t understand what those things are or maybe assume that people do. So I’m glad that you went through and defined them. The only thing I would say on top of that is as an investor, what’s your duty to do is to look at how they calculate the IRR, the cash on cash, those kinds of things. Because there’s levers that the syndicator, the operator, the sponsor can pull to make the IRR look really, really good. We’re going to sell it five years from now at today’s cap rate. Or we’re going to sell it and double our money, whatever it is a year or two from now or five years from now, whatever it is.
There are factors that they can use to not so much manipulate the numbers, but to make the numbers shine in the best light on the deal. And you want to look at what the assumptions that they made because every syndicator is being asked to look into the future. And so if they look into the future with super rosy colored glasses, well we’re probably going to sell into a booming economy and we’re probably going to sell when interest rates are going to be back down to 3%. We’re probably going to refinance and get a 4% loan. Well, given today’s standards, you might not. And so it’s important to make sure the operator made conservative assumptions when they present those metrics to investors.

David:
You can see why AAR is going to be a more popular metric because it doesn’t account for the inflation. If inflation is 5% a year and it’s a five-year deal, that’s actually a 25% pad that they’ve been able to work into what their numbers would look like versus the IRR, you’re getting your money right now and it can’t be inflated literally by inflation. So, you can see this is the tricky way that people can adjust what they’re saying to make it look better than it is.
All right, last red flag. The sponsor is not transparent about where the money’s coming from and where it is going or if there are strings attached.

Andrew:
This is another one where we could almost do an entire podcast on it, but essentially what you’re looking for as an LP here is there’s a couple of different things. Number One, sources and uses, right? So if they’re raising $8 million, how much of that is for down payment? How much of that is for fees? How much is for renovation? How much is for reserves? How much is for maybe a rate cap or all of those things? And that gets into how you vet a deal. I actually just talked to somebody unfortunately today who had a situation where, whether it was their, they didn’t understand or it seems like this maybe not have been disclosed, but an additional capital partner was brought into the deal and they were a large capital partner and that large capital partner came in with a clause that said, if certain targets aren’t met, we have the right to arbitrarily buy out the entire LP position at a value we determine.
Basically, let’s just say that investors getting zero. Because, you ever seen those contracts where it’s like, for a consideration of $1 seller does … this. That’s essentially what happened where this large capital partner said, because of this, this, and this, we have the unilateral right to buy out the limited partners for an amount we determine and the amount they determined was effectively zero. And unfortunately this is really common. These kinds of clauses and strings are common with mezzanine debt, with rescue capital, with institutional capital. So it’s not that this situation was completely out of the norm or even fraudulent, it’s just that it doesn’t seem like it was fully disclosed to the investor and/or the investor didn’t fully understand the ramifications of it.
So make sure that any investment you’re doing that you fully understand the capital stack. And when I say capital stack, think of it like literally a stack of pancakes, right? The debt, maybe a big juicy layer preferred equity, and then the LP equity on top of that. And however you want to stack that up, make sure you fully understand not the structure of it and then the rights that come with each piece of that structure. Lenders are not the only ones who can come and take over a deal.

David:
All right, thank you for that Andrew. Matt, to close us out, can you give us some common sense principles for people to keep in mind when choosing a sponsor?

Matt:
Thank you, David. So guys, here’s some common sense principles for you guys to take home and take to heart when you’re looking at deals as either a investor or even as an operator. A great sponsor can turn a bad deal into a good one, just like a bad sponsor can turn a great deal into a terrible one. Good sponsors can have deals not work out, and they are willing to tell you about them. So good sponsors, guys, are transparent, good times and bad. Look for asymmetric risk, meaning the amount of money you could make on the upside of the deal is much, much more than you could potentially lose on the downside of the deal. Use your gut, guys. Listen, a lot of times your gut’s right. There’s some Spidey senses, if I may use a superhero analogy. There are some good things in your intuition.
So use those when considering a deal. And if your gut says slow down a little bit, maybe do a little bit more diligence, do that. If you don’t understand, don’t invest in it. That’s a great analogy for anything. Don’t invest in anything that you can’t comprehend or explain to somebody else very easily. And if you guys want a lot more thoughts, as in from an LPs perspective on how to select the right operator, consider all of our good friend Brian Burke wrote a book called The Hands-Off Investor. And it is a great book about selecting operators. And at the very end of that book, there is, I believe, 72 questions that I’ve had investors ask me to answer all 72 of them. So maybe don’t do that to an operator, but pick maybe the top five you like and send them over to an operator you’re considering investing in because Brian put a lot of hard work into that book and it’s intended to help you guys select operators that are really going to be there for your best interest.

David:
All right, so several good book recommendations on today’s show. We mentioned my book, Pillars of Wealth: How to Make, Save, and Invest Your Money to Achieve Financial Freedom. Brian Burke’s book, The Hands-Off Investor. Matt Faircloth’s book, Raising Private Capital, and I’ll throw a bonus one in there for you. You can also get this at the biggerpockets.com/store website. The Richest Man in Babylon, which covers investing principles. And one of them is don’t invest in anything that you don’t understand.
A quick recap of our seven red flags. The sponsor has a different partner for every deal. The sponsor suggests anything suspicious like inflating proof of funds or not disclosing material facts. The sponsor does not have a successful track record in the business. They lack focus, meaning that this is not their core expertise, it’s just one thing that they’re doing. The sponsor is new to that market. The sponsor only pushes one return metric. The old smoke and mirrors. And the sponsor isn’t transparent about where the money is coming from and where it is going to.
Matt, Andrew, thank you so much for joining me on this show. This is very valuable to our audience, which hopefully we could help people save some money. I’ve said it before, the old flex was bragging about how many doors you got. The new flex is holding onto what you have accumulated during the good years.
All right guys, thank you very much for today’s show. This has been fantastic. Appreciate you all being here. I’m going to let you guys get out of here. If you’re listening to this and you enjoyed our show and helping save you some money, please consider giving us a five star review wherever you listen to podcasts. Those are incredibly helpful for us. And share this show with anyone you know of that is considering investing in someone else’s deal before they send their money.
And if you’d like to get in touch with any of us, you can find out more in the show notes.
Do I look like a Shar Pei when I do this, in my head?

Matt:
A little bit?

Andrew:
Actually, you kind of look like one of those Sega characters that had the lines on there.

Matt:
Yes, the bad guy. And Sonic the Hedgehog.

David:
Dr. Robotnik. That’s right.

Andrew:
You know what, quick side note, I think pigs should be man’s best friend instead of dogs because three quick – Number One, highly intelligent and trainable. Two, easy to care for and Three someday when they pass away? Bacon, right?

Mark Cuban says he’s leaving ABC’s long-running series Shark Tank. The question is, who could the network get to replace him?

Cuban has been a shark, or investor looking for new opportunities, on the series since season three. The program is currently in season 15, and the billionaire said on the All the Smoke podcast this week that he plans to leave after season 16.

ABC has not yet confirmed Cuban’s departure, which is still a while off.

Still, Cuban is by far the biggest name on the program, appearing alongside fellow sharks Daymond John, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, Kevin O’Leary and Barbara Corcoran. His high-profile media presence and willingness to promote the show make him very valuable to ABC, which could have been caught off-guard by his off-the-cuff remark.

If Cuban does indeed, depart, the network will need an equally high-profile replacement to succeed him. It’s also an opportunity to add diversity to a largely homogenous panel of investors. Though the network is likely months from making any sort of decision, here are five possibilities to replace Cuban, whose net worth is $6.2 billion, according to Forbes.

1. Kylie Jenner

Why not dream big? One of the stars of The Kardashians on Hulu, Kylie Jenner is also a cosmetics mogul and model who is worth $680 million. While she’s not actually a billionaire, her clout and name could prove valuable to any of the Shark Tank inventors, and any network would love to have a Jenner on their program.

2. Aman Gupta

The breakout star of Shark Tank India, Aman Gupta co-founded boAT, a wearables company that has taken off very quickly. He’s known for his positive outlook and excitement for ideas pitched on the Indian version of the program, a trait he shares with the enthusiastic Cuban. Gupta would share a similar hype man type of role.

3. Tyler Perry

The billionaire who built an entertainment empire based on movies and TV shows has the showmanship and bluster to match the current set of sharks. Tyler Perry famously supports Black brands and would bring sharp business acumen to the table—but he’s already so busy with all his pursuits (he also acts in films and shows he doesn’t produce or write), it might be tough to get on his schedule.

4. Col. Jennifer Pritzker

The Pritzker family has been on Forbes’ list of wealthiest families for decades, and Col. Jennifer Pritzker has an interesting story. She was a Republican donor until a few years ago, when Pritzker, who is transgender, said she could not support Donald Trump (she famously explained, “why should I contribute to my own destruction?”). A savvy businesswoman devoted to philanthropy, she would bring great knowledge of nonprofits and the military, adding to the sharks’ dimensionality.

5. Camila Coelho

A Brazilian YouTube star with more than 10 million Instagram followers, Camila Coelho is a self-made millionaire whose matter-of-fact approach to beauty has earned her legions of fans worldwide. She launched both a beauty and a clothing line, and the influencer appeared in People magazine after giving birth to her first child, something she had long worried she couldn’t do because she has epilepsy. Her fun personality, gorgeous clothes and huge platform make her an excellent potential shark.

Ashley:
This is Real Estate Rookie. My name is Ashley Kehr, and I am here with my co-host, Tony J. Robinson.

Tony:
And welcome to the Real Estate Rookie Podcast where every week, twice a week, we bring you the inspiration, motivation, and stories you need to hear to kickstart your investing journey. And today, we’ve got Brian Lubin. Brian’s also a podcaster, but a real estate investor, entrepreneur who really documents his journey of being able to leave his six-figure salary with only two deals. He only had two deals. And he talks about this strategy of using both passive income and what he calls passionate income, and how you can combine those two things together to really accelerate the time that you can leave your job or, I guess, so you can leave your job faster.

Ashley:
Yeah. The foundation is really important to having that stability to be able to do that. But it’s not just all roses and happiness. He had a panic attack, and that wasn’t really because of real estate, which most of us do have panic attacks over or worry about. It was actually just the fact of leaving his job.
And he actually talks about how detrimental and serious a panic attack can feel. So he’s going to go through as to when this happened to him, what were the steps that he took in that moment to reassure himself that he was making that right decision to actually move forward with leaving his job.
At the end, you’ll want to keep listening because we go into more detail on co-living and how he was using this real estate strategy, but also even some tax strategies that he implemented during this process too, especially if you are house hacking or you’ve lived in your primary residence, he lets you know something that is a really, really good piece of advice that you may not realize as far as paying taxes on your primary residence.

Tony:
All right. So before we kick it over, I want to give a shout-out to someone by the name of Jet 91 Jackson. Jet, love to see a five-star view on Apple Podcast. And Jet says, “I’ve been listening to the original BP podcast for years, and I also love on the market, but I find myself gravitating more towards the Rookie Podcast every single day. They cover all the details and strategies a rookie would need to know, and I love hearing the challenges people have run into and how they overcome that in their journey. Not to mention Ashley and Tony complement each other very well. Keep it up, guys. You’re helping more people than you know.”
Jet, really appreciate those kind words. That truly is why Ashley and I love doing this podcast is to hear stories just like that. And you kind of hit randomly on a lot of what we’re going to be talking about in today’s episode, right? You get to hear a lot of challenges. You get to hear about how they overcame them, and it’s just cool that we get to present so many stories like that to folks just like this. So if you’re a part of the Rookie audience, if you’re enjoying this content, please take just a few minutes out of your day. Leave us an honest rating and review on whatever podcast platform it is you’re listening to.

Ashley:
Brian, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today. Please let us know a little bit about you and how you were able to get started in real estate.

Brian:
Oh, man. So I had a very traditional upbringing. I went to high school, did the four-year college thing, thought that I was going to be a suit and tie wearing guy for the rest of my life, and that was going to be the pinnacle of existence, right? I was like, “Man, I can’t wait to make it to the top of this corporate mountaintop, and I’m just going to make it to manager, VP. I’m going to drive the fancy cars, have the nice watches, have the beautiful house, be at the coolest country club.”
And so, that was my intention after I left college. I didn’t have this backstory of wanting to be an entrepreneur, wanting to be an investor, any of this stuff. Very traditional, just I wanted to make money. I wanted to just do the thing, and I wanted to get better. So when I was looking at that, I originally got my degree in marketing, and I realized, “Wait a second, this whole salary thing, if I’m really good, I’m making the same amount of money as somebody does not really good. It’s the same amount of money.”
I was like, “Wait, hold on a second. Can I go do something where if I get better, I get paid more?” So I was introduced to sales. So I joined this Fortune 500 sales organization. It was a wonderful experience, which is ironic because I actively preached about how to get out of corporate America, but it was as good as it could have been and, sometimes, the most difficult situations to leave. It’s very easy to leave when things are awful. It’s harder to leave when things are good enough. And that applies to relationships, your life, your business, anything.
So I made it to the top of that company over four and a half years. I made it up and just worked my tail off, blood, sweat and tears, 80-hour weeks really learning, being coachable, just taking feedback, going to the top reps in the company and asking them for help. And that was my first run in with mentorship, made it to the top, got everything I ever wanted, won number eight out of 5,079 for the position rep of the year, rookie of the year, and then decided it was time to leave.

Tony:
Brian, first, something you said that I think I want to circle back to you, it’s an important point, but you talked about how when you first got that W2 job and you were looking around like, “Man, I’m making the same as everyone else, even though I feel that I’m a better employee than these people,” and you said, “I want to go into a field that kind of compensates me based on the value that I can provide.” I think that in itself is a major lesson for a lot of rookies who are listening today because say that your goal is to accelerate your ability to save cash, to put money towards your real estate business, sometimes, the simplest solution is getting a new job, right?
And if you can leave this job where you’re tied to a 2% annual raise based on how the company performs or whatever it is, and instead move yourself into a position where based on your skills, based on your merits, based on the value that you provide, you can exponentially increase your income, that’s one of the fastest ways to kind of kickstart your real estate journey.
So I want to talk about this because there’s, I think, a certain sentiment, Brian, towards the sales profession. There’s a lot of people who feel that I can’t be a good salesman, or being a salesperson just kind of gives me the ick or I don’t know if I like the idea of doing that. So what’s your rebuttal to people that have hesitancy about sales as a career?

Brian:
So you guys have complete control over what you sell, who you sell for, and how long you do it. So what my advice is, especially to those people that are listening that are maybe in college, that are looking to make that first jump, go into an organization that’s tried, tested, and proven to where you can actually get behind the product that you’re selling because, then, selling isn’t a game of closing people. It’s the game of helping people make a decision. That’s it.
And sometimes, the decision is that it’s not the best fit, and that’s okay. And I’ll tell you right now, Tony and Ashley, the best salespeople in the world are the ones that will actively lead with that and say, “Hey, I’m here to help you make a decision. This may not be the best thing for you, but it may be the greatest thing for you,” and I only want you to do it if it is the greatest thing for you.
And so, that’s what led to everything. And I even sold myself into that position because I had zero experience, and they said, “Well, why should we do this for you?” And I said, “Well, if you hire someone with a bunch of experience, they may do things the way you don’t want them to do it.” I’m a blank slate. I’m a clean canvas. You can mold me into whatever you want me to become. And that’s what happened.
And so, I made it to the top of that company. And then, a piece of advice that I give to everyone that I think is really, really important, look at your boss’s boss. So that’s what I did because I made it to the top. I won the awards. There was nowhere else to go besides promotions, right? And so, in corporate, you start shadowing your manager. And then, you see their boss too, and you start following the position, and they’re like, “This is what the day-to-day looks like.”
And I followed them, and I was like, “Oh my God, you have less freedom than I do. Oh-oh.” I was like, “Bro, you have Zoom calls in 15-minute increments throughout your entire day, and your diet is donuts and caffeine.” I was like, “Oh-oh, I don’t want to do this.”And then, that’s when I started being like, “There’s got to be another way. There’s got to be another option. I can’t be 30, 40, 50, 60 years old living that kind of existence. I want to have my freedom to do what I want, when I want, with who I want.” So then, that’s when I was introduced to real estate. I’ll pause there.

Tony:
Yeah. And I want to go into the real estate piece, Brian. But one last thing that I want to circle back to is, I can’t remember how you phrased it, but it was really well said, but you said that it’s easy to leave when you hate your job, but it’s harder to leave when things are just okay. And it’s true, right, because when things are just okay, it’s this idea of you start to get complacent, you find yourself in your comfort zone. And it reminds me of the story.
Have you guys heard the story about the dog that’s sitting on the nail? Have you guys heard this? So there’s a story, these two neighbors. One neighbor walks over to their neighbor’s house, and the neighbor’s got a dog sitting on the front porch. And neighbor’s in his rocking chair, a dog sitting next to him, and the dog’s just howling.
And the other neighbor is like, “What’s wrong with your dog?” And the neighbor who has a dog, he’s like, “Oh, he’s sitting on a nail.” And the other neighbor says, “Well, why doesn’t the dog move?” And the neighbor says, “Because it doesn’t hurt bad enough.”
And it’s this analogy for how a lot of people live life where we’re all sitting on some sort of nails in different parts of our life, but we don’t take action because the pain isn’t great enough. So the question to you then, Brian, is what was the straw that broke the camel’s back, or at what point did that pain get big enough for you to have that moment where you woke up and said, “This is what I want to do full time”?

Brian:
Oh, it was absolutely when I got everything I ever wanted. So I call these the mountaintop moments of life, and it represents the 2% of life where you get everything. You hit that goal. You run the marathon. You accomplish that thing that you’ve been working towards, and you get up to it, and you raise your hands in victory, and you’re like, “Yes, I did it.” And you’re like, “Oh, wait, now what?” And then, back to the 98% of life, which is accomplishing the next goal. S.
So once I looked at my boss and I looked at my boss’s boss and I realized the goals that I want in life do not correlate with the trajectory that’s before me. So that ceiling kind of started coming down on me. And then, when I was able… Like you said, it was a good job. I was making great money for my 20s. And I had to create the pain from the future and bring it to the present in order for me to do that, because I was like, “I want to be a present father in the future. I want to have my freedom. I want to have control of my time.”
And if I continue down this path, I will not have those things. So therefore, this is the moment I need to draw a line in the sand and make a change in my life. And then, I feel like people that are listening to that, you guys have all had these moments already, which is why you’re listening to BiggerPockets and you’re listening to Real Estate Rookie. You’ve already had those moments, and you’re trying to find that other path, that other alternative. And it’s here.

