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The LeFrak Organization CEO Richard LeFrak joins ‘Squawk Box’ to discuss the state of the commercial real estate market, the stressors facing the sector, and more.

Dave:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to On the Market. I’m your host, Dave Meyer, and today we’re going to be digging into three of the most pressing and important headlines facing the real estate investing industry. And to do that, I have my friends, Kathy Fecke, James Dannard and Henry Washington joining us. Kathy, how are you today?

Kathy:
Doing great. We survived the atmospheric river, so all good.

Dave:
What is an atmospheric river?

Kathy:
Apparently when the clouds open up and just dump a lot of water.

Dave:
Rain? Is that just a fancy term for rain?

Kathy:
Yeah, life-threatening rain in California.

Dave:
Okay. Well, this is maybe why on this episode we’re going to be digging into headlines so that we don’t just see things like atmospheric river and read too much into it when all it is is rain. We’ll be doing the same thing, hopefully, for the real estate market to help you not overreact to any potential headlines that you’re seeing. James, how you’ve been?

James:
I’m good. I took off in the atmospheric river last night. It was a bumpy ride out.

Dave:
It’s almost like it’s a normal weather phenomenon. All right, Henry, it’s good to have you on as well. Hopefully down in Arkansas you don’t have to make up fancy words for just normal weather.

Henry:
Yeah, today I am here despite the atmospheric brightness that we are experiencing. I believe some call it sunshine, but down here in Arkansas we like to get pretty fancy.

Dave:
We got a real meteorology team over here. Thank you for joining us. All right, well, we do have a great show for you all today. We’re going to be covering, like I said, a couple of major headlines facing real estate industry, like what’s going on with the big NAR Sitzer/Burnett lawsuit. Updates on credit markets and what’s happening with banks and are they lending to real estate investors. And we’ll be talking about fresh data about the labor market that we’re seeing here in 2024. Let’s just jump right into our first headline, which is Keller Williams reaches a $70 million settlement.
If you remember, there’s been this ongoing lawsuit against NAR and a lot of the largest real estate brokerages in the country alleging that they colluded to keep their commission structure in place against the best interest of home sellers. We did get a jury verdict back in the fall that found NAR and some of their co-defendants liable. Now we’re seeing Keller Williams, one of the largest brokerages in the country with over 180,000 real estate agents reaching a settlement to address these antitrust claims. Now, it seems like this story just keeps evolving. James, as an agent, what do you make of the updates in this story? How are you thinking about Keller Williams behavior here and what it means for the next few steps that might unfold from this lawsuit?

James:
I feel like we’re going through an evolution of broker fees. I think that happens in every business, every service and what we’re seeing now is the traditional way and the assumption of doing business might be getting changed, where it’s like, “You’re a broker, you just get paid this and you move on.” The fact that they settled does, I think, make a pretty important impression on what’s going on right now and it could open it up for other lawsuits. They did admit to no wrongdoing and they were just trying to get this thing gone. It looks like they settled for the 70 million, they’re trying to move on and now they’ve agreed to change their business practices. I don’t think it’s going to impact us in the next 12 to 24 months, but over the next four to five years we’re going to see this evolution of broker fees, which I don’t have a problem with whatsoever, because if you really look at the history of brokers, back in the ’90s, they didn’t have the internet.
They had books and advertising and brokers would meet together and they would have to go over the inventory and then bring it out to the market. It was a lot of work, and we still get paid the same percentage today with a lot higher numbers. We’re getting paid well and I feel like this is going to be the evolution of the niche broker, and if you’re a niche broker with a high level of service or a specialty, you’re going to get paid well. And if you’re just pushing paper and putting signs in the yard, you might get paid a lot less and it could be going to that Redfin style model. I think people need to brace for it and don’t be delusional about it. I don’t think it’s going to have that much impact over the next 12 to 24 months.

Dave:
Well, I’m curious because, just as a reminder, as of right now we have this jury verdict that held NAR liable, but we haven’t heard from the judge exactly what this means. Kathy, do you think this move by Keller Williams is trying to head off a really big injunction from the judge so that they don’t change everything and they’re saying like, “Okay, okay, we’ll change a little bit.” And that way it won’t disrupt their entire business model?

Kathy:
Yeah, I don’t want to speak for them. I do know that NAR and HomeServices have refused to settle. They are taking a different bet. They think that they’re, I guess, going to get a better deal if they keep fighting. Again, I’m trying to read minds here. I have no idea what’s going on in those boardrooms, but I can tell you from personal experience that we had to settle a case once where we had absolutely nothing to do with it. We weren’t involved, we were just named and our attorney said, “This is just a business decision. You have to look at it just like a business. You could spend a whole bunch more money trying to fight or you just put up your hands and say, ‘We didn’t do anything wrong but go away.’” It could be that’s what they did or they just thought it could be worse if we wait. I don’t know. When you go to a jury, you have a jury who may not know very much about real estate deciding your fate. Again, it was just a business decision.

Dave:
Henry, have you noticed any changes in the way the agents you work with are operating? What are you seeing?

Henry:
No, no changes in the way they’re operating so far. I agree with James. I don’t know that we’ll see any major changes in the next one to two years, but I do think that the industry is going to change and I don’t believe it’s a bad thing. It’s like any other industry. You typically get paid based on performance and level of service and customer service. I think those agents and brokerages who are going to provide exceptional customer service and who are going to go above and beyond in their business practices are going to not just survive but thrive in a market where you’ve got to provide those things in order to make money now. You didn’t have to provide that before, right? You were going to get your percentage as long as you were the named broker, agent on that deal. You have to think about home buyers, especially first-time home buyers. They’re called first-time home buyers.
They have no idea what a good level of service is from a real estate agent, right? They’re just trusting that this person knows what they’re doing and they just have to take what’s given to them. It’s not till they’ve been through maybe their first deal and then they get a better agent on their second home purchase and then they realize, “Oh my goodness, our first agent just really didn’t do much compared to the level of service that we’re getting now.” I think that it’s just going to mean that, like I said, the better agents who provide a good quality of service and operate a better business will do well.

Kathy:
Yeah, my concern is that people won’t get a buyer’s agent and they’ll either try to do the negotiation on their own or they’ll use the listing agent. My message to all you out there who maybe have not bought your first property, be really careful about going to the listing agent and using them to double represent you. That was our very first deal. I didn’t really know back then, this was a long time ago before I knew anything about real estate, and I didn’t know the difference between a buyer’s agent and a listing agent. I just went with a listing agent. In retrospect, they weren’t serving me. They were hired by the seller. They did not negotiate on my behalf because that would be… How do you do that when you’re representing both? It’s like getting an attorney to represent two parties, speaking of the NAR situation.
That’s my concern is don’t be lazy, don’t just use the listing agent because they are not necessarily working in your favor unless you’re an expert. Now I do that just so they get more commission and I get the deal, but hopefully this means that people will get a buyer’s agent and get one who really truly will represent them and understand what that means. What do you even need a buyer’s agent for? Hopefully to help you negotiate. To make sure that you’ve got all the proper inspections. Hopefully someone who knows the area, knows the history. Really, it comes down to that. What does a buyer’s agent do besides have really beautiful marketing and maybe great hair and a great car?

Henry:
Yes, I agree with you, but I think this is moving in a way that every other business operates. Hiring a real estate agent has always baffled me. People don’t do any research. They just pick the family friend or the person at their church or the lady who’s on your kid’s soccer team, other soccer team member, mom, right? That’s the level of research that they put into it. It’s always baffled me that that’s how it was done before. Going forward, it’s just going to be you have to do the same amount of research that you would do for anything else. If you’re going to hire a plumber, you’re not just going to hire some Joe Schmoe off the street. You’re going to go ask people who you trust who are in the industry or ask people who have had plumbing work done recently. Who did you use? What was your experience like? Can I have their phone number? And then you might ask a series of qualifying questions when you get them on the phone. You just have to do this normal now.

Dave:
Yeah, that’s so true. This whole situation reminds me, I guess, it was probably 10 or 15 years ago when Uber came around and certain taxi drivers and drivers got with the times and figured it out, and then there were some that just stuck their head in the sand and were fighting against it and were suing and they were just fighting upstream. To me, it just feels like that’s what NAR is doing. KW, a lot of these other brokerages are settling and, I think, are trying to adapt to the times and maybe ready to move on a little bit. Then there are others who are just really digging in hard when, at least to me, it feels like the winds have changed, are already… What am I saying? Winds have changed. Is that a saying?

Henry:
Atmospheric river has changed path, it’s now flowing upstream.

Dave:
The atmospheric river has changed and now things are changing (beep). This has gone off the rails. Should we do that again?

James:
Yeah, I think it worked. I fully understood what you were trying to say, Dave. The money is stopping flowing for these brokers that don’t offer additional services.

Dave:
Yeah, I think people have to accept that things are changing and there’s still a way to make money, as Henry just pointed out. It’s just you need to adapt to the new time, which is true in every single business.

