BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 156: Lifestyle Engineering Through Commercial, Residential, and Vacation Rentals with Mark Spidell

Episode Date: January 7, 2016

On this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast, we sit down with Mark Spidell, an investor from the great state of Colorado, to discuss how he uses real estate to engineer his ideal lifestyle! We talk about partnering with family, investing out-of-state, buying small commercial buildings, owning vacation rentals, and much, much more! Not only will this episode entertain and inform you, it will also help you clarify your own investing plan so you can begin engineering your own perfect lifestyle! In This Episode We Cover: How Mark got started through ADU Why he went the vacation rental route Where he currently invests The benefits of lifestyle-focused investing Tips for people with families The qualitative and quantitative parts of his investing What he’s learned from his first investments How he weathered the market crash How he was able to buy more after the crash Tips for investing in commercial deals How he financed his commercial property A commercial banker’s perspective on applying for loan The difference between commercial and residential financing How to minimize risk on commercial property The benefits of investing in commercial real estate Why you should ask for help from attorneys when drawing up leases for commercial property The ins and outs of being a landlord for commercial real estate How to successfully mix commercial property and vacation rentals in your portfolio How to find out what you’re good at and figure out which investing path to take The art of lifestyle engineering And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets’ Rental Property Portfolio Tracker BP Podcast 076: Growing Your Real Estate Company Into a $30 Million Dollar Business with Brian Burke BiggerPockets Webinar BiggerPockets Calculator BP Podcast 152: Building Wealth and Passive Income with Rental Properties with Ben Leybovich, Brian Burke, and Serge Shukhat Be a guest on the podcast Books Mentioned in this Show Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki Rich Dad’s CASHFLOW Quadrant by Robert T. Kiyosaki Schweser Notes for the 2011 CFA Exam Level 1 Book 3: Financial Reporting and Analysis Tweetable Topics: “Commercial real estate is valued based on the income of the property.” (Tweet This!) “If you want the freedom, real estate could help you, but make sure you are doing it for the right reasons.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Mark Mark’s BiggerPockets Profile Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 156. Yeah, that was how it happened. And, you know, learned a lot from that. So now we have a much more smaller scale property management group involved and a much higher level of service, monthly report. And we're out. We're feeling good. 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 Dorkin, host to the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host, Mr. Brandon Turner. Happy New Year, Brian. Happy New Year, Josh Dorkin. How you doing?

Yeah, yeah. I'm good, man. I'm good, as you can probably hear. I'm a little sick here, a little recovery from the... You're always sick. What are you talking about? You're a sick person. What can I say?

Really? Why are you so mean? Like, everybody talks about what a nice guy you are. It's not true. They don't realize. You're kind of meat. Well, here's what I realized this week. Somebody said something in the forums and they said,

I just watched the YouTube video of the Bigger Pockets podcast because we put this on YouTube as well. And they said, I totally had Brandon and Josh's faces mixed up with their voices. And somebody else said, I did too. And then somebody else was like, I did too. And I realized, people have no idea. that I'm you and you're... So people think that I'm you and you're me

and I think that's weird. So maybe really, they're actually thinking, I pick on you more and they're saying the wrong thing to your face. I don't know. So I don't know. Who picks on whom?

You guys should let us know in the comments of this show. Oh, yeah. Liggerpics on whom are on whom. Slash show 156. Let us know what you think. Let us know. All right, guys,

we've got a really cool show today. Before we go into the show, let's bust out today's quick tip. All right, today's quick tip. You got it? Brandon, would you want it? I got it.

It's a new year. Let's, you know, I'll be generous. Okay, thanks. Today's quick tip is a brand new feature on bigger pockets called the rental property portfolio tracker. And basically what this does is it allows you enter in your properties that you currently have. And you can track the, you know, the process. I mean, basically the idea of your property address, the purchase date, purchase price,

current value, loan balance, equity, and your monthly cash flow. So you have like this one nice page where all. all your properties are at. You can see what your cashful looks like, how much your net worth is currently, and you can download a PDF or share just like a PDF document with anybody you want. So if you're trying to get a bank loan, you can print out this nice document. So check it out at biggerpockets.com slash portfolio and start using it. Nice. Nice. It's free. Yeah, it's free for everyone. And it's in beta mode. So, you know, we're still working on it, trying to make it better. But we could use your advice on how

to make it better. So get in there, use it, try it out and see what you think. Yeah. Awesome. Great tool. Cool. There are two kinds of real estate investors. Those who have reviewed their insurance and those who think that they have. Most don't realize their coverage wasn't built for how they actually invest. Vacancy periods, rehabs, short-term rentals,

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Flagship Fund before investing. This and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash flagship. This is a paid advertisement. For decades, real estate has been a cornerstone of the world's largest portfolios. But it's also historically been sort of complex, time-consuming, and expensive. But imagine if real estate investing was suddenly easy, all the benefits of owning real, tangible assets without the complexity and expense. That's the power of the Fundrise Flagship Fund.

Now you can invest in a $1.1 billion portfolio of real estate, starting with as little as $10. The portfolio features 4,700 single-family rental homes spread across the booming sunbelt. They also have 3.3 million square feet of highly sought after industrial facilities, thanks to the e-commerce wave. The flagship fund is one of the largest of its kind. It's well diversified, and it's managed by a team of professionals. And it's now available to you. Visit fundrise.com slash BP Market to explore the fund's full portfolio. check out historical returns and start investing in just minutes.

Carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses of the Fundrise Flagship Fund before investing. This and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at funnrise.com slash flagship. This is a paid advertisement. All right, guys, let's cut to this thing. Today's guest is Mark Spidell. Mark's a real estate investor with a really interesting background.

