BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 113: Becoming a Millionaire Real Estate Investor Using The One Thing with Jay Papasan

Episode Date: March 12, 2015

Today on the BiggerPockets Podcast we’re excited to bring you another fantastic interview by one of the most successful real estate authors in America. Jay Papasan is best known to this audience as the co-author of The Millionaire Real Estate Investor (co-written with Gary Keller) which has been our top-recommended real estate book here from BiggerPockets Podcast guests. He also co-authored The Millionaire Real Estate Agent and collaborated on the best selling book FLIP and HOLD. Most recently, Jay is the co-author of The One Thing, which Brandon recently featured as the number one book on his list of the business books that changed his life in 2014. Jay is also a savvy real estate investor, and he shares his incredible story and strategy with us today! In This Episode We Cover: How Jay got started writing real estate books Why real estate agents don’t invest themselves How to adopt an investor mindset The habits real estate investors hold How to do the math when looking at properties Insight into The Millionaire Real Estate Investor Clever methods for finding deals What you should know about “The Domino Effect“ And SO much more! Links from the Show: BiggerPockets T-shirt BiggerPockets Tools for Analysis BiggerPockets Podcast Show 105 with Ophelia Nicholson BiggerPocket’s The Book on Investing in Real Estate with No (and Low) Money Down Books Mentioned in this Show The Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Gary Keller The Millionaire Real Estate Agent: It’s Not About the Money…It’s About Being the Best You Can Be! by Gary Keller The Book on Flipping Houses by Mr. J Scott The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t by Jim Collins The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley The Automatic Millionaire: A Powerful One-Step Plan to Live and Finish Rich by David Bach Body for Life: 12 Weeks to Mental and Physical Strength by Bill Phillips Go For the Goal by Mia Hamm Rich Habits – The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals by Thomas C. Corley Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss The Lean Startup by Eric Ries The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason Rich Dad’s CASHFLOW Quadrant by Robert T. Kiyosaki Managing Oneself by Peter Ferdinand Drucker Tweetable Topics: “Start looking at the world as an opportunity.” (Tweet This!) “Every house is a surprise.” (Tweet This!) “I’d always rather miss 5 or 6 good ones rather than buy one bad one.” (Tweet This!) “I’d rather have fewer roofs to manage but have more net worth and cash flow over time.” (Tweet This!) “Achievers have a clear sense of priority.” (Tweet This!) “Action is how you make progress in life.” (Tweet This!) “If I just teach him one thing, where do I begin that has the most impactful way for me to line up my life?” (Tweet This!) “You figure out what your focus should be and act that way all the time.” (Tweet This!) “The best way to learn something is to teach it.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Jay Jay’s Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast, show 113. We interviewed about 120 people like you to write the millionaire real estate investor, and I started to see a pattern. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from BiggerPockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online.

What's going on, everybody? This is Josh Dork and host to the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host, Mr. Brandon Turner. What up, Brandon? Literally, you are here with your co-host. We are like 10 feet away. We are. You are right in the cubicle next to mine.

I love it. I love it. It's been fun having you here, man. Yeah, I don't like this cubicle idea. This is kind of creepy in here. But life wasn't meant to be lived in a cubicle, wasn't it? Life was not meant to be lived. That's why I work at home normally.

but you know, I'm here at the office hanging out with you because I like you. By the way, we do have Bigger Pockets T-shirts that bear that exact slogan, don't they? They do. They do. And they're kind of cool. So if you want to check them out, head over to BiggerPockets.com slash t-shirt, T-S-H-I-R-T. Right on, right on. Get your copy today. All right, guys. So today is kind of an exciting day. We've got a really, really amazing guest. He's such a cool guy. And he's one of the biggest authors that is in the business. And he's, you know, he, yeah, he really is one of the biggest authors in the business. And we'll get to that in a second. But before we get there, let's really quickly get to our quick tip. Today's quick tip, guys. We've been working on this idea for a little

while. And we thought, you know what? Bigger Pocket users come onto the site. They interact on the forums. They find people they like. They find people they want to connect with. They connect with them. They want to work with them, do business. And so then they go and they leave Bigger Pockets and they go to other websites and they start chatting with them on Skype and other places. And we're like, well, that's crazy. You know, you guys want to interact with these people, these colleagues. Why don't we help you do that and facilitate that on Bigger Pockets? So either at the time of this podcast or at some point in the very, very near future, we're going to be launching Bigger Pockets chat. And you'll see it's, you'll know it's launched because you'll see it on the bottom

of your screen. And bigger jackets, pockets chat is like a little IAM. Bigger jackets pot? What you said? You were like bigger packet. It's a tongue twister. It's like rural. Rural.

Rural. Bigger pockets chat. Yeah. Anyway, so look for bigger pockets chat coming soon on the bottom right corner of your screen. And you can start IAMing with your colleagues and getting work done with them and interacting. And it's going to be great. And you're going to love it. So that is today's quick tip. Let's get to this thing. Today's guest is Jay Papazon. Jay is best known to our audience is the co-author

of the millionaire real estate investor alongside Gary Keller, which has been our top recommended real estate book here on the Bigger Pockets podcast by our guests. So it really was an honor to have him. He also co-authored the millionaire real estate agent and collaborated on the best selling book, Flip. Most recently, Jay is the co-author of The One Thing. which Brandon recently featured as the number one book on his list of business books that changed his life in 2014. He doesn't stop talking about it. And the book has some amazing, amazing wisdom. We're going to talk with Jay about that. We're going to talk with him about his own personal real estate investing, building wealth. It's a fantastic show. Get a pen out. Get ready to listen

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All right, Jay, welcome to the show, man. It's great to have you here. Thanks for having me. I'm super. excited to be here. Oh, no, the honor is ours. This is, it's going to be fun. I've been reading your stuff for a long time, so it's kind of cool to be able to actually, you know, talk to the guy who wrote some of the stuff that I've been kind of obsessed with for years. So you're obsessed about a lot of stuff, man. I know. He's obsessed with cats. He's, it's weird. I do, I do like the cats and my little dog, Charlie, but this is not about me, Josh. Let's let's bring it back to Jay, shall we? Jay's here just as like window dressing. Come on. Jay, what's your story? I mean,

How did you get involved in this whole real estate thing? I mean, this whole niche of real estate. Oh, wow. The quick elevator version of that is I always wanted to be a writer, right? Since age 12, I think I tried to rip off the Hobbit on my mom's typewriter on a card table. What's the typewriter? But I actually wrote for like three or four. Yeah, typewriter.