James:
Every investor does use numerous brokers, right? Depending on whether you’re trying to get the deal or not. I’m a broker, sometimes there’s brokers bringing me deals and they’re off-market and I’m being buyer in this scenario, not my service fee. I don’t really see this changing too much for investors. If anything, it might actually steer more deals their way because they might just go straight calling the listing broker. To Kathy’s point, when you’re going direct to that listing broker, you do want dual representation if you can get it. Then you are protected. They have a fiduciary duty to watch over you. But investors are a lot more savvy than your normal homeowner because they’re doing a lot more transactions. For not having representation, they don’t care half the time because they’re buying it a certain way and that’s what they know to buy, and they’re doing their own feasibility inspections anyways.
I think it actually might push more deals towards investors. The one thing I can see this affecting though is off-market transactions because a lot of times when you’re negotiating direct to seller is you’re looking at, “Hey, this is a cash convenience sale.” You have all this cost when you sell, which is anywhere between 5 and 6%. Many times those sellers will give you that credit to get that discount that you need, right? And it’s that inch game where you’re just trying to get that net number to them where they’re happy and we can [inaudible 00:13:05] it. Now, that’s going down by half. It actually makes a much bigger negotiation for wholesalers and brokers on direct to seller, but I think on-market it’s going to push more deals investors away, but off-market it actually could add a bigger gap and less off-market deals could be getting done.

Dave:
All right. Well, thank you. I appreciate that insight, James. We’ll all just have to wait and see how this goes over the next couple of months, but I think those are some wise things to keep an eye out for. All right, now we’ve covered our first headline and we will be right back with two of the most important headlines impacting the real estate industry after this quick break.
Welcome back to On the Market. Let’s move on to our second headline, which is that, “Banks are being rocked again as real estate losses mount.” This article talks about a specific bank, New York Community Bancorp, where shares plunged a whopping 38% after posting a $252 million loss in just the last quarter. This was higher losses that they were expecting and they were already expecting pretty big losses on commercial real estate. This is a little bit concerning, but at the same time I feel like we keep hearing about this pending apocalypse with commercial lending, but so far it’s been contained to a few banks. Kathy, do you think this is a sign of more trouble to come in the future?

Kathy:
I think it’s a sign of bad business practice, honestly, and lack of diversification. I think in the case of this New York Bank, the bulk of their portfolio was in office. COVID obviously accelerated the work from home environment, but it’s been a trend for a while. With business stay diversified. Make sure you’ve got plenty of reserves on hand and don’t over leverage, and all the things that people should know about. To me it’s like, “I wouldn’t have done that if I were the owner of the bank.”

Dave:
James, with your commercial deals, are you noticing any big change recently in commercial practices? Because I know they’ve changed over the last few years, but in the last three months has anything altered?

James:
It’s funny, I read these headlines and some of it, I believe, is just hype and it’s for a specific type of asset and product in the market and they make it seem doom and gloom with these local commercial banks. But we’ve had the easiest time getting access to capital from commercial banks on townhome sites, apartment deals. It has not been a struggle to get financing. We actually just got a development loan where we perform about 20%. That we were going to leave 20% of the total project in. The banks appraised it. They ended up giving us a 90/10. They gave us 90% leverage with an interest reserve in there for 12 months. And because their loan-to-value position was good and they liked us as a borrower, I think if you have that long-term relationship, don’t always shop your banks guys. Staying with the same bank and getting that consistency with them, they’ll lever you more.
Even all this doom and gloom news that the banks aren’t really lending, they don’t really want to. If they like you, they’re being a little bit more aggressive. I think build those relationships, you can still get debt, especially on residential. Apartments, townhomes, development, single family, you can get that. Office? Yeah, it’s not the most desirable, but even right now we’re about ready to list an office building, small office. We didn’t think it was going to get much traction. We talked to five banks and they all pre-approved it for a purchase. If you have the right product in the right area, banks will still lend you. It’s not as bad as what I’m seeing in the articles. But I will say some of these guys have made some bad moves and lost some serious money, because I was even reading that article, it’s like, “Some small ripples.” I’m like, “33 billion is a small ripple?”

Dave:
It’s another atmospheric ripple.

James:
Yeah.

Dave:
Henry, I know you work a lot with local banks. I’m curious, how would you advise investors who maybe don’t have the track record that you have or James has with local banks? How do you establish those relationships to create that credit worthiness in the eyes of these banks?

Henry:
Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, first I want to piggyback off James and say I completely agree. I’m seeing the exact same thing. I’ve got two deals that I’m closing on at the end of this week, both with local banks, both with creative aspects to them. One, I’m doing an owner carryback for part of the down payment portion. A lot of banks, if they’re being tight, they’re not allowing you to do some of those things, right? But this bank is totally fine with that. Another bank we’re closing on a deal where we’ve got seller credits involved. One of these banks is only my third deal I’ve done with them and the other bank it’s the very first deal I’ve done with them. I think what you’re seeing is these banks who are smarter, who may have some of these office assets are trying to diversify and want people who are doing really good deals to bring those deals to them so that they’ve got some different asset types in their portfolio that have a good amount of equity in them.
To answer your question, Dave, you’ve got to speak to these banks in the what’s in it for them, right? And the what’s in it for them with these small banks when you’re brand new is you want to bring them a deal that’s got equity in it because that’s a lower risk investment for them. They want low risk loans in their portfolio. They have to loan to stay in business and if they’ve got a loan to stay in business, they would much rather take on low risk loans in a residential space because then if they end up with those assets, they’re not really stressing about it. They can sell those assets and recoup their money. They’re not losing their shirt like they are in some commercial spaces or in some office commercial spaces. You’ve got to have a good deal. That’s first and foremost.
If you’re buying off-market, you can go and get a deal and then bring a good deal to them. If you’re buying on-market, you’ve got to get a pre-approval first and a bank can give you a pre-approval, but make sure when you’re going to ask for that pre-approval, you’re talking to them about your strategy. What is it you’re going to look for? “I’m going to look for single and small multifamily that I can get at a 30, 40, 50% discount. I want to bring those assets to you and have you finance those deals.” The second thing that you want to mention to the bank is that you are looking for a long-term relationship. Banks need deposits and they need to loan.
Share with them your plan. “I’m looking to buy these types of assets in these markets with this type of equity in it, and I will bring my business bank accounts here to you and we can have a relationship where I keep my deposits here, you continue to help me grow my business and I’m helping you grow yours.” Right? You’ve got to speak to them in the what’s in it for them. You can’t just go and say, “Hey, give me some money. I’m trying to do some deals.” They need to know what you’re trying to do and what’s in it for them.

Kathy:
100%. Banks are in the business of lending. They’re desperate to lend right now, but it’s the basics. You got to have a good deal. They got to have security. Land development, that’s all riskier, so that’s going to be more expensive or more difficult to get. That always has been… Well, not always. They’re going to look at the risk level and in residential, there’s not a whole lot of risk there right now. Just bring them a good deal, especially if you’re putting money down.

Dave:
This is such a good conversation because I think as Henry just brought up and Kathy reiterated that. If you understand how banks make money, you can very easily work with them. This is so important with any business, any contractor that you work with, any lender, any agent. If you understand what they’re looking for, then you can adjust your own strategy, your own requests, your own proposals to them accordingly. And as Henry and Kathy just stated, there’s this term in finance where people say that banks are either like, “Risk on.” Quote, unquote. Or risk off. That is basically just a shorthand for how much risk financial institutions are taking. Right now most financial institutions are quote, unquote, “Risk off.” Which means that they’re not going to be lending on the type of projects Kathy just said, development or land deals as readily, but they have to make money.
If you can bring them low risk deals, they’re going to be thrilled by it. Thank you both for bringing that up. I think that’s a really important point and really helpful tactical advice here for everyone listening that if you are worried about being able to finance your next project, think about the relative risk, just take a minute and sit, and put yourself in the bank’s position and ask yourself like, “If I were the bank, would I lend on this deal?” And if the answer’s no, maybe bring them a different deal and go find something else. We’ve now hit our first two headlines on Keller Williams settling the antitrust lawsuit and headwinds in the banking sector due to commercial real estate weakness. Stick with us because after this we’re going to be talking about the, spoiler alert, robust labor market.
Welcome back to the show. All right, with that, let’s move on to our third headline, which is about the labor market. We just can’t stop talking about this labor market because it continues to surprise. The headline is that the January jobs report showed US job growth surging. The labor market added 353,000 jobs in January 2024, which is the highest mark in over a year. We’re seeing strength across a lot of industries. High paying sectors like professional and business services accelerated and piled on 74,000 jobs. Healthcare added 70,000, and we’re seeing wages growing faster than traditional historic rates above and beyond the pace of inflation. Spending power, after years of getting pretty hammered is starting to recover slowly. Henry, what do you make of this labor report and what it means for you as an investor?

Henry:
You know what? This is reflecting what I’m seeing here in my local market as well. I think I read that we added like 10,000 jobs last year and we have about the same amount of people moving to the area. It just shows the strength in the jobs market and some strength in the economy. I believe that that’s going to be beneficial for the real estate market. These people need places to live. A lot of these companies are not doing remote work or are lighter on remote work now. That means people have to move to these new places where the jobs are being added. They’ve got to have a place to live. They’re going to be buying homes. They’re going to be building homes. They’re going to be renting homes. We’ve also seen a 9% rise in appreciation here in home prices. I think it all plays in hand in hand. If there are jobs, people are going to need homes, and if they’ve got money to pay for them… It just speaks to a healthy real estate market.

Dave:
Kathy, how do you look at this labor market situation, in particular how it relates to the Fed and interest rates? Do you think this will change their calculus after signaling they may be open to a pivot and cutting rates in 2024?

Kathy:
Yeah, there’s no pivot in sight right now. This was a big miss by economists. They just cannot get a grasp on the job market and why it just keeps expanding and why it just keeps being bigger than expected. I have my theory on that, and the theory is that second stimulus package was probably not needed. It was a ton of money created and put out in the economy and it’s still out there circulating. When you look at a deficit like we have today, we better have job growth. We better have something for all that money printing. That’s, again, my humble opinion on it. Lots of money circulating. It’s creating lots of jobs. How are we going to pay off that debt? Don’t know. Nobody knows how you’re going to pay off the debt, but at least we’ve got job growth.