He's built a pretty cool portfolio with both long-term and short-term rentals. He's got a great story and a really cool philosophy on life, which includes something that he calls lifestyle engineering. I'm doing finger quotes here. And I know you guys listening are going to love it. We also talk a bit about commercial real estate investing as well as a bunch of other topics. There's tons of actionable stuff in here.

Lots of advice for everybody regardless of where they are in the real estate world. I know I get excited about these shows that help everybody out. And so here we are again with me, excited. You're always excited. I am excited. I'm so excited. I'm excited. Yes. All right. Let's get to the exciting show, shall we? Mark Spidell. Let's do it. Mark. Welcome to the show, man. It's good to have you here. Thanks, guys. It's an honor. Yeah, this should be fun. We're talking about investing in a couple things today. You do a, you do vacation rentals. You do commercial, you do residential. You kind of cover the whole

gambit, right? Correct. Yeah. Awesome. So great. Why don't we start with how you got into that game? You know, I was pretty timid to start. off with. I would say I eased into it. I had an ADU, or like a mother-in-law apartment at my house, and some neighbors had been doing vacation rental, had some success with that. Also, I had a background in banking and other just mortgage-related finance, even kind of at a higher Wall Street level. And from that, I always understood real estate, but to be a more active investor, it took me a while to kind of take the plunge. Hey, Mark, what's the ADU stand for? dwelling unit.

Got it. Yeah. Great. There you go. So basically, so you were house hacking at the beginning. That was kind of how you got into it. Yeah.

It was a modified house hack for sure. That's awesome. That's awesome. So you decided to convert it. You said into a vacation rental. Yeah. Before we had a guy working for Comcast living in there that did nothing but kind of be creepy all day, in my opinion.

And so I thought, I thought, so I thought, gosh, how can we best utilize this space? Because the nice thing about it was we could have friends and families stay there as well as get the income. So it was sort of a nice compromise at that time in life. Yeah. Nice. So what inspired you to do it though? I mean, at the end of the day, why start running it out? Did you have plans? What was your goal up front? Did you want to just build some side income? Did you want to be a full-time investor? At that time, I wasn't sure. I've always been a bit of a hustler, but I think one of the challenges in my area is that the credit quality of the tenants is not all that pot. And I'm not trying to pick on anybody because it's a tough place to live. It's an expensive market. So what I thought was a better route at that time, and I still believe it. That's why my business has evolved this way, was if you go the vacation rental route, you obviously just get a different clientele. Would you say, I mean, I would assume those clientele are a lot higher because they're renting vacation rentals, right?

Yeah, and the vacation rental mindset is a lot different, I would say. 80% of the people, they tidy up when they leave, you know, they do exactly what you say in the instructions, and they're just pleasant to deal with. On the rental side of things, you know, you go through the background check, you look at their income, and everybody's a stretch around here, just because there's such a huge discrepancy between what people can make income-wise here and really what rents are. And you're in Glenwood Springs, right? So that's Colorado. Yeah. So we are 45 minutes north of Aspen.

So the Aspen market has a huge impact on our local market. And there were about an hour due west of Vale. So again, a major resort market there. So, okay. Yeah. And Glenwood Springs is beautiful. You guys have Hot Springs, and it's an amazing place for anyone listening. You want a cool spot to go check out.

But it's boundaryed by these ultra, ultra, ultra, high-end resorts. So that's kind of fascinating. We talk about these different market niches and market types, big cities and things like that. It's kind of neat to have somebody who's kind of caught in between the two ultra-high-end neighborhoods. So you get into this, you've got this property, and you've got this Wall Street background, and where does your mind take you? You know, like, all right, I've got this guy now renting out this mother-in-law, ADU apartment.

How do you transition from that to kind of the next phases in your investing? Well, really, it was lifestyle-focused. My wife's a professional, and she works a fair amount. At the same time, she's been fortunate to find a situation where she can work three-quarter time. We now have a four-year-old and we have a four-month baby. So thank you. Yeah. So big deal.

And we're very focused on wanting to do the parent thing correctly. You know, and it's so hard in an expensive market and just how life is for modern people. So we're trying to figure out a way to have balance, have a little bit of control and have some freedom. So, yeah, that's why we went more into real estate. Okay. So let's talk about your first then non-owner-occupied deal. What did that look like? Well, I had been in the mortgage-backed securities industry studying what was going to happen, really. I went from doing work related to subprime mortgages and the different companies that were involved in those mortgages, and I saw that there was going to be an opportunity in extreme levels of default.

So I told my brother and my dad, hey, I think there's an opportunity. opportunity here. Do you guys want to try to pull some money together and invest? And so we bought two single family homes in the Dallas area and then a house near DIA and Denver. And so that was sort of our first for a way of saying, hey, there may be an opportunity here. Let's give it a shot. And as a partnership, it was just okay. But it was our first way of kind of getting into real estate. So yeah, it was interesting. Okay. And you said those were single family. You said in Denver, right? One in Denver and two in Dallas. Oh, okay.

Okay. And do you still own those today? Yeah. So I bought my brother and dad out of the partnership at the beginning of last year. And that was just sort of a piece to my overall puzzle that I have now. Okay. Can I ask you about the relationship thing? And obviously maybe your family's going to listen to this, so don't talk bad about them.