That age is me, doesn't it? Went on through life, went to graduate school at NYU and got into publishing. Married my wife. And she's this amazing lady. and she said, you know, let's backpack for five months. And while we were doing that, let's decide where we're going to live. We quit our jobs. And she kept saying Austin, Texas, Austin, Texas.

So we came here in February, and it's 80 degrees, compared to New York, where it's all slush. So we moved here without jobs. And I end up interviewing at this little sleepy company called Keller Williams Realty. When I joined Keller Williams, there were 6,700 agents. Today there's 113,000, I think of as today, largest in the world. Wow. And there were 27 employees. And so I'm literally working in the tech department.

And I see one of our designers working on clearly a book cover. And I thought he was freelancing. And I just called him. I said, are you freelancing at work? And he goes, no, you didn't hear that Gary and our then writing partner, Dave Jinx, didn't you hear they're writing a book? I was like, no. So this is where my wife cracks up.

I see Gary Keller in the bathroom. She was like, it's a glass ceiling, it's a glass ceiling, right? I just said, hey, Gary, I don't know if you remember when you hired me, but I came from publishing. I hear you're trying to write a book. And he gave me that look. Like, no, he didn't remember that. He said, come in my office. He was between consulting calls.

And he laid out a vision to write 13 books, which is interesting. We were written 12 together so far. And he laid out five books that he and Dave Jinks had gone to Barnes & Noble and picked out five of their favorite business how-to books. It was like good to great, the millionaire next door, a book I can never remember. Is that the title? I know. I wish. That would be great. Body for Life by Bill Phillips and Mia Hams go for the goal. And he started talking to me through why he loved these books. And I was like, I edited those two. And Body for Life by Bill Phillips and Mia Hemp were books that I'd worked on. And I showed him my name in the book and the conversation changed.

And he basically called my then boss and said, good news or bad news. The guy said bad news. He goes, you just lost an employee. Good news is they're working with me. And like the next week, I was sitting outside of his office. And it took us three and a half months from start to finish to write our first book, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent. And from there, we wrote The Millionaire Real Estate Investor, which I presume we'll talk about today.

Yeah. And all the way through to our last book, the one thing. That's awesome. I love that. And now you and your wife also have a brokerage of your own, right? Is that true? Like, I read something about that online. Right.

We have the Papazan Properties Group. Okay. And it's a team, right? It's its own business within the Keloim structure. Sure. So last year, in our fifth full year, we sold 141 homes in Austin, Texas. Nice. Okay, cool.

So it's a nice little business. And that came afterwards, right? I mean, that, I'm assuming you started as a tech, you became the writer. And then as you kind of moved along, eventually you've got your own team and so on and so forth. I never dreamed I would own real estate, much less invest in. I mean, living in New York in Paris, I was a renter in my mind. And we started by buying our first house. We thought we terribly overpaid. We still owned that house, and it's our best rental property. Nice. And then when Wendy, we had our kids, Wendy left her job in marketing and she started taking care. We had, I think,

four rental properties. She started managing those. We did a few flips. When we were writing the book Flip, we were practicing at home. And she was really good at it. And when it came time for her to go back to work, I was like, what are you going to do? And she's like, well, maybe real estate. And I was really happy about that. You know, I write books about real estate. And so she launched a team five years ago and has built it into like a $36 million business. That's great. That's awesome. Hey, Jay, I've got a question. I mean, this wasn't something I planned on asking, but why do you think more, because we've got agents who listen, we've got investors, but why do you think more agents don't become investors. When I was an agent, it was like this dream that was this untouchable,

oh man, maybe one day I could become an investor. And it's not that complicated. It's not that much harder than being an agent. In fact, it might be easier. So why would you say more agents don't go on to actually invest themselves? The brutal truth is there's a lot of agents who don't own themselves. Okay? I see people with real estate, you know, signage on their car parked in apartment buildings, and I presume they don't own the complex. They live there. And experience you bear that out. The top 10% sells more than half of all of the real estate. I think if you look at that group, there's a sizable percentage of them that invest in real estate. Yeah. And so I think that you've got to be making enough money to, one, cover your means, right? You're making more than you need

every month or able to set aside because the biggest challenge for most people to invest is saving up a down payment. I don't believe in nothing down investing personally. That's not what we teach. And so it took my wife and I about two years. I was working a part-time job to extra, you know, save the money so we could get a down payment, buy the house, live in the house, move out, rent the house by the next house. That was our original plan. Well, so you and Brandon are going to have a fist fight because his book, which competes with your books, is the investing in real estate with no and low money down. Well, that's why I added, I added low in there because low.

Low because you can do, you know, there's, there's strategies, obviously like low down payment and FHA loans and all those things. I'm not picking a fight here. I'm just saying, I'm just saying, I don't, I think me and Jay actually probably would be pretty similar. I agree. I bet if we, at the end of the day, I want you to have an equity position in the home. Yeah.

And you can get that through putting cash down or getting it on a discount. Yep. And if you're a real estate agent, to get back to your point, Josh. You can use your commission to do that. So you are investing with very little, but you're not having to come out of pocket. And you can charge yourself on those deals. It depends on the state, so don't quote me. I've heard of people charging 13% commissions.

And so they're closing the deal, and almost all of their down payment is their commission itself. Interesting. That is interesting. To follow up on the previous question, what advice would you have for that group of 90% to get them to transition to become more active as investors. We try, you know, one of our goals is, you know, we want to educate people on real estate investing. And, you know, it's such a right market. There's a million agents out there.

You know, these guys have the knowledge mostly. They've got the experience. They understand real estate probably as good as most. So to get that group kind of thinking about it, getting them over the edge, what advice would you give them? I think what's awesome about our industry, if you work in, is that you're in your inventory every day. And if you just adopt an investor mindset and start looking for something

that feels like undervalued property, and we see it. And you talk to realtors and like, oh, I remember when that house went for sale, I wish I'd bought it. There's a lot of regret out there. Just adopt the mindset, whether I can do this alone

or I have to have a partner, if you can find a deal, you'll find the money. That's been the reality for me. You find a great deal. You can partner with your clients. Exactly. Right. I'll contribute my commission to this deal and my expertise for a minority position, but now you're starting down the journey. I think it's taking the first step. Mindset, start looking at the world as an opportunity. People told us we could not find investment properties in my neighborhood. It was done. It was the most expensive neighborhood near downtown. We own three properties there. Yeah. We just didn't find them overnight. We were patient. So I think it's a mindset thing and just start somewhere. Even if you're buying your first