Dave:
What do you think, James? Are you seeing confidence from buyers right now? Because it felt like for a couple of years, buyers were pulling back a little bit, not necessarily because of affordability, that was obviously a big part of it, but people also want to feel secure with their income before they make a huge purchase. Do you think the continued resilience of the labor market is going to increase in demand for homes?

James:
I think that always is going to be correlated. The one thing about this jobs reports is it’s so up and down every month. It’s like, “Oh, finally cooling.” Then it’s red-hot. Then it goes cooling. I swear two months ago it was saying it was way down. It was going in the right direction. I do feel like buyers are confident, but more, I do feel buyers came to life the last two weeks for sure. I think it has to do more with them just knowing that the Fed is saying, “Hey, look, we’re going to start going in the opposite direction at some point.” They think there’s no free fall. It’s funny because when I do talk to people about the job report, even real estate professionals are like, “Hey, the jobs report came out hot this month.” And they’re like, “Oh, what’s that mean?”

Dave:
Yeah.

James:
They’re focused on the now, right? Most consumers like, “What I experience now?” And at the interest rate, and they’re not looking at all the factors. But I didn’t think this was great news because if it’s this hot and it keeps going, even if it’s pulsated, they need stability. And I don’t think they’re going to start moving rates until there’s stability in the jobs market, the economy in general and not this surging. As investor, as we’re trying to perform out deals, that’s what we’re looking for, consistency and stability. Every time this goes up and down, it makes me a little bit more nervous because it could go the opposite way real fast and cause some market shifts.

Dave:
Yeah, that’s a great point. And just to remind everyone why we as real estate investors should be thinking about the labor market. Few reasons. One, first and foremost, labor market very correlated with overall economic growth. That’s really important. The second thing that I think has become more important over the last few years is thinking about the role of the Federal Reserve. We talk about the Fed a lot, but just as a reminder, they have two different jobs. The first job is to maximize employment. They care a lot about the employment rate, labor force participation, and the many different ways that you can measure and evaluate the strength of the labor market. On the other hand, their second job is to control inflation. Obviously they’ve been really focused on that element of their job the last couple of years because inflation got out of control.
But if you think about this job, you see a paradox here, because maximizing employment can lead to an overstimulation of the economy, which leads to inflation. But if you work too hard to combat inflation, that will slow down the economy and negatively impact the labor market and people’s ways of earning a living. The Fed is constantly on a seesaw. They are just going back and forth and trying to find the right balance between maximizing employment without overshooting and having a lot of inflation. That’s why these labor market reports are so closely watched by people like us and economists because they are trying to read the tea leaves and think about how the Fed is going to react to these labor market reports.
When you see strong labor market reports like the one that we’re seeing here, that, to me, at least signals, “Hey, maybe even though the Fed has said that they do intend to lower rates in the future, it might take a little bit longer because they don’t need to focus so much on preserving the labor market. That’s doing great, and they can keep focusing on the inflation piece, which is still above their target of 2%.” We’re still above 3%. That’s why we’re talking about this and why it’s so important, even though it might feel a little bit abstract from real estate investing.

Kathy:
Yeah. Also, how it affects us is people keep hoping that mortgage rates will go down and mortgage rates don’t go down when the economy’s booming. It doesn’t work that way. I think we can at least expect rates will be where they are, and I’m speaking mortgage rates, probably for a while because my guess is the Fed will keep the Fed fund rate where it is until they see things slow down a bit. But I can tell you in the markets that we invest in like Dallas, Texas in general, Texas was the number one market where that job growth happened, and Florida was pretty close behind. From an investor perspective, I’m going where all those jobs are going and that’s where we’re investing.

James:
This is why we’re in the mess we are now, right? The economy was way too hot. The money was way too cheap and then cut rates. Hopefully, and as much as I hate to say this, they keep rates where they need to be until we get this fixed because if they start cutting rates, things could explode again. And we’re going to be exactly… It’s great in the short term, right? We all make a bunch of money. We’re selling things for a lot. We’re renting things for a lot, but there needs to be some stability for us to move forward over the next five years.

Dave:
Absolutely. Well, thank you all so much for your insights on these latest stories. If you have any ideas of stories you would like to hear us talk about on future episodes of On the Market or these correspondents show, please let us know. You can put that in the comments below on YouTube, or you can always find me on BiggerPockets or Kathy, James or Henry on BiggerPockets as well. And share with us your thoughts or stories that are of particular interest to you. James, Kathy, Henry, thank you for joining us. Thank you all so much for listening and we’ll see you for the next episode of On The Market. 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.

John Kim, analyst at BMO Capital Markets, joins ‘Squawk on the Street’ to discuss his insights into the commercial real estate market, whether distressed funds will help to stabilize the market, and more.

I often hear new investors ask: “What types of properties are the best? “What should I look for when evaluating rental properties?” 

They are starting at the wrong point. As with any major venture, real estate investing starts with clarifying your goal. And every investment decision you make must align with your goals.

For most investors, the goal is financial freedom. However, financial freedom is more than just replacing your existing income. It’s about maintaining your current lifestyle for as long as you live. To achieve this, you need passive income that meets three requirements:

1. Rents must outpace inflation: If rents do not outpace inflation, you cannot achieve financial freedom because inflation continuously erodes purchasing power. The major driver for rents and prices is population growth.
2. Income persistence: Financial freedom requires that your income lasts throughout your life. Your financial future is tied to the long-term economic growth of the city where you invest.
3. Income reliability: The rental income must continue, even in bad economic times. The reliability of your income hinges on your tenants remaining employed, even during economic downturns.

The Process

Property selection is a three-step process, as illustrated here, starting with the investment location or city.

1. Location/city

The first and most important investment decision is the city where you invest. The city determines all long-term aspects of your rental income, including the ones listed in the graphic.

Primary selection criteria:

• Significant and sustained population growth
• A metro population > 1 million
• Low operating costs

2. Tenant segment

In order to have a reliable income, your property must be continuously occupied by a reliable tenant. A reliable tenant is someone who stays for many years, always pays the rent on time, and takes good care of the property. Reliable tenants are the exception, not the norm.

Also, you will need multiple reliable tenants over the years you hold the property. The best way to accomplish this is to select a tenant segment with a high concentration of reliable people. You can find this segment through property manager interviews. Once you identify a segment with a high concentration of reliable people, determine what and where they are currently renting. 

Based on these properties, you can create what I call a property profile. A property profile has at least four elements:

1. Location: The location(s) where a significant percentage(s) of the target segment are renting today.
2. Property type: The type of properties they rent today. Condo, high rise, multifamily, single family—the type does not matter. Only a reliable tenant matters.
3. Rent range: What the segment is willing and able to pay.
4. Configuration: Two bedrooms, three-car garage, large backyard, single-story, two stories?

Property selection

You can give your property profile to any real estate agent, and they can find conforming properties. However, property selection involves more than matching the target tenant segment’s housing requirements. The property must also:

• Meet your initial ROI and cash flow requirements.
• The price must be within your budget.
• The time to rent must be low.
• The renovation cost and risk must be acceptable.
• The property should have low maintenance.

A good property manager can provide an accurate rent estimate and time to rent for the property, and an investment real estate agent can provide the rest of the information needed.

There’s much more to selecting (and bringing to market) good investment properties. However, these criteria should give you a good idea of the fundamentals.

Final Thoughts

I outlined the process for achieving financial freedom through real estate investing. If you follow this process, your odds of achieving financial freedom are excellent. If you have questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.

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Mindy Jensen:
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my lovely co-host, Scott Trench.

Scott Trench:
Thanks, Mindy. Great to be here with the heart of BiggerPockets Money, Mindy Jensen. We’re here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else. To introduce you to every money story, toolkit, or product. Because we truly believe that financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you’re starting.

Mindy Jensen:
Scott, in honor of Valentine’s Day being tomorrow, today we’re going to gush about our favorite financial tools and habits, and you’ll also hear about the ones that we loved while we were on our journey to financial independence.
We wanted to do this episode right now, near Valentine’s Day, because most people’s New Year’s resolutions have kind of fallen by the wayside. And something that we have found to be very helpful is to revisit your goals every month of the year. It gives you the opportunity to figure out what’s working, what has to change, and which tools and strategies you can start using to get back on track.

Scott Trench:
That’s right. So on today’s episode, you’re going to hear all about the financial tools and habits we’ve been loving recently, and the game-changing productivity tools we’ve discovered, as well as some of the financial tools and habits that we’re leaving behind.
Well, let’s jump into it. Mindy, what is the number one money habit that you’ve been falling in love with lately?

Mindy Jensen:
I am trying really hard to learn how to exercise my spending muscle. And this is something that has been a work in progress for about a year now, and Carl and I are really looking at ways that we can enhance our life or make things easier. And it is still a work in progress, but we are making leaps and bounds from a year ago.

Scott Trench:
Yeah, I know that’s been a big theme here. Hey, the mentality of being very frugal and really watching every dollar that goes through people’s accounts is a huge correlate to financial freedom and the ability to amass wealth.
Once you amass wealth though, what’s the point in continuing to do that, right? At certain point, once you have enough, every extra dollar beyond that should be spent for your happiness, to make the world a better place, or go on to the next generation. And I know that that’s been a challenge you struggled with, and were coached by Ramit Sethi on, and it sounds like you’re making a lot of progress there.