But do you have tips for people working with family? Because oftentimes people's first inclination is to go out and partner with her mom and dad, brother, sister, kids. what are your thoughts on that? What are some of the dangers and ways you can avoid that? Well, we're a very transparent family in that, you know, we'd have formal loan documents, if there's loans involved. In fact, I would say it's almost a detriment because sometimes we're talking about it at Thanksgiving and my mom hates that, my wife hates that. But at the same time, we, you know, everybody knows their role and is transparent about it. You know, it's not a awkward sort of thing. At the same time, though, we had different roles in response.

responsibilities and skills. But after a while, my brother, he needed some money to invest in some of his other business ventures. And my dad was kind of getting just tired of even wanting to think about it. So he wanted out and it made sense for me to get bigger into real estate. Okay. So what year was this? We bought those houses in 2009. Okay. So right after. Yeah, it was right at the right time for sure. Perfect. All right. So I mean, would you be willing to tell us, okay, you talked about, you got into bed with your brother and dad as your partners. What did these deals look like? You know, what attracted you to them?

Basically, you could get over 10% return on your money. That was pretty much, we were just back into the math and look at it that way. Purely quantitative. We were not looking at enough qualitative because we actually had some hiccups, and that's why we didn't grow more at that time because now everybody was on the same page, more on the qualitative aspects of what was involved. Can you go into more detail into what that means? I get, you know, qualitative, okay, so it's the math.

What's the quantitative part of the picture? Well, in the quantitative, we felt good about qualitative-wise. For example, at the house near DIA, we had the very first tenant, and it was my responsibility to find the property management company. I just Googled what's the property management company in Denver, found the really big one, and I got really big company service, and it wasn't good. So long story short, we had a woman applied to rent. She didn't ever really live there.

A gang had paid her off. A group of gang members had paid her off to get access to the house. So, yeah, two or three months in, they stopped paying. And then it takes a while for the eviction. And, you know, they were definitely sketch tough guys. I got a relationship going with a neighbor, and so he would shoot me pictures every now and again. One day I get a text of an escalate on blocks in front of the place.

Bad things were going on for sure. And so that was sort of part of the qualitative part where not everybody was feeling good about this, and hey, my bad. That was a learning opportunity for sure. Yeah, yeah. I want to know more about this escalate on blocks. I mean, were they putting like drugs?

drugs in the tires or what? No, I think what happened. Somebody was not happy with whatever they did and took their tires. That's pretty funny. Took their wheels. Yeah. So yeah. But, you know, that very house, though, I mean, that was a $90,000 house. And it is currently up for renewal now. I vote there, let's see, since we bought it, I would say we're on the third or fourth tenant. And, you know, I might be able to sell up for 240 if I want or, you know, it's going to rent now for $1,700. Yeah. So back to the gang member. I mean, it's interesting because I had some drug doings in property that I had. And that was, it was scary and it was, you know, it was a pain in the backside to get rid of these folks. Yeah. How did that go down for you? How did evicting? And I'm assuming your manager just dealt with it and you had nothing to do with it, but maybe not.

Yeah. Well, and they dealt with it really poorly, to be honest with you. I mean, they, wanted to take the path of least resistance. And I had to just follow up, you know, bang on the phone a lot. And, you know, that was how it happened. And, you know, learned a lot from that. So now we have a much more smaller scale property management group involved and a much higher level of service, monthly report. And we're out. We're feeling good. So if you can go back, you know, and tell your younger self, or maybe somebody else comes up to you and their exact shoes that you were in back then, you know, what can you tell them? Like, what lessons did you learn from that first, those first couple deals, maybe with your family, that you would warn, you know, listeners of the podcast

right now about? I think at that time I was almost viewing it as a, you know, like I would view an investment in a stock or a bond and just say like, oh, pure math, this is how we do it. You sure, you know, instead of calling an investment person, now I'm going to have to call a property manager and, you know, I'm going to make the very minimum decisions involved in this. And, and, you know what, in hindsight, no, you need to be educated and you need to, uh, make more than one phone call. It's just not that easy. Yeah, interviewing property managers is a monster, monster task. It's of the utmost importance. And we've got tons of resources on the site that go into that. We've got a lot of articles that include questions to ask and things like that

when interviewing. So for anybody listening, if you're dealing with that, I definitely encourage you to just jump on bigger pockets, type in in the search like interview property managers, and you'll come up with some cool stuff. I think everybody will find it really helpful. Okay, so, you know, Brandon made a note here about the crash coming. I want to jump back before we jump forward. Sure.

You saw the crash coming. You were in the MBS, you know, space. What, where are we today? I mean, do you think we're in a position? You know, Yellen just made some changes to, yeah. at the Fed and, you know, where are we going? Well, looking backward, I was in that industry from 2001 until about 2005. And part of the reason why I got out at 2005 was because all we were talking about

was rising delinquencies at that point in time. And it was in a lot of the tougher rust belt markets. And so I was just, I've always been a bit of a belt and suspenders type of guy. So I thought, you know what, maybe I need to diversify my skills a little bit. I'm young, I'm going to try some different things out. And so I actually went to commercial appraising for a year. Didn't like that, but learned a lot, went back to the MBS space for another few years. But from there, it was crazy because it was hot at that time.

I mean, they were just pumping out the loans all the way through to about 2008. Really, towards the end, all I was doing was work for the FDIC, closing down small banks that still have mortgages on their portfolios. I mean, it was an interesting roller coaster for sure. But where we are now, I definitely agree with Brian, who is on the podcast a few episodes back, you know, he talked about the fact that, yeah, this time around, it's not just crazy lending that has escalated prices. There are fundamentals. I think that jobs have come back a bit. I think that incomes are supporting just the mortgages that people are getting now.