house, just buy it like an investment so you can move out in a few years and rent it. That's a advice. Terrific advice. And that's something I tell people all the time, like, you know, they want to know should they buy a house. I'm like, I mean, maybe, maybe not. But if you buy it like an investment, then you're probably going to be okay no matter what, even if you don't plan on staying for 20 years in that house. So I love that. Now, I have a question about Keller Williams. No, I'm not an agent. I've never been an agent. And though I hear Keller Williams name all the time. I mean, I got friends like my buddy Darren Sager. He's a, he's like Keller William's agent, he just sings your praises every time I talk to him. What do you think sets

apart Keller Williams? Why did you become the powerhouse that Keller Williams is? I guess what can you say to that? I think it's got a different culture. I've worked for, like I worked for Harper Collins. I worked in Rupert Murdoch's organization. Super successful. Great achievement atmosphere. I didn't love culture. And I think that Keller Williams, all the chief executives, have been top real estate agents. They've all owned their own real estate brokerages, and all of them have actually run regions in our own company. So Chris Heller, our new CEO, he still has one of our top, maybe five or six real estate teams in San Diego. He's still a real estate agent. Gotcha. That's cool. And so I think every day they wake up and they ask the question,

how do we stay in business with the agent? Yeah. How do we champion their cause? Because that's where they came from. And it creates a real, everybody's kind of looking at the same problems from the perspective. It might be a weakness that we're too agent-centric, but I think that's the main thing is we're speaking their language and they can tell that we're genuine. That's great. Cool. That's great. So back to investing. What kind of habits should a real estate investor have? Oh, I love you. You said the habit word. Was that a soft one? Oh, yeah. But, you know, with our last book, the one thing, you know, my big aha, that the most successful thing you can do is learn how to make habits in your life.

Like, if I want something to happen on a regular basis, what's the habit that would drive that thing? And I think pretty early, I can't quote my own books. I'm not a goober that way. I think it was called Tuesdays with Michael. It was like a play on Tuesdays with Mori or whatever. But Gary had a financial advisor that was his mentor, made him read all of the great financial books.

And he said, you need to start knowing your net worth. And it became evident to Gary that that was the number. that if you measured it, you would one know how much cash you had, no much debt you had. It's the wealth number. And so he got in the habit, like every week he gets his net worth updated. And that's not an easy feat to do. But I've seen the sheet. And his admins will come together and they'll report it.

And he reviews where his money is. And he counseled me to do the same thing. And my wife and I pretty early on, we set a goal, we want to be millionaires. We thought it would take us 10 years. It took us six. And I think that habit of every month, I mean, and back then, we didn't have things like mint. Yeah. Right.

We didn't have Quicken. I had to literally call every home loan. You know, we had three or four properties and get the current balance, right? How much do we owe? We'd call a realtor friend because we weren't in the business and say, I hate to do this to you again, but is that neighborhood appreciating? Like once a quarter or so, we'd get them to update what they thought the value of our properties were and we'd figure out our net worth. and that became a game for us. And so that drove a lot of really good habits.

You know, that led to, for like three years, we lived on about 50 to 70% of our income, and we invested the difference. Yeah. So you just, that one habit triggered a lot. That, to me, is like a big one. Do you know your net worth? That's great.

That question answers a lot of questions. I love that. I love that. I'm like, I don't know what it was. 35 days ago or something like that. I started this like 100-day challenge where I'm going to write a book. I'm writing a rental property book, which I don't think we've ever talked about that on the show.

But anyway, writing a new book. And I said, I'm going to write like, you know, buy it today, pre-order. Yeah, 1,000 words a day, right? And then I set five goals for myself, like three of them, financial, two of them personal. And every single morning I review them. Every week I sit down and review how far I've gotten, you know, total.

And, you know, once every month I sit down and, you know, it's unbelievable what it's done for my life. I mean, just setting that habit. I haven't missed a day yet. I haven't had one, like, hiccup at all, because it's that habit of every single day. Just explosive. Yeah, tracking my network.

worth every single week. It's amazing. So I'm glad you brought that up because it's something that's just right on my mind right now. And I love it. It's amazing. Let me ask you, when do you do that, Brandon. I do it every morning when I wake up. First thing. See, that's huge. Just that alone. I've just taught a class. And the whole point was to get people waking up earlier. Yep. I love that. And I'd read a book, and I think it was called Rich Habits. And this guy was an accountant, and he surveyed all of his clients. And he noticed that all the millionaires were getting up, on average three hours before they had to get to work. And for me, that was 5.30 a.m.

And I've just put that up on the screen, and it's weird. My wife and I, not every day, but three days a week, we have to get up at 5.10 a.m. to work out because we started understanding that if we wanted to get stuff done before work started and the kids were up and we had to get them to school and feed and walk the dog, we had to get up before everybody else was awake. Yep. And I think that wealthy people do their most important things a lot of times before the rest of the world's up. Yeah. And that was a big aha for me. Yeah, I try to have my thousand words written before

7 a.m. That's my goal. So I have to get up usually between 5, 30, and 6 to make sure that that gets done, you know, and every day. Same thing with working out. If I want to do that in the morning, got to get it in in that time too. So yeah, love that. Awesome. There's nothing on TV. There's nobody on Facebook. There's nothing to distract you. No one's calling my phone. Yeah, I mean, my phone rings all day long. Not at five, six in the morning. That's great. That's a big habit. I love that. Yeah, me too. Cool. Any other habits you want to throw out there at us, things that real estate investors should be good at? I think when I was starting down the journey, since we're kind of taking this from the

beginning versus the advanced version, the first thing I did was I started analyzing deals. We make a big deal out of, I want to know what our terms are and our criteria are. And I had a great network. I worked with Gary Keller, right? I had a really good group of people around to advise me. That's obviously important too. But I think Wendy and I, before we really pulled the trigger on our first, we're not living in investment, I bet we had done the numbers on 100 homes. Yep. And if you do that, you know, just kind of methodically, all right, I'm just going to go through and call a few places and say, what would this house rent for? I'm thinking about renting this house on such and such street. And you start getting quotes and you

start seeing what would actually cash flow versus what wouldn't. After a little while, when a deal shows up, you just know it. Yep. You're like, wow, that's a deal. We've got to call our realtor right now and make an offer on that. And it's just, it's just a little habit of running the number. And then all of a sudden, it just happens up here. You're like, it's magic. Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely something that comes with practice, with time. And we love telling new investors, get out, you know, drive the neighborhood, get to know your farm, get to understand it.