Mindy Jensen:
We are. We started off just kind of adding to vacations, and there’s not a ton of stuff that we need to add to our life, although you wouldn’t know that by how much we spent last year on cars. We bought two vehicles last year, including Carl’s Tesla. So I can finally get him to stop talking about when he’s going to buy a Tesla, and now I get to hear all about the Tesla.
Oh, did you know it does this? Did you know it does that? Nope. Didn’t know. Didn’t care.

Scott Trench:
I think 2024 will be the year where I might part ways with my trustee Corolla as well. It’s getting time.

Mindy Jensen:
Are you going to buy a Tesla?

Scott Trench:
We’ll see. I’m going to think about it, and think about what I want to drive there. But yeah, I think it’s time for me to flex that muscle as well, and upgrade a little bit.

Mindy Jensen:
Well, Scott, you deserve it. And more importantly, you can afford it. You have set yourself up to be in a great financial position. I hesitate to say, “Oh, you deserve it, go buy it,” when we also talk about frequently, don’t just buy something because you think you deserve it, you also have to be able to afford it. But you are easily in both places.

Scott Trench:
Maybe in 2025, we’ll flex the spending muscle of moving out of our house hack, which we’ve also been doing for most of the last 10 years.

Mindy Jensen:
I love it. Okay, so Scott, what is a money product that you have been loving lately?

Scott Trench:
I’ve been really loving Monarch. So, I used mint.com for many, many years. And with Mint being sunset, I was one of those people that transitioned over to Monarch, and I think they do a pretty good job so far. I’ve really liked it, it seems intuitive and easy to use.
I kind of like the fact, honestly, that it’s a subscription. I like the fact that, hey, there’s no … It’s just, you pay a hundred bucks and you get the product, and hopefully continuous improvements from that product, and not ads or whatever else is going on with it. So I’ve been liking it, and find it to be pretty powerful and sophisticated.
All right, what else? What’s another habit you’ve been loving lately?

Mindy Jensen:
I’m going to go into travel. We used to optimize our travel based on price, not so much location. So if you’re flying into Chicago, you have the choice of two airports. If you’re flying into New York City, you have the choice of, I don’t know, like nine airports or something, when you take into account all of the surrounding places.
But now when we travel, we know we want to go into this location. We are looking for what’s closest to where we’re going, not so much how much less it is to have to drive three hours in New York City traffic at rush hour.

Scott Trench:
Yeah, kind of related to that flexing the spending muscle it sounds like, is, hey, I’m going to optimize for convenience here, not just for cost. And I think, as always, really important to remember there’s different stages in this journey. Probably not congruent with the grind and the accumulation phase on the journey to five, but once we’re past the point of five, that’s the point of this. Is, let’s spend some of that money to optimize for life, happiness, and convenience.
And I love it, Mindy. Love that bicep getting bigger and bigger.

Mindy Jensen:
It is getting bigger and bigger. Someday they’ll be as big as yours, Scott. Maybe not. Scott, how about you?

Scott Trench:
I have switched banks a number of times over the years, and the last three I think I’ve been with Ally and really enjoying it. I think that I love the 24/7 support. It’s pretty easy. Not a sponsor of today’s show or any BiggerPockets materials as far as I’m aware, but I just like them and I feel like they do a good job.
There’s always discussion in the BiggerPockets Money Facebook group about who’s got the highest yield on savings, and I think that Ally’s is like 4.35% or something like that. And there are places where you can get up to 5.3%. So there are better rates out there, but I’ve just liked the ease of use and the relatively high rates throughout over the last couple of years, where I’ve never been way different from what you can get if you’re really maximizing for that yield. So really enjoy them and the ease of use. So, highly recommend them personally.

Mindy Jensen:
And Ally Bank has been tied to the conversation with consistently high yields over the course of, even when high yields meant like 0.1%, they were still paying among the highest.
And you cannot discount the fact that they have 24/7 customer service. Because, frankly, when you need customer service most is usually when the banks are closed.

Scott Trench:
Yeah. And if I was in some sort of business that required constant interaction with the bank, they don’t have branches, so it’s not possible for that type of purpose. But for my personal checking and savings account, it’s been phenomenal.

Mindy Jensen:
Next is a break. After we’re back, we’ll go into all the productivity habits we are implementing this year.

Scott Trench:
And we’re back. Before the break, we revealed all the financial products and habits that we’ve been loving. And now we’ll be gushing about all the productivity products that have been a game changer.

Mindy Jensen:
Anything else, Scott, that you’re just in love with? Sorry, I’ve got to use the word love all the time because it’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow.

Scott Trench:
Yeah, moving into kind of productivity tools. And I’ve said this many times in the podcast here, I am really in love with the vision and goal-setting process that my wife and I have used for the duration of our marriage, and I’ve used for a long time previous to that. But it’s a very simple process, it does not require any money to be spent. There is no product associated with it, although actually there is a product, I’ll mention it later.
But basically it’s a document, a piece of paper. And we say, we start off the conversation and say, “What are some things we’re grateful for since the last time we updated our vision?”
Like, oh, we’re grateful for the new set of words from our little baby, the funny thing our cat did, this piece of progress in our careers, this thing about our house that we like, this recent trip that we went on. And it just grounds the conversation in happiness of what you have.
Then it’s kind of like, hey, in five years from now, what do we want our lives to look like? We want to wake up and do this, we want to be vacationing here, we want our day-to-day to be like this, we want our careers to look like this, and that sets the context. Because we’re constantly iterating on it every quarter, there’s always little changes that are being made, but it keeps an alignment on exactly where you’re going. And then you can set goals on a quarterly or annual basis from there, which we do.
And then we have a Sunday little ritual, where we translate those quarterly goals into weekly things that we’re going to do to move forward. For my wife, it’s often writing the next few thousand words for a book that she’s working on. And for me it’s often a combination of BiggerPockets things. We also, of course, prioritize our family life and making sure that we’re proactive about curating great experiences.
So that is super powerful. I don’t know about you guys listening, but the week can get away from me and sometimes does, but I’m never off track for more than a week. Because I always reground it on Sunday night, and get realigned with most important things.
And also, there’s so many things related to your goals that have to do with just sending an email. Just, I got to reach out to this person and kick off this process. And this ritual, I can’t overemphasize the importance of having this ritual and just being like, oh, it’s Sunday night. I’m going to schedule these three emails for tomorrow morning and kick off these processes, and I’m good to go.
So, in love with that process. Feel like it’s so, so powerful. Highly encourage it for folks. So Mindy, how about you? What have you been loving lately from a productivity standpoint?

Mindy Jensen:
Okay, this one you have to bear with me, because it doesn’t sound like a productivity tip in the beginning. But I do not fly on a flight before 10:00 AM, and I don’t land after 7:00 PM.
And the reason is, I can’t sleep the night before a flight if I have to set an alarm. I am up well in advance of any flight that has to take off at 10:00 AM. But if I have to set an alarm, I don’t sleep the entire night, which wrecks my whole day of travel, which kind of wrecks my whole vacation.
On the same token, if I land late, I get home super late, which wrecks my whole night of sleep then, too. So I’ve got multiple days that I’m trying to catch up on my sleep, which will really destroy your productivity. The reason this is a money hack and a productivity hack is that the cheapest flights are super early or super late.
So I have decided, again in conjunction with the exercising my spending muscle, I’m not flying out early, and I’m not landing late, just to save a couple of bucks. Because it wrecks my week.

Scott Trench:
I completely agree. The loss of a day or two, or the ability to make great decisions for a day or two from red eyes, can often not be worth it. And I only fly red-eyes when there’s really no other reasonable option, or if I have a whole weekend to recover with it. But then my weekend’s shot, so I really don’t like to do that either.
But yeah, completely agree.

Mindy Jensen:
Scott, any productivity tools that you are using?

Scott Trench:
Yeah. I would say, aside from my goal-setting stuff, I’m really big into audio content consumption. So I obviously use Spotify and Apple Podcasts to listen to a lot of podcasts. I use Audible. And I’ve recently, embarrassingly because I’ve run a money podcast with you here, rediscovered the public library.
The public library here in Jefferson County, Colorado at least, has basically Audible for free through a variety of apps. You get a library card, you go in there, it’s super easy. And you can borrow almost any ebook or almost any audiobook for free from the library. So I’ve been using that a lot lately.
One specific hack I have, not hack but tip I have is, I will occasionally, if there’s an audiobook that or a subject that I feel like I really need to master quickly, or at least get a grounding in quickly, I will get a Audible book and the Kindle version. And the reason I’ll do this, and it might be 40 bucks between those two things and it sounds like a lot, but I can listen to the book at two, or two-and-a-half, or sometimes even three-times speed depending on the narrator and follow along with the Kindle.
And that allows me to, very rapidly in a matter of hours, absorb an entire book and retain it pretty well on a new subject. So that’s a little tip that I’ll use sometimes. It’s not super cost-efficient, but if you really need to master a new subject quickly, that can be powerful. And you’re able to give your a hundred-percent attention to the task.

Mindy Jensen:
Scott, do you have a random, life-changing product that you love?