Ashley:
I think there’s three different ways that actually could have gone. So you needed that next goal, that next achievement. You were at the mountaintop, and you needed another mountain to actually climb. But what about the people whose mindset is, “I’m comfortable, I’m complacent, I’m just going to stay here”? And then what about the people that get too comfortable where they actually start sliding down that other side as to maybe that they get comfortable. They’re like, “We love this lifestyle creep, but it starts creeping too much.”
And then, they start partying too much, and they start going on too many vacations. And their work starts to slide. How did you achieve that mindset of, “I need another mountain,” instead of staying complacent or actually falling back down that path?

Brian:
Oh, that’s a great question. So Tony Robbins has this quote that says, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”

Ashley:
Tony Robinson?

Tony:
Yeah.

Brian:
Oh, yeah.

Tony:
Oh, [inaudible 00:11:43]

Brian:
Yeah. No. Tony Robinson has got this great quote about this dog on a nail. Tony Robbins has this great quote about if you’re not growing, you’re dying. And that applies throughout all of life. So I’ll answer that with there’s actually this wonderful book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, and it was by this hospice nurse named Bronnie Ware.
And in this book, she interviewed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of her patients on their death beds. And the vast majority of them on their death beds, when they were asked, “Your regrets of life, what do you look back on and regret,” most of them are regrets of omission of things that they didn’t do as opposed to things that they did do that they wish they hadn’t. So it was, “I wish I would’ve went and talked to that person I saw at the bar. I wish I would’ve spoke my mind. I wish I would’ve been true to myself. I wish I would’ve left that job, and done something else.”
And so, they’re all thinking about the things that could have been. And so a piece of advice that I give to people is zoom out to 80-year-old you, and it’s like, “Is 80-year-old you happy with what you’re doing looking back on your life right now?”
If not, take the advice of that person. So it’s like I talked to the 80-year-old version of myself a lot, and I’m saying, “Okay, cool.” Looking back on all of this, what does this look like? And so, that really helped reinforce it. And there’s this thing called sunk-cost fallacy, which is you spent so many years climbing this mountain that you make it 75% of the way to the top, and then you realize that the only way to make it to the top is to go all the way back down and climb another path, which all of us have been, especially in real estate investing, because it’s seasonal sometimes too.
And you’re like, “Oh man, I can’t go all the way back down. I’ve made it so far.” And that’s a lot of relationships too. You’re like, “We’ve been married 10 years. I don’t want to start all over again.” But, sometimes, it’s like you have to go back down to the base of the mountain to make it to the actual mountaintop that you’re looking to summit. A lot of the people, the top regrets of the dying were, “Man, I wish I would’ve gone back down to the base and tried to climb again a different way,” because that’s where the fun of life is. It’s in the climb. Hopefully, that answered the question.

Ashley:
Do you think there is in that story or that situation, there’s some part of some people where they may be thinking that I actually wish I could start over?

Brian:
Yeah.

Ashley:
I wish that it was wiped away and I would start over, knowing what I know now, it would be so much easier to build and to create that path, and I could get up there faster because of what I know now.

Brian:
Oh, and the coolest part is you already know what you know now today.

Ashley:
Yeah.

Brian:
So tomorrow is literally that instance for you to start all over again for fresh, because I tell people the reason that people don’t take action is because they’re terrified to start. They don’t have the confidence to take the action, but taking the action is what builds the confidence, ironically.
And so, the advice I give to people, especially people listening, that on your first property, your first three properties, your first 10, if you do leave that job to go do this thing full-time, when the cashflow supports it, what’s the worst case scenario that’s going to happen, the worst possible thing? You fail, right? Oh man, repairs, CapEx, a roof goes out, the tenant, there’s a messy eviction, like “Oh, crap. What now?” You go get another job. It’s like your worst case scenario is your present day reality.
And then, people are like, “Oh, okay, that makes sense.” And so, that alleviates the fear a lot to just get started because analysis paralysis, I know which we’ll get into here in this episode, that’s the big boogeyman that everyone’s got to beat. That’s the dragon that needs to be slayed for people to do anything because let’s face the reality of the situation. We all know how to do this stuff. BiggerPockets does exist. There’s a lot of episodes. There’s a lot of YouTube videos. There’s a lot of books. So it’s just a matter of people being like, “There’s other roadblocks that are keeping them from that now.”

Ashley:
Brian, I’m curious. When you approach someone that is stuck in that analysis paralysis, what are some questions you ask them to try to help them get out of it?

Brian:
What do you want? What do you want? So it’s like that scene in the notebook where he is banging on the window, and it’s just like, “What do you want,” because 99% of people can’t answer that at all. And because in our society you’re not trained, it’s not encouraged for you to actually ask what you want. You’re encouraged to be practical and reasonable. So like, “Hey, whoa, too much dip on your chip there. Calm down. Come back. Let’s not do this whole real estate thing,” which my entire family told me how stupid of an idea it was, which I’m sure you guys can relate to, all my friends, all my coworkers, at the time, because that was my network. That was it. They all told me it was the worst idea ever. And so through doing all of that, I asked people, what the heck do you want?
If you won the lottery tomorrow, if you had $100 million just pop into your bank account and you don’t never have to work a day in your life again, what are you doing? What does your day look like? What does your routine look like? Where are you living? Who are you with? How do you feel?
And so, the biggest thing that I’ve done throughout all of investing in all of anything is literally just wrote down what the heck I wanted. And I’ve done that for a long time now for the last three years. This is an excellent book called Vivid Vision by Cameron Herold. And it talks about writing out a three. And he’s been a guest on BiggerPockets on the main podcast too. And so, he talks about writing out in present tense three years in the future, “What does your life and business look like if you’re experiencing it today, if anything was possible?”
And when you write that out, then all of a sudden, you have a goalpost to aim for. When you have a goalpost to aim for, now, you actually have an understanding of what to say yes to and what to say no to. So the reason that most people are not starting is because they have too many options, and they’re driving in this car, and it’s dark, and it’s foggy and cloudy, and they have zero visibility. Of course, you’re going to go slow.
It would be fullest for you to mash the gas in that situation. But if it’s crystal clear, you got the Google Maps set. You got a freaking playlist, bump it on Spotify, you’re listening to BiggerPockets, you can just mash the gas. You can go clear. So clarity is the answer. And that also solves anxiety because people are just anxious because they have too many options. So if you remove all these different options and you’re only focused on one, game over.

Tony:
Yeah. One thing I want to add to that, Brian, you made a couple of really good points. But the last piece you said about just making the decision, I think that’s where a lot of people get stuck, is that they have this overwhelm because they’re like, “I need to make a decision that I can live with for the rest of my life.” That is not the case.
You make a decision today based on the information that you currently have available. And then, you start progressing down that path. And then, every opportunity that you get, you’re kind of reassessing, does this still make sense for me? And then, sometimes, you might need to pivot, and you pivot this way, and you pivot that way because the path to success is never a straight line. It’s really messy. And there’s ups, and there’s downs. And there’s 180s where you’re not even making any progress at some points.
But the point that I’m trying to make for all of our rookies that are listening, and this was advice that a mentor gave to me, was that it’s not super important in terms of what you decide. What’s more important is that you make a decision. And once you do that, then, you can start making and feeling that progress and feeling that momentum.
And then, the other thing you said was that your family wasn’t incredibly supportive. And I think that is a big challenge for a lot of our rookies listening as well, is that they’ve got their Uncle Jims who watch CNBC and think they have all the information about real estate investing, but they’ve done exactly zero deals themselves. But yet, somehow, Uncle Jim is this authority on what it takes to be a successful real estate investor. And because most of us who have never invested in real estate before, we don’t have that network of people who are also doing it. We feel influenced by Uncle Jim because, hey, he’s our uncle, he’s our family member. I love Uncle Jim. He’s given me good advice before. So he must be right about investing in real estate. But the thing that I always say is that you should only take advice from someone that’s actually done the thing that you’re wanting to do.

Brian:
Bingo.

Tony:
And if they haven’t done that, then, why take advice from them? I feel like I’m a pretty good dad, but I wouldn’t feel qualified to give my son advice on how to do an open heart surgery. I’ve never done it before, but if he wants to learn from me about real estate investing, I can teach him that. So I think that’s a super important point, Brian, I’m glad you brought it up, was that community can either support you or they can pull you back.

Brian:
And everyone’s so stuck at capital H, how. Right? Everyone listening to this podcast in some way, shape or form, it’s like, “How? How do I do this? How do I get mentors? How do I find peers, partners? How do I raise capital?” What are all these crazy things that you guys are talking about all the time?
And when you change the question, exactly what you said, Tony, it was a great point because this is an awesome segue, when you change the questions from how to where and then to who, the game changes. Life unlocks. Everything becomes easier because you don’t have to do this by yourself. And anxiety and indecision, analysis paralysis because you’re doing it by yourself and you’re trying to, and you have to start that way in the beginning. I did it by myself for the first three years, and I felt like I was on an island.
And a lot of people listen to this feel like they’re on an island. So when you know where you’re going, there’s this crazy thing in your brain called reticular activating system, RAS for short. When you go buy a new car to car dealership, you drive out on the road, you start seeing that car freaking everywhere. So it’s just your brain just being trained to see what you’re paying attention to.
So when you know where you’re going, and you’re saying, “Man, I want to travel around the world,” which is what I did. I quit that job and I traveled full-time around the world for eight months. I was like, That’s what I want to do.” So I’m like, “Who has done that? Who has built a business? Who has invested in real estate and built a framework around that, that allows them to have the remote management style and the ability to travel while they do it?”
So that allowed me to say no to other opportunities that presented themselves because every single yes needs to be justified by a hundred nos. So strategy isn’t really a game of what to say yes to. Strategy is a game of what to say no to.
And for me, I was like, “I can’t do multifamily.” It’s too hands-on right now. I can’t do Airbnb for me, at the time, two hands on because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But I was like, man, “I could do this house hack thing. I got this down, and I could be able to go travel around the world, and you’re telling me I don’t have to pay for rent. What?” I was like, all of a sudden, this just unlocked for me. So you need to know what attributes that you’re looking for in your mentor as well. Then, that’s when you start recognizing those people.

Ashley:
Brian, when you started the second mountain, can you kind of go back and tell us as to how you actually quit your first job and made that decision and what your next step was? Was it to get into real estate, or what was the process there?

Brian:
Yeah. So a bunch of people listening to this want to quit their jobs, right? That’s basically what I’ve built my entire personality around. So I’ve got this covered, guys. So the advice that I always give around leaving your job is, man, do things in tandem with your job.
Guys, think back to what Tony said at the beginning of the episode about your income. Your income is your biggest asset when you’re first purchasing real estate because you’re bankable, you’re loanable, and you’re able to save that money and have that cash cushion. So we start with our W2 income. And then, eventually, once you have a couple of doors under your belt, then, you can start leveraging all the creative strategies. I know we all want to do sub -2 seller finance, all these wraps and all this stuff to get the first couple of doors, and that’s all fine and good.
But the easiest and best way that’s most predictable and you can spread it out across everyone, it’s just being really good at your job and being where your feet are and making sure that that’s optimized so that you can start buying the property.
So what I did was I had my doors already purchased. I just bought one a year. It was very boring, very unsexy. Anybody can do it. They’d be terrified to learn that anyone can do it. And so, I just did that. So by the time that it came, now, I was making a six-figure income, which some people may think is an advantage and a privilege. And other people that are making a six-figure income also view it a different way, which is oof, this is way more difficult to replace.
40, 50,000 is easier to replace than over 150,000 plus. So it’s like it’s a different game to play. And so, I always say there’s three different levels of passive cashflow that you need. And if you chunk it down, it makes it more attainable. So you have survive, arrive and thrive. So if somebody’s making $100,00, even $70,000 plus, that may be really intimidating for them to figure out how to build that passive cashflow.
And they’re like, “There’s no way I can get out of my job.” But I’m like, “Okay. Well, let’s chunk it down.” So survive, first step. So for survive, we’re just figuring out what are our fixed expenses, roof over our head, food on the table, bills paid. I can survive here. And then, that’s going to be way lower than what your total income is take home.
Arrive is now you’ve got some discretionary room, you can wiggle around a little bit. And then, thrive is, “Oh man, I got this whole thing replaced.” So for me, once I hit that survive and kind of moved to arrive, that was about $4,000 a freaking month for me. Wasn’t that much cashflow? I had two properties co-living that I lived in one part, rented the other rooms out, bought one a year, and I had $4,000 coming in. I was like, “I live for free. I’m debt free, because I always made sure to pay off the credit cards and everything.” I was like, “This is enough to swing for the plate and try to venture out and start up side hustles, take big bets on myself, do my own thing.”
And so January, February, March of 2022, the income was coming in. I started up my own podcast and that started producing revenue as well. It’s like a side hustle. And I was like, “I got this. This is consistent.”
March of 2022, I left that job. And as we were talking about this before the podcast, I journaled every single day, day one, post W2, day two, day 14. I was having panic attacks after I left my job. And so, that’s the irony, is nobody talks about what happens after you do the thing, after you have done, you’ve left your job, you hit quote-unquote “financial freedom,” whatever you want to call it.
There’s a whole lot of life to live afterwards. And none of us, none of us, are just wanting to sit on a freaking beach and do nothing. I did it. I lived in Greece for a month, and I traveled full-time for eight months. I literally lived on the beach. And after three weeks, you’re hung over and sun burnt.
So it’s like what is next afterwards? So a coach asked me something that really changed my life. And I always love sharing it on podcasts because it really impacts people. And my coach said… And you guys will really resonate with this. He said, “Okay. So you want to build $20,000 of passive income.” And everyone says “10,000 is kind of the default,” that you guys probably hear a month. And he goes, “Okay. So you want to build this passive income.” He goes, “Why does all of it need to be passive? Why?”
He’s like, “Can’t you make some of it passive and then just go try to figure out how to generate active income in ways that are super fun to you?” I was like, “Oh my god. Yeah. That sounds awesome.” And so, that’s what I did.
So I used the real estate to build the foundation to exit, and then ask the question, “What really fires me up that I can do, that I would do for free but I can make money from?” And that’s where I came up with passionate income.
So for some people that is building a big old real estate company, that is building an Airbnb empire, that is doing wholesaling, flipping, self-storage, whatever have you, for me, it was podcasting, and I’m still going to buy a bunch of real estate in my life, and we’ll go into my real estate journey here in a second.
But it’s just I want to get everyone to that point where they have enough passive income coming in to where they can focus on passionate income and to really drive the point home and to land the plane. Think about Steve Irwin. He’s a perfect example of this. Steve Irwin was a dude that was the crocodile hunter for people that are maybe don’t recognize the name. He was the guy that lived every single day. He was on freaking fire. Dude’s soul just radiated through the television, and every single person around the world resonated with this guy.
And so, when he died, I remember there was a quote that he had that really stuck out with me. He said, “Give me all the money. Give me the millions of dollars. I’m going to pour it all back into wildlife and conservation, and my family.” And now, his kids are old enough to be doing the same thing that he did. So I want everyone to have that passion. It may not be quitting your job and traveling around the world full time like I did. But if it’s making freaking candles in a cabin in Colorado or teaching surf classes in Hawaii, I want you to do that. A lot of information. I’ll pause there.

Ashley:
You know what? But that is such a great point, and that is very true. When a lot of people do hit that financial freedom, they still end up going out and working somehow, whether it’s a passion project or it’s a job to help somebody else. Whatever that is, it is very true that most people just don’t stop everything and sit on the beach especially, there’s a lot of people too that do education. So whatever they’ve built passively, then, they are so passionate about it, and they help other people to get to that point too. But let’s talk about some of that real estate. So do you have a deal that you want to walk us through?

Brian:
Yeah. Let’s walk through two of them because I don’t have much real estate, guys. So maybe, I don’t know what I’m talking about. No. The first couple of deals, man, the first deal, I’ll tell you guys, every single person that I knew in my world at the time told me how dumb it was. And the second deal, there were less people.
And now to give you, guys, a full circle snapshot, I just exited both of these deals. I actually sold them, which we can get into that as well about why I made that decision to sell. And now, I have enough cash to be able to float three years of living expenses by doing whatever I want of that thrive level based off the equity created from these two terrible decisions that everyone told me about. So, guys, real estate pays off in the future through appreciation.
It may not be this rapid COVID appreciation that we had, but if you hold on 10, 20 years, it starts to get fun. So the first property I bought was about $300,000 in North Atlanta. I put 3% down. I did a conventional house hack. So that’s what I did, is I put that downpayment down. I lived in one room, and I went and rented the other rooms out.
So when I was looking for a property, I did what David Greene calls the luxury house hack. So I bought a five bed, four bath houses, 1970s built plus or newer with two kitchens, in-law suite, two separate entrances because in Atlanta, duplexes are either way off in kind of the rural markets, and they’re very dilapidated and need a lot of CapEx, or they’re like $4 million in the middle of the city. And a lot of people are relating to this because I talked to people 24/7, and they’re saying, “I’m sitting on $80,000 of cash that I’ve saved, and I’m trying to buy this condo or this place, the house hack, and I’m not able to buy it.
I keep getting outbid. The interest rates are going crazy. And then, I’m just like, “Okay, well, let’s zoom out, and go back to what we’re actually aiming for here.” So back then, I was able to do that and just break even in the beginning, right? And then, when I moved out, I was able to rent it out by the room instead of by sections.
So in the beginning, I rented it out in the top half as a full unit, bottom half as one person living in a bedroom. Afterwards, I transitioned to the co-living approach by rent, by the room. And then, that was able to produce about 1600 to 1800 of pure net cashflow on top of CapEx and everything afterwards. So I just rinsed and repeated that same strategy and got the same house again the next year.

Ashley:
How did you not get shiny object syndrome and stay focused on doing that same thing on repeat?

Brian:
At the time, I didn’t know anything else because I was just-

Ashley:
That’s a good answer.

Brian:
And that was such a blessing. I didn’t even know about anything else. I didn’t have mentors or people in my life that were coaching me. I was just like, I read the books, the BiggerPockets books, and I was like, “Man, I’m going to buy this house, and this sounds cool. I ain’t going to have to pay money for rent or mortgage. It’s covered. Awesome.”
And so in the beginning, that’s what I did. But for people that have a couple of properties under their belt like I had at the time, and they come to that realization where they’re saying, “Okay, I’ve done the thing. I’ve got a couple of rentals, now I need to scale,” that’s a whole different ball game to play because now, you’re going from a focus on passive income to a focus on people, which both of you know more than anyone. At that point, it’s all about people.
You’re like, “Okay. Who has scaled where I want to scale? Who in my local market can I trust for acquisition and lead flow? Who are the top wholesalers? Who are the top realtors? Who are the top agents that I can get connected with?”
And then, it becomes a who conversation because going back to what we said, when you know you’re aware and you know exactly what you need, how much you need to come in per month and you know your who’s, that’s when you become dangerous. And so at that point, I was like, “Okay, cool.” Now, we can start to scale.
And for me, it just happened to be, “Oh, this podcasting thing ended up being more lucrative than I anticipated because I created a show myself.” And I was like, “Okay. For me, that was that.” But I know hundreds of other people that have done that through multifamily self-storage, commercial, mobile home parks because what Tony said is, doesn’t matter what you pick, matters that you pick,

Ashley:
And what’s your advice to somebody that is trying to pick their strategy that they don’t get distracted with that shiny object syndrome and just, “You know what, I’m going to research short-term rentals, but also I’m going to be at the same time analyzing campgrounds. And then, I’m going to be analyzing duplexes for long-term rentals.” So what’s your advice on that?