You know, you should see every house that's available that's open. So you can at least understand values of a property. But then one further is actually doing the analysis. And then understanding the fundamentals that go in, the expenses that go with a rental property, so on and so forth. We actually built analysis tools on BiggerPockets. We've got a calculator for buying hole. We've got a calculator for people who want to flip houses and these things at BiggerPockes.com

slash calc for those of you who are listening and want to check them out at CALC for Calc. And it forces somebody to go in and take the numbers and think about everything. Most people say, hey, well, you know, and I blame a lot of this on agents and this is not picking on you or anything, but like a lot of agents think, hey, if I could find you a rental property where you're making more money than your mortgage, you're cash flow positive and you're kicking

butt. And it's such a misnomer. And, you know, our goal is to educate people like, hey, listen, there's a whole heck of a lot more. There's CAPX and there's maintenance and there's vacancy and there's yada, yada, yada, yada. And so the tools help people to kind of see what's out there and kind of punch the numbers and analyze those things. And more agents should use it, frankly. Yeah, I mean, it's so key. surprise is what I was told. Every house has a surprise and shame on you if you didn't find the five other ones that were just right out in the open. No matter how much due diligence, there's always a nasty. You just want it to be small and hopefully not structural. Exactly. Exactly. And you have to,

I mean, and that's why as an investor, you have to find that discount. You know, paying retail, paying market is, is, you know, it works in some cases. But, you know, you know, know, you've got to find those properties that are at a discount because, and you've got to prepare and plan for that nasty, as you call it, which I love, and, you know, have that little extra budget, you know, whether it's on a flip, you know, no flips ever go smoothly, whether it's a buy and hold, there's always kind of some little thing in there. That's, it's fantastic. Yeah, it's great. So you just work through it and soon and later your instincts will be pretty strong. You still do the math. I was going to say that earlier. Just because you know it's a deal, you might have earned the right to, quote, blink on

it. Before the ink is dry on the offer, I mean, you have done all the math again. You've walked through it. And you know, you're just, I'd always rather miss five or six good ones than buy one bad one. Oh, hands down. That's going to be a quote right there for this show. That's so true, right? I mean, I mean, I have to do it for, what, eight, nine years now or something like that. And still, like, I'll find a deal that I'm like, I'm positive. It's an amazing deal. I go, look at it. I run the numbers in my head. It's perfect. And then I actually sit down and plug in every number the way that I should, and I realize that it's actually not a very good deal at all. It may even be a bad deal. Just because there's so much swimming up there that it's hard to do,

I mean, unless you really sit down and do it. So yeah, no matter how experienced you are, do the numbers anyway. And it's always better to walk. I mean, you've got nothing to lose if you walk. Yeah. You can get complicated and start talking about when people don't do the numbers, the opportunity cost of their money. You know, I don't know about y'all. I don't walk around with 10 down payments in my back pocket. I might any given year be able to add one property to my portfolio. That's kind of where we are right now. I want to do that wisely. I'd like to get one. I'd love to get a 20, 25 rate of return on all the money on it, right? Not just the cash flow. I want to see it appreciating. I want to see my dollars working really hard.

I don't want to get the minimum because, you know, I'll still have to rent this thing out once, maybe twice a year. I might have to handle maintenance on it. I want it to feel like a really good investment. So, you know, doing the math really helps you make the best ones. Let me ask you that then. When you're finding a property, when you're looking for a property for yourself, I mean, what do you look for? Are you buying, I mean, you're in Austin, you said, right? Austin's one of the craziest real estate markets I hear in the country, like in terms of prices and how difficult it is to find good stuff. So, I mean, what are you looking for? Are you looking for junker houses that you can fix up a little? Are you looking for high-end stuff? What are you buying? We made the decision because we made one mistake, and it was really about, we ended up buying a great cash flow property that we just didn't enjoy owning. It was too far away. So just going there to show it was kind of a hassle. Yeah. Yeah. And I just felt like we were going to be, we had a lot of wealth tied up in that house, and we were going to be neglecting it because we didn't want to go there. We didn't particularly love hanging out with the kind of people who were going to be renting it. And that's just not where our life was. And so we knew that by narrowing our criteria, to Central Austin, we were going to be fighting two battles. So we just got clear about what we would really enjoy owning.

And a lot of the places that we rent now, like they're, they used to be starter homes. We've got them at a bargain. Now they're kind of mid-tier, but they rent to professionals. I remember the first two times we rented our first house and the people who were renting our home made more money than we did. And we just kind of giggled with delight. It's like, great, they won't miss a payment. Yeah.

You know? And so, but they're also the kind of. people that we felt really comfortable. My wife's pregnant. We had two kids and she's showing houses. We could have easily had these people to dinner with us. And so we made a choice. So our properties don't cash flow a lot. And we're okay with that. We just have to look in Austin. We don't have income tax in Texas. We have property taxes. And so if your house is going up in value, so our books look really good, our net worth, but you then are fighting property taxes every year. And so the real gift is defined if you're buying single family, and that's most of ours, other than a couple of

duplexes. Sure. You're generally fighting those to be cash flow positive. I mean, our first house, we bought it for 175. It's probably worth 410 now, and it's been less than 10 years. Wow. So it's a crazy hot market, but if we weren't managing it right, we'd be writing checks to own it, and I don't ever want to do that.

Yeah. So that's kind of the trick for us. And our criteria is can we keep it cash flow positive while it continues to appreciate? at some point, like we're going to pay off that first house this quarter. Boom. Now you have no debt against it. It'll turn into a really nice cash flow property. So that's been our strategy.

We want to pay off a few of them. And it's kind of our safe haven against all, you know, bad storms of life. That's cool. That's great. And, you know, the beauty of real estate investing is there is no one strategy, right? No. What works for you? What works for your goals, your family value?

I mean, you guys want to rent a people. people that you can have at the dinner table, so to speak, that's great. And, you know, and, whatever works for you, the listener, you know, people listening to the show, you know, you've got to figure that out, you know, because if you end up buying those properties that don't work and don't feel within that, it's going to be a struggle. It's going to become work. You're going to hate it, and you're going to be out of the game. And people blame the real estate. It's their fault. They are the ones who pick the real estate. Yeah. So there's enough room to succeed to pick things that match really your personal personality and your criteria.

I got a good friend. He loves four plexes. I would hate that because of all the maintenance. He likes to work on stuff and he likes to talk to handymen and he loves cash flow. That's what he wants. And those are great investment properties for him. So it is very personal. It just has functionally, it needs to be a good investment.