Scott Trench:
There’s a self-help guru named Darren Hardy who has written a little journal called Living Your Best Year Ever. And it’s got a lot of this kind of self-help stuff, like you sign a pledge to yourself that you’re going to keep your goals for the next year, and you do all that. I’ve been doing this thing for 10 years in a row now, and I attribute a lot of my organization around the goal setting-stuff to this product.
It’s like a $40 journal and it has a weekly planner. Just, forces of function around, what are the top three goals, what are you going to do related to those goals? How are you going to handle the whirlwind, he calls it the vortex, of things that are going to come up in the week? Like, it’s tax season, got to get the taxes done. It’s not one of my top goals, but got to get it done, and then here are the habits that we want to form in this week.
Super simple structure. And I must have filled out this thing 90% of the weeks over the last 10 years straight. Not every week, but the vast majority of them. And I feel like that’s such a powerful thing there. You can get that book, Living Your Best Year Ever. Again, not a financial affiliate of BiggerPockets.
I actually email Darren Hardy once a year and tell him how much the book helps. One of these years, he’ll respond to me. If you’re listening, let me know. But that’s a good product. There are free journals that you can download. There’s stuff you can get at the supermarket that has similar products, or on Amazon. But go get one of those things, and just start the process at least weekly tracking that. It’s so powerful, and it’s not a big cost.

Mindy Jensen:
That’s awesome, Scott. And 90% of every week over the last 10 years, that’s very impressive.

Scott Trench:
I think that’s probably right. It’s probably in that ballpark. There’s definitely been a couple-month stretches here and there where I’ve skipped it or gotten away from it, but I always come back to it because it’s so powerful. Mindy, what’s your random life-changing product you love?

Mindy Jensen:
I love Google Keep. It’s a note-taking app that is on my phone, but it also saves to the cloud. And then when I get to my computer, I can see it on my computer as well. So every note that I take as I’m walking around the track at the gym, or as I’m sitting at a stoplight, ooh, I have to remember to do this. I then have it on my computer as well.
I don’t have great eyesight, so it’s difficult for me to see things on my phone, which makes it hard for me to do things on my phone. But I can talk to text and then I can see it on my computer screen, and it is absolutely fantastic ways to remind myself of all sorts of things. Spending ideas, trips, literally any random thought I have that I want to remember. And it’s free, which is my favorite cost of all.

Scott Trench:
Love it. Yeah, I need to do better a job at that. I still take all of my notes in pen and paper, and there are huge problems associated with that. Or at least all of my goal-setting notes in pen and paper. I wish I could adapt the mindset of translating that goal setting stuff that I did into something like this. I just, It’s a challenge for me to transpose it with the habit formed over all this time.

Mindy Jensen:
Well, If you know where your things are, then being able to write them down is great. But sometimes you live in a house where there are other people, and they move your things, and then they can never find them. And sometimes it’s just easier to know where your phone is. Not that I’m speaking from personal experience, everybody in the Jensen family.
Stay with us. After the break, we’ll reveal the single most important financial tool that helped us get to financial independence.
Okay Scott, now is time to talk about the kind of sad aspect of Valentine’s Day. Sometimes you have to break up. Is there any productivity tool, money product, or habit that you’re breaking up with?

Scott Trench:
Well, I broke up with Mint.

Mindy Jensen:
They broke up with you.

Scott Trench:
Yeah, they broke up with me. That’s right, it wasn’t me.

Mindy Jensen:
And everybody. It’s not you, it’s them.

Scott Trench:
Yeah, yeah, whatever it was. Yeah. So yeah, Mint’s out, Monarch’s in, as I mentioned earlier.
Another one I’m going to change over is Robinhood. I’ve found Robinhood easy to use and all those kinds of things. Nothing against Robinhood, I just feel like Schwab is a little bit more powerful. And again, I always like to say this, no financial affiliation or anything like that with Robinhood or Schwab here.
But I just think that the research analytics and the tenure of Schwab makes me feel just a little bit more secure and confident as I begin the next couple of years of investing. So I’m not liquidating my Robinhood account, I’m just not contributing more to it. I’m going to put that all in Schwab going forward. How about you?

Mindy Jensen:
Well, Scott, like Ross and Rachel, I am on a break with my customized spending tracker. Did you get that joke? Do you even know who Ross and Rachel are?

Scott Trench:
Yes, I know Friends, Mindy. Sure.

Mindy Jensen:
My customized spending tracker helped me in the beginning, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, recognize where my spending holes were. Or my spending black holes were. And now I don’t need it anymore. So I am taking a bit of a break, while still keeping an overall eye to make sure I don’t go from $60,000 a year spend to $600,000 a year. But we all know that’s not going to actually happen.
But I am not going to be able to continue to exercise my spending muscle if I’m constantly obsessing over how much money I have spent every month. And now that I am in the financial position that I do not have to constantly obsess over how much I’m spending, I’m taking a break.

Scott Trench:
Another breakup I’m going to have this year, Mindy, is multifamily syndications and funds. I am about to write, may be released by the time this episode comes out, a 5,000 word thesis on why I think multifamily is going to crash even more in 2024.
And while, yes, that is market timing, which you shouldn’t do and I shouldn’t do, I just can’t help myself. And I want to stay out of that. I’m getting my butt kicked on a syndication. Not the fault of the syndicator in my view, I knew the risks just going in. I don’t think they operated poorly, I just think it’s an interest rate issue. But I think that there’s going to be a lot more of that on the horizon in 2024 with all the supply coming online.
So learning my lesson from getting my butt kicked, watch and see how this next year goes. But I do think there’ll be opportunity on the horizon in 2025 and 2026 as that pressure continues to mount.

Mindy Jensen:
And I encourage everybody who is invested in syndications to listen to episode 456 with Jay Scott, where we talked about some of the things that can go wrong in a syndication, and some of the flags to look for, the leading indicators that could signal a potential problem with your syndication.
I also had some syndications that didn’t perform as well as they should have. And I do think that it’s a lot to do with the meteoric rise of interest rates. I don’t know that there has ever been an interest rate hike so fast and so high. Has there, in the history of American finance?

Scott Trench:
As a percentage? Probably no. If anything comes close, it’s probably that big rise in the seventies and eighties where interest rates really went up. Maybe they went up more in a condensed period of time there, but not as a percentage. But going from zero to one is a huge change, right?

Mindy Jensen:
Yes.

Scott Trench:
So going from zero to four, zero to five-and-a-half, five-and-a-quarter, is really what the federal funds rate has gone to essentially in the last two years. And that’s a big change. And one item on there, we’re starting to stray a little bit off-topic on that is, the yield curve is inverted. So the tenure is at four, and it’s usually 150 basis points above the federal funds rate.
Right now the federal funds rate’s at 5.3. So for the tenure not to not rise, the federal fund rate has to go to about 2.6%. That’s nine or 10 rate cuts from the Fed, which would be historic.

Mindy Jensen:
Yeah.

Scott Trench:
And I don’t think that’s going to happen, so I think interest rates are going to stay high the next couple of years. And I might be alone in that one, the market seems to disagree. But it’s really hard for me to envision a reality where the Fed reduces rates nine or 10 times in a hurry over the next couple of years. That’s basically admitting that they were complete idiots over the last couple of years. And while a lot of people think they are, I don’t.

Mindy Jensen:
Okay. Scott, let’s get a little off-topic, off financial topics. Are there any non-financial products that you will no longer be spending money on?

Scott Trench:
Yeah. I am a big Eagles fan, and their catastrophic collapse in the back-half of the year meant that I no longer needed my YouTube TV and NFL Sunday ticket subscription, which I have splurged on the last two years. So yeah, I’m canceling that, and I have no access to streaming television right now other than Netflix and Max. So yeah, whatever’s on regular TV I can’t watch right now.

Mindy Jensen:
Well Scott, I’m going to say that if you want to continue that streak, you can just become a Bears fan, and then you’ll always be disappointed in the second half of the season.
Didn’t your Eagles go seven and O?

Scott Trench:
The Eagles had a phenomenal start to the season, and were at one point ranked number one in the power rankings. And then just totally collapsed, back-half of the year.

Mindy Jensen:
Totally collapsed. Well, I’m sorry for their losses, Scott. And also, welcome to the club.

Scott Trench:
Well, aside from breaking up with the Bears, are there any other non-financial products that you’re not going to spend any money on?

Mindy Jensen:
In the same vein as you Scott, I just canceled a bunch of streaming services that I had signed up for to watch specific shows. And then when I was done with the show, I didn’t cancel the service. So I’m looking right at you, Paramount, for Inkmaster. And Peacock for one season of Suits. Why couldn’t that last season be on Netflix?
So anyway, I have canceled those. And I hope that this is a reminder to anybody listening that if they have unwatched streaming systems because they were just going to watch that one show, cancel it. Just put this episode on pause, and go up to your TV or your computer, and cancel that subscription right now.

Scott Trench:
Mindy, what was a tool that was indispensable to you on your journey to financial independence

Mindy Jensen:
For people who are starting their journey, I think it is so important to track your spending and track your net worth, everything in your financial tool belt. And the product that we used when we were starting out is called, it’s now called Empower Personal Wealth, but back then it was called Personal Capital.
And it was, you load up all of your accounts into this system, and you can then track all of the different sources of income, all the different sources of investments that you have. If you just have one, like a normal person, it might be easy for you to just check Fidelity every day. But if you’re crazy like we are, and have them all over the place, having a company like Personal Capital or Empower Personal Wealth will help you keep track of them when they’re in multiple locations.

Scott Trench:
And just to echo that, what these products do, Mint, Personal Capital, Monarch, there are other platforms as well, is if they’re good at it, they’ll do two things for you.
One is create what we call here at BiggerPockets a player’s scorecard, right? You can take a look at it and in five seconds tell if you’re winning, or losing, or making progress. And the other is what we call a coach’s scorecard, which has tons of additional data; your entire budget, every expense, and all these other things for you to mine and track and look at all these different trends.
And I think that these products tend to do a good job in both of those areas, of giving you that snapshot so you can just check and see if you’re winning. But also the ability to go into that more granular detail to analyze trends and where your big expenses are, and immediately find problem areas or opportunities.