Brian:
Well, that’s my favorite one. It’s my favorite one because I think I came up with something original. I haven’t heard it. So I think I came up with something original, guys. Oh-oh. Five-star rating review for real estate rookie.
So what we created was if you are in a mall and you’re walking around a food court, are you just going to walk around the food court and just look at the different places and not eat anything? No. You go try the free samples. So you’re going to walk around, you’re going to try the chicken, you’re going to try the beef, you’re going to try the barbecue over here. Maybe, they got some Japanese over here. You’re going to try all the free samples. And then at the end, you’re going to circle around and you say, “I really like the barbecue. I’m going to go back and sit down for that meal. I like that meal.” That’s it.
It’s literally like a food court. So people in the beginning, I think people mislabel shiny object syndrome because I don’t think that shiny object syndrome is a problem until you have something that’s working, and then, you leave that thing to do something else.
Then, it becomes an issue. But in the beginning, it’s about trying out all the different stuff. So maybe, you do a flip. You’re like, “Okay, that was cool.”All right. Maybe, you invest in a duplex. Maybe, you start up a short-term rental.
Maybe, you try the midterm rental strategy afterwards, and you’re like, “Oh, that was a little bit more fun.” Maybe, you try sell storage. And then, you just start trying different things. And then, you can look around your food court, your real estate food court and say, “Okay. Man, self-storage was really interesting to me as opposed to all the rest of this stuff. I want to use that as my path.”
And so, I use this another analogy to land the plane here. If you’re going to a car dealership, and we all are going into this entrepreneurship car dealership and you’re walking around the lot and all the different asset classes are the different cars to pick. So then, say, that you pick a car and it doesn’t matter which one, and you start just driving down this endless highway. So that’s what most people are doing.
So they are like, “Okay, a defeated analysis paralysis, a defeated shiny object syndrome. I’m going to do Airbnb. I’ve got this.” And they post on Instagram. They’re like, “Look at my new car.” And they start driving. But back to what we talked about in the beginning, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re just going to keep driving, man. You’re just going to keep going.
And then, eventually, what happens when you just keep going and you don’t stop, the car breaks down. And then, that is where everyone’s having all this anxiety, this depression, this fatigue, their relationships are falling apart. They’re getting sick because they’ve been driving this car for 20 years. They don’t know where they’re going. So it’s like once you have that, so land the plane, like I said. Once you have your destination picked out, go around the dealership, test drive a couple of the cars. And then, you can pick out which one you like the best.

Tony:
One thing I think I’d add to that, Brian, is for all of our rookies that are still trying to decide what strategy they want to go after, I think… Well, first, let me take a step back. There’s a few decisions you need to make. You need to make a decision on your actual strategy. And then, you need to make a decision on your niche because I could say that I want to become a syndicator. But I can syndicate apartment complexes, I can syndicate mobile home parks. I can syndicate hotels, or I can say I want to become a flipper. Same thing. I could flip single family homes. I could flip small multifamily. I could flip large multifamily. I could say I want to become a wholesaler. So you have your strategy first. And then, you have the niche that you want to apply that strategy in.
And I think the best way to find that perfect intersection of strategy and niche is doing a bit of a self-assessment because just because you know someone that makes a ton of money at wholesaling, that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the right strategy for you because wholesaling, in a sense, is a sales position. And you have to be really good at having conversations, handling objections, managing leads, and dealing with a lot of rejection.
And if you’re not the type of person that no matter how much income potential there is, no matter even how good you might be at it, if you don’t like the idea of doing that, you’re going to struggle with that strategy. Same thing with house flipping. If you don’t like dealing with contractors and kind of not handholding, but holding people accountable in that sense, then flipping may not be the right strategy for you.
If you want to get into the Airbnb space and you don’t like the idea of being at the beck and call of your guest and providing a exceptional customer service, my property’s turned 12 to 15 times per month, that’s 12 to 15 different groups of people at every single property. If that overwhelms you, then, maybe that’s not the strategy for you.
So the point here is that you’ve got to find the strategy and the niche that aligns with your personality, with your skillset, with your desires and ultimately what your goals are because if your goal is long-term equity gain and your goal is tax benefits, then, you shouldn’t be flipping because that strategy doesn’t align with that goal. If your goal is I want big chunks of cash right now today, then don’t go buy a single family as a long-term rental because that doesn’t align with your goal. So I think it’s taking a step back, assessing yourself and then trying to figure out how do I fit within these different strategies and these different niches.

Brian:
At the car dealership when you’re at, also, those are the different cars you’re looking at. The equity, I say if you’re looking for the equity, maybe that’s a multifamily play and you’re doing a longer term time horizon, maybe, that’s like searching for the minivans for a family. Tony’s about to have this big old family that he’s growing right now with Sarah.
So it’s just like maybe you’re not looking for that fast cash, you’re not in the market for a Porsche. You’re in the market for that minivan, right. So that’s what you’re going for. And I love everything that you said. Have you guys ever heard of the DISC assessment?

Ashley:
Yeah.

Tony:
Yeah. By the way, I’m never buying a minivan.

Brian:
Never buying a minivan. All right. You guys heard it here first. So Sarah, when y’all buy a minivan, you come back to this, and you show it to him.

Tony:
Actually, I will say we’ve rented a car in Tennessee. And usually when we go out there, I’ll get a truck. But all the trucks were sold out. They’re like, “All we got left is a minivan.” And it was a Dodge Caravan, and it was actually a really, really nice car. It had screens everywhere, and everything was automated. So who knows? Maybe, I want to buy the minivan.

Ashley:
I could honestly see Sarah getting sponsored by a minivan company-

Brian:
By a minivan.

Ashley:
… and her moving reels and the dancing and the minivan doors opening up and her showcasing it 100%.

Tony:
I can’t wait. [inaudible 00:40:03]

Brian:
That’s a good idea. This is going to be awesome. But the DISC assessment for people listening, this is an awesome, awesome thing that you guys can take because in the beginning, it’s like, “You don’t know what you don’t know.”
And a lot of us are probably asking the question, “All right. What Tony just said is awesome, but what are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? Where are my blind spots?” When you’re looking for partners, which we can get into a whole tangent on this as peers, partners, mentors and coaches, but when you’re looking for partners, you’re looking for someone with a complementary skillset to you because if there are two of the same of you, one of you isn’t needed. All right.
So if you’re a people person, you’re super extroverted and bubbly and outgoing like me, believe it or not, guys, Labrador Retriever energy, Golden Retriever energy over here, it’s like I’m terrible at details.
So it’s like I’m not going to partner with somebody that’s a super extroverted people person. I need to partner with someone that’s hyper-analytical, that loves pouring into Excel sheets, and that’s called your operator.
So not go too deep into the operations weeds, a DISC profile is D-I-S-C. And if you go take this free test online, there’s a bunch of free resources, a bunch of websites, it will tell you what your personality style is. D is dominance, I is interpersonal or whatever. The moral of the story is that D and I, if you’re a high ID like I am, then that means that you’re super into people. It may be capital raising and running a team. That’s where you thrive.
If you’re an SC, then that means that you are really into systems, structure, compliance, building out the deal analysis spreadsheet. And if you’re an SC for a person like me that loves making content and loves being the voice and making the vision and all this stuff, I am hungry for SCs in my life. I’m starving for those people that love the spreadsheet. So you may be loving doing that. You love deal analysis, but you’re like, “I can’t stand making content. How am I ever going to be successful in real estate?” Go to that person making content. [inaudible 00:41:54]

Ashley:
Or like Tony, you just marry that person.

Brian:
Just marry them.

Ashley:
You like the spreadsheet. She likes the content.

Brian:
You heard it here first, guys. Go find a person that marry them. That is the secret to your financial freedom, but that also be the biggest roadblock if you marry the wrong person.

Tony:
That’s also true.

Ashley:
So before you get married, take the DISC profile.

Brian:
DISC profile, baby.

Ashley:
Okay. So Brian, I want to circle back to your properties. And before we move into our segments here, I want to hear the bad. So you left your job. you have these rental properties as your foundation, did everything go as smooth as you thought it would owning these properties because you didn’t mention the panic attacks. Was any of that because of things that happened with the properties? Explain more.

Brian:
All right. So there’s two different points to that. But first, of course, nothing went wrong. Everything was perfect. It’s real estate. What are you talking about? Everything is okay. No.
A belief that I had in the beginning was that you can out-earn problems. This is false. For people that are listening that think that real estate’s going to magically solve every single problem that you’re ever going to have, this is incorrect. You are always going to have problems. They’re just going to look different through different stages.
They call it different levels, different devils. And I remind myself with that phrase every single day. So it’s like you’re never going to avoid them. You just get better at managing them emotionally. So the first time one of my basement units flooded, it was a lot of emotions. The water heater started leaking.

Ashley:
Wait, first time?

Brian:
The first time. Oh, are you guys sitting down?

Ashley:
There’s more.

Brian:
Just wait. Just wait, there’s more. So first time my unit flooded, it was the water heater had bust, and it completely destroyed the entire basement unit, had to get everything fixed. Tenant texted me, and he’s like “Hey, I’m in water.” What? I had never dealt with anything like this before. So, okay, cool.
First time, hyper-emotional, fixing that. Cool. Second time a unit flooded, different house. This time, it was the washing machine return hose came loose, and just launched water all in my personal unit that I was living in. And it was Valentine’s Day. So we had just come back, my girlfriend at the time had just come back and we were like, “Who spilled something on the floor, on the carpet?” And then, all of a sudden, it was everywhere. And then, it started coming under the door. And so, that was fun.
So it was a washing machine hose. So I fixed it, turned the water off, come back later. Then, we leave to go get fans to fix it, come back, have the fans going. And then, the tenant upstairs, their teenage kids came back to do a load of laundry. They realized, “Oh, the washing machine’s not working.” So they plugged it back in, turned it back on again, pretty flooded everything.
So the fourth time was heavy rains, floodplain, poor drainage, one of the gutters and everything wasn’t working, it just backed up. There was a creek. And so, then, it flooded the fourth time. So guys, by the fourth flood, I was just like, “Of course, it’s going to flood. It’s an annual tradition.” And I was traveling at that point. So I just was like, “Okay, cool. Let me call Eric. Eric will take care of it,” property manager at the time.
So he took care of that. So, yeah. And then, you also asked if any of the panic attacks that happened after I left my job were real estate related. No. The answer is because by that point, I’d had the four floods. Well, the three floods, the fourth flood happened. I’d had everything under the sun go wrong, like plumbing, electrical, roof, everything at that point.
So I tell people, “You’re not a real estate investor until you have one flood or a roof.” Now, you’re a real estate investor. Welcome. It’s not even something to be upset about. Welcome to the tribe. You’re embraced now. So I left my job. And this is a really, really important point for people that are still listening to the sound of my voice right now, which means, hopefully, you’re getting some value here.
Cashflow gets you out of your job. Cashflow will get you your initial freedom. Community keeps your freedom. So cashflow gets you out of your job. Community keeps you out of your job because I did everything right. I had the cashflow. I had six months of emergency fund cash sitting in my account. I had great community, I had a thriving podcast. Everything was right on paper.
And I left that job, and I did it. And I was more excited than I was nervous. I submitted that two weeks’ notice on a Wednesday. And I left. And I remember driving to my car thinking there was going to be a mariachi band or something. Just like when you hit millionaire status, you’re like, “Okay. Where are the fireworks? Who do I call?”
It never happens. And so, I remember I didn’t feel anything then, but it was the day, two weeks after, and it’d been two weeks of me not working. And I was texting my friends. And if anybody’s planning to go travel full-time around the world after leaving your job, book the trip close.
I had it two months out. So I had this two-month buffer of second guessing every single thing and every single decision that I’ve ever made. And I’m texting friends to say like, “Hey, can we hang out?” No, they’re working.
So thank God I had my own community that I’d invested in. And that’s ironically where I met Brandon Turner and David Greene, all the BiggerPockets guys, was through that community. And I had mentors in that group that were able to be on the phone with me and talk me off the ledge metaphorically whenever I was freaking out because I was journaling one day, and I was writing out everything that I was about to do. And I was going to go do this trip, and I was going to live in Greece for a month. And I had Mykonos booked and Santorini booked, and all these places booked.
And I was like, wait, “Greece is expensive.” It’s like, “Whoa. What am I doing?” And it just washed over me. And anyone’s had a panic attack before. It’s like a heart attack. You’re like, “I am going to the hospital right now. Call the ambulance. I’m going to die. And that’s what you’re thinking at the time.
And I remember at the time I started just walking and doing my deep breaths and I called a mentor of mine and he said, “This is going to be the scariest time of your life is after you leave that job. But I’m telling you right now that you have made the right decision. You have done the right things. I’m here to support you in any way that I can. And a year from now, you’re going to be going on podcasts. You’re going to be telling people that it’s worth it and that it’s the greatest thing you’ve ever done.”
And now here we are, a year and a half later, I’m still not bankrupt. I did something okay. So it works. And now, I’m literally living every single day feeling like Steve Irwin did, where I’m just on fire and on this like I’m in my path, in my purpose, in my passion for people that are watching Deion Sanders of what he’s doing at Colorado right now as a football coach. That’s what I feel like every single day.
So Ashley, you made this point before about education and about helping other people. I remember I was in Brazil at the time, and this thought came to me, and this is something people can take away and implement in your life today. You don’t need to be in freaking Brazil. You could be at Dunkin Donuts. And this thought is going from me to we.
So at a certain point, if you do this real estate thing the right way, you will have financial freedom, and there will come a point for all of you when you’re like, “I have more income coming in than my expenses. I don’t have to work anymore. Now, what?” And that goes back into passionate income. And what I think my hypothesis is for a lot of people, it’s going to be involved with giving back to other people and helping other people.
So I was walking on the beach, and I was feeling so lost. I was feeling so aimless because when a winner stops winning, you are no longer a winner. And the irony is when you become the type of person that can’t become financially free, you become the type of person that’s emotionally unable to because now, you’re really good at systems, processes, business, and investing.
So I was like, “I got to work on something. What is my path? What am I meant to do in life?” And the thought came to me. I was like, “Me to we.” And it was something a mentor had said to me. So I was like, “How do I help a million other people do the same thing that I did? How do I help a million other people do this for free?”
And so, that’s what started me going crazy with the podcast, going crazy with content. The account started blowing up. Now, we’re knocking on a million followers now. It’s insane, just posting videos and sharing the story, sharing the journey, letting people know that they’re not alone. And now, this is the most fulfilling thing that I’ve ever done in my life. And I know that both of you can directly relate with what I’m saying because you both do it. And watching other people win after you coach them and give them something and they execute almost feels better than when you did it. It’s insane.

Ashley:
That is so true. Having somebody come up to you and tell you they listen to the podcast and their story of what they’ve achieved since they’ve been listening for a year from… I mean the guests that we bring in, they just give so much valuable information. And Tony and I just sit here and get to ask questions based off our own curiosity. But it’s still, yes, it is a great feeling.

Brian:
Yeah. And here’s the kicker, and I want you guys to do something. Here’s my homework for everyone listening. DM Tony and DM Ashley, and let them know how they’re impacting you. You could DM me too at Brian Lubin. Let them know because a lot of the time, we’re talking into the void. And it’s just like you spend an entire year. And everyone assumes that we’re flooded with, “Oh my God, you’re changing my life. You helped me with this episode.”
No, no one’s doing it because you all think that somebody else is doing it. And so, I had this one woman named Jamara, shout out, Jamara. She called me about some education that I was doing and she said, “Oh my God, you did a podcast episode a year and a half ago about Airbnb, and I’ve bought three Airbnbs since then. And I’m financially free. ” I was like, “Why am I hearing about this a year and a half later?” I was like, “Couldn’t have shot me an email? What the heck?” So there’s so much more impact than you know that’s going on in the background.

Tony:
Brian, I appreciate you being so transparent about that journey post leaving your job because for a lot of people listening to this Rookie podcast, it is the goal that they want to be able to be in a position where they can walk away from their jobs. But there’s something that I want to point out to everyone. When you do leave your job, it is scary because it’s a different lifestyle where you’re not getting direct deposit every two weeks.
Your ability to generate income is based on the value that you’re providing to not just your employer, but to the marketplace. And the thing that I always tell myself that helps me sleep better at night is that say that my businesses, all of them just came to a screeching halt today. I know without a shadow of a doubt that I can go back out into the workplace, brush up my resume, start applying to places, and in a reasonable amount of time, have another six figure paying job just like I did before.
It’s not like I’m in a position where just because I took a break from the workforce that I’m never going to be able to go back. It’s not like I’m blackballed from every single company that’s out there. Even if everything that I’ve done as an entrepreneur failed in this exact moment, I know I could still go out and get a six-figure income just by being an employee somewhere else. And that’s what always gives me the confidence to keep moving forward because I know that that option is there, and that’s something I want people to understand.

Brian:
That’s so huge. And I’ll also add to that, my buddy, Aaron Amuchastegui, he runs an awesome real estate podcast as well, and I think he’s been a guest on BiggerPockets a bunch. And so, he did a keynote at this event that we just threw, and he was saying all about his journey and how in the 2000s he was killing it, and he was making millions of dollars through. He had left his job as a home builder, and he was doing his own thing on his own.
And then, BlackRock came to him at the time and said, “Hey, we want to hire you to come on with us. We want to buy your company, basically.” And he’s like, “You can’t put me…” or they said, “We’re going to put you out of business.” He goes, “You can’t put me out of business. I’m the best.”
But it was BlackRock, and no one knew who BlackRock was at the time. So BlackRock put him out of business. And so, that directly afterwards. They bought up every single house at the foreclosure auctions. He couldn’t make a dime, and his income just disappeared. And he went through a two and a half year period of just floundering, of just turmoil with his family and everything.
And now, I met him through a mutual mastermind that we’re in as well in a community, and he’s like, “Man, if I would’ve had people around me at that time,” he goes, “I wouldn’t have floundered for two and a half years.” And Tony, I would actually challenge you on that. I don’t even think you would ever in your life ever again have to go back to that six-figure income because of how strong your community and your network is today, just from even posting free content or sharing what you’re doing, sharing your story with you and Sarah, you would never have to. It’s an option.
But because you have people in your corner, the people are always the answer. They’ve always been the answer. And the more you make, the more they’re going to be the answer. So your rental property, your house hack is not going to emotionally support you. Technology is not advanced to this level. It’s not going to call you when you’re crying when you’re down, you’re depressed. Your people will. So I just wanted to add that.