At the same time, though, I think there have. has been financial innovation where people have been able to get access to credit in different ways. Subprime financing is coming back, both auto and home. So that is something I think that people have to consider where we are now, though. I'm not sure that we're going to have a big real estate crash so much as we may just not have as sexy of appreciation for the next few years. It's my feel for it. Fair enough. Cool. Thanks for sharing. Yeah, sure. Cool. All right. So what happened next at that? You know, you got these first deals under your belt. You started working on them. Maybe actually before you answer that, how did you finance those deals? Was it all cash? Or did you guys? Yeah, we just used family money at that point. And they were cheap enough where it wasn't too. You know, we should have backed up the truck at that point in time and bought more. But, you know, we were just kind of trying things out. And so, yeah, it was pretty easy. Okay. So what happened next then? How did you buy more? You know, I really took a break for a long time.

and at but when we bought those I was actually transition we were living in glenwood that time I used to live in Denver now we're in glenwood trying to start a family and I was working as a commercial banker at that time doing commercial real estate loans I was I was doing a lot of research on just the local markets both residential commercial and so I actually came across a commercial building loan that I liked it was a it was a new loan that we took, we had taken from another bank on a commercial building that I felt had good tenants and I had left that banking job and went into something else. But I had always remembered that building and sure enough one day I drive by and I see this commercial building for sale. And so the guy who was actually listing it was the same guy that helped me buy a couple condos that I also

have in my portfolio also. So got it. Yeah. Went into this commercial building. Can you explain what you mean by you liked the loan? So what's the distinction between that and liking the fundamentals of the property? Well, you know, so I guess it's kind of the same thing. I mean, I understood the loan and there's just very few commercial loans in a market like this that actually look good, especially as a pure investment. If you might have a situation where a business owner, maybe a restaurant owner, wants to buy their their real estate. Yeah, that makes sense. But as a pure investment in terms of commercial,

you're buying this tenant income, there's not a whole lot in these markets that I think float. So this is one that did. And I had always remembered that. So yeah. Got it. So tell us about the property. Yeah. Yeah. So it has three major tenants, I would say, high quality tenants. You know, and what I mean by high quality tenant in a small market, You know, there's one of the top three real estate companies is in one of the bigger spots. I have a title company. I have a state farm agent. Then I have a dentist specialty type guy in one spot.

And then I have a couple of nonprofits. So I'm full except for one basement space that I actually use for my office right now. Yeah, cash flows. It was a brother's sister team that inherited the property. and they were really just not into real estate investing so much. I mean, they basically wanted to collect checks and not really think too hard on it. So there was a lot of deferred maintenance problems. The utilities weren't handled well.

The tenant relationships weren't all that great. You know, just a lot of easy pickings to work on to really add value. So how would somebody know that? You know, how am I as some novice real estate investor who's interested in commercial see this property and be able to identify that there was all this deferred stuff sitting around that I can potentially snap it up, cheaply, make some fixes and drastically improve the value. Yeah. You know, and Brandon talks about your unfair advantage.

And really, I have the unfair advantage of seeing the loan. You know, so that was in seeing the types of leases involved. So that was something that was a little bit unique in this. situation, but it takes a long time on a commercial deal. And, you know, by by the, just in terms of size, this was a $1.14 million deal. So not, not a huge deal, but at the same time, it was, it's big for me. And, but yet too small for for bigger boys, right? You know, you're not going to get a large real estate investment group looking at that size of building. And the value add is really in the management. So, it took, it took, gosh, two, three months to really scrutinize the deal. I interviewed all the different

tenants. I got a good handle on all the different deferred maintenance aspects. And yeah, it was definitely intensive work. And it was still scary. I mean, at the end of it, because they weren't going to give me a lot of information. You know, they were only going to give me the least to get the deal done. And so it was hard. It was painful. Hey, Mark, so you touched upon something. There's this kind of whole on the market. This is a $1.14 million commercial deal, too small for the big boys, but kind of scary, perfect for you. At what point is something not too small for the big boys? As somebody who's been in the commercial space, when do the institutions start to take notice of properties? Is it $5 million? Is it $10 million? Is it $20?

You know, I'm not sure I'm the best to answer that, but you would be surprised, though, like one of the things I learned from being a commercial real estate appraiser, a interesting story where a guy who had hotel experience bought a Hampton Inn in roughly 2005, and he knew that he could go in and manage that hotel better. It was underperforming. The people that he bought it from were the original developers of the hotel, and they were going to get their value at from just billing the hotel, right, and selling it for the profit.

So he went in, he worked hard. You know, he lived in this hotel. He got the income up and just got a better culture in there. And then he sold it a year later for roughly a million dollar profit. So that was, you know, I would call that at that time. It was a $6 million hotel. So that was one guy doing that. And I think he maybe had one or two investors.

So that was, I would say, not yet at that scale. of the bigger time guys. So really, I think the bigger investors are going to look for something that's at least $10 million. Got it. Yeah. Cool. So how did you finance that property? How are you able to do cash or do you financing? No, well, I actually went to the very bank I used to work for and I said, hey guys, wouldn't it be nice for you to keep this loan? And I helped him, you know, do some of the underwriting work. I showed him what I was going to do. You know, I gave him countless spreadsheets of, you know, this is how I'm going to add value and I'm going to make this work. And it worked. And that was with a very conservative bank. So I felt good that we were able to get it done.

Interesting. That's cool. I pretty much every webinar I do here on BiggerPockets, I do a weekly webinar, usually on, I don't know, Wednesdays or Thursdays, but people can sign up at Biggerpockets.com. So that's webinar. But anyway, almost every webinar, I stress this idea of help your banker out. When you're trying to apply for a loan, when you're trying to get a deal, the more work you can do for your banker, you know, if they've got 10 loans they've got to try to process and one of them is handed them on a silver platter and one of them they have to dig and spend hours and hours of time digging, who are they going to help? You're the front of the line when you help them. So I love that you said that.