Mindy Jensen:
Scott, this was super, super fun. I really enjoyed hearing about your financial tools, and I do need to start journaling. I’m going to get a copy of that Darren Hardy book. Awesome. Do you have any plans for Valentine’s Day?

Scott Trench:
Valentine’s Day, actually the 15th, we will be traveling to Cancun for a little vacation with some family. So, yeah. I haven’t been anywhere sunny in a long time, and I’m very much looking forward to that.

Mindy Jensen:
Well, that’s awesome. Scott, I hope you have a great time.

Scott Trench:
Oh, and we’re actually having a host retreat, and many of the podcast hosts from Rookie, from Real Estate, Dave Meyer from On The Market, a couple of the On The Market hosts, we’ll, actually I’ll be in town and we’ll go skiing on Valentine’s Day. So skiing and then straight to vacation. Work and play. Or is it all play? I don’t know. Yeah, it’ll be a good week.

Mindy Jensen:
Well, that sounds awesome. I’m going to go snowboarding with you guys.

Scott Trench:
All right. Yeah.

Mindy Jensen:
All right, Scott. Well, let’s go hit the slopes. That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. He, of course, is the Scott Trench. And I am Mindy Jensen saying goodbye, Cherry Pie.

Scott Trench:
If you enjoyed today’s episode, please give us a five-star review on Spotify or Apple. And if you’re looking for even more money content, feel free to visit our YouTube channel at youtube.com/biggerpocketsmoney.

Mindy Jensen:
BiggerPockets Money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench, produced by Kaylin Bennett, editing by Exodus Media, Copywriting by Nate Weintraub. Lastly, a big thank you to the BiggerPockets team for making this show possible.

David:
This is the BiggerPockets Podcast show 892. What’s going on everyone? This is David Greene, your host of the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast here today with a Seeing Greene episode where we arm you with the information that you need to start building long-term wealth through real estate today. In today’s show, I’m going to be taking questions from you, the BiggerPockets community about the conundrums, the debacle, and the quintessential problems that you’re having with your portfolio and doing my best to give my advice for how you can improve your situation, better spend your money, better manage the asset that you’ve got and more.
Today, we’ve got some pretty awesome topics, including how to understand financial energy when it’s stored in your properties, seeing your properties as a piece of a portfolio, a concept that I call portfolio architecture and how to make that work for your wealth. What happens when you’re divorced and starting late, but you want real estate assets in your portfolio, as well as negotiating more favorable terms on a commercial construction project and more from you all. But most importantly, if you want to be featured on the show, head over to biggerpockets.com/david and submit your question to be featured on Seeing Greene and remember to let me know if you’re watching this on YouTube, in the comments, what you thought of today’s show.
Up first, we’ve got Justin in Virginia Beach trying to figure out what to do with his house hack condo. Let’s see what Justin needs some help with.

Justin:
Hey, David. My name’s Justin from Virginia Beach. I have a money question for you. So I have about $40,000 cash on hand. I have a house that I bought two years ago. I’ve been house hacking. I bought it for 225. It’s worth around 310, 320, so I was wondering if it would be smart if I did a HELOC and combine the cash on hand to do a BRRRR or a flip or if I should get a hard money loan and just use the cash I have on hand to do either of those two. I am a real estate agent as well, so I do have MLS access. So please let me know what you think would be best.

David:
Justin. Awesome, my man. This is some good stuff. So I see in my notes that you bought a condo two years ago and you’ve been house hacking ever since. Basically, you own the property and you only have to pay the HOA fee. So you’re paying about 280 bucks a month and all the rest of it is being covered by the income coming in from the people living in your house hack. So well done eliminating your biggest expense in life, which is housing. And it sounds like you’ve been saving that money that you used to spend on either rent or a mortgage and you got 40 grand of it put away and you’re trying to figure out what to do with it and you’re looking at BRRRR. So we’re trying to figure out how are we going to come up with the money to do it.
I do like the idea of taking a HELOC on this property as opposed to taking out an additional hard money loan, and here’s why. The rate’s going to be a lot cheaper and it’s also more flexible to pay back. So for anyone that’s not aware of how HELOCs work, they’re really cool products in the flexibility that you have. If you take out a hard money loan, there’s usually prepayment penalties and there’s more than just the interest that you’re paying on that hard money loan. So everybody knows, hey, you’re going to have a 12% rate or a 10% rate, probably closer to 13 or 14% with today’s rates, but you’re also going to have points that you pay upfront for the loan. You’re also going to have to pay closing costs, title fees, escrow fees, making sure that all the stuff is recorded properly. There’s always these little paper cuts that add up to be pretty significant expenses when you go forward with the hard money loan.
With most HELOCs, you pay for an appraisal and that’s it. You pull the money out and when you want to pay it back, you just pay it back. It’s really an easy and convenient way to move equity from one location to another location, and that’s what I love about your HELOC options. I’d rather see you take a HELOC on that property and add it with the $40,000 that you have saved up and that can become the down payment for the next property that you buy. Now, you’re going to have to get a loan for that next property. That might be a hard money loan because you’re probably going to be putting 20% down, maybe 25% down on it, maybe even 30, and you’re going to have to borrow the other 70 to 80%. So in that case, maybe a hard money loan. But what I’d love to see you do Justin, is repeat what you did with this condo.
If you move out of the condo and you rent out the room that you’re currently in, not only will you be saving that 280 bucks because now you’re getting more rent, but you’re probably going to be cash flowing a little bit. Now, you buy a live in flip. So you move into a property. Ooh, I like this idea even more the more that I talk about it. Because you don’t have to put 20 or 30% down if you’re going to do the live in flip. You can get away with 5% down on a conventional loan, which you might not even need to use the HELOC for because you got 40 grand saved up and you could take that HELOC and make that your emergency reserves in case something goes wrong and you have to pull that money out. But assuming nothing goes wrong, you’re not even going to have to spend any interest to use that money.
So you take your 40 grand, that becomes a down payment for your next property. You get yourself a fixer upper, you move into it, you put some roommates in there, and then you start fixing it up on your timeline. Maybe you hire people to come in and do the work, maybe you do some of the work yourself, but you see where I’m going here? You’re eliminating a lot of your expenses that are involved with flips or BRRRRs when you buy the property and move into it because you could do it on your time. The holding costs aren’t the same. You’re also eliminating a lot of the stress and you’re also eliminating the big down payment. These are all things that make flipping and BRRRRing tricky. You’re getting rid of them by taking the live-in flip approach.
Now, like you said, as a realtor, you have MLS access, so you could just make this a part of your morning routine. You wake up, you stretch, you scratch your cat on the head, you pour yourself some coffee, you read the news, you do your affirmations, you check biggerpockets.com and you look on the MLS to see if any fixer uppers have hit the market. You can also set a filter on there to remind you when a property has sat for 60 days or 70 days without getting taken off and going pending. Those are properties that are usually in rough shape and you can get a better deal with, and then you just wait. You’re in no rush. You got a great situation going right now, so you got the odds in your favor. It’s kind of like being a poker player sitting on a big stack of money. You only have to play the best hands. You’re not forced to play that 7-2 combination because you got to make some moves in life because you put yourself in a bad spot.
So use that to your advantage. Don’t go after anything that’s not a great deal. Don’t make any big mistakes and spend money on dumb things. Don’t get a hard money loan to buy a property if you don’t have to. Get pre-approved to get a conventional loan to buy something that can be a live-in flip and eliminate a lot of the risk that other investors have to take on when they can’t take the live-in flip approach. Thanks very much for the question. This was one that I enjoyed answering. Let us know how that goes.
All right, we got a great question coming up here about someone who’s late to the game in real estate, coming out of divorce, isn’t quite sure how the game should be played, but knows that they need to do something and they’re concerned about risks, but they also have to make some moves. We’re going to be getting into how to navigate that type of complex situation right after this quick break.
All right, welcome back. Let’s dive into our next question coming from Shelly in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Shelly says, “I know I need to diversify my assets as none of them include real estate. I’ve never bought a house by myself, but I have owned two with my ex who got everything when I divorced him three years ago. I walked away with about 1.5 million in retirement assets. I’m interested in house flipping or short-term rentals, but I feel that a multifamily would give me a steadier return. However, I’m nervous about spending any of my retirement money since I’m 57 and slowing down. Also, I cannot touch it until I’m 59 and a half, which is two years away. My question is, since I’m older, have a health issue and I’m late to the game, what kind of market and what type of building should I focus on? Can you give me any advice on how to proceed with financing?”
All right, Shelly, this is some good stuff. Let’s talk about what you do have going for you and how we can use this to your advantage. You mentioned you have 1.5 million in retirement assets and you did mention that some of this money you can’t touch till you’re 59 and a half, which is two years away, which would lead me to believe that this is retirement income. Here’s what I’d like to see with you. The pressure’s going to be that you got to buy something, you’re going to have to find some way to get some income coming in in retirement. You’re not probably just going to be able to live on that 1.5 million assuming that you’re going to have a longer lifespan, which we’re all hoping for here.
So you’re going to have to invest it, but you want to avoid risk. And with real estate, risk comes in several ways. One would be buying in rough areas, that’s risky. Two would be buying an asset you don’t understand, that’s not having knowledge or not having experience. And a third would be the mortgage. The debt you have on the property constitute risk because it’s basically just something that slows down your ability to make a profit. So if a property generates net income through rents, vacancy can kill that, maintenance issues can kill that, problems with the property themselves can kill that, but that mortgage shows up every single month and that slows you down. What if we were able to buy you some real estate that didn’t have a mortgage? Now, you’re going to be able to get into the game. You’re going to be buying an asset that presumably is going to be going up in value over the long term, but if we can eliminate your risk by having you buy it with cash or very low money down if you had to, I’m starting to feel a lot better about this deal.
Now, I understand that you’re considering multifamily because you think it would give you a steadier return. My concern is that a lot of the income that comes from small multifamily properties like two, three and four unit stuff goes back into small multifamily properties like two, three and four unit stuff. Oftentimes, the tenants break things, the house itself wears down. You have to replace the roof, you have to replace one of the HVAC systems. Remember, when you have a fourplex, you’ve got four air conditioning units, you’ve got four kitchens, you’ve got four water heaters, you’ve got a lot more things that can go wrong, and I have one of these things and it seems like it’s always popping up in my inbox that another thing broke on that property and I forget. It’s because there’s four times as many things. And since maintenance and things breaking are one of your biggest expenses in real estate, if you go that route and you buy small multifamily, even if it’s paid off, it may feel safer, but it may not generate enough cashflow to actually support you in retirement.
That brings us into the short-term rental space, which can seem risky, but depending on the area that you buy into, there are going to be areas that have lot less risk than others. Buying into an area that is known for having vacation properties, the entire area is dependent on tourism and people visiting significantly reduce your risk of the city coming in and saying that you can’t have a short-term rental. Almost eliminates it. And it also significantly reduces how bad of vacancy issues you’re going to have because this is an area known for tourism. In other words, if you try to buy a short-term rental somewhere in Cincinnati, Ohio and you just hope that there’s enough people visiting Cincinnati to rent your unit over somebody else’s, you’re rolling the dice a little bit. But if you go into a vacation destination area like Orlando where you have Disney World or the Smoky Mountains where I have a bunch of cabins, the odds of you not having someone that’s going to rent your property at all are very, very low, and so it becomes less risky even though it’s a short-term rental.
Now what happens if we put this all together? You get into a short-term rental instead of a small multifamily because it’s going to produce enough income to make it worth your while. You buy it with cash so you don’t have a mortgage so that your risk is significantly decreased and you buy it in an area that is known for having a steady stream of tourism to reduce your amount of vacancy. Now, you might not get the deal of the century, but the goal here, setting you up for retirement is to get you base hits. We’re looking for singles, maybe doubles. We’re not looking to hit home runs and possibly strike out.
So here’s what I’d like to see you do. Pick a market that is known for having vacation rentals with very reliable and consistent income. Find an asset that is kind of boring and very steady and dependable. That’s something that I can help you with if it’s a market that I know because I know some of those neighborhoods and then have somebody manage it for you, which you should have plenty of revenue to do because you are not going to be paying that mortgage. You might even be able to buy two properties with that 1.5 million. You might even be able to buy two properties with just 1 million of it, right? You’ve got some options here. You should definitely talk to somebody who owns properties there and ask them who they’re using and how you can get set up with them.
Here’s my last piece of advice. Do not assume that all property managers are the same. I’ve had many bad experiences hiring other people to manage my properties who then delegated the work to virtual assistants or people working in their company that were not doing a good job and my revenue has crashed. I recently took over a lot of these properties myself, gave them to somebody that I hired and that one move, taking them away from professional property management and bringing them in-house has increased my top line revenue by 25% and we’re barely getting started.
The point here is don’t just pick anyone and think that they’re okay. Use someone you know who’s managing one or two properties in that area and doing a great job that can take on yours or vet the company very, very carefully and have a contract written so you can get out of it if the property’s not performing. The last thing that I want is for you to spend a lot of money buying properties in cash, handing them to property management and getting a disappointing statement every single month with some excuse that they’re always going to give you. And because you don’t have experience in real estate, you’re assuming that what they’re telling you is the truth. You’re going to end up feeling hopeless and that’s what we want to avoid.
Now, you also mentioned here any advice on how to proceed with financing. Let’s say that you want to buy two cabins in the Smoky Mountains and they’re about $700,000 each, but you don’t want to put all of your money into buying them cash. So maybe you want to take out a loan on each cabin and you want to borrow 25% of the money for the property. So in this case, you would be buying the cabin for $700,000 and putting down right around $180,000, $200,000 on each cabin. You’re still going to keep that mortgage really low, but there’ll be some kind of financing. You can use what we call a DSCR loan. That stands for Debt-Service Coverage Ratio. These are 30-year loans with fixed rates that will qualify you for the loan based on the income that the cabin is going to be generating.
Now, if you buy in an area with a lot of other properties, high tourism area, this will be easier to get the loan because there’s tons of comps for an appraiser to look at and feel comfortable that this cabin or this property is going to bring in the income that you need to pay for it. And most importantly, you are not going to have to worry about having your own debt to income looked at because they’re not going to be using your debt to income ratio. They’re going to be using what they think that the property is going to be producing.
All right, our next question is coming from Tyler Judd in Williams Lake, British Columbia.