And that to me is cash flow positive and hopefully it's consistently appreciating. Right on. I find that changes a lot throughout a career, right? When I started, I mean, all I wanted was small multi-family. I still like them because they're great cash flow. It got me out of my job. I was able to kind of retire-ish by 27. I was like, this is great, right?

I don't have to work a job anymore. But then, like, things change. Your life change. I don't want that cash flow anymore. What I want is I want to become a multimillionaire through prices going up. So I'm not going to go and gamble this thing away. But at the same time, I'm looking to adopt your strategy much more than I am where I've been. We interviewed about 120 people like you to write the millionaire real estate.

estate investor and I started to see a pattern. A lot of people in the beginning were trying to get cash flow so they didn't have to work for a living. They could do whatever they wanted. So once they hit that threshold, we had a real estate business that had cash flow. So we weren't looking for that. They tend to go to net worth. Yes. And I love like duplexes. They get a little bit of both worlds. You can buy it on terms of cash flow, but sell it to someone who's going to live half of it as a first home. You can kind of max value. But I see people moving up to larger multifamily and commercial.

Like we bought a warehouse three years ago, four years ago. We paid cash. It threw off 450,000 in cash flow a year. Wow. Wow. And we made $1.7 million on it two years later. Wow. I still hate that we sold it.

I want that property. Yes. I still want that. that property. We ended up buying another warehouse and it turns out that warehouse space near downtown, it's totally unsexy. It's very boring. There's literally like a goodwill type place. There is kind of a cool brewery that's in one of them, but nobody knows that those businesses are occupying those stalls, but it's very consistent and it's near downtown. It started to depreciate and value. It's like, oh, wow, you know, there are highly leveraged ways to make your wealth grow as you, you know,

they call it the property ladder. I hate to be cheesy. But we've been kind of going up that line. Sure. And I'd rather have fewer roofs to manage, but have more net worth and more cash flow over time. Makes sense. And the thing that you had talked about earlier with the duplex,

you know, we call that house hacking. That's, you know, and it's a great way. We love talking about it on bigger pockets. It's, it's such a phenomenal way for a new investor

to experience being an owner, being a landlord, you know, and it's a great. great way to kind of move up. You buy the duplex. You live in half. You get the experience. You move on to the next. And now you've got the full rental property and you can either keep doing it. The nice thing is you can get the FHA, three and a half percent loan. I mean, it's a, it's a beautiful thing. If I have a regret, and I don't have a lot about my investing career is like, I wish I could go back in time and coach that, you know, couple that bought their

first house as a house. We didn't buy it. We got lucky. It turned into a great rental property. But if I could go back, We would have bought a duplex every 18 months as fast as we could and looked up, you know, four or five years later and had nine or ten streams of income behind us. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Because after about six years of us living in Austin, there was so much competition on the duplexes. It's a little bit harder to get value there. Makes sense.

And so I was like, ah, but that was it. That was the perfect investment vehicle. You could be a homeowner and an investor, your first purchase. I love it. House hacking. I'm going to steal that. You got a quote. You got to cite bigger pockets any time you use that.

I am. That's not the book I'm writing, but that is on my agenda at some point. So we'll say. But speaking of books, so you mentioned real estate. I won't steal the book from you. Yeah, don't steal the book title. You know, we've got this now recorded here for all to hear. Yeah.

Yeah. Maybe we'll work together on that one. But, all right, it's been 10 years since a real estate, a millionaire real estate investor was released. And I mean, okay, so we ask on the end of the show, and we're going to ask you later on, we always ask at the end, what is your favorite real estate book? Now, we're like, rich dad, poor dad has mentioned a lot, but you can't really necessarily call that a real estate book. So the number one real estate book that of our 110-some guests we've had is the number

one most popular choice is a millionaire real estate investor. So good job on that, by the way. I mean, like, yeah, yeah, absolutely. People recommend. So I want to know why do you think that is, before we move on and talk about, you know, the one thing, I want to know why is that book have such stain power? And why is it so powerful for investors today? I think it's a really good argument for why real estate investing is accessible to everyone. And it shows them, like, Gary's really good at making complex things simple. And I think it helps make it simple for people and feel less threatening. You know, one of the things a lot of people don't know is that when he was writing that book, his father was nearing the end of his life. And he was very reflective of his

role as a father for his son. And about the first 120 pages of that is kind of Gary's thoughts on money. Here's a guy who's built incredible wealth. And unlike a conventional investing book, here's a very fundamental take. I usually tell people, if you want to know about money, go read the first 120 pages of that book. Because that was like a letter from Gary to his son who wasn't old enough yet to receive that information. And so there was a lot of heart and soul in that book. And I I think that was part of the magic. I think the information is great. It wasn't our thoughts on real estate.

We interviewed 120 millionaires. And we asked, what did they do in common? Which I think is a very different way to approach the problem. Yeah, that's great. That's great. All right. So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about the one thing, another book. You know, okay, hi, I'm Jay.

I've authored all these books. Yeah. It's a one thing. Oh, my goodness. All right. So the one thing, you co-authored it with Gary. Brandon talks about this constantly, you know, it's a little annoying by now.

But you know, and what's funny is whenever we get these authors on, authors like yourself, successful people who write really great books, you know, he's always just crazy, enthusiastic, which we love. And he said it was the best book he read last year.

And we've heard other people say that. He's always like, Josh, what's the one thing that you're doing right now? You know, bust my chops. But I love it. It's amazing.

So, you know, what was the, what was the reasoning behind the book? and then we'd love to talk, really, what is the one thing about? Okay, the book came out of an essay. Gary and I and some other team members were finishing up a course on lead generation for real estate agents.

Sure. You know, that's their one thing, right? Is that if you want to service business, you've got to have more customers. If you don't have customers, you have nothing to deliver. And the course was great, and he took it home for the weekend. He said, I just want to have a little weekend to tinker. I might just change a word here. It just doesn't feel exciting to me.

And he wrote like a 10-page essay called The Power of One. And it blew everybody's socks off because he really eloquently, for the first time I'd heard, stated that achievers work from a sense of a clear sense of priority. And as a publishing guy, I thought, this is it. You know, Gary's really smart. He's really hardworking. But he's not the smartest guy in the room. He doesn't let his ego get in the way. He'll hire people a lot smarter than him.