You helped them with spreadsheets and with documents and you show them, you know, this is why it is a good deal. I love it. Oh, absolutely. Well, you know, and that's a great tip because being a commercial banker, I can tell you that it is hard. You know, most of your day is just vetting through folks, having them try to, you know, trying to to have to give them bad news that, sorry, you know, you're just not in a good position. And they're not even close to being ready to help themselves. You know, that's the hard part about it is they don't even have the information.

They're not even in the ballpark of knowing that they could even apply for a commercial loan. At the same time, though, I mean, I still have friends that work for this bank. You know, it's a large regional bank. And, you know, there's cost cutting. You know, there's a lot of pressure in that market. so the easier you can make it on your banker, but they really want your loan. There are very few good commercial real estate loans out there.

So the easier you can make it, they want to give you the loan for sure, but they just have time and resource problems for sure. I did it when I was trying to get a loan on my 24-unit apartment complex, I had a five-unit and a 24-unit trying to get a loans on them. And I went to a couple different banks and had a lot of trouble getting it. And it wasn't until I flipped that switch in my mind and said, you know what, I'm going to help this banker do their job for them. And I went and printed out this really nice report.

I gave them every bit of information they could have possibly wanted and then gave them more information to verify it. I put it inside of a plastic binder. I even used the bigger pockets like rental property calculator report on the front of it that showed them all the numbers. I gave it to them. Within a day, I was approved for both those loans. Nice. Yeah. And it was like, oh, well, that was way easier.

And I realized because before that, I was handing them a box of paperwork. And they hate that. And so, of course, they turn me down because they're busy doing other stuff. Yeah. Hey, Mark, Mark, tell me about that two to three month vetting period. I think a lot of the folks here want to know, what exactly are you doing? What is it that it, you know, is it not just evaluating what they give you? You know, you have to go out and actually source some information yourself, right? You have to do some detective work. Can you talk about what exactly you're doing? Yeah, so I would say the big parts of that were having specialists come out. So I had a roofing guy. I had an HVAC guy come out versus with a residential deal. You might just hire a home inspector, right?

You know, and there's some value to that, arguably. But with this, especially with the roof, with the HVAC, I knew those were big deals. I also talked with the city utility company and worked with them a little bit, try to get an idea of how I could add value there, as well as there's a energy savings nonprofit around. And so through them, I got some ideas on how I could add value through energy savings. So LED lights was a big, big project that we did. For example, this building, one of the buildings is, you know, the assessor shows it as 1950 era. So it had the old school T-12 halogen lights, awful, awful in terms of energy efficiency. So,

through replacing those lights with LED, not only did the energy nonprofit help me by covering over half the cost of that improvement, but then I got the tenant to pay, go havesies with me on the other half. So then I'm only out a quarter of the cost, and so now it's a win-win for everybody, right? That's awesome.

Yeah, that's great. That's great. Cool. Do you need to be locked in a contract in order to have these specialists come out or can you actually do that just with the, hey, we're in diligence period and we're going to have people come and look? Yeah, yeah, that wasn't hard. The owners were helpful there. And again, my broker was the one who was listening to property. So although he had to walk that fine line of, you know, serving both parties, he was also, though, helpful in, you know, doing what he could to facilitate that. So the answer is yes, you can actually do it without being in contract, yes?

Correct. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Cool. Cool. Well, let me take talk about financing a little bit more. You being a commercial financing guy, how does it differ? For those people who don't know, how does commercial financing differ from residential financing? Well, we talk a lot about portfolio loans, and so I have both. I have residential portfolio loans that I use a small commercial bank in Texas, and then I have the Colorado Commercial Building that is also a commercial loan. So, well, some of the bigger differences are with a 30-year loan, talking about 30-year fixed rate, 30-year amortizing loans. With a commercial, both of them are 20-year amortizing, both my residential portfolio loan and my commercial building loan. Those

are both 20-year ams, but five-year terms. So what's that mean? I mean, what's a five-year term mean? So five-year term, we're talking about at the end of five years, you either have to refi or you have to pay off. Actually, with my Texas residential portfolio loan, that one's a little bit different. It just adjusts. The interest trade adjusts after that. So not as much exposure. Now, a lot of people might be wondering, I mean, if you've got a, you got five years, that's not very much time, right?

So you got this multim multimillion dollar potentially loan with a commercial property. And the bank says, we'll give you five years to do something with this. Doesn't that, I mean, like, that seems a lot of pressure, right? That's a lot of pressure, right? How do you get around that? Or what are your thoughts on? Well, true, but you are, your loans amortizing 20 years, right? So you are going to have that loan pay down.

So it should be easier to refinance at that point in time. At the same time, though, I thought Ben had some good points. And I know some of the other folks on the... You're talking about Ben Labovich? Yes. You might, no, I think you've got it all right. He drives a Tesla. He does drive a Tesla.

I know. Oh, okay. That's all I took away from that podcast was the fact that Ben now has a Tesla. I was talking about show 151 or 52. I forget. I don't remember. I'll flick it out. Yeah.

I could just totally imagine Ben pimping around Lima, Ohio, and it's that Tesla. Just sporting it. Yep, I'm sure. He's very, very happy with that. I'm sure. So, by the way, 152, BiggerPockus.com, so show 152. Probably one of the best shows we've done.

It was a great show. Fantastic show. And you can learn all about Ben's Tesla. So check it out. All right. So definitely the adjustable thing makes me a little nervous. I mean, I have it too, right? I think mine, I can't remember now for sure.