Ashley:
I don’t think Tony and I physically could actually go back to a nine to five job. [inaudible 00:55:24]

Brian:
I’m the least hireable person. If anyone Googles me, it’s like how to quit your job, how to leave your nine to five. I’m the least hireable person in America. So those ships have been burned a year ago.

Tony:
Brian, before we let you go here, brother, I do want to just drill down a little bit on the strategy that you chose because we don’t talk a lot about the co-living strategy. But I guess, first, just for folks that maybe weren’t paying attention at that point, just define what co-living is and how it’s kind of an extension of typical house hacking. And I would love to hear how you sourced your tenants and how you kind of managed multiple people living in the same space together.

Brian:
Yeah. So it was just rent by the room essentially is how we started it. So in the beginning, it kind of just became this Frankenstein’s monster. There are people that are much better at this than me. My buddy Sam, Sam Wegert, plug for him, I think he’s been on BiggerPockets as well. So he’s a great co-living expert where he actually has SOPs and everything around it.
So for me, I was just doing the house hack thing. And then, I had a tenant move out upstairs. And then, I just had people that I knew already and I was just able to give them a lower than market rent. Say, “Hey, you got a bedroom over here. We do a year lease, like a traditional lease. You’re just basically leasing a bedroom.” So we didn’t have anything fancy about it, and that’s kind of how I’ve operated my entire life, is to just figure things out.
And here’s the cool thing for people that are still listening, once again, you guys are rock stars. You guys are troopers. So I’ll say this, you are guaranteed to fail. It’s guaranteed. At some way, shape, or form. At some point in your journey, you will fail, and that’s okay. I need you to know that.
So we are like, “We’re so afraid of failure that we don’t get started.” But what if you knew that failure was part of the journey, and it was actually an acceptable part of your progression and your investing journey? People aren’t afraid of failure. They’re afraid of the appearance of failure, and they’re afraid of uncertainty. So they’re like, “How long will this failure last before I find success?” So it’s like if you knew that you were four leaky roofs away from the property and the SOPs in the systems that will change your life, you’d be like, “Give me the leaky roofs.”
If you knew you were seven dates away from finding your wife or your husband, you’d go on seven bad dates. If you knew you were four crappy businesses or 40 crappy properties away from changing your life and hitting financial freedom, you’d be excited for that 41st. So that’s how I view this and view everything that I do. I was just like, “Okay. I’m going to try this out. And then, I’m going to pivot and tweak and tweak and tweak.”
And then, eventually, it came to the point to highlight this and to really drive this home, there came a point when I was traveling. And all of a sudden, “Oops, didn’t work out anymore.” Tenant became a problem. Oh, oh, it was a mother with two kids that I had taken out. She was paying enough rent to where I could take out the individual and just give her the full top unit again.
And she didn’t have the best credit score. So when it came to my tenant screening, I let her through. Tenant screening is the most important thing. The most important thing, especially for your first property. You need that good tenant for your first property. Otherwise, you’re going to be discouraged to stay in the game.
And man, she trashed it. She stopped paying rent while I’m traveling. She just said, “No, I’m just not going to reply to you anymore.” And so, it went two or three months with her paying no rent, me filing for eviction, went through that entire process. By the time I came back, the unit was trashed, and it was $17,000 to fix it. So everything was trashed. And this was in a nice neighborhood too. So I was like, “Okay, cool.” So emotional hat was off because I’m a real estate investor now. So I say, “Okay. This is what it is. How do we fix this? And where do we go from here?”
So we talk about the importance of CapEx when you’re doing your underwriting for especially single family and anything… I would be more generous with your CapEx with a co-living situation with more people because more wear and tear, more points of failure. So what I did was I was just like, “Okay. I had CapEx in my bank account, but that was getting eaten away while I was going through the eviction process,” which is the worst thing to go through in any state.
Thankfully, it was Georgia, which was a landlord-friendly state. And so, I finished that up. I go back, I’m looking at it. And my realtor at the time, who also is an investor in the local Atlanta market, he was just like, “Oh yeah, it’s going to be 17,000 to fix.”
I do this all day in my sleep. And I looked at him, and I was like, “I hate this. This is awful. I don’t want to ever do this again in my life. This is the worst thing ever.” I said, “I am done with house hacking now.” And I was like, “I’m going to do something different moving forward.” I was like, “Actually, let’s run the numbers and see what repairs would be and getting this rented back out. What’s the turn? What am I going to have to eat?”
So we talk, I don’t want to go too high level. We can bring it down a little bit, but we talk about return on equity a lot, ROE, which is what is your equity in that property the best thing to use in that property or can you leverage that through a home equity line of credit, through a cash-out refinance and do another property?
I talk about return on ROE, return on energy, return on effort. And right now, I had a thriving business outside of this. And I was just like, “Every single minute that I’m spending focusing on this is a blip on the radar,” and this is just a distraction from what else I’m trying to do in my side business, quote-unquote “my passionate income.”
So we did the analysis on return on equity and the return on energy and effort. And I was just, “Man, this is going to eat our cashflow for a full calendar year afterwards.” Now remember, this worked for four years. And, finally, there was a pop when I did something that was against my systems and my standards. So set strong standards do not waiver from them, and I wavered from them. And that was my mistake. And so, the aftermath was, I was like, “Dude, I’ve got a low interest rate on this property.”
Every single bit of conventional wisdom is telling me not to sell this property. And I hear that you buy real estate, you hold it forever. But I was like, “This is draining me emotionally to deal with. And then, I have to get another tenant.” And now, nobody wants to take the property to manage.
So I was like, “What I’m going to do is I’m going to put it on the market. I’m going to sell it.” So I sold it. And now, I’ve got enough cash to do a bigger deal now that we’re four or five years down the road. And now, I didn’t even do a 1031, which for people listening, you can do a 1031 exchange. You sell a property. Then, you have a time window in which you have to pick a new asset to invest in. And I was just like, “Man, I want to keep my one thing, my one thing.” And that’s what I’m doing.
I say, “I just want to podcast right now.” And I can financially support it. So what I did was I sold that property and now is there going to be a tax implication on one? Yes, about 10 to 15% long-term capital gains, which we’re going to offset with business expenses. And this may be a little insider baseball for people.
You guys let me know. The other property, we’re going to do what’s called the homestead exemption. So I lived in that property for I think it was like two out of the last five years as a primary residence. So we’re able to tax defer that. Now, an important note on the homestead exemption is because me and my CPA are actively going through this right now, you have to have a portion of it sanctioned for business use and personal use. So because a house hacked, if you house hack, you’re going to have a portion of it sanctioned for business use, which will probably be 50% plus.
So when you file your homestead exemption, you can do the exemption on the part that’s your personal use. So that’s another thing that’s important for people. And I didn’t know that until recently. So that’s a lesson that I just learned. So I’ll probably have to pay five or $6,000 tax on that, which is a drop in the bucket. So now, the position I’m at today, I can freaking swing for whatever fence I want to swing for. And I can take whatever risk I want to take because I have the financial foundation and the backing to be able to really launch into the stratosphere now. So it’s about emotional wellbeing over anything. And I feel like the more experience of an investor you become, the more that this will resonate with you.

Ashley:
If you hold the property forever and you transitioned into actually selling the properties and it’s beneficial to you, and I think that’s such a lesson right there, is you don’t have to stay stuck in the same thing. You can change and pivot and still have that strong foundation. It’s just the fact of getting started.

Brian:
I will say that that isn’t to say just sell your property when things go wrong. Things will go wrong always. You’re always going to have something go left, right sideways. But if you do choose to sell the property, you need to have a strong enough business case why. So for me, it was the return on energy and effort for my other business that was already established and running, or if you are looking to do a 1031 or you are looking to have a strategy in place, don’t just say, “Oh, this property is annoying me now. I’m just going to sell it.” I would not do that. I do want to add that disclaimer.

Ashley:
Well, Brian, thank you so much for joining us today. Can you let everyone know where they can reach out to you and find out some more information about you?

Brian:
Absolutely. I’m all over social media at Brian Lubin, just my name. Action Academy podcast it’s my show which I want both of you guys on. It’s my literal life’s passion. I have not missed a day of podcasting in 479 days. I podcast every day. I do a daily show. So I’m either making a podcast or I’m a guest on a podcast. And I’ve done it all around the world, literally everywhere.
I’ve recorded in Greece, Turkey, Istanbul, Brazil, Austin, Texas right now. So it’s my life’s passion, is that podcast. And then, if you guys want a bunch of free stuff, I’ve basically consolidated every free guide resource, and training that I’ve got at quityourjob.co because that is a dope domain that I was able to buy. And it’s dot C-O, not com. It’s quityourjob.co. So that’s where you guys can find me, and I just talk into a microphone.

Ashley:
I’m Ashley at Wealth From Rentals, and he’s Tony at Tony J. Robinson. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Real Estate Rookie, and we will be back with a Rookie reply.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, and CNBC’s Diana Olick join ‘The Exchange’ to discuss affordability concerns in the real estate market, when inventory will settle and more.

New technologies like blockchain and AI have been in the spotlight in the past years. Yet, new technologies wouldn’t be that exciting if they couldn’t find a receptive environment – at least one industry in which they can create added value and specific niches that they can disrupt and grow.

While e-commerce is as old as the internet, it has returned to the center of the startup world since the COVID-19 pandemic during which it found unprecedented growth.

In this article, we’ll explore four e-commerce niches that present great opportunities for new innovative startup projects.

1. Personalized Shopping Experiences

The contemporary e-commerce landscape is undergoing a shift toward personalized shopping experiences, where algorithms and machine learning analyze user behavior to provide tailored recommendations. Accenture reports that 91% of consumers prefer brands offering relevant offers and suggestions. Early-stage startups have the opportunity to leverage AI to predict future needs and create a shopping journey uniquely crafted for each customer.

A great example of a successful startup in this niche is Stitch Fix, which seamlessly blends data science with a human touch, sending personalized clothing selections to users.

The innovative opportunity for early-stage startups in personalized shopping experiences is rooted in the growing consumer demand for individualization. Amidst a sea of choices, a curated and personalized approach stands out.

2. Social Commerce Platforms

The fusion of social interactions with online shopping has given rise to social commerce platforms. With the average person spending nearly 2.5 hours daily on social media, according to Statista, integrating commerce into these platforms is strategically aligned with consumer behavior. This niche revolves around seamlessly combining social elements with online shopping, allowing users to not only discover products but also make purchases without leaving their favorite social networks.

Poshmark is a standout success in the realm of social commerce. By creating a community where users buy and sell fashion items directly through the app, Poshmark has harnessed the power of social influence.

For startups entering this space, the opportunity lies in not just creating transactional platforms but fostering communities where shopping becomes a social and collaborative experience. Social media has evolved beyond communication; it’s a space where users seek recommendations, share experiences, and discover trends.

3. Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) Brands

The Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) model is reshaping traditional retail by establishing a direct link between manufacturers and consumers. With DTC e-commerce sales reaching over $150 billion in 2022 according to eMarketer, this model eliminates intermediaries, allowing startups to control the entire customer experience and gather valuable data directly from their audience.

Warby Parker, a pioneer in the DTC niche, disrupted the eyewear industry by offering stylish, affordable glasses directly to consumers.

By cutting out middlemen, startups can offer products at competitive prices while maintaining quality and gaining authenticity, transparency, and an opportunity to differentiate themselves. Moreover, the direct relationship with customers opens avenues for gathering valuable insights, allowing startups to adapt and evolve based on real-time feedback, which is a crucial advantage for early-stage startups.

4. Gamified Shopping Experiences

Gamification has proven to be a captivating strategy to enhance user engagement, and when applied to shopping experiences, it creates a unique niche for startups. By integrating gaming elements like rewards and challenges into e-commerce campaigns (e.g. merch drops, influencer campaigns, etc.), startups can in the competition for attention especially of the younger generations. As consumers seek entertainment and engagement, startups can leverage gamification to not only boost sales but also to establish a brand identity that resonates with a digitally savvy audience.

The innovative opportunity for early-stage startups in gamified shopping experiences is rooted in the ability to offer more than just products; it’s about creating an immersive journey and a one-of-a-kind experience.

David:
This is the BiggerPockets Podcast, show 849. What’s going on everyone? It’s David Greene, your host of the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast, the number one real estate podcast in the world every week, bringing you up-to-date information, how-tos and stories of successful investors that include how they did it and how you can to. Today’s episode is a Seeing Greene show and I brought in some support. Rob Abasolo joins me today as we answer your questions, our loyal listener base and we walk through what to do in different real estate conundrums. Today’s show we are going to cover a flip gone wrong with HELOC interest eating at a bank account, what happens when HELOCs turn against you, why we would sell a particular deal that’s doing well because it’s in an HOA.
And we also had one listener submit a question that was so good, we were incredibly intrigued that we had to bring them in to talk to them personally to get more information and give as solid of real estate investing and financial advice as we possibly could. You’re going to love today’s show. The topics are relevant for everybody that’s trying to invest and make it work in today’s market, which is the trickiest market that I’ve ever seen. Rob, what were some things that you think people need to keep an eye out for in today’s show?

Rob:
This is a good one, man. This keeps us on our toes. As investors I feel like we always understand the core concepts and fundamentals of investing, so it is always nice to answer some of these questions that are hyper-specific and hyper nuanced, because it forces us to think outside of the boilerplate investing advice sometimes and a little bit more like, okay, if we were going to apply this stuff, here’s what exactly what we do from a tactical standpoint day by day in our operations.

David:
In the real estate education space, which is where we are, it’s been ridiculously easy to give advice in the last decade. It was like, here’s how you calculate a property. It’s like, here’s how you analyze a property to calculate cash to cash return. Now go buy it. The market is becoming so challenging that you’re starting to separate the men from the boys, the women from the girls. It’s getting trickier. And so in today’s show we’re actually going to break down some of the nuances that people need to be looking at when they’re investing to make sure that they don’t lose money. Now, if you would like to be featured on a Seeing Greene episode, we would love to have you. Head over to biggerpockets.com/david. The link is in the description, so pause this, send me your question and jump back in to listen to today’s amazing show.
Before we get into our first question, I’ve got a quick tip for all of you. Learn and take action. If you like what I talk about or what Rob says and you want to explore new real estate topics, head over to the biggerpockets.com/store website and get up to 60% off for cyber money on so many great books and use the code, books 849, for an additional 10% off. So today’s episode is 849. If you use the code books 849, you can get 10% off of the already discounted books in the store. I’ve got several of them and which to pick up. Pillars just made the Wall Street Journal bestseller list.

Rob:
Nice. Congrats.

David:
Thank you. So if you don’t want to miss out, join the movement. That is the three pillared approach to building wealth. Pick that one up as well as some other BiggerPockets incredible additions. All right, Anthony is a longtime investor in California and Hawaii, much like me, and he joins us in the recording studio to talk about what to do once you’ve built up some equity. Anthony, it’s great to have you.

Anthony:
So let me give you just a brief, I guess, I hope it’s brief background. I started real estate investing in 2009/10. I’ve done hard money loans, did the fix up rehab, cashed out a lot, not a lot, not a bunch, but put a little cap money in my pocket, which was able to get me to the next property and the next property. I’ve done that a few times to be quite honest in crappy markets. But it’s gotten me to the point today where I’ve done that, traded up through 1031 tax exchange and was able to get into better properties. Here in Hawaii now I’m sitting on some nice real estate. One property is worth quite a bit. It’s hard to put a number on it, but if you look at comps just on whatever, Zillow or whatnot, I’m putting one property at somewhere around two million, owe 290,000 on it, tons of equity.
I have another piece of property in a small community in Southern California, I bought for 48K, worth about 250 now. I own those by myself. My wife and I own our primary residence, which we purchased for 595, probably worth about 1.4 to 1.5 now. And we purchased a vacant lot attached to our primary home for 195, probably worth 875 now. I’m sitting on a ton of equity. Yay. Yeah, and hey and look, and I’m making good cashflow on my rental. It’s grossing about 10,820 a month once you break it all down, I’m roughly cash flowing 6K a month-ish. But I’m using that cashflow to support our life here because it’s a single income household. I’m only making about 82K a year with my job. That’s not a lot in Hawaii. I’m going down a limb here, but I’m going to say that’s not much over poverty line here in Hawaii, because everything costs double. A two by four here costs $6.25. I don’t know what it costs on the mainland, but I feel everything-

Rob:
$2.25. $3.

Anthony:
Yeah, right. Everything I do out here costs me double. I do all my own rehabs as I mentioned earlier, tradesmen. I do all my work while having a full-time job. So when I was rehabbing that one property, man, I was working around the clock, literally just the only time I’d see my lady was I’d be in the shower and she’d serve me lunch while I was showering, getting ready to go to work. And I did that for two years. But look at where I am. So I’m super happy. I got a lot of equity, feeling great about that, but I’m equity debt up to here and don’t care. I’m trying to get HELOC, man, just throwing up bricks, man. I’m not getting any traction there. I just went with a lender just recently last week, matter of fact yesterday called him back, finally got him on the phone after three calls.
They’re like, we’re not going to do the HELOC in second position on a rental property, but we got a HE loan. I’m like, that’s great. It does me no good. I need the credit card effect. I don’t have any deals. I’m not going to take a loan and just start paying for it monthly with nothing in the pipeline. So really where I’m stuck is tons of equity. I’m 53. I’m pretty bused up. I’ve been doing a lot of work for a long time and my body hurts and I want to try to find a different path to continue investing in real estate and I really need to go after more cashflow. I want to retire, but I want to retire to make a W2 an option, but I want to focus more on real estate. If I just buy one house a year, fix it up, add to the portfolio, add more cashflow, I’m super happy about that.
One additive piece of information, we are in the process of changing the lot lines between the upper lot and the lower lot and then we’re going to sell that 1031 into a community in California where we should be hitting about 2000 to 2,400 bucks a month cashflow based on my calculations so far. So that’s going to be a great boost, but I’m just trying to find the path forward and I’m having a hard time as I’ve analyzed probably 30 or 40 deals in the last month and I keep coming up with donuts.

Rob:
Okay. So the main crux of it is you’ve got a lot of equity and you can’t really use it. Right? That’s the main problem. And if you could tap into that equity, you would use the equity?

Anthony:
100%. I’d basically be my own hard moneylender or private moneylender, however, whatever you want to use. I’d go and buy it, fix it up, refi out, take the money back out, do it over again.

Rob:
Okay. And then do you have any capital to put towards anything?

Anthony:
Liquid not a bunch. I just built a bunch of retaining walls. I just spent a lot of cash over the last year, maybe 150K fixing up the properties and so I’m probably sitting on about 90 ish K.