He doesn't work long hours. He knows that that's not how you make. money. He always figures out what matters most. That's his thing. That's his one thing. And so I got really excited. So we actually worked on the book for like five years because I feel like more than anything else, I believed it, he believed it. And we felt like almost no one we knew was living it. Because today, and you know this, it's easy to multitask. It's easy to get distracted. And so we felt like not only did we have something to share on the subject, but there was a real out there for it. So that's kind of the genesis. That's great. People love to call real estate

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to your area while you're off making memories somewhere else. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. So why is the concept of the one thing so important then? You know, it's simple. It's nothing new. We're not the first people to say it. I think that we tackled it from a pragmatic, how do I take action now? A lot of people will say simplify, avoid distractions, and those are really trite without anything behind them.

So we really sat down. We found a great publisher. He only does one book a year. Imagine that, that we would end up with him. And we worked really hard at trying to say, what do people need to understand in order to implement this? And we identified six lies, right? that there's stuff that we think ties up to success that's really getting us in the way. You know, people don't understand the 80-20 principle, not on the deep level, right?

Most of what we get comes from a very small minority of what we do, and the people who get the farthest in life stop to identify it. Yeah. You know, we get caught up in multitasking. I could go down that road, and we will if you want to. But I just felt like we tried to tie it together in a way that people could set down the book and say, I'm going to ask this question and I'm going to identify the one thing I need to start doing. So, start there.

How do you do that? I mean, how do, you know, if you don't know what that one thing should be. And is that presumably we're talking about both in my personal and in my professional lives, correct? Actually, there's a page 114. I know that page where we identify seven areas. Yeah, I know. Seven areas in your life where we think that it's worthwhile to apply the book. Your spiritual life, your physical life, your personal life.

your personal life, your key relationships, your job, your business, and your finances. If you ask the focusing question, and I'll just say it, it sounds like Brandon's been saying it for you, what's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or necessary? That's the question and people are really good at identifying, I think, the one thing that's their biggest lever right now. It's not could, would, or should do, right? It's what they can do right now, and that gets them into action. That's great. And action is the key to success, right? Yeah, that's how you learn. You know, you go out, you mess up, you fail a little bit, and you see that you're just off course and you fix it. But action is how you make progress in life.

Absolutely. You know, one of the things you mentioned in the book, early on, I think it was early on in the book, but the domino analogy, right? Like one domino can knock over one 50% larger and the exponential growth. I probably have told, I don't know, 500 people in the past like three months, that analogy. And I'm like, you got to read this book because this is what it's like, it just made so much sense to me. I mean, like, again, like there's certain books in my life that have hit me at certain points. You know, first it was rich dad, poor dad. There was four-hour work week in there. There was a lean startup. And then there was the one thing. It hit me at that exact perfect point where like,

that's great company. Yeah, I just blew my mind because it hit me at that point. And I mean, I would attribute that to most of the success I've had in the past six months have been from that book alone. So can maybe talk about what is that analogy that the domino thing? The domino effect. And, you know, basically we wanted a metaphor for what we were trying to achieve. The first objection people have is it's never one thing, right?

I mean, I just told you there's seven areas, right? There's never just one thing. Our life isn't that simple. I'm not Howard Hughes with a, you know, cotillion of servants to go do everything else for me. Oh, come on. You know, I've got a real life. One day, one day.

Yes. I wish, you know, without the fingernails. So, you know, you look up and you say, okay, so what's the metaphor? And everybody at some point in their life has lined up dominoes, right? If you line them up right, you knock over one and they all fall down. Yeah. And so that became a reality. And then we found that crazy article by a physicist,

from 1982, Lauren Whitehead, that said one domino can knock over one that's 50% larger. So a two-inch domino can knock over a three-inch domino can knock over a four-and-a-half-inch domino. And my math breaks down. I was going to say, what's next? Yeah, come on. Come on. I'm an English-French major. Don't do that.

But what's cool is like by, I can't remember all the numbers here, but I think the 18th domino, if you grow them at that rate, it'll be taller than the Tower. Yeah. By the 23rd, it'd be higher than the Eiffel Tower. And what kind of blew my mind, you start with the two. inch domino and you just start them running, right? You just knocked that one over. By the 33rd, it would knock over a domino three thousand feet higher than Everest. Wow. And by the 57th, if you could build it, it would knock over a domino that would reach from all the way from the earth to the moon. And you get this sense that there's not just this sense that a lot of stuff

happens, but you're gaining momentum. Yeah. And if you remember, Brandon, when you look at that line, we graphed it in, you know, in Excel, you know, all those numbers. and then we drew little dominoes to show it, but it looks like a hockey stick on its side. And that graph is the graph of a geometric progression. Anything that compounds exponentially over time, it looks like nothing's happening, and then it just explodes.

And that is the shape of big success. You're doing something really awesome, really consistently. Think about Apple. They were innovating and innovating and highly focused, and then boom. I mean, they came out of nowhere, and then they had a good decade for the tech industry, that's huge.

Oh, yeah. You know, and great people, great companies do that. And so that's the metaphor. I love it. It's like, my kids got that. Yep, exactly. What's the first domino, dad?

And I'm like, ah, if I just teach them one thing, where do I begin that has the most impactful way for me to line up my life? And you guys did that too. I mean, at KW, I remember, I mean, listen,

I don't know how old you guys are, but I remember when I was an agent 15 years ago, you were starting to spread little by little. Nobody, nobody outside of Texas, I think, knew who you were. And then it was just really quickly, you guys exploded on the scene. And suddenly, KW. Now is the biggest brokerage on the planet. And it's amazing. And I guess, you know, you guys have a right to use that analogy because, you know, you've lived it. You've experienced it. And that's phenomenal.

We could graph it out. I mean, it'd be crazy. I haven't actually done that. You should. It's 31 years old. And 15 years ago, there were 60, 700 agents, right? So that's a midpoint. This year, there's 113,000. Yeah. Yeah, crazy. So, yeah, totally is the hockey stick, right? It's just been growing at an exponential rate. And, you know, it's not going to, you think that can't be sustainable, but every year we kind of keep growing, and that's like, I hope it keeps going for a long time. Yeah. But if you do the right thing, and for us, we focus on the agents. I said that before. You figure out what your focus should be and act that way all the time. Big stuff happens.

So maybe you can take this back to like, you know, the real estate investors that are listening. Yeah. Kind of wondering, you know, let's say somebody listened to the show, they've never, I mean, they maybe own their own house, but they don't have any investments yet. They want to do that. How do they figure out what their next one thing is in terms of building a real estate empire? I mean, how does that person start? For me, the first domino, like always is go to your net worth, right? Hopefully it's a positive number. Sure.