I should know this. But I think mine's a 10-year, it's got a 10-year balloon payment on it. 20-year-25 AM. I think it's 20-year. Anyway, my thinking is a. same thing. After 10 years or after five years, whatever, I'll have it paid down significantly. Hopefully prices will go up. If not, the bank could call it and say, you know what, we said you had to pay this back. But at the same time, they're not going to, my hope is, if the market did tank,

they're not going to want to necessarily go and foreclose on me anyway. So they're going to want to work with me, hopefully, if most case scenario happens. But that's on the variable rate, right? That's on the one where you go variable. What about the five-year term? No, that's what I'm talking about. After the end of that. You do have a risk. and, you know, I worked for a very conservative bank that actually had inherited a ton of loans from another bank that they bought. And they kicked a ton of loans out because, you know, they weren't well underwritten. And, you know, they just didn't fit the guideline anymore. So a lot of folks had to go hustle after that five-year mark and go to the other bank in town. And sometimes it works. Sometimes it didn't. There's a lot of hard stories, you know, in 2008 to 2010 in the commercial market for sure. This is why also I don't like, if I'm going to have a short-term loan, like I said, the ones that I have 10 years or whatever, like I want to make sure I have enough equity in there even now and then I'll have even significantly more. Like I don't want to over leverage my risky loans, so to speak, right? I want to have that option to later on be able to get out. And that's why commercial loans typically don't lend 90% loan to value. You know, they're what, 60, 70% usually, right? Right. Well, and from the bank's perspective, they do not want to be long. You know, I mean, you've been talking about a seven-year loan. They just, a lot of them just pucker up because they have interest trade risk.

They don't want to deal with that. At the same time, though, as an investor, it gives you discipline to have that five-year mark because if you have a house that you've had for five years and sort of the buy-and-mold theory that some people talk about, that, you know, you really shouldn't just keep some of these things forever. Maybe it is time to parse something out of your portfolio after five years, and then, you know, you start again. Yeah. There are two kinds of real estate investors. those who have reviewed their insurance, and those who think that they have.

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at Dominion Financial. Check them out at biggerpockets.com slash dominion. Again, that's biggerpockets.com slash dominion. Hey, Mark, so one, what is the standard down payment on a commercial loan? Usually I see it as 30%. 30%. Okay. And then what tips do you have for somebody who's looking to go and purchase commercial property to minimize their risk? How do they go about doing that? You know, I would say homework is your key, but the best thing about being in that market, you just have a lot of fewer competition. For example, I'm by far the youngest commercial real estate investor in my town. Everybody else, if I go around talking to just different people that are tenants and buildings,

I'll ask them, hey, who's your landlord? And they'll say, like, you know, some LLC out of California, I've never met them. And how long have you rented here? oh, 15 years. You've never met your landlord in 15 years. It's just a faceless thing. Or you have an old school investor who's had the building for 25 years and they're getting older and they don't want to put any money into it. So it's pretty easy actually to, if you hustle, you know, to be the best landlord in a small market and have a lot of success. Mark, how really quick? How old are you? I turned 40 in June. Oh, I got you beat. February.

You are an old guy, by the way. Well, look at my hair. I mean, you have great hair compared to me. I got the sober back grilla going on for sure. Looking good, man. Looking good. It's all so good. Okay.

You say that it's not that hard for those who want to hustle. It maybe isn't as hard as people might envision getting into commercial real estate. But I want to go more basic than that. Sure. Why get into commercial real estate? What's the point? I mean, what are the benefits of going into that niche? Well, it comes down to, uh,

commercial real estate is valued based on the income of the property. And there is more value ad because, yeah, you can cut expenses. And, you know, there's plenty of deals out there where you can, you can better manage the expense. At the same time, though, you should be able to hustle and be more creative. For example, you might have, and you've had a lot of good guests talk about this, let's say you buy a commercial building. You need an office yourself. There could be a lot of benefits just right there. You may have some friends that need office space, but then downstairs you have a basement that's completely unutilized. Well, all of a sudden, just due to social media, just different apps, whatever it might be, why not make your basement of this building a mini storage, for example?

I mean, you can totally do that now, where I think 10 years ago that was not even in the ballgame. Yep. I love that. I like commercial for that very reason, the ability to add value by being creative and by using your head, you can just add cash to your pocket at the end of the day as well as equity later on the road. I think that's awesome. Do you manage your property yourself, the commercial ones? I manage everything in Colorado myself, with exception of the Denver property. The stuff I have in Texas, I have a manager down there. But yeah, everything in Glenwood, I do manage myself. So what is, we've talked to the endth degree about managing houses and stuff like that, but we haven't really talked about managing the commercial. So what is that like? What's different about it?

That's a good question. I would say that you obviously have some different things going on. You have snow removal is a bigger issue. You have just landscaping. You have outdoor trash. You know, things that you just don't have to deal with this much with residential. You know, the leases are much more complicated. So you can't go cheap there. You really should use attorneys when possible. You know, I think also culture is a big deal at a building. If you can have a good culture where everybody gets along, you have good. synergies between tenant businesses, that really goes a long way too, adding value. We just signed our first. We've been working out of a co-work space for a little while and just signed our first commercial lease. We've got a 2,700 square foot office space now. And what a, oh man, I mean, this was not signing your five, six page, you know, residential. I think our current lease is 69 pages, something like that. I mean, You have triple net and cab and all that? You know, I mean, it's exceptionally complicated.