Rob:
And then the only way you can really get cash is by the lot line adjustment where you’re going to sell a lot off and then that will be your watt of cash that you’re then going to go and invest in a southern California community?

Anthony:
That’s correct.

Rob:
Okay. Is there any opportunity, just out of curiosity, to go with a new construction lender that can use your land as equity towards the down payment basically, or use the equity in your land towards the down payment and then build on that piece of land?

Anthony:
That is an option, but we’ve been here in Hawaii 11 years and my wife has not really had a job because of what she does. She’s a doctor of traditional Chinese and medicine acupuncturist and they don’t recognize her license here, so its been single income, so I’ve been floating the bill for her and her mom. So at one point we were Airbnbing and crushing it from 2016 to right up into the pandemic, but Hawaii abolished that. They’re super not into it. Get it, understand. So that was good. That was awesome. And I want to get back to the mainland and do that. She was amazing. She was a super host, she was fantastic at it. Between the two of us, we really crushed in that. I can’t wait to get back into that, because it’s cool meeting new people from everywhere and it’s a business and it’s a lot of work, but I’m a donkey and an ox, so it’s all good.

Rob:
Great, great. Okay. But what’s the reason for not maybe turning over the stone on building a new construction on that lot? Is it because you can’t STR it?

Anthony:
No, she wants off the island. She wants to go back to where she can have dignity of income, she can have her own life. Here it’s kind of one-sided, I’m working around the clock and she’s not. It’s super imbalanced. And to be fair to her, she’s spent 11 years of her life here with me supporting me and building this small empire we have, but I’ve got to give her, I got to be fair.

Rob:
Got it, got it. Okay, so you want off the island and that’s why you’re okay with selling that one lot.

Anthony:
We are open to selling the house, but I’m like we’re going to have good cashflow. Let’s not do that. Because once we move out, I did a light numbers, once we move out and rent this out because basically it’s a duplex upstairs, downstairs, we should be looking at roughly a cashflow of 2100 bucks a month. So between the property, potentially we’ll 1031 and two on the mainland, we’re looking at 5K a month in cashflow. That’s gross cashflow. That’s not accounting for some of the fix up and this and that, but still 5K a month, for most people that’s a monthly income from a W2.

David:
And that’s in addition to the 6K that you’re getting currently?

Anthony:
Correct.

Rob:
Does that put you at 11?

Anthony:
Yeah. I’m trying to get to 15, trying to 15 or 18. If I broke down all my numbers, basic household expenses, travel expenses and reinvestment expenses, if I hit 15 to 16K a month, I can basically retire and write my own story.

Rob:
So we are going to have some cash and we’re trying to make four to $5,000 extra thousand dollars a month?

Anthony:
Correct.

Rob:
And then how much cash will we have to do that outside? Is it the 90 or is it the 90 plus the lot sale money?

Anthony:
With the lot money, I would like to, that’s 1031 and with my cash on hand, I would like to get into a new acquisition if possible.

Rob:
So how much will that be total?

Anthony:
Well, let’s say we can get 875 for the lot after fees and expenses, whatever we got 825, 800,000 leftover, so we’re close to 890, let’s call it 890. Simple math.

Rob:
It’s a good problem to have. You’re like, I’m trying to make $4,000, but I only have $900,000. It’s like, okay, well at least you don’t have 5,000, you have 900,000. If you could just even squeak out, what? A 10% return, you’re looking at, what is that? Nine grand a month? Am I mouthing that out correctly?

David:
No, that’ll be a little bit, that’d be a 12% return.

Rob:
But 80, 8500 or something like that, right?

Anthony:
Yeah.

Rob:
So it almost feels like you could just, how close are you all to retirement? How many years away?

Anthony:
As stated I’m 53 and I’m pretty beat up, so I’m ready right now. But like I said, retirement would continue with real estate.

Rob:
Well, because it feels like typically I’d say if you were on the front end of the journey, it’s like aggressive, aggressive, short-term rentals as you transition to the second half of the journey. That’s where I feel like going more the long-term route’s not a bad call. It just takes a lot of acquisitions to do that. However you have the capital to do something like that. I might consider moving into some kind of, I know you like short-term rentals, so maybe you could consider a small multifamily that brings everything together. I’m a big fan of this model. I’m trying to crack this right now with a couple of deals that I’m working through, but small multifamilies that basically let me short-term rent a couple, medium term rent a couple, long-term rent a couple.
That way I’m not taking on the complete risk of turning it all into a short-term rental and I’m not sacrificing a ton of cashflow by making it all a long-term rental and I’m getting a diversified set of income from that. So is that something that would be interesting to you is maybe getting into the multifamily space on a small level?

Anthony:
I forgot to mention, so I’ve probably, like I said, I ran about 30 or 40 single family analysis. I’ve also probably done about 10 multifamily. I’m looking for anything from four units to 60 units, whatever. I’ve been looking at everything because I have-

David:
That’s where my mind went. I think you need to get out into a better asset class. I think you need to get into the multifamily space especially because I think you’re going to be seeing some opportunity there in the next couple of years. We’re already starting to see opportunity there. Rates are really high and you’ve got cash, so these high rates aren’t going to hurt you as much as your competition. Everyone else competing with these assets, they’re trying to go and put 20% down. They’re trying to stretch that 20% as far as they possibly can, and it has to cashflow and it has to get a high cash on cash return and it has to be in an area that isn’t going to cause them a headache. All these requirements to what you’re trying to find in an asset, it’s really hard to find, everyone complains, real estate sucks.
Well, you’re going to be going in there $900,000. If let’s say you buy a $1.5 million asset, you got to borrow 600 grand. Yeah, those high rates suck, but they suck a lot less for you at 600 grand than somebody else would if they had to borrow 1.3 or 1.2, something like that to buy the same asset. Or even you buy something cash. You could go in there and buy something for $900,000 that nobody else, and maybe it’s worth a little bit more than that, but they can’t find a buyer, because where rates are, it doesn’t work for another competitor, right? I’d love to see you sell something out there that’s got a lot of equity and no cashflow and exchange it for something that’s meant to cashflow like commercial property.

Rob:
I don’t even know if you’d need to go multifamily with that strategy. Whatever you want, but I think yeah, if you were open to that idea of just 1030, look, most real estate investors would be very angry at this advice, but if you did pay cash for a $900,000 property, you could totally make $5,000 a month on a short-term rental. If you just went and bought a cabin in the Smoky Mountains, a lot of cabins out there will gross 80 to $120,000 if it’s like a four or five bedroom. And I think you could probably lock one down if it was an all cash offer. Granted you’re going to work for it. You still have to run the business and everything like that. That would be one option. The other thing I was going to say is you said you’re tired, right?
If you just invested in some fund or syndication that oftentimes a lot of these right now are offering an 8% pref on the money that you’re investing, 8% on 895 is like $71,000, which is about 5,900 bucks a month. That would also get you to that and it would be 100% passive. Obviously you’d have to do your due diligence and you probably don’t want to put it all into one fund, put it into different to diversify, but that would be a way to just completely be passive and not even have to worry about working for it. So it just depends on do you want it to be completely passive or do you want to work for it and make a little bit more money?

Anthony:
One thing I should have added, so I apologize, but I’m 100% on board with the multifamily, because my wife and I own that lower lot together. She really has her heart set on eventually getting to this community we would buy in. So that money’s earmarked for a very specific location, so we’re going to use that money for her wishes, to where we’re going to eventually end up. And as far as the syndication thing is, I’ve looked into it a little bit, and with real estate, with the hard asset, the property itself, I can analyze it, I can figure it out, and I know I’m the captain of the boat and I’m not going to let myself down. I feel with the syndication I have to vet the property and the people.
I was listening to the BP, BiggerPockets podcast, no, maybe it was On the Market maybe and there was that syndication lost like 3,200 units and I’m like, yeah, that would really suck. So who wants to be part of that? I’m a little too conservative maybe. Right now I’m sitting around waiting to do something. I’m buying T-bills for like 5.5%, right? I’m like, oh, that’s cool. I’m into that. No toilets, no roofs, and the variable, that latent threat of someone messing me up. I think I’d rather just me staying charge. I know I’m not going to screw myself.

David:
That’s what I like about multifamily. You buy a 25 unit complex somewhere if you have to finance, you just don’t finance as much of it. You definitely don’t finance 80%, you do much less. You have enough revenue coming off that you can put a management system in place where somebody else is the frontline that absorbs all the garbage and then you just tell them how you want them to handle the problems and then they go execute it. Similar to a short-term rental, you could do something similar to that. It’s the asset you put your money in, Anthony, that’s going to make the difference in the quality of life, not the ROI. Don’t go chasing after the most growth you can get. That worked great to get you to this point. You’re actually the poster child of what I tell everyone they should be doing, is stop focusing on cashflow when you’re a young able-bodied person that can work.
Focus on equity growth when that’s the case. And then when you get to the point of life where you’re like, I don’t want to work as much like what you’re saying, take all that equity, convert it into cashflow, and now you’ve got the perfect transition here. So even though you may feel frustrated you’ve got all this equity in Hawaii and you can’t cashflow with it, you are actually the person that did everything right. You’re sitting on an incredible gold mine of several million dollars of equity and you don’t need to live in your primary residence. You’re thinking about leaving Hawaii. My brother, just like don’t put all three million into one deal and make mistakes and learn the hard way. Okay? Gently go out there and tip your toe into the water and see what it’s like before you put all of the money in there, but put this into assets that are meant to cashflow.
Single family homes, though they do cashflow and they can cashflow, were never meant to cashflow. We have to find the perfect scenario in order to get that to happen, which was pretty easy the last 10 years, getting a lot harder right now. We’re also probably heading into some economic recession where I don’t think residential values are going to plummet, but I do think that it’s going to be harder to find tenants. It’s going to be harder to get people to pay their rents. It’s going to be harder to find opportunities. I think the world, at least in our country, is about to hit a crunch. We’re going to feel it like we haven’t had to feel it before.
So think about the location. You want to be buying somewhere where there’s going to be steady jobs, where they’re not as likely to get laid off and if you don’t have any leverage, you’ll survive the storm that other people don’t. And if you keep some of that powder dry, you’ll just start seeing more and more deals are going to start popping up. People running into financial problem, people can’t make their debt service payments. People that have too much vacancy and they can’t float it. And I think that you’ll be able to start gobbling some of these things up. We don’t talk about it, but when rates are high, having a whole lot of cash is a really good thing.

Anthony:
Yes sir. I appreciate that poster child thing, man, because half the time I feel like a boob. I’m like, man, I’ve been doing this 14 years and I still feel like an idiot.

David:
Brother, there’s someone that could be making 20 grand a month in cashflow and that comes out to a little bit less than a quarter million dollars in a year, right? It would take that same person like 13, 14 years to get to where you are right now, and that’s assuming that your equity never grows. And that’s a 20 grand a month of cashflow that most people would give their right arm to be able to be in that position. You did it the way that you’re supposed to. You delayed gratification. You bought in the right location, you forsaked the immediate gratification of cashflow that everybody wants. You didn’t quit your job, you kept working, you grinded. Now you’ve got this big, big reward that you just have to make sure that you space it out in the right way, that you put it in the right places. Don’t just get like, ah, I got to do something and get nervous and run out there and buy something that you don’t understand anything about.
I like Rob’s advice. Buy a cabin in the Smoky Mountains. Your cash on cash return could be low, but so is your risk. And if it’s paid for in cash, the cash flow will give you the life that you want, and that’s what this is about. It’s about building a life you want, not having your ego get pumped up because you get to tell someone you have a 40% cash on cash return, even if that turns out to be like $800 a month. It doesn’t really do much to change your life. I’m stoked to hear this story.

Rob:
You’re a millionaire and you’re going to sell your property and have-

David:
Multimillionaire.

Rob:
… multimillionaire. You’re going to have 900K to make a lot of decisions that will make you even more money. So you’re good. You just need to sit with it a bit, talk it out with your partner and I think you’re going to be just fine.

Anthony:
Man, thanks you guys.

David:
I would tell people to follow the Anthony method, that’s how much I like what you did. Because everybody else is doing the opposite of you, man. They’re like, I don’t want to work. Work’s hard. I just want cashflow so I don’t have to work anymore. So they go buy this $40,000 duplex in a terrible area thinking that if they just buy five of them, they can quit at 26 and never have to work, and they just get themselves into a hole that’s horrible. It makes their life, it’s like running with weights, as they try to get out of it. And you said, no, I’m okay with work, I’m going to put my money where it’s going to grow the most, which was in an area with constricted supply, scarce resources, and growing demand, Hawaii.
Now it did exactly what it’s supposed to do. It grew exponential rates. You grew the equity that you had more control over. Now go transition that into cashflow. That’s a better method in general for growing wealth than the crypto method, which is like, no, just buy a bunch of crypto, hit a pump, cash out, and then never work again for the rest of your life. It usually doesn’t work out when people take that approach.

Anthony:
I must’ve been dropped on my head because a lot of times I wake up looking for more work. I don’t know what it is. My boy’s going to come over today and we’re going to do some work on the house. I’m like, hey man, let’s do some more stuff.

David:
I love it, man. If you could bottle that up and you could put it in an energy drink and sell it, I would invest in that product, right? We definitely don’t need less people that want to work hard. The more someone can love work the better position they’re going to be. And that doesn’t mean be a slave to your job, of course, right? You’re doing work that you feel good about that makes you feel better about yourself, that you enjoy and that adds value to the world as well as to your own portfolio. So Anthony, for people that want to reach out, maybe they’ve got some ideas that we didn’t cover. Where can they find you?

Anthony:
Really just BiggerPockets. Anthony Isgro, my last name, I-S-G-R-O. I just got on Instagram, but I don’t have a picture. I’m not doing anything. I barely got on Facebook. I’m a hermit a little bit too, so BiggerPockets.

David:
All right, find Anthony Isgro, his profile on biggerpockets.com. All right, thanks a lot, Anthony. Appreciate you, man.

Anthony:
Blessings. Thanks you guys.

David:
All right. And thank you to Anthony for that killer question about how to solve the problem of deploying the equity that he’s built up over time. I love that type of stuff. That’s where we get to really dig into the meat of what real estate investors should be thinking about at a high level. So Anthony, congratulations on your problem in air quotes and thank you for submitting your question. And I want you to submit your questions as well, everyone biggerpockets.com/david, and you can be featured on the Seeing Greene episode. Now, Anthony’s situation was so inspiring that I actually asked Rob to wait for a second, jumped on a plane, headed to Hawaii myself, and I am now coming to you all live from Maui, because I had to see for myself what’s going on. So Rob, I apologize.

Rob:
Yeah, it’s been a little frustrating. I’ve been waiting here in this spot for 12 hours. You said don’t move, don’t go eat, don’t go use the restroom. I’ll be right back. And as a true, loyal friend, I’ve been here, man, my back hurts. I thought it would be a little faster.

David:
Well, that’s the level of dedication that it takes to be a BiggerPockets podcast co-host. So it’s not meant for everyone, Rob. You are one of the elite of the elite. Go ahead and stretch out your back as I transition us into the next part of the show. At this stage, we like to read the comments that y’all have left in the YouTube section for the show. So if you’re listening to this now and you’d like to be featured on Seeing Greene, just head over to YouTube and leave us a comment. We’re going to read them. Our first comment comes from Florian Uyu, who says a cashflow conundrum debate with examples would be very helpful. Thank you for letting us learn from your analytical thinking process, complete with four different emojis. This was a very well-thought-out answer, which is probably why we are reading it. So thank you.
We are considering Rob and I having a debate either with each other or maybe on the same side against somebody else about how important cashflow really is when you’re trying to build wealth through real estate investing, who it’s important for, who maybe doesn’t need to worry about it as much and what role it should play.

Rob:
I think we have a question coming up on this very same thing, so stay tuned after the comments and we’ll get into this, a little bit more than the cashflow conundrum.

David:
That is going to be the name. I’m debating over cashflow chaos, cashflow critic, cashflow conundrum. There’s a lot of alliteration here, but the idea would be a book that explains all the ways you make money in real estate of which natural cashflow is only one. So thank you for the shout out there.

Rob:
Cashflow critic is pretty good actually. I like that. That’d be a good podcast name, the cashflow critic.

David:
Here’s the problem though, is the minute that people hear that, they never read the article, they just see the headline, right? So now I become known as the guy who says, I hate cashflow, but I don’t. I like cashflow just as much as everybody else. I just think that there’s more to life than just it. Much like Moana who wanted to get off of the island and see what else the world had to offer. It’s not that she hated Maui, she just wanted to see what else was out there.

Rob:
Have you really seen Moana, by the way?

David:
No, I haven’t, but I’ve heard the song.

Rob:
I’ve seen it 1,000 times without watching it. My daughter has watched it so many times and it’s white noise for me, but I like the songs. I’ve never seen it in its entirety, so maybe you and I can watch it sometime together, after Interstellar.

David:
If you hang out with Brandon Turner enough, you absorb every single Disney movie that there is in the world. He just sings, as a grown man he sings those songs in front of other people with no shame. Really embarrasses me all the time, but that’s mostly how I’ve heard it. All right, our next comment here. Hi David and Rob, I’ve been watching BP for over a year, but David, it was your challenge to get into real estate in 2023 that lit a fire within me. I signed up for BP Pro and I ran analysis of a little over 100 properties in three to days. Finally found two properties that not only has a small cash on cash return of 5%, but is expected to increase in value near a new medical center being built that’s walking distance away. I’m focused on taxes, depreciation, et cetera, more than just cash on cash.
Thank you for this great and fun discussion and all you guys do. Every time I hear both you and Rob, I become less fearful and I feel more empowered. It’s like you guys are virtual coaches. By the way, David, Rob may be funny, but you have bigger guns, man.

Rob:
Okay. I read this comment, I was like, oh, that’s so nice. And then they said, but David, you have big guns. And I’m like, did you write this? Did you write this David?

David:
Yeah, that would’ve been nice, but we both know I can’t. I’m not this articulate. What I do love is that he said that you may be funny, but he didn’t say you are funnier, right? So not only did he say that I have bigger guns, he didn’t even say that you were funnier than me. So who is this here?

Rob:
Well, and just to bring it back a little bit, they said, I may be funny, Rob may be funny, the jury is still out.

David:
This person knew how to get included on Seeing Greene. This is from myndfulness, spelled with a Y, not an I. Myndfulness, you have an open invitation to comment as often as you possibly can and we will prioritize your comments. Thank you for recognizing who the alpha of the show is here.

Rob:
Wait, wait, I have a follow-up, I can’t believe I’m just remembering this now, do you remember on the last Seeing Greene, someone was like, thank you so much BiggerPockets for all the things you do, and David, you’re just such a good-looking guy, I can’t believe you’re single, or something like that. And then I was like, is this real? There’s no way that this is real. Cassandra, who are you? That episode came out and she sent me a message on DM. She DMed me and she’s like, I don’t don’t know if remember her name was Cassandra, but she was like, hey, this is Cassandra from that Seeing Greene episode that left the nice comment about David, yes, I am real, LOL. And I was like.