Tyler:
Hey David, Tyler Judd here in Williams Lake. We’re a small town in Central British Columbia up on the West Coast of Canada. My wife and I have a number of small multifamily properties and a small apartment complex commercial building. We’ve got a single family home that’s an ongoing BRRRR, should be done in the next month or two, converting it into having a legalized basement suite, and I’m looking for a little bit of guidance on how we might negotiate with the lenders. My wife and I are in healthcare, so we’ve got strong personal incomes and I’m wanting to maximize that cash on cash return, kind of restocking our cash reserves as we’re continuing to look for opportunities in the market.
Details on the property. We purchased it in December for 280,000. Renovation and holding costs will be 120,000, all in for 400,000. ARV will be about 475. And so we’ve been offered from our local credit union, 80% of the acquisition and construction costs for 320,000 and that’ll be a commercial loan, 5.5% on a five-year term, amortized over 25 years, PITI is 2,650. Or through a mortgage broker, we’ve been offered a residential loan from one of our big banks up here in Canada. They’ll do 80% of the ARV at 6.25% over five-year term with 25-year amortization with the PITI at 3,150. It’ll end up being a furnished midterm rental. We’ve signed a one-year contract with a corporate tenant for 3,250 a month for that upper unit, and we’ll get about 1,750 for the basement, consistent with the other units that we have in the area, bringing our income to about $5,000 a month.
We’re confident in the property and the location for the next five or maybe 10 years. So I’m wanting to ask your advice on how to approach the lender at that credit union to possibly improve the terms on that commercial/construction loan. The credit union also has our commercial mortgage on that apartment building in a few of our small multi-families, so they’re able to see how we do financially and they like how we do business in general. So thanks in advance, David. You and the rest of the BP team have been wildly influential, so we appreciate you and thanks again.

David:
All right, thank you Tyler. I appreciate that, especially that last part about the mindset stuff, helping your business. Though I do believe that real estate builds wealth better than anything else and we love educating real estate investors around here, I’m also a businessman and I’ve found that you can create significant wealth through running businesses like me, providing services to real estate investors. So I love hearing that your business is doing better based off of some of the content that you’ve got from me and BiggerPockets. Thank you for sharing that. That made me feel good.
All right, I heard all the details there, very thorough. I see that you’re probably a doctor or in some form of medicine. Your main question was, how can you approach the credit union about improving the conditions and the terms of the loan that they’re offering you? I don’t know that my first option would be to try to get them to improve those. The first thing that I would do, Tyler, is I would look for someone else that had better ones. The easiest way to do that is from finding a mortgage broker. So there’s basically two kinds of lenders. There’s lenders who say, “Hey, I work for this company or this fund or this bank and I lend out their money, and these are the terms that we have to give you a loan.” Or you can work for someone who says, “I’m a broker. I broker your deal to a lot of different banks. Tell me what you’re looking to do and let me go to all the banks that I have a relationship with and see who’s got the best deal for you.”
I typically recommend people start with mortgage brokers going to these different lenders to shop for them so you don’t have to do all the work. If you find a mortgage broker, they can shop it for you. See if you can get better terms there than with your credit union, and then you don’t have to worry about any of this. You can just use them. For instance, at the one brokerage, we broker these types of loans all the time. We call them bridge products, and we find ways that you can borrow, just like you said, 80 to 85% of the down payment and the construction costs for the property, so you only have to put 15% down on the property and 15% down of the construction costs. You could borrow the rest of it. That might be better than the loan that your credit union’s giving you or the rates might be way better at the credit union than what anybody else can give you, but how are you going to know that if you don’t have something to compare it to?
Now, once you’ve looked around, if you’re finding that the credit union is still the best game in town, which sometimes they are, you might feel better about the terms they’re offering you. Lastly, if you don’t, I would just go in there and I would talk to loan officer and I’d say, “Hey, I’d like to use you because I have a relationship with your bank. I just think that the terms could be improved a little bit. How would you feel about lowering the interest rate or lowering the closing costs or having the points that I’m paying up front? Where do you have the most flexibility with improving these terms so that we can sign this thing today?” That’s going to let you know how interested they are in your business because this is something people don’t understand about banks and credit unions. They’re not always in this situation where they’re competing for your business. Sometimes they don’t want it.
If they haven’t had a lot of deposits or if they’ve recently loaned out a large amount of the capital that they’ve collected on deposit from all of their customers, they don’t want to make loans to people like you because they don’t have as much money to lend. In those situations, the head honchos at the bank say, “Hey, if you’re going to make loans like this, you need to jack up the rate and jack up the points because we don’t need that business.” Now sometimes they’re in the opposite position. Sometimes they’ve got a bunch of deposits that have come in and they’re paying out interest on all the people who have made those deposits and they’re under pressure to get that money lent out at a higher spread so that they can make the delta. You’re never going to know until you talk to the person at the credit union and find out what position they’re in.
Now, they’re probably not going to come forward and tell you if they’re motivated or not, but if you make a proposal to them and say, what do we have to do to get this signed today and they don’t seem interested in it, that’s a good sign that they’re not feeling the pressure. If you can tell the person you’re talking to really, really, really wants to get that loan signed, he’s probably going to give you some form of, “Let me go talk to my manager,” which is a great sign that you’ve got leverage. There’s a little negotiating tip for you, a courtesy of Seeing Greene.
One last thing to think about, Tyler, if you haven’t considered this, you may not need to take a loan from the credit union or maybe you can borrow half the money since you don’t love the terms by taking out a HELOC on one of your other properties. So you might be able to save some money by putting a HELOC on something else and using that for a portion of the construction costs instead of just going to the credit union to borrow the money from them.
If you’ve got paid off properties, you can look into cross collateralizing them, meaning, hey, put the loan on this property instead of on the one that I’m going to buy. It’s all collateral to the lender. It really shouldn’t make a difference, but oftentimes if you’re putting a loan on a property that’s already stabilized, you get a much better rate than a hard money loan where you’re going to be going into a construction process. So think about if you’re going to be borrowing money on a property that is risky, meaning you’re going to be going to improve it, they’re going to charge you for that risk and give you a higher rate. But if you put the loan on a property that is stabilized and less risky for them, meaning if they had to foreclose on it, they could sell it easier, they’re going to have less risk and therefore give you a better rate. But from your position, you just want to get the money. It probably doesn’t make a big difference whether it’s collateralized with something that’s stabilized or something that’s unstable like the fixture that you’re talking about.
All right, the green light is shining and we are on a roll. We’re actually going to skip the section where we normally read comments from the YouTube channel and the review, so sorry if that’s your favorite part. It will be in the next episode of Seeing Greene, I promise. But because we’re having such good content, I’m going to keep rolling right through. Right after this break, we’re going to be getting into a great question from Alex who bought a primary residence and did very well with it and is trying to figure out the best use of the asset. We’ll get into that right after this quick break.
All right, welcome back. Let’s take a look at this next video question from Alex in Seattle, Washington.