You know, there's all sorts of, you know, gotchas and things like that. And, you know, I've looked at other leases in the past that had, you know, I mean, very old school tenants. And, you know, I would need to literally get permission to put Wi-Fi in the office space. But a typewriter was okay, you know, written in the lease. Like, really? So, yeah, I think your advice about using a real estate attorney is. is spot on. I mean, listen, I think it's spot on for anybody, but particularly for commercial, because to go through that kind of paperwork and assume that you're going to know what the hell

you're doing as a tenant and as a landlord is remarkable. But yeah, it's interesting. And the culture part, I think it's something that I bet a lot of the big corporate landlords don't think about as, again, as somebody who was shopping. Right. And we looked at a lot of buildings. And it's like, You know, you've got this surgeon's office and you've got next to it, you know, just these random combinations. And you're like, they're never going to interact. There never is going to be this positivity, this vibe within the building itself. And I think by trying at least to establish some kind of culture, I think you can, like anything else, get longer term leases, get people to stick around and want to be there because, you know, that's just that little extra that is going to keep them. from moving somewhere else.

Yeah, and a couple of my tents have been in the building since the mid-90s. So, you know, there's a lot of value to that. And if you're a good landlord, if you hustle and everybody gets along, you know, sure, why are they going to leave? It's a hassle to leave. Yeah. So how do you make a, you know, how do you make your buildings, how do you landlord differently than the big corporate, faceless, nameless entities that are out

they're doing it. What gives a commercial, a tenant, what do you do to attract those tenants that much more than those big guys? Well, first off, if somebody calls, I reply within at least no more than two hours. Second, I usually meet with the primary decision maker once a year, and I go through just different maintenance things I'm doing, different improvements I'm doing, let them know who the neighbors are. I'll go out of my way to say to a new tenant, hey, have you met everybody? And we'll go around and we'll shake hands and just get everybody comfortable.

In just fact this year, I gave everybody a Jimmy John's lunch for just being good tenants, you know, and for the holidays. So, yeah, little stuff like that. Yeah, very cool. Awesome. All right. So before we get out of here, I want to touch base on a little bit more besides just the commercial. We got to have vacation rentals and your commercial.

So what else do you do besides that? You have more than that, right? Yeah. So I have my portfolio in Texas that I don't really do a whole lot with, but it's just a lot of single family homes. Then the commercial building we've talked about. And then I have four short-term vacation rentals that I do VRBO and Airbnb, that kind of strategy. But then I have four other furnished condos that I do month or longer. And it's a nice synergy with the vacation rentals because I might have some, somebody that's longer term that I can move into a vacation rental in the shoulder slow season, or I'm getting a lot of traveling nurses, temporary workers. So sometimes those folks need to stay

for three months, sometimes six months, or I may have a retired couple that wants to ski for the season. They want to spend a couple thousand bucks a month on a vacation rental furnished condo, and yeah, it works out great. That's cool. And you manage all those yourself, you said, right? Yeah, I have a lot of help. I have a couple cleaning people, a couple of maintenance people, but I do all the sort of FaceTime with the guests slash, you know, tenants. That's cool. That's cool. And do you anticipate in the future? Are you going to do more vacation rentals, more commercial?

Where are you headed? You know, I would like to, I may go into the direction of just via a pure technology play of doing more marketing for other vacation rentals and help them provide some structure to their business. I personally don't want to use my time to really kind of grow that aspect. of it. Next step, though, I find a lot of value add in understanding and executing on bigger deals. So, but sort of these medium to larger deals for me, you know, a million to five million bucks. I'm going to look for other investors and we're going to execute on some of those opportunities.

Okay, cool. Hey, Mark, you've got SFRs. You've got the commercial, the vacation short term. You've got the vacation long term. I mean, that's a, that's a pretty unique mix. And it seems like one that you probably crafted intentionally. Is that the case? Did you do that intentionally? You know, part of it was it was the best opportunity at the time. Okay. You know, a lot of the vacation rentals in a resort market at the time I bought a few of these,

they were the best thing in terms of value to buy in terms of just price point, you know, what you could do if worst case scenario is to do a 12-month lease. I mean, you could go that route. It's not going to give you the best yield. but it's a good worst-case scenario. So that's why I did that. At the same time, though, it is a little bit labor-intensive, especially on the vacation rental side to really execute that well.

It's not a passive business, but it can be lucrative. Yeah. Hey, and really quickly, because you brought it up, you talk about the furnished versus vacation versus your standard, longer-term lease. What goes into that? You know, how different, it seems like kind of a quasi in between the two. what's different about running a furnished property short-term and a super short-term apartment,

vacation rental, and again, a longer-term typical lease? Right. Well, obviously, cleaning is a big part of that and just having a standard. So we've kind of come up with a little bit of a program between my two cleaning folks and my maintenance people that when it's time to have a turnover, you know, we execute. We know what we're going to do that day. And I'm planning that a couple weeks in advance always. At the same time, just keeping them booked, because I've actually had a lot of success, I would say with my sort of intermediate terminals, I've only had a couple months in the past four years where I haven't had those things filled.

So what that means, though, is I might have a traveling nurse who's working in the area for six months. Well, she called and I told her because of just a tight market, I can accommodate you here. for the first two months, and then I'm going to move you over there for the next. And you know what? They don't really have a lot of choice, and I have the best product. So that's how the synergies sort of work with all these different units. I love the diversification within that asset class. And I also love how, you know, I wrote a blog post on this a couple weeks ago,

but this topic of when finding out what strategy you should do, you got to look at, you know, what are you good at? What are your abilities? What's your location like? It's kind of like this intersection of a lot of different things. And for you, I love that you just figure that out that this works for you in your area. And that's why I advise people all the time, listen to as many podcasts as you can because you start to hear these things. And today there's probably dozens of people going, man, Mark's strategy is exactly what I want to do.