David:
Wow. Props to Cassandra for actually existing first off. We didn’t think that was real, not that there’s anything wrong with it, but my audience base tends to be basically 100% men. I’ve never gotten a compliment from a female in all of my years on the BiggerPockets podcast. I am on a roll right now. What can I say? I got a good fortune cookie. Somebody blessed me. I don’t know what it was, but thank you all for Seeing Greene and Rob, for you being here to witness it.

Rob:
Hey, congratulations my friend.

David:
And if your name wasn’t Cassandra, we apologize. Alexandra. There we go. Look at our production staff. Isn’t it nice to have the privilege of producers that just pop in here with, it’s like Jamie on the Joe Rogan podcast right there with whatever we need. All right, our next comment comes from Nori Carolyn who says you’ve got a gift for making engaging content. Well, wow, the compliments keep flowing. I appreciate that, Nori. I agree that I do have a gift and I like to open it and give it to myself sometimes. Rob, you’ve got a gift for making engaging content as well, which is why you’re here on the show. She might’ve actually been talking to you for all we know, right? I’m assuming that that compliment was meant towards me.

Rob:
That’s right. Hey, there’s two of us now. Thank you very much Nori.

David:
And from King Louis I, thank you for this. Was wondering how the HELOC approach would work at this moment in time. I really appreciate this conversation. Now I love that comment too. I believe he’s referring to when we were discussing uses of a HELOC and it’s typically described as the only use is that you use it for the down payment on your next property. And that’s because over the years we’ve given that as a hypothetical example of when you buy a property that you create equity, the equity can be taken out to buy the next property. We call it the snowball method or we’ve often said if you get one good deal, it will buy your future deals. One of the ways we’ve described that was using a HELOC to buy your next property, but in today’s market that may not always work because cashflow can be so hard to find.
The debt to income ratios are very tight. We described using a HELOC to improve a property, which Rob is something that you’ve been doing quite a bit of in your own portfolio as well as our property. I think this is something that people should take note of. Don’t just ask how to get the next property, but if it’s a short-term rental, maybe ask how to improve what you’ve already got.

Rob:
Right. Right. And just for everyone at home that doesn’t know, a HELOC is a home equity line of credit. So it’s like a line of credit against the equity that you’ve built in your house.

David:
That is right, and we will be discussing more uses for a HELOC shortly. All right, one more review and then we’re going to jump back into your questions. This one comes from AS McNerney. They say, great content. Signed up for BiggerPockets in 2014, searching for another income stream. Never got active in the forums but have always enjoyed reading and looking at real estate. I ended up working my down payment generator and getting my finances in order. Found the podcast about a year ago and it helped me towards a path I always wanted to get into but never took action. I bought my first rental in January. Consuming content every day from the podcast is incredibly inspiring and highly educational. Keep it up. Thank you very much for that Apple review. We love your YouTube comments, but we also love the reviews that you leave us wherever you listen to your podcast.
So if you wouldn’t mind going to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast and leaving us a review, we will love you forever. And Rob personally promised me that he would start working out his biceps if we got more reviews. So if you’d like to see that, which I think that I definitely would and many of you other people would probably agree, go leave us a review. All right, we love and appreciate your engagement. Please continue to like, comment, subscribe on YouTube as well and submit your questions at biggerpockets.com/david, to be featured on the show. Speaking of those questions, our next one comes from Francesco Ponticelli.

Francesco:
Hi David. My name is Francesco from Miami, Florida. Quick question for you. I have five properties here in Miami area, two of which are condos in the prime area, that is the Bricker, the marathon of Miami. One property I bought 340,000 in 2019. I put 50K on it and now it’s worth 650. I have a very low interest rate on that property. Insurance is skyrocketing, that is inflating the HOA. They doubled in the last four years and they are going to increase 30% more next year. Rent are flat, so I’m near the breakeven points. What do you suggest to do? One, keep the property hoping on the equity even if there is a risk of a negative cash flow, sell it and look for other alternative investment that is not a condo in Florida or wait and keep the money and look for investment out of state? Because in Florida it’s hot. Waiting for your comment. Thank you.

David:
All right, thank you Francesco. Very nice video. And you’re actually in a good situation. You have good or better options here, not just good or bad. Francesco also left us a little bit of a written supplement here. So what he says in his writings is that given the current market, I’m torn, number one, do I keep the property and bank on equity in the longterm but risk possible negative cashflow? Because as he said, the HOAs are adjusting and they’re becoming more expensive. Number two, sell it, then wait for a local gem to invest in. In the last two years I haven’t been able to buy anything in the Miami area priced below 500,000 with a positive ROI. Or number three sell and venture out of state where you still have positive return on income, cashflow and equity growth. Maybe if I go further north. All right Rob, I’m going to turn this over to you in a second, but I find it very funny that we often assume every market is better than our own.
When I was in LA meeting with Meet Kevin, ironically, he was investing in a city called Oakley that is like six minutes away from where I record the podcast. I’ve never even considered buying there. I’m going to other areas. He did a bunch of research and ended up on this city that’s right in my neighborhood that I didn’t think anyone had even heard of. And I just thought it was funny that I’m driving six hours south to find a person who’s actually investing in my own backyard. And I think Francesco might be in a similar situation here. He’s thinking my own market doesn’t cashflow, should I go somewhere else, when so much of the world is investing in his market, which ironically is what’s creating the difficulty in finding the cashflow. So I’ll weigh in here with my two cents, but before I do, what are your thoughts?

Rob:
Okay, so let me get some clarity here, because I thought he was thinking about, maybe I misheard this question. We can edit this out if it’s not. But I thought he was thinking about doing a refi and pulling equity out, but since he’d have a higher interest rate, his mortgage would go up. Was that not correct?

David:
He said that in the video. It wasn’t included in these three questions here. So you can weigh that in on an option.

Rob:
Okay. So I’m pretty much always going to be against negative cashflow. I don’t think you should ever refi into something that gives you negative cashflow. So he’s wondering should he bank on the equity in the longterm but risk negative cash flow. So we think that his HOA fees are going to go up. I don’t like it. I don’t really ever like to tell someone to sell a property either, but I really don’t want someone losing money every single month. I don’t know why I’m like that, but I feel like it should at least break even. Breaking even to me is like a win and losing money is not.

David:
Well I think he said he’s nearing the breakeven point, but he’s concerned if the HOAs keep going up he could actually go the other way.

Rob:
I would probably just keep it until the HOA fees went up and then once they went up I’d probably sell it. I don’t think I would ever really want to keep something that’s losing money every month. Unless he can really absorb it. But I don’t know, not for me. What do you think?

David:
This question really highlights that real estate investing is moving from a checkers era into a chess era. It was very simple. Save money, buy property, run it through a calculator to find the highest ROI you can, buy in the best area you can and wait, that’s what I’m using as a checkers example. Now you’ve got all these variables, it’s much more like chess. You’re like, well my rate is low so if I sell and buy somewhere else I’m going to get a higher rate which will hurt cashflow, but if I keep it, the HOA can keep going up. So that could hurt me. Would that hurt me more than the rate increase if I buy somewhere else? And oh by the way, I’m in an area that’s still appreciating a lot, so if I sell to get more cashflow, I could miss out on the appreciation.
But is there a market where it’s getting appreciation and cashflow and your mind just spins through all of these options and it becomes really confident.

Rob:
And they’re all hard.

David:
Yes, none of them are an obvious answer. Which is, you mentioned the book that I’m working on right now. That’s why I’m writing it. Because we need a framework to look at questions like this from. It becomes confusing when you’re thinking my job is to get as much cashflow as I can. Well that’s very simple. Find the market with the highest cash on cash return and buy there. But as you start to weigh in all these other factors like future appreciation, future rent increases, HOA increases if you buy into the wrong market, the cash benefits of buying real estate if you work in certain ways. Now it just becomes less simple. So here’s some of the first thoughts that I was having. I will always prioritize the location or the area over the other intangibles in a deal.
So I really like South Florida. I really like Miami. When Francesco is saying I can’t find anything that cashflow is under 500,000. There is a reason for that. The reason is there’s so much demand to get in on that market that they’re bidding the prices out of the range where cashflow can work. But the reason that they’re doing that is so many people are recognizing you’re going to get a lot of appreciation. So if you look at a scale with cashflow on one side and appreciation on the other side, the appreciation in South Florida is so heavy that it’s outweighing the need for cashflow. So investors are buying there, which means that you can just keep going up in price range until your competition thins and you will hit a point where you can find properties that other people are not necessarily fighting to get.
You just have to be a little bit more nuanced when you get there because you have to be creative at finding a way to make it cashflow. It’s not going to cashflow on its own. It’s something you’re going to have to do to it to get it to cashflow. So that’s one option. Overall I don’t like that he bought into an area with an HOA. For investors, it’s not terrible, but here’s the problem. When you run the numbers, you can just include the HOA as an expense, which is how people have been told to do this for a long time. But people aren’t explained you lose control when you buy into an area with an HOA. You can’t stop them from raising that expense. You can’t stop them from hitting you with a special assessment.
So if you’re not aware, when you buy into an area that has shared common areas or shared parts of the building and there’s an HOA in place, if there’s a flood, if there’s a storm, if there’s a tree that falls on the building, if the pool leaks and they have to replace it, they can come to everyone in the complex and say, you all got to kick in $6,000 so that we can take an accumulation of 700 grand and fix this problem that we have with our plumbing or our electrical or our roof or whatever the problem may be, and you have to pay it. That can destroy cashflow and you can’t account for that in your underwriting. You don’t know what’s going to happen. Now, what you should do when buying an HOA is make sure that the HOA itself is properly funded, that they’re not low on cash, but that can even be tricky. Real estate agents themselves don’t always know how to figure that out.
So long story short, try to avoid buying in an HOA if you can. It’s tempting because the prices are usually lower and it’s easier to get in there. The problem is it’s easier to get in, but it’s harder to get out. It’s harder to make cashflow.

Rob:
Okay, so here’s my thought. I guess I would probably wait it out until the HOA fees go up, don’t sell if you don’t have to. And I’m not even sure selling right now would even be all that easy, but I would say probably keep it until you’re in the negative cashflow. His other option he gave us was sell it then wait for a local gem to invest in. And then he said in the last two years I haven’t been able to buy anything in Miami in the three to $500,000 range with a positive ROI. I really don’t really like this, I don’t like this idea of sell it and then wait for a gem to pop up. That’s way too lackadaisical. It’s not going to. I can tell you right now, you have to make the good deal. You and Brandon, you always say. I would say, and also from a capital gain standpoint, he’s going to make 300K on this property, so he’s going to pay capital gains on it. So he can’t wait.
He’s forced to 1031 into a property unless he wants to pay a pretty decent tax bill on that. What about this? We haven’t talked about this. I know this is going to make a lot of people at home very mad, but he says that he can’t find anything in the three to $500,000 range with a positive ROI, but he is going to make $300,000 on this sale. So what if he just put a larger down payment on a three to $500,000 property to get his payment down so that he could actually cashflow every month? In my mind it’s the same thing because he’s currently breakeven right now, but if he could go find something else and just put a really large down payment on and make more money with it, then I would feel like that’s ultimately he’s going to make more money that way. Does that make sense?

David:
He’s going to make more money in the cashflow arena.

Rob:
Cashflow. Right.

David:
But he could lose money in equity growth because South Florida just we don’t know what’s going to happen, but all the metrics are leaning towards that being an area of incredible growth in the future, because they’re so business friendly and the climate’s great and it’s like the trending place to be. I was just out there a couple of weeks ago recording a podcast to promote pillars and I was amazed at how much growth had been there just in the year before. It looked like San Francesco in San Francesco’s prime, which is the opposite, right? People have left San Francesco and now they’re moving out that way. The reason I’m going to, in this case like you Rob, I’m going to advise I do think he should sell, is that there is no way of controlling what the HOA is going to do in the future.
And HOAs are not always corrupt, but they are notorious for having management that is not the most scrupulous people. They can mismanage funds, they can take salaries for themselves. People that are listening to this that have had the experience probably know what I’m talking about. I don’t like putting so many eggs in a basket that I don’t control. I’d much rather see him have a single family home. If he could sell it and buy something else in South Florida that could function as a short-term rental and it’s just a single family home without HOAs that he has more control over, I’d love it. If he has to sell and move that money into a different area, I would prefer that and missing out on potential equity growth to at least have the safety that you’re not going to have your HOAs double over and over and over.
Because if you think about how most people raise prices, it happens with inflation. So the cost of the materials, the cost of the things that the HOA needs to run go up, they’re just going to pass that expense off to the people who live there and they’re under no pressure to keep expenses low. There’s no competition within HOAs. It’s not like, well, if we get too expensive, they’re going to kick us out and start another one. It’s incredibly difficult to do that.

Rob:
Yeah, I agree. The HOA board, it’s not like they’re qualified, they’re not necessarily qualified people, isn’t it just like the people of the complex all come together and nominate people and stuff? It’s not like you’re like a certified HOA person.

David:
You contract with the company to run and do the duties of an HOA, but the people in the complex can vote on them. It’s just no one’s going to put a ton of time into studying. Well, who are the people that we want to bring in? And once they get brought in, they just go make themselves comfortable. This is what you have to pay us and this is what we’re going to get. It’s not a capitalistic environment. I’ve often said when I retire from real estate sales, I’m just going to start an HOA, because it’s like the easiest thing ever.

Rob:
My wife’s complex back in the day, I think the president of the HOA was one of the owners of the houses.

David:
It’s small enough. Yes.

Rob:
Yeah, it was. It was a small enough complex. So when it’s small enough, it’s just ran by a lot of the residents who appoint the people. And it’s like, who’s really, I don’t know, I could see how unqualified people run it.

David:
Who’s going to be the president of the Boy Scouts? Well, let’s look at all the kids that are in the Boy Scouts and pick the parent who ties the best knot. But once it gets to a bigger size or it’s in an expensive area like Miami, they then contract with a company that provides HOA services.

Rob:
That makes sense.

David:
Tough spot to be in here, Francesco. Good news is you’ve done well already. You’ve had quite a bit of growth in the property that you bought, which has given you equity. And as I always say, equity gives you options. I think Rob and I are both on the side of, you should sell this thing while the market is up and put your money into somewhere that you have more control. Rob, any markets that you like that he should look into?

Rob:
If he’s in Florida, I was going to say he should stay in Florida, but I think with all the insurance stuff going out there, I would probably say not Florida. I’m hearing a lot of people rag on the Florida insurance situation, so right around that area, oh gosh, I don’t even want to say it, but Shenandoah, this is something that me and Avery Carl keep joking about because she keeps talking about Shenandoah. I’m like, don’t ruin this market for all of us. I think that’s a pretty good market to invest in. But that would be really more on the short-term side. On the long-term side, I can’t really speak to the East coast per se.

David:
I don’t think anyone knows where you can buy long-term rentals right now and just know you’re going to get cashflow. It used to be like, hey, this is the new place. Well I don’t want to go there. Okay, well don’t get cashflow. All right, fine. I’ll go there. Now it’s like all the investors have flooded the market and there’s so much demand for cashflow that I don’t know anywhere that traditional rentals are cash flowing, which is why so many people have moved into short term or medium term or creative ideas here. All right, Francesco, thank you very much for your question and giving Rob and I the opportunity to explain how HOAs work as well as the checkers/chess situation with real estate investing.
Our next question comes from Meredith in Austin. Meredith says that I did a successful first flip in Austin in 2017, and then I flipped another house in Austin this past summer using a HELOC and a hard money loan. On the second flip in this miserable downmarket, it took forever to sell and I ended up losing over 60K. Wow, glad that she’s sharing. That sucks, but there’s not a whole lot of people that are admitting when they lose money. So props to you, Meredith. I paid back my hard money loan at closing and only about half of my HELOC, so she took out a HELOC for part of the money and she was only able to pay half of it back because she didn’t have enough money, which left her with a balance. So my HELOC is hemorrhaging interest every month and I have this massive loss I can use against future capital gains and I’m trying to figure out what to do.
I’ve already decided to try a cheaper and less volatile market. I’m reading your Long-Distance investing book, David, but I wonder whether you would advise that I try another flip or two despite my huge failure in this one or try a BRRRR instead and cash out to pay back my HELOC. Is that even possible? My remaining HELOC balance is around 60K and that’s all the liquidity I have available for the next deal. Rob, what say you?

Rob:
All right, let me read this last part. I’ve already decided to try cheaper, less volatile market, but I wonder whether you would advise that I try another flip or two or try to BRRRR instead and cash out to pay back my HELOC. All right. This is a hard one. Well, first and foremost, Meredith, I feel you. I’ve got two flips in Austin that turned out to be total dogs. One of them is actually fine because I ended up turning it into what’s going to be a super crazy Airbnb. It’s going to be like a bachelorette themed Airbnb. So David, I want you to go and stay there and give me your thoughts. But the other one was a flip that we bought in Austin that was a screaming good deal when we got. It was like 400K and we were going to make like $100,000 profit on this and we’re like, heck yeah, we did it.
And then quickly after running through the bid and all the changes that happened in Austin, literally within two or three months we went from making $100,000 profit to breaking even or losing 10 or 20,000 bucks. And so that’s where we’re at right now. And we had already started the renovation, gutted everything, and so we were trying to think what’s the highest and best use for this property? And we were like, well, maybe we can demo it, build a duplex. And dude, we went back and forth on this for the last two months and then finally I had the bright idea. I was like, well, you know what? It’s already gutted. What if we just sold it for all the money that we’re into it? And so we bought it for 400K, we put about $7,000 into it, paid about another five or 6,000 in holding costs.
We’re all in like 415. Listed it for 450, got a full price offer. Someone’s going to buy our gutted house. And it’s like, oh my goodness, I can’t believe I pulled this off. But I’m going to say this, we were going to have to invest 100K to flip this house to break even. And I was like, holy crap, I don’t want to spend $100,000 only to maybe break even. So I was like, I’d rather just spend no money and lose $10,000 now. So I say all this Meredith, to just let you understand that even someone like myself, I haven’t done a ton of flips, this isn’t really what I do, but it was a really good deal at the time and the Austin market did turn very quickly for a lot of people out there. I think a lot of people in Austin are hurting.
So definitely would advise you to break out of Austin, which sounds like you’re willing to do. Should you try to BRRRR and build up so much equity that you cash out and pay back your HELOC? Is that even possible? Man, I don’t know dude, that’s a hard one. It’s like she didn’t succeed on her first one, but she could definitely use her mistakes on that to have a successful second or third flip or BRRRR. I just don’t really like getting into more debt to pay back the debt that you currently have.