I then tell people the next domino is where do I want to be and how long. do I have to get there? If you're asking this question about real estate investing and you're 65 years old, it's very different than when you're 23. You've got a lot more time in one equation to work with. Sure. And so when I sit down with people, I usually work it out. Like, how much do you want? What's your goal and what does that look like? And then we work backwards. And that's something that we describe in the one thing. So my wife and I, you know, we set a goal and our most recent goal was $8 million. We wanted to have a net worth of $8 million because it was was something Gary just said offhandedly. He goes, you know, at a really conservative yield, you got about a half million dollars off of $8 million. He goes, who can spend a half million

a year? Yeah. Yeah. You know, Mike Tyson, you know, keeping tigers as pets. If you actually live a normal life, I drive a Toyota. You know, that's a ton of money. You can't drive a Toyota, man. You're a millionaire. Hold on. Millionaires are out, like shining their bling. Come on, man, that's nonsense. You know the truth, right? No, the truth is, I mean, Warren Buffett drives like a Toyota, isn't he? I mean, you know, people. Well, when he finally, his chairpeople finally convinced him to buy a plane, he called it the indefensible, right? Because he knew there was no way to justify it from an investment standpoint. But his shareholders said, no, your time has worked too much money to be riding in coach, you know, places. So, yeah, yeah, we live thrifty. Those habits didn't go away.

So usually when people figure out where they want to be and where they are today, that gap, you can then work out a plan. For a lot of people, it's like they only need to own four or five properties to get where they want to go. It's actually often less than they think they needed to do. I love that little exercise. Yeah, no, that's great. And, you know, we, you know, I think one of my favorite shows, I can't tell you which was my favorite show. But we did a show with Ophelia, and I forget what show number that was brand. and but there's this woman, she came, you know, from overseas, had absolutely nothing and, you know,

found a way, found the way to get that first property and then built it and built it and built it and built it. And, you know, so many people think, you know, I've got to be rich to be a real estate investor. And so many people like, you know, just say, you landlords are, you know, rich, beep, you know. You know, it's not true. A, that's not true. you know, be, anybody can do it, but you said it, be thrifty. If you can, if you're smart, if you're wise, you know, it's real easy to go and buy, you know, some big houses and all of a sudden you've got nothing left. But if you're smart with your money and you build it little by

little and you're thrifty and you're not blowing it on stupid stuff, you know, there's no stopping you and there's no end. And anybody, anybody can become a millionaire through real estate. I love that. It's the most democratic of all investment vehicles. Agreed. You know, if I want to add value to one of our houses, I'm like, kids, we're going to paint this weekend. And we can go and prove the value. I love Apple computers and I own Apple stock, but I can't do anything to influence their value. So I love it.

It gives me control. It's accessible. And, you know, Wendy and I, I think we owned three or four properties before we had 100,000 in household income. So we were just saving a lot of money and scrapping to get the money to buy. another down payment to get another house. Yep. That's great. Just to add on to that and kind of tie back in the analogy you use, I mean, like we talked about the dominoes, right, and the exponential growth that that makes.

You know, so just people listening can kind of think of it this way too. If you, if that exponential growth to hit that point is going to take you 10 years, if you wait until you think that you are, you know, are financially at the point, like you're a millionaire. You're going to wait to you a millionaire to start that domino. It's going to take you then 10 years further. So why not hit the first domino today? do something, even if it's like the smallest thing. You're not even buying a property.

Even whatever that is, find your one thing, knock that down and over today. And it just puts you, you know, just take action on whatever that is. So I don't know, hopefully I'll leave somebody with some motivation. Nice. Did you ever read The Automatic Millionaire? A long time ago, yeah. What I loved about that is like I tell that story sometimes. He called it the latte factor.

You know, people think they can't afford to buy a house or be a millionaire. But every day they go into Starbucks and drop five bucks on something that costs five cents. Sure. And he showed the opportunity cost of if you just took that $5 a day, right, and instead saved it and invested it, how much money you could make. So a really humble, a really small domino, if you just keep whacking away at it, $5 a day, $5 a day. You know, instead of a pack of cigarettes, get that instead. Yeah. It can add up to a lot of wealth later in life.

Yeah, my wife's going to hate me, but I'll just call her out right now. I mean, she used to be on the Starbucks habit. no offense to Starbucks. It's great, delicious down the block. Feel fear to sponsor us Starbucks. But it was, I'm shameless, right? It was, you know, she was buying these Starbucks every day. I'm like, my God, you're buying, you know, $5 cup of coffee. Let's get a coffee pot and do it. And, you know, it's not a ton of money, but like every five bucks counts. If we can knock out five bucks here, if we can knock out, you know, an extra dinner here, if we can knock out this year, all of a sudden, we've got all that more money. We can, you know,

We like to kind of take chunks of money, and I forget, I'm blanking out now on where we learn this, but you put it away, you know, auto withdrawal and put it into another account. And we don't touch it, right? So, you know, we do it for each of our kids. We do it. And this is money. Like that's the, I think it was richest man or something like that in Babylon, one of these things. And we don't ever touch it.

We don't even count that as money that we have. That's not ours. You know, we plow that stuff away. We plow it. We make sure we save for ourselves and for the goals that we've got. first and then everything else is our, you know, it's our spending leftover money. And if you can do that and kind of, you know, requisition cash for certain purposes and, and then, you know, minimize the other, you know, crazy stuff, anybody and any, and I really do mean anybody can become wealthy. You just have to

be methodical and smart about it. I love that technique. I didn't know if it came from the, the richest man in Babylon. I didn't remember that. We wrote about it, but I loved it because I hate budgeting. I don't want to save receipts. we set a goal of, I think, in the beginning was, could we put $1,500 in our money market every month? And so for us to do that, I went into our payroll, and I said, I know I'm already getting money that goes straight into my 401K.

Will you pay my paycheck into two accounts? And they said, sure, how much do you want? And I said, can you put $400 in the beginning? I knew we couldn't do it in the beginning, but she could do X amount. My wife did the same. And then we were playing the game. how do we make up the difference?

And that's when I had to get a second job. I got a little freelance gig that I did for two straight years, and we made up the difference, and that's how we bought the properties. But once the $400 was gone from my paycheck, it was just like the 401K. It was like it had never been there to begin with. Yes, exactly. It was just mounting in this other account that's slightly out of your perspective.