Alex:
Hi, David. My name is Alex from Seattle, Washington. My wife and I started as real estate investors and a part of other few properties, rental properties. We have this primary residence, which we converted into rental last year. We purchased it in 2018 and refinance it for 2.6%. Our return on equity currently is very low, about 4%, and we are trying to find a way on how to make it work better. Cash-out refinance won’t work because of higher rates and it won’t cash flow with that and at all, or even negative cashflow, and also I know we can sell it tax-free because we lived there for more than two years during previous five years. We can sell it, but it did not appreciate well, only to 765K versus 720 when we purchased it. And yeah, what do you think our best next options with this equity? Our goal is long-term investment and make sure our equity works well. Thank you.

David:
All right, thank you, Alex. In Pillars of Wealth, I talk a lot about the framework that I like to look at equity through. I see equity as energy. It’s financial energy and it’s the name for financial energy when it is stored in real estate. Now, you don’t have as much flexibility with it when you have cash in the bank that you can pull out very easily or cash under your mattress that you can pull out very easily. There’s more things that you can do with that energy. So one of the things that real estate investors should be looking at is seeing the architecture of their entire portfolio and asking themselves, where is my equity working hard and where is it being lazy? Now, in this case, it sounds like you’ve got some lazy equity, which sounds bad, but it’s actually a great problem to have because it means you can improve the performance of your finances.
Condos typically are not strong cash flowing vehicles. Now, a lot of people will hear that and say, “Wait a minute, my condo cash flows.” I know. I believe that it does. However, it’s probably not cash flowing as strong as if that same equity was in a duplex, a triplex, a fourplex, a single family home, a short-term rental, an apartment complex, a commercial building, something that is designed to generate more income. Condos are inefficient. They’ve usually got high HOA fees. The rents on them don’t go up as much as on single family houses or duplexes or triplexes. So they’re great ways to get into the game because they’re typically cheaper and they do appreciate, much like single family houses. So I look at these as sort of launching pads. If you buy a condo in the right area and you play the game the right way, you can get a lot of equity really quickly.
This happens when people buy a new development in an area like Miami, or if you bought a condo in Austin five or six years ago, you’re probably feeling really good about it, but the return on your equity, my guess is not that great. So Alex, you’re probably going to want to sell it, which is one of the ways that you get your equity out of one real estate vehicle and into a better one, and you already recognize that you get to avoid capital gains taxes because you lived in the property. So I don’t even have to tell you about that, you already know. If you’re married, which you are, you get to avoid about $500,000 in gain. If you’re single, it’s about $250,000. So you can probably sell this property, you’re going to have some realtor fees, you’re going to have some closing costs, you might have some seller credits, but you should sell the property and move it into a better vehicle.
Now, my advice would be to sell it in the spring because you typically get significantly more for your property if you get more offers and you have a lot more buyers that are shopping in the spring than in the winter, and then the question becomes, where are you going to live? Why you’re looking for something else? So you may have to move in with some friends. You may have to rent a unit from somebody else. You may have to find a medium term rental to move into, or you may have to go lease another home. I typically tell the clients that come to the David Greene team, I don’t want you to lease an entire house for a year and then have to break your lease when you go somewhere else. So look on Furnished Finder for something that you can move into for a couple of months to live in while you’re looking for your next property.
You’re also going to want to get pre-approved to know what type of loan you get, what your interest rate is going to be, or a range that you could be in and what your budget’s going to be when you buy the next house, because you’re going to need to know the expenses in order to run the numbers on your next property. Remember, running the numbers is about knowing income and expenses. You need the expenses by starting with the lender, and then you can grab the income from looking at AirDNA, from looking at Furnished Finder, or from looking at the BiggerPockets rent estimator if it’s going to be a single family house.
Once you’re armed with this information, you can start asking yourself the question of, where do I want to put the money? Maybe you save some of it and put 5% down on a house hack for you and your wife and start over with another situation like the condo where you buy into a neighborhood that’s going to appreciate and in five years you get to this whole thing again with the equity that you created. Maybe you take the rest of the cash and you buy yourself a couple short-term rentals. Maybe you buy a couple small multifamily properties. Maybe you get into the commercial space if that’s what you want to do. But the idea here is to get the equity out of the condo where it’s acting lazy and put it into the market where you’re going to do better.
Now, here’s something to think about that works in this market right now that we typically haven’t preached at BiggerPockets, but I think it’s a good strategy. Let’s say you can’t find anything that’s a screaming deal that you love, but it’s in a good neighborhood or a great neighborhood, a good location, it’s not going to cause you any headaches and you know it’s going to perform over time. It just doesn’t cashflow right now. Well, remember, it just doesn’t cashflow right now typically means it just doesn’t cashflow at 20% down right now.
You mentioned in the notes here that you don’t need the equity because you got some money saved up. So what if you sold the property and you took the equity and you just bought something all cash? Maybe you buy a short-term rental somewhere, all cash. Now, you have enough money that you can pay somebody else to manage that property, or you can learn how to manage it yourself and make some mistakes because your risk is significantly reduced when you don’t have the mortgage payment. You’re now making cashflow that nobody else can get because you don’t have a mortgage on the property, but you’ve got all the equity. Remember, equity is energy stored in the property. And later on, if you do find a good deal, you can go do a cash-out refinance on that property, pull the equity out, and put that into the next deal, which is another way of getting the energy out of the investment vehicle.
When we’re having a hard time finding cashflow, that doesn’t mean you can’t buy real estate, it just means it’s harder to buy real estate using leverage. So all you investors out there that have got this problem, a lot of equity, a lot of savings but nowhere to put it, break yourself out of the mindset of looking at everything at putting 20% down. Think about it, if you pay cash, if you put 50% down, if you put 80% down, would that asset operate making you a cashflow and making you money? And then you’ve always got the option to pull that equity out later and go put it into the deal you find that makes more sense.
All right, in today’s show, we covered quite a few topics and financial principles including what return on equity is and how to use it, understanding financial energy stored in properties and how to get it out, seeing properties as a piece of a portfolio as opposed to a standalone unit, being divorced and starting late, but wanting to get into real estate to build your wealth and negotiating more favorable terms on a commercial construction project, as well as how banks make decisions when it comes to lending out their money.
Where else are you going to get stuff like this? Seeing Greene is the only game in town that I know of, so thank you for being here. I appreciate you all. But we can’t make the show without you, literally. So if you’d like to see the show keep happening, I need your help. Go to biggerpockets.com/david and submit your questions there. If you want to reach out to me to talk more about any of the things you heard in today’s show, you can find my information in the show notes. Please do that. And if you want more BiggerPockets content, head over to the forums on the website where I promise you there is more information than you will ever be able to consume if you looked at it for probably the rest of your life.
I’m David Greene, the host of the BiggerPockets Podcast. We are BiggerPockets and you are the people that we love the most. Thank you for being here, and if you’ve got a minute, check out another episode of Seeing Greene, and if you’re an extra awesome person and you just want to show off your awesomeness, please head over to wherever you listen to your podcast at and leave us a five star review. Those help tremendously. I’ll see you on the next episode.