David:
It feels like when you lose money gambling and you’re like, well, I need to go make more to pay back my losses.

Rob:
I need to double up real fast. Exactly. But that’s real estate and people lose money on flips all the time and people oftentimes have to flip another property to offset that loss. I interviewed James Dainard about it, just for some of my Insta Reels, and he was telling me about a deal that he lost money on, and I was like, what’d you do? And he is like, I flipped another house to pay for it. So I do think it’s relatively common. With that said, I don’t know if I want to advise it.

David:
Here’s why I think you’re hesitant. I’ve been thinking through it as you’re talking. James Dainard is a professional house flipper.

Rob:
Exactly.

David:
He’s dialed in. That guy is good. He can sit there and he can talk about construction. He knows the cost of capital. He does this. How many houses do you think James has flipped? Well over 100.

Rob:
Hundreds. Hundreds.

David:
Okay. And he’s immersed in real estate every day. He’s got a brokerage. That guy just never stops. I like James business ethic quite a bit. Meredith here is learning how to be a real estate investor. Now what’s confusing I think is oftentimes real estate influencers describe flipping as a strategy that makes it sound like it’s just like every other strategy. You could flip a house, you could buy and hold, just pick one and go for it. But the reality is flipping requires a very specific set of skills, much like Liam Neeson in Taken. And if you don’t have those skills, you can lose a lot of money as Meredith saw. Now, in the last eight years or so, very few people lost money flipping because the market itself was so favorable. You could do so many things wrong, but you just happened to gain $50,000 of equity while you made all those mistakes.
And so you sold the house and you still made a little bit of money and the mistakes you made were less expensive. They were less dangerous. It is the opposite now. As you saw Rob as an experienced investor, you bought a property. A few mistakes were made I’m sure, the market turned on you. The next thing you know what looked like $100,000 of profit evaporated like that, and you were lucky to get out from underneath it. I don’t want to tell more people to rush into that mess and say, yeah, just try to do it again. In general, what I’m saying here is that if you’re going to flip houses in today’s market, you should be more of a professional flipper. You know construction really well, maybe you own a construction company or the deal is so fat and juicy, you walked into a good one.
I had one time a friend who fell behind on her mortgage and she was a couple of weeks away from literal foreclosure, and she came to me and she’s like, David, I don’t want this to hammer my credit. Can you buy this house? And so I basically gave her what she, I paid off the loan and I gave her 20 grand to get out from underneath it. That deal was super, super juicy. So if you mess up on it, you’ve got a lot of wiggle room there. That’s not the same as going on the MLS competing with other buyers trying to get the house and trying to squeeze it out to make it work. I don’t think, Meredith, from what you’ve told us, that I would recommend you try to flip another house. Unless it’s too good of a deal to pass up. I’d much rather see you focus on something that’s a little more safe and wait out this market till we get some stability here and we don’t wonder if the market’s going to tank or if people aren’t going to buy homes.
One metric that I think everyone should be looking at right now is the days on market. It’s easy when you look at a flip to say, here’s a comp, it’s sold for X, I’m going to pay Y, and the construction and holding costs are Z. Let me just do the math with those numbers. But if you’ve got 15 houses available for sale and one or two pending, no one’s going to pay that price that you saw in the comp. It’s very misleading. You need to be looking at what is the supply in your market, how much demand is there for that and how long are houses sitting on the market before they sell? And don’t try to flip in a market where there’s already a lot of existing supply and not a ton of demand. Is that something that you’ve been noticing as well, Rob?

Rob:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I’ve thought about this while you were saying that. I think we had to really talk this one out to give some advice. James doesn’t really miss, and I guess that’s the difference. You’re saying he’s an experienced flipper, and if he does miss, like he talked about on that one deal, he’s got eight other deals that are going to make up for it because he is good at this. I don’t think Meredith can afford to miss again. And that’s why I don’t want you to go out and try to do it again until we clean up your HELOC and you may just have to pay that down the old-fashioned way. You might have to get, not to be too Dave Ramsey here, but a side hustle, another job. Figure that out.
I certainly don’t want to discourage anyone from continuing the real estate train because I think it is something that anybody can do, but if she’s feeling the pain from one that’s already hurting, I just would hate for this to happen again. So I don’t know. I would feel like waiting it out and nicking down her HELOC as much as possible. And then when rates allow for it refi out of the HELOC in a couple years, I think that’s my apprehensive answer to that. We don’t always have good ones, but that’s mine. I don’t know. How do you feel about that?

David:
I think it would be irresponsible to tell people, yeah, just rush in there and figure it out. If you’re sitting on $3 million of money to play with, you got a big fat stack of poker chips, you can learn how to play poker with live money. But in this case, I don’t think that that’s great advice. If Meredith was saying she has some kind of an advantage, my dad owns a construction company or I have an in where I’m getting deals at better rates than other people, that would be a different scenario. But I’m not getting that vibe from the question here. So based on that, I think Meredith, you should be a little bit more hesitant. Don’t stop investing in real estate. Don’t stop looking at deals, but don’t be thinking, I have to make that 60 grand back. Where’s my opportunity to make it back? Because now you’re assuming that the deal’s going to work out. You could have end up in $120,000 of debt just the same as $60,000.
There’s a line from the movie Rounders with Matt Damon and Edward Norton, really good poker movie, where they say, you can only lose what you put in the pot, right? You can’t lose money if you don’t actually put it into the market. Now, is it true you can’t gain money? Yes, that that is true. But once you’re already in debt, you need to be extra careful with what you do with the chips that you have remaining. And real estate is not a magic pill that’s going to save you from things. So Rob, I think you gave great financial advice there. You can only lose the money that you put into the pot. So be very careful in today’s market. If you’ve got a great hand, play it, but don’t feel pressured to play a hand that’s not great. Eventually the market will turn around and you’ll have plenty of opportunities.
Rob, thank you for joining me today. I thought solid advice here and it was a lot of fun as well as supporting me with your Disney knowledge.

Rob:
That’s true. Well, these are fun because they are so specific, niche and situational that there isn’t always a clear cut answer. There’s just like you can hear a couple of pros bat around things that they would do or how they would consider it, and you just use that to inform your strategy, right? There’s no right or wrong. There’s just what’s right for you. So don’t take anything we say too hard or too personally. Everything that we say pretty much comes from a place of like, all right, we want to try to be as helpful as possible, but recognize that sometimes there isn’t a beautiful resolution that’s super obvious at the beginning. You have to work through it a little bit first.

David:
That’s right. I really hope that we were able to help some of you brave souls who took action to ask questions. And I look forward to answering more of your questions in future episodes. Today’s show, we covered quite a few topics, including what to do when you’re strapped on cash, but have a lot of equity. If you should buy in an HOA or if you shouldn’t, as well as how HOAs work. When flips go wrong and HELOCs don’t work out the way you thought and had to pivot in a hard situation to make sure you don’t lose more money. Don’t forget to check the show notes for how to get connected with Rob and I on social media and let us know what you thought of today’s show.
Now, get out there, look at some more deals, find the very best ones, and take action when you find them. This is David Greene for Rob. No one knows how far he’ll go. Abasolo signing off.

Do you have a promising idea for a business? You might want to press pause before you start grinding away at marketing plans and networking your way to seed funding. Not that you should sleep on your visions for a startup, of course. But you should take a moment to study what has made other founders successful.

It’s understandable if taking a page from someone else’s book doesn’t hold much appeal. Most entrepreneurs get into the game because they have a desire to carve out their own niche, after all. However, you could pick up strategic insights to add fuel to your momentum. In that spirit, here are a few lessons from some of today’s exceptionally successful startups that took an idea from zero to IPO.

1. Simplify a Difficult Process

Consumers crave simplicity. If a product or service is too complex, they tend to think twice about using it. But say it’s a service that markets consider essential, such as buying or selling a home. The U.S. real estate market might have tapered off recently, but 5 million transactions still went through last year.

Despite the necessity of home buying and selling, most consumers would agree it’s a complicated ordeal. You’ve got to find an agent, disrupt your routine for showings or open houses and—should you eventually find a good fit—sift through all the legalese. A lot about the process can slow things down. And when you need to buy or sell fast, the traditional route can be too much to handle.

Opendoor is an example of a startup founded on the idea of simplifying an overly complex but necessary process. Its business model leverages technology to make it easier for buyers and sellers to carry out this multifaceted exchange. Opendoor’s idea caught on with homeowners who want to skip the hassles of showings and need to sell their properties quickly. The company’s services also streamline the process for those buying and selling at the same time. Goodbye, stress and inconvenience.

2. Connect the Dots

Profitable startups sometimes begin with the notion of bringing groups of businesses and consumers under one roof. Take the restaurant industry as an example. Some restaurants have the capacity to offer delivery services, while others don’t. Simultaneously, hungry customers don’t always want to dine in or pick up curbside. And in households with different palates, calling multiple restaurants to deliver a family feast can be a pain.

Sometimes, a brilliant business model starts by building bridges between unmet needs. This is something Doordash did by providing a service both restaurants and diners find useful. By expanding food delivery services, the company creates a way for more restaurants and consumers to connect.

Restaurant owners win because they don’t lose out on sales or have to maintain the overhead, including personnel, associated with deliveries. Consumers also score because of the convenience of ordering from multiple restaurants under a single platform. The key to success in this model is finding the overlap in market needs and offering convenient, centralized solutions to both sides of the transaction.

3. Uncover the Real Need

It’s hard to believe streaming giant Netflix was once a startup. Known for disrupting the video rental industry, the company’s founders did it by closely studying the market. Consumers were seeking home entertainment—the more on demand, the better. The reason video rentals were popular was because they brought the movie theater into people’s homes. This was easier and more economical than going to the theater, yet consumers’ choices were limited to the films video stores had on their shelves when they visited.

Netflix knew that access to seemingly endless video content was what mattered. Through extensive market research, the company was able to reshape how consumers fulfilled this need. The fact that they didn’t have to leave their homes to do it made it even better. Netflix’s model of delivering DVDs to people’s doors was born, and it continued to evolve with changes in technology.

By uncovering the core driver of your target market’s behaviors, you can find ways to introduce disruptive, high-growth solutions. Listening to what the market is saying and analyzing consumers’ actions leads to improvements they’ll want to embrace. Uniquely serving the identified need helps your company stand out and establish market leadership.

Learning From the Lessons Others Learned

Launching a startup comes with risks and rewards. You’re pursuing an entrepreneurial path because you want a different kind of life. You see a way to do something better and want to bring that to the world. You also want to experience the freedom of being in charge of your career.

Learning what’s made startups before yours thrive can help you determine whether your business idea is viable. You might find ways to serve markets with simplified solutions, bridge market gaps and/or identify consumers’ true wants before they do. By applying these winning strategies to your distinct offering, your startup could be the next big success story.

Dave:
Welcome to On The Market, and happy Thanksgiving to everyone. I hope you enjoyed a wonderful Thanksgiving, and I hope that you enjoyed the day after Thanksgiving even more where you get to eat all those delicious leftovers, hopefully piling everything onto a giant sandwich and then going into a food coma for the rest of the day. For today’s episode, we’re actually going to be replaying an episode that we recorded last year where me, Kathy, Henry and James made predictions about 2023. Now that the year is winding down, we wanted to be accountable and share with you what we thought was going to happen in 2023, and you can see for yourself what we got right and what we got wrong.
We’re choosing to do this right now because next week we are going to be airing our 2024 predictions. So listen to today’s episode and you can evaluate our credentials for making predictions, see how well we did last year, and that should give you some context for our predictions episode that is coming next week. Okay, so hopefully you enjoy this replay episode and join us again next week for our 2024 predictions. Hey, everyone. Welcome to On The Market. My name’s Dave Meyer, I’ll be your host, and I am joined by three wonderful panelists. First up we have Henry Washington. Henry, what’s going on?

Henry:
What’s up, Dave? Glad to be here, man. Good to see you again.

Dave:
You too. We also have James Danner. James, how you been?

James:
I’m doing well. We have a sunny day in October in Seattle, which is very rare, so it’s a good day.

Dave:
Cherish it.

James:
I am.

Dave:
Kathy, how are you? Probably sunny and enjoying Malibu ’cause it’s always nice.

Kathy:
It’s been foggy, but you guys, I’m still recovering from BPCON. I don’t know about you, but trying to keep up with all these youngsters.

Dave:
Kathy is completely lying, by the way. She was leading the charge. There’s no way. You were hanging in with us. You were absolutely driving all of the fun we had at BPCON. All right. So today we are going to talk about… this show gives me a little bit of anxiety because we are going to try and make some forecasts about the 2023 housing market, which normally housing market years, it’s not that hard to predict. It usually just goes up a little bit, but the last couple of years have gotten pretty tricky, but we’re going to do it anyway because even though none of us know exactly what’s going to happen, this type of forecasting and discussion of the elements of variables that go into housing prices could help all of us form a investing hypothesis for next year and make better investing decisions. Sound good to you guys?

Kathy:
I should have grabbed my crystal ball. It’s in the other room.

Dave:
I know. Mine is very broken right now, unfortunately.

James:
I think everyone’s is broken.

Dave:
All right it’s time to make these very frightening predictions for the 2023 housing price. Who is bold enough to go first? Henry, I’m looking at you man.

Henry:
Absolutely not.

Kathy:
Are we talking rates?

Dave:
No. I want you to guess year-over-year, one year from today, where are we? What day is this? It’s October 12th. One year from today, year-over-year housing market prices on a national level where are we going to be? Right now, we are at about 7% from 2021 to 2022. Where are we going to be in 2023? What do you got, James?

James:
I do believe that we are going to slide steadily backwards and that we’re going to be looking at about a 9% drop. We’ve just seen too much appreciation. I think we were up what, nearly 10, 12% last year? Then from 2018 to 2020 we saw over 30% growth in home prices, and so the growth has just been too large. I think it’s going to pull back and we’re going to see about a nine to 10% year-over-year drop from where we are at today.

Dave:
All right. Henry, I’m going to make you answer this.

Henry:
No, I want to answer it. I think that’s aggressive. Maybe it’s because the Seattle market is the one having the largest pullback right now compared to the rest of the markets in the country. So but not joking, you’re feeling it more than everybody else is, ’cause you’re So heavily invested in that market where I’m the opposite. We’re still seeing… sorry, we’re still seeing home price growth here, so I don’t know. I think on a national scale it’s probably going to come down, but I don’t know, 5%, I feel like it’s still even a lot, but that that’s my guess.

Kathy:
Wow. So if I came in around 7.5, I’d be right between you two? I’m going to stick with my 7.5. I played this game on car rides, you guys.

Dave:
Isn’t there a movie about that, the number 24 or number 23 where it’s like everything comes down to that number? That’s you, Kathy.

Kathy:
There it is, 7.5. I don’t care what the national number is. I really don’t care because look at Henry, he’s like, “I don’t care.” I’m not in those markets that are going to have a pullback. If you got into Boise or Austin or Seattle a year or two years ago, you made a lot of money and some of that’s going to get pulled back. It’s not the worst thing in the world for the person who owns the home because if you hold it long enough it’ll rebound eventually. It’s obviously really hard for people who are trying to sell right now, better price your property right. But if you are in markets, Tampa’s another market where prices went up a lot, but there’s still so much demand they’re not really seeing the pullback that some of the other cities are that saw such massive gains over the last year.

Dave:
Kathy, you’re absolutely right, and we do want to allow you to have your public service announcement that there is no national housing market, which is true. You’re absolutely right, but just to clarify, ’cause I have to hold you to this, was that a +7.5% or or a -7.5%

Kathy:
It was a -7.5 nationwide.

Dave:
Just making sure.

Kathy:
Nationwide, and then I think that’s going to come from certain areas going down 20%-

Dave:
Totally.

Kathy:
… where other areas might go up a little or stay flat, but overall, I think it’ll be a national number will be negative. So let’s say 7.5% ’cause I’m right in the middle, and it’s a safe place.

James:
One thing that I think everyone should know is typically when housing starts sliding backwards, the more expensive markets actually start going first and then it does catch up across the board. Because at the end of the day, rates going to be up 75% of cost of money from where they were 12 months ago. It’s just something to pay attention to because when money gets increased that rapidly, nothing is protected. They’re doing that on purpose. If they’re trying to put us into a recession, it’s going to have impact across the board, ’cause Seattle used to be a more affordable market. We were actually always one of the last markets to get hit.
In 2008, we were one of the tail end areas to start deflating, but now it’s became an expensive market, so we were one of the first to go off. So always check the trends in your historical trends too in your neighborhoods. What Kathy said was completely right. Look at where you’re investing, not the national. National will throw it way off, and then just check those trends. See what it’s done in other prior recessions during that time, and it will give you some predictability. Then just check the growth, and if the growth was rapid, it’s probably going to come back a little bit quicker.

Dave:
Well said, and there’s never been more data available for people too. You can go on just regular websites like Zillow or Redfin or realtor.com and see what’s happening in your market in terms of inventory, days on market, pricing. So there’s really no excuse not to do it, it’s free. You can get a lot of this information right there and look up just what Kathy and James were saying.

Henry:
I think what throws a wrench in those plans, though, is that there’s going to be less competition out there, but there’s still going to be people who can afford to buy single-family homes, and there’s still going to be a shortage of those homes. So even though the interest rates are higher, there’s still going to be a subset of people who can afford to pay those interest rates and who are going to want to buy homes because they can get a little bit better price and there’s less competition out there, which is going to help the sales numbers.

Kathy:
Right. That’s such a great point. 552,000 homes sold in August. We’re still on track for over 5 million this year, which was the average over the last decade if you take out COVID, so homes are still selling. It’s definitely down from the crazy frenzy of the last couple of years, but it’s down to somewhat normal. Would you guys agree with that?

Henry:
Absolutely.

Dave:
I think as soon as mortgage rates get a little bit more stable, people will do it. It’s just like every day it’s just so volatile right now I think that probably is people a little afraid. But at some point, people are going to have to get used to it cause personally, I think even if the Fed starts cutting rates, we’re not going down to 4% again anytime soon. We’re going to have to live with something in the fives probably. So I think people are just going to have to get used to it at some point and start buying again. Okay, I am going to make my guess. It’s right in the middle. There’s not that much variance. I think we also of think it’s the same thing, so I’m going to just go with 6%. Since Jamil’s not here and-

Kathy:
6% negative?

Dave:
6% negative, yes, I definitely think that national housing market’s going down. I’m going to give Jamil a +12% as his estimate because he declined to be here. He’s on the record saying he thinks the housing market’s going on 12%. All right. Well, that’s all fun. As Kathy said, listen, the national housing market, totally agree. It doesn’t really matter. It’s for the headlines, and it is fun to just guess and see how we do on these things. But I’m curious in moving on to some more anecdotal things that you all are thinking about. I want your hot take for 2023. This can be about the housing market, the economy, the state of the world. What’s a unique thing that you think is going to happen next year that will impact the lives of investors I guess I would say? Anyone want to go first?