Right. Yeah. That's great. Cool. All right, moving on. Why don't we wrap this thing up with our world famous? Famous for. All right. All right, today's famous four and I guess fire around since we didn't really have one. It is sponsored by 99 Designs, where you can get professionally designed work for your real estate business,

and it is exceptionally fast and affordable. You can get dozens of designers to compete and deliver you the best design, plus it's 100% guaranteed that you'll love it. From logos to websites to car wraps and more, definitely head over to 99designs.com slash bigger pockets to get a $99 upgrade of services for free. So again, check them out at 99designs.com slash bigger pockets. And with that, let's get to the famous four. So these are questions we ask every single guest every week.

And I'm going to alter them a little bit for you. But the first question is, what is your favorite real estate related book? Hold on, hold on, hold on. I'm going to amend that. What is your favorite book that you've written? That's a good question, too. The most impactful for me are really, I always cite them in this order. It used to be the millionaire real estate investor.

Now it's the one thing and the millionaire real estate investor. We've written a lot of good books, but the investor changed the way I looked at our whole world. We've built most of our wealth from the wisdom in that. And the one thing is helping me be a better parent and a better husband. That's great. And I just love it. I'm being a better person because we're living that book. So thank you.

Writing a book, you have to live it. It's like the best way to learn something is to teach it. Yep. It's that magnified. I'm sure Brandon, you know this if you have to write about it. Yeah, definitely does. Definitely. What about besides that?

What do you get? Do you have any other books that you'd recommend that you've read in your past? Gosh, you know, the first one that comes to mind that I throw out all the time is kind of, oh, yeah, there we go. Right there on the screen. Cash flow quadrant was not necessarily real estate, but it was a business. Like, I understood that I could work for money, right? I could be self-employed and still work for my money. But if I stopped, I could own a business where other people earn me money and then invest my money. and it worked for me. And distinguishing between what owning a business and being self-employed was

was a really big deal to me. Yeah. Yeah. And it helped shape, like, even our investing business, are we self-employed here or is this a business? Yeah. And marching through those quadrants was really seminal for us in terms of how we move forward. That's great. Cool. That's great. What about real estate? Well, we said real estate. What about business books? What are your favorite business books? Not your own. Okay. I give away books all the time. And so all I can say is the book I probably gave away more than any other last year, right? Which is indicative of what's in favor right now. It was a real tiny book called Managing oneself by Peter Drucker. Okay. Okay. I haven't read that. Yeah, it's real short. It was an essay he wrote that was in the Harvard Review. And it's full of a lot of wisdom about how to understand what you're good at, be okay with what you're not good at. that and manage that in your career. And I've given it to a lot of young people as a way to force

myself to relive it. Because every time I have to give it, I have it on audio book on my phone and I listen to it all the time. Nice. And it's just good timeless wisdom. Peter Drucker, if you only read one business author, read Peter Drucker. The guy was smart. That's great. Awesome. All right, what do you do for fun? You've got a family, you've got kids. What do you guys like to do outside of work? okay, we just bought a ranch this last year. It's kind of like buying a yacht in investment terms, right? We talk to land yachts. But I love being outdoors.

Wait, so is it like a yacht in that like the best day is the day you buy it and the next best day is the day you sell it? No, it's just it's the undefincible, right? It's that it's an expense with no revenue. And I hope that it will appreciate and we'll recoup it. But we have a lot of animals. We have an ostrich. That's awesome.

And we have to feed this ostrich. And so it doesn't cost as much as we thought, but it is an ongoing expense. But my kids were my son's 10 years old. I love to be outsourers. I like to hunt and fish. This is Texas. There's no public land. And so to me, like anything outdoors, we changed our lifestyle and our investing to make that happen.

Yeah. Because if I can be on the water, are out watching animals, I'm a really happy guy. So that's my happy spot. That's great. I want a video of you riding your ostrich. Oh, gosh, no way, man. Have you seen the claws on those things? They're scary.

Come on, you can do it. I've got video of me feeding it by hand, which took a fair amount of guts because that thick beak comes at you. It's tame. She'll lay down and let you pet her. Oh, nice. She still scares me a little bit. That's great. All right, my final question of the day, what do you believe sets apart successful real estate investors

from those who give up, fail, or never get started? Oh, gosh, that's a great question. I think fundamentally the people who succeed the longest to the ones that are absolutely clear and true to their criteria. It's so easy to cheat. It's so easy. The people who get drawn to investing tend to be kind of optimistic. And at your heart, you need to be a little skeptical.

And we went over that before. But the one time we violated our criteria, we wrote a big check. Yep. And thank goodness, it was an education we could. afford and it didn't knock us out of the game because we already owned eight houses when we made our first big mistake. So never let your ego. Everyone is vulnerable. I mean, look at the giants. They go bankrupt, you know, because you can to know your criteria and never violate them. I think that's the key. It's simple. It's boring, but it's very hard to do. Yeah. Now, that's great.

That's great. All right, Jay, well, before we let you go, where can people find you? Where can they connect with you and find all your books. We're going to link to all of it in our show notes, your books, and so feel free to let them know. Right now, kind of my home base is www.W.W. The One Thing with the Number One.com. It's our one thing right now. It's the book that we've just released and it's still being really successful. And I teach and support that book. And you can link to all the rest of our world from there. Perfect. Perfect. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. It is an honor. And, you know, lots of great wisdom imparted here on the show, I'm sure, for our listeners. So we really do appreciate it and

keep putting out great books. And thanks so much. Thanks for making it fun, too. It was really fun talking to you. I appreciate it. Well, good. Well, thank you. We'll talk to your soon. All right. All right, everybody. That was Jay Papazon from Keller Williams, author of so many books I can't even think. It's amazing. Again, a great honor to have him. and I know Brandon is still glowing from his chance to talk about the one thing. I'm pretty obsessed with that book. Don't underestimate how much I talk about that book. Every single conversation generally revolves around in my life and in bigger pockets life and in my investing.

Well, what is the one thing? What's the one thing that's going to get us there? So, yeah, it was very cool to be able to talk with Jay kind of about some of those thoughts today. Yeah, and adapting that into your life. You're the listener, I definitely recommend it. I have found that since Brandon started preaching this to me, it's definitely been helpful. It helps you keep that focus. And focus is the key to success.

And so get out there and make it happen. With that said, really, again, very much appreciate Jay and everything that he brought to us and everything that he's doing for real estate investors, agents and others in our industry. He and the KW team are doing great. So with that, again, thank you for joining us. If you're not already a user of Bigger Pockets, get out there, jump on the platform, start interacting, start learning, start making things happen, figure out what your one thing is and really spend your time and energy and focus on it and be successful, make it happen. So we'll leave you with that. Get out of here, figure it out, and we'll chat with you next week. I am Josh Dorkin, signing off.

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