Kathy:
Oh, my gosh, I’ll jump in.

Dave:
Yes, Kathy, go.

Kathy:
[inaudible 00:10:32] Do you think?

Dave:
Yeah.

Kathy:
Oh, you guys, you guys, you got to understand. You understand the difference between a seller’s market and a buyer’s market and people, they mess this up all the time buying in a seller’s market and selling in a buyer’s market. Oftentimes, I’ll talk to a room and say, “Do you know what a seller’s market is?” They’ll say, “Yeah, it’s a great time to buy!” So I just want to be super clear that a seller’s market means this seller has the power. They can do whatever they want. They can put a house on the market with nothing fixed, with all kinds of problems to say, “You know what? You don’t even get to do inspections. This is the price,” and then get people overbidding.
That’s a seller’s market, the seller has the power. That’s what we’ve had for two years. It was a tough market. If you’re a savvy investor, you could still work around that, but man, if you were flipping houses, what a time. You’ve got the power. If you’re a home builder like we’ve been, wow, got people lining up for your homes. It is shifting. It’s shifting to a buyer’s market, and this is the time to buy. It’s so funny ’cause people are freaking out. It’s like it’s your turn.

Dave:
That’s such a good way to put it.

Kathy:
If you’ve bought and you’re holding on and rents are solid, you’re good. This is the time to get in there and not have all that competition. You have the power. You get to negotiate. It’s a buyer’s market. I don’t know how long that’ll last because I do think eventually, the Fed’s going to get what they want. They’re going to slow things down, and that’s going to, again, bring potentially mortgage rates down. I really think they will, not lower than 5%, maybe slightly or if you pay points, but as soon as those rates come down, what do you think’s going to happen? People are going to come pouring in again as buyers. So you have this window to take advantage of what might be a small opportunity to play in a buyer’s market as a buyer.

Dave:
I love it. That’s a good way to put it, Kathy. Yeah, I think it’s just crazy that people are yearning for what was going on last year. No one wanted to buy last year and now they’re like, “Oh, but interest rates are high, and now it’s going down?” It’s like everyone was completely about it last year. So I think a lot of people are just scared to get in the market at all, and that’s the problem. But as Kathy said, good opportunity right now. Henry, what’s your hot take?

Henry:
My hot take is surprise, surprise at me being a single family and small multifamily investor. I think single-family homes become a very, very hot commodity and something everybody wishes they kept more of or could get at the prices they’re able to get them at right now because of the supply and demand issues. So you look at the interest rate hikes and you look at inflation, at some point, I think those things either level out, maybe start to come down. I don’t know if it does in this year, but at some point, it’ll become normalized. Like you said, the people will continue to buy. But our supply and demand problem didn’t get fixed through all of this, right? There’s still a need for housing. I got approached by a hedge fund just last week asking me if I had any deals, anything in this area that I would be willing to sell them.
I think their thought is the same is that these single-family homes are going to be in need and that over the next, I think a year is tough to predict to say, but over the next couple of years, I think definitely they’re going to be more valuable and in a commodity that a lot of people want to be able to get their hands on. You’re right Kathy, it’s your time to buy, and so we are doing just that. We’re buying, and I’m more bullish on single-family homes than I have been in the past. I’ve typically been flipping all of my single families, but just today we closed on… literally right before this, I had my title company here in my office.
We closed on a single-family home that we’re going to keep. We may start to look more aggressively at not flipping all of the singles and keeping them because the people who own the single-family homes are going to be in the best position to make the profit as well as… The interest rates right now, there are some people who aren’t buying maybe because they can’t, maybe ’cause they don’t want to. But then they have to live somewhere so they’re renting and rents are still doing well here. So I think owning that single-family home, you’re going to be able to get outstanding rents, and I think it’s going to be a more valuable asset to everyone than it seems that it is right now.

Dave:
All right. I like it. James, what do you got? Something controversial maybe?

James:
So I think 2023 is going to be a pretty big shock year for people, and I am actually predicting that defaults are going to be extremely high,

Dave:
Really?

James:
Not percentage wise, but in a different sector. I actually think it’s going to be in the investment sector, not the residential homeowner sector. I think over the last 12 to 24 months, we’ve seen a lot of FOMO and greed in the investment space, and there’s been a lot of purchasing of bad assets or assets that had artificial performance. What’s going to happen is if the market corrects down, which I believe will happen, you’re going to see people needing to bail out of these deals because they had bad practices, they did the rust investments. They were packing performance because they just wanted to get into the market, and I do think there is going to be a graveyard of investment properties and opportunities out there, and that’s really what we’re gearing up to buy.
We’re actually gearing up to buy half-finished town home sites, fix- and-flip projects that are red tagged and stuck and tore apart. I think you could see in the short, short-term rental market, people walking away from properties ’cause they were putting 3.5% down in markets all for the appreciation and those investment engines are slowing down. The high-yield investments right now are not yielding the same growth. Flipping is not doing that well. Development is not doing that well on the margins in a lot of markets. Short-term rentals are down too. These high-yield investments are going to deflate backwards and I don’t think people accounted for that, or they had all stars in their eyes rather than balanced look at portfolios.
I think this is going to be a massive opportunity for investors to purchase bad investments that need to be stabilized and turned into profitable ventures. I think this is going to be a big deal in the next 12 months and I know personally I’m geared up for it and gearing up for it because it’s just the writing’s on the wall for a lot of people. Bad underwriting, greedy underwriting, bad plans, and that equates to inexpensive money in a lot of these deals. That creates a recipe for disaster, but they will need to be purchased and that’s where investors are going to have a lot of opportunity If they have the right plans, right systems in play and the right capital in the door, there’s going to be a lot of opportunity out there.

Kathy:
100%.

Dave:
All right.

Kathy:
Yeah, multifamily particularly. Yeah, there was just insane underwriting.

James:
Oh, talk about stacking performance. They were just stacked. People were just pumping every little yield into these deals, and if you do it that way, that’s where the risk is and it’s going to hurt on the way out the door. It’s all market time at that point and you have missed the market. That game is over.

Dave:
That’s really interesting ’cause when you said that you were going to see a lot of defaults, I was surprised because when you look at home buyer positions like American home buyers are in pretty good position to service their debt right now, but what you’re saying makes total sense. There’s a lot of people who got pretty greedy. We did that show a couple of months ago, Kathy, you said you were looking at two multifamily, right? Syndications that were just crazy with some of the assumptions that we’re making. That was like people were still doing those types of deals even after the writing was on the wall, and you could see that the market was changing gears.

Kathy:
It’s still happening. It’s still happening. On this last one, again, I won’t say who it is, but it’s somebody who’s on a lot of podcasts and they were using… I don’t know if you know-

Henry:
And their initials are…

Kathy:
… who it is, and when we underwrit it… underwrit, is that a word? Underwrote, they were using the reserves as a return, not a return, a return on capital, not even a return of.

Dave:
What?

Kathy:
Basically saying that was profit. Well, first of all, you’ve got reserves set aside ’cause you’re probably going to need them. If you have an older building, I guarantee you’re going to need those reserves. But to put them in the proforma as if it’s profit, oh, boy, I was just like, oh, boy.

Dave:
Yeah.

Kathy:
It’ll be interesting.

Dave:
Wow. Yeah, James, so that actually goes well with my take, and I was going to be a little bit more specific. I’ve said this a little bit, I think there is a storm brewing in the short-term rental market, specifically. If you look at the way those markets grew, it was even faster… I’m not necessarily saying short-term rentals in cities, but in vacation hot spots have gone absolutely crazy over the last couple of years. We saw a demand for second homes go up 90%. So that combined with the increased demand from investors just sent those prices through the roof. Like you said, people put 3.5% down and they were seeing this perfect storm where the supply of short-term rentals has continually gone up. I think it was up like 20% year-over-year.
So there’s way, way more short-term rentals than there have ever been at a point where if we hit a recession and we continue to see this inflation that’s hurting people spending power, we’re discretionary spending things, and going to a short-term rental is probably going to go down. So you could see the whole industry have more supply but less revenue, and that could put really people in a bad spot. I’m not saying this is going to be everyone. I think people who are experienced operators, people who have good, unique properties that stand out can still do well. But I personally believe there’s going to be very good opportunity in these markets over the next couple of years like James said, and so I’m excited about that. The other thing I think that’s happening in the short-term rental market that is this slow-moving freight train is all the regulation that’s going on in short-term rentals.
More and more big cities are starting to regulate, like Dallas just regulated. I think Atlanta is starting to put in regulations, and I think that trend is really going to continue, and we’re going to see an erosion of opportunity in the big cities. People who have grandfathered in will probably do really well ’cause there’s going to be constrained supply. But I think that’s going to be a really interesting thing to watch. If housing prices stay this high, more and more municipalities are probably going to be tempted to try and solve the housing problem with regulating short-term rentals, which makes no sense to me, but I think they’ll try and do it anyway.

Henry:
Well, it might make no sense in some smaller… but we just got back from San Diego. There’s tons and tons of Airbnbs out there and they’re starting to impose more restrictions. The same reason why Atlanta’s doing it is because tons of people were buying property, they’re turning them into Airbnbs. Again, there’s a supply and demand problem. So the best way they can think to get more housing on the market, the quickest is you impose these taxes and rules and things and only allowing people to have a certain amount of Airbnb property that they own, and that frees up housing almost immediately. Is it the best move, the right move? I don’t know. That’s not for me to say, but it is absolutely happening, and that’s why I think people need to be careful. Just as an education piece, we’re not saying that Airbnb’s bad don’t do it. I always say if you’re going to buy an Airbnb property, you want to be able to buy it and have more than one exit in the event that some regulations change.
We just bought a property that we bought solely to use as Airbnb, but we also bought it at a point where if we renovate it and we don’t get the return that we want, we can sell it and still make a profit. So I have two exits there, but not everybody’s doing that. Especially what we saw over the last year-and-a-half to two years is people had all this extra money. They didn’t have all these restrictions on where they had to live. They started buying second properties and Airbnbs in all different places, and they weren’t really evaluating what the numbers were going to do if they didn’t have to do it or use it as an Airbnb if they had to pivot and do something else because they were just like, “Well, it’s appreciating. It’ll appreciate. It’ll be fine,” and that’s not what we’re seeing anymore. So just be careful about the markets you’re investing in and be careful about the numbers and have more than one exit, cause if you’ve got a second exit and that exit is positive, then you’re fine.

Kathy:
Yeah, a great hack around that, by the way, is buying short-term rentals just outside of that perimeter of where they’ll be illegal. That’s what we have. We’re two houses away from where those rules are, so we’re still slower. It’s definitely still slower right now. Then also if you are stuck with a short-term rental that’s not performing and you’re upside down, really consider some of the shared vacation ownership because it makes vacation home purchases really cheap if you split it between eight owners. Some municipalities don’t want that either because then you’ve got all these vacation homes with multiple owners. But again, if you just stay right outside the city perimeter, then you’re usually allowed to do it.

Dave:
That’s good advice, and places that need it to survive the economy, I think Avery said that on a recent show too. It’s like if you’re in a tourism-dependent destination, I have a Airbnb in a ski town where there’s very few hotels, which makes no sense, but they need to drive the economy. They absolutely need short-term rentals. So while they’ve raised taxes, which is fine, they’re not eliminating it, but just to want to say, Henry, I get the logic of why they’re doing it. But short-term rentals, even though it’s gone up so much, make up less than 1% of all the housing stock in the U.S., so it could help, but it’s like it’s a short-term fix. Maybe it will help short-term, but it’s not going to address the long-term structural issues with housing supply in the U.S.

James:
That’s hotel lobbyist money going to work. [inaudible 00:25:26] Hotels don’t like losing money.

Kathy:
Yep.

Henry:
It’s the Hiltons [inaudible 00:25:31]

James:
Airbnb needs their own lobbyists.

Dave:
Oh, I bet they do. I bet they’ve got [inaudible 00:25:36]

Kathy:
I’m sure they have it.

Dave:
All right. Well, we could talk about this all day, and I’m sure throughout the next year we’ll be talking about the 2023 housing market. But we do have to wind this down because Kathy, we have a special request of you.

Kathy:
Oh.

Dave:
A listener reached out with a question just for you, which we will get to after this quick break. All right. Well, Kathy, you are on the hot spot. You’re in the hot seat right now. We had a listener named Gregory Schwartz reach out and said, “This question is in the title.” The title was, “Will Increasing 10-Year Treasury Yields,” we talked about this a little bit, “decompress cap rates?” I’ll let you explain that, Kathy, but he said, “The question’s in the title. I’d like to hear from the panel, but mostly Kathy Fettke, you’re the favorite. I believe she mentioned something about this relationship in the most recent podcast. I read an article that the historical average spread between 10-year cap rate and multifamily… 10-year yield,” excuse me, “and multifamily cap rate has been 2.15%.” Kathy enlighten us.

Kathy:
Well, it’s such a good question because if you could get 4 or 5% if wherever the 10-year ends up, like you said earlier, that’s a pretty safe bet. You’ve got the U.S. government backing your investment and they haven’t failed yet. I think at one of the conferences I was at, someone was selling a 2 cap in Houston, so that’s going to be a lot harder to sell.

Dave:
Basically, a cap rate, it’s a formula that does a lot of things in commercial real estate, but basically, it helps you understand how much revenue or income you’re buying as a ratio to your expense. So basically, the easiest one is like a 10 cap. If you’re buying 10 cap, you’re basically getting… it will take you 10 years to repay that investment. If you get a 5 cap, it will take you 20 years to repay your investment, generally speaking. So when cap rates are low, that’s good for a seller because they’re getting way more money. When cap rates are high, it’s good for a buyer because they’re buying more income for less money relatively.
So I think what they’re asking, and just generally speaking, cap rates are very low right now, and no one sets cap rate. It’s like this market dependent thing where just like a single-family home, a seller and a buyer have to come to agreement. Right now, I don’t know what the average cap rate is in the country. It really depends market to market, depends on the asset class. It depends on competition, what rents are. It depends on all these things, but generally speaking, they’re pretty low right now. Just like everything, it’s been a seller’s market. So my guess is that what Gregory’s asking, is will it become more of a buyer’s market in the multifamily space?

Kathy:
Yeah, and that’s what I was saying earlier is exciting is when you’re in a seller’s market and everybody’s bidding for the same property and prices go up, your return goes down. Your cash flow is down. So for the past few years it’s been really hard to find properties that cash flow or the cash flow has definitely gone down and the cap rate has gone down. In single family at least, as prices come down generally then you have more cash flow except the interest rate is a problem. So I would say that in commercial real estate, the biggest factor to focus on is the interest rate because generally, that is tied that if interest rates go up, your NOI, your return goes down, and that will affect pricing more. So I think more commercial investors are worried that cap rates will increase, which again, if you’re a buyer, that’s great, but if you’re trying to sell, that’s awful. If you bought it at a low cap rate, which is a high price, you got to sell it at a higher cap rate, it’s a lower price. You’re going to take losses.

James:
We’re seeing that in the market right now. Locally in Washington, we are apartment buyers. We typically have been buying 20 to 30, 40 units at a time. That’s the space we’ve had to hang out in because the big hedge funds have been buying these properties. If it was above 40, 50 units, the hedge funds were buying, they were buying it like a 3 cap, which is bizarre to me. I don’t understand why anybody would want a 3 cap. But as the rates have increased and their cost of money’s increased and now the bonds that they can also redeploy into and get a good return, we’ve seen them really dry up. We just recently locked up an 80 unit and we got a 5.6 to 5.7 cap on that, which was not in existence the last 24 months. So the cap rates are definitely getting better, especially in the bigger spaces.
We’ve been getting good cap rates in the small value add for the last 10 years in our local market, but we had to put in a lot of work to get it there. Now we can buy a little bit cleaner in that space because it’s less competitive and the opportunities are definitely there because, again, we could not touch that product. I think that the property that we’re in contract on, it was pending twice prior to the rates really spiking for 2 1/2 to $3 million more than we’re paying for. So as the rates come up, pricing comes down, gets way more opportunities out there. Then also to think about too, the debt coverage service ratios are changing rapidly right now too. So investors have to leave a little bit more capital in the game too. So it’s really slowing everything down, but it is creating a lot better opportunity in a way healthier market to invest in because you should not be getting into a 3 cap, or at least that’s my firm. I just-

Dave:
It’s crazy.

Henry:
It’s insane.

James:
It’s disgusting.

Dave:
Yeah.

James:
It grosses me out. I don’t know, earn some money. But now the investments are more balanced into they’re there to buy, which is great.

Dave:
Generally, I think, yeah, there’s a lot of factors that go into the cap rate that something trades for, but I think generally speaking, they’re going to expand and it’s going to become more of a buyer’s market. But we have to remember that multifamily, at least multifamily, excuse me, that commercial specifically multifamily is based off rents. If rents keep going up, I don’t think we’re going to see cap rates expand too much. They probably will just because of interest rate, but there probably will still be fair demand from investors if rents keep going up because it’s still going to be one of the better, more attractive options in real estate, I think.

Kathy:
That’s going to be a big if because Yardi Matrix just came up and said rents were unchanged and then Apartment List said there were actually declines.

Dave:
Did they?

Kathy:
Mm-hmm.

Dave:
Okay. That’s really good because we had a production meeting before this, and that’s going to be one of our upcoming shows. I saw some headlines about that, and we’re going to do some research and dig into that. So thanks, Kathy. All right. Well, Kathy, great job, Henry, James also great job. I guess we’re not as cool. We don’t get the specific questions asked for us, but it’s okay. I’m not that offended. But thank you all for being here. This was a lot of fun. We’ll come back to this and check out how our predictions and forecasts did in about a year, but in the meantime, it’ll be very fun to… or at least very interesting, I don’t know about fun-

Henry:
We’re good to go.

Dave:
… to see what happens over the next couple of months. Obviously, for everyone listening, we will be coming to you twice a week every week with updates on the housing market. Before we go, if you like On The Market, if you are so impressed by our incredible foresight and ability to predict the future, please give us a five-star review. We really appreciate that either on Apple or on Spotify, and we would love if you share this with a friend. If you know someone who’s interested in real estate investing, someone who just wants to buy a house and is trying to understand what’s going on in the housing market, please share this podcast, share the love.
We work really hard to get this out to all of you. We know that a lot of you at BPCON were telling us how much value you get from it, so share the love with your friends and your community as well. Kathy, Henry, James, thanks a lot. We appreciate you. I’ll see you all soon. On The Market was created by me, Dave Meyer and Kailyn Bennett. The show is produced by Kailyn Bennett, with editing by Exodus Media. Copywriting is by Calico Content, and we want to extend a big thank you to everyone at BiggerPockets for making this show possible.