That works for me. I'm in a great area for that. And other people are like, eh, maybe someday down the road, I'll keep it in the file cabinet and come back to it. So I just love that. That's very cool. And the reminder that there is no one set path for anybody for it. particularly, I just, I think it's important to reiterate this for the newbies, you know, despite what the quote-unquote educators out there might tell you,

there isn't a single path. There isn't a single strategy that's going to work. But I'm not going to tell you what it is unless you pay me $9.97. Hold on. Let me bust out my wallet right now. Let me call my credit card company and extend my limit. Yeah. So, I mean, every niche, you know, he's working, you know, within his market, what works there. He's looking at the niches and the strategies and kind of polishing and creating a formulating a plan that works for himself. And that's the key is, you know, create that plan, create that strategy up front so that you can start to take steps forward

and actually start making things happen. Well, it was purposeful in that it was a little bit lifestyle engineering. I said, well, how much time and effort and energy do I want to spend on certain things and how much cash do I really want to have? If you use the mindset of every month put yourself in a position to take more and more risk, then all of a sudden, you can get to a place to do really cool things. So I've kind of hit phase one where between what my wife's doing, what I'm doing, we have enough to really do some cool things in both in terms of we have more control and flexibility with their time. But at the same time, now I'm to the place where I can say, you know what, maybe I get a couple people together and we go look at that $2 million deal.

You know, I know I can get the bank loan set up. I know that we can add about. you to this deal, all of a sudden, it can start to get more fun. Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. I love that. I like that term lifestyle engineering, you said. That's kind of cool, because that's what it is. You're saying, this is what I want out of my life. I'm going to build it out of my real estate investing. I'm going to engineer this to make it happen. And it's one of the things that we all love about real estate is the ability to do that. Very cool. Last question I have before we get out of here, or before we move to the fire round anyway,

is what are some of the potential pitfalls or, you know, things. that can happen when you invest in those resort areas, the mountain towns, the things like you're doing right now. Yeah. Well, I think a lot of folks do not give enough credit to just the fact of liquidity. And these markets are more like rubber band type reactions. So when things are going great, all of a sudden, there's just a lot of activity going on. And you'll have a hard time finding a place to rent or buy. At the same time, though, boy, when it got soft, it got soft hard. You know, a funny way of saying that, but that's really what happened, right? So, you know, I mean, the thing about it is in a resort market, there's not cookie-cutter houses so much. A lot of the stuff that really got into trouble was like the $800,000 custom home that was just an oddball.

And, you know, it sat there vacant and there was a problem with it. Or, you know, the same thing with the commercial side of things, too. There's just not a lot of liquidity in these markets when everything is, you know, don't go well. So from the investor's perspective, you know, you have to have money in reserves to get you through these tough times. Yeah, that's a good point. That is a great bit of advice, and I think we can apply that to absolutely anybody in real estate, whether they be a flipper or, you know, rental property, you know, single family rental property owner. I mean, reserves are absolutely key. Yeah. And I think it's coming again to the point where if we do have another soft spell, there's just a lot of people stretching right now, whether it's, you know, you might get caught on a couple bad flips or you might get caught doing a couple speck houses. You know, that's when the heartache starts for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. Very true. All right. Well, hey, let's shift gears and move over to the world famous Fire Round. It's time for the Fire Round. All right. Thank you very much to response. of the fire round, let's move on and ask you those fire round questions. So these questions come direct from the Bigger Pockets forums and we're going to fire them at you. Number one, how can I know what a commercial property is going to rent for? You know, that is difficult because in a small market, you may not have good comparables. So, but you can't go on the MLS. You can't see what things are renting for. The important thing, especially in a small market, is to look at what the gross rent rates are and the net rates are and do your adjusting to really get a good handle on what the market

rates are for your product type. Okay. So it's kind of like, it's kind of like how you would value the purchase price of a house. You just got to find what similar ones are going for and adjust up and down based on, you know, what your property has and doesn't have. Well, that, but also, if it's a gross lease, let's say it's a gross at $20 a square foot. Okay, well, then, you know, you might be going on triple net. Well, the triple net's $15, but it's really hard. hard building to building to know what those expenses are going to be. So apples to apples is more difficult. It does take a little homework and a little bit of math. Okay, cool. Awesome. All right, my question, do I need a commercial real estate broker to find a good commercial deal? No, absolutely not.

You know, and I like the fact that Ben was talking about sitting in his Tesla and the guy sat down and wanted to talk about selling his commercial portfolio. I mean, that is how a lot of business happens. In fact, you know, there's some folks in my town that, you know, I know, I know, know are getting to a point in their life where maybe they don't want to be property owners. Maybe they want to be property lenders. And so, yeah, I'm talking to those folks for sure. So you think just the relationships is the best way to get out there and source deals? I mean, obviously, brokers are a great resource. Well, in small markets especially, there's not a lot of people that's quote unquote specialized in commercial real estate brokerage. You know, because to lease a

commercial space in a small town is not all that fun. I mean, there's not a whole lot of sexy action in terms of commission on that kind of stuff, as well as just selling those buildings. It's not as fun and easy as to sell a luxury home, for example. So why does somebody want to get in that business? So there is a lot of opportunities in the small markets to just go out and hustle, talk to, you know, make calls and get to know people for sure. Cool. Next question. What's your best advice for people looking to invest in another city outside of their own?

Maybe they found a city that's growing really fast or, you know, they think those potential. What's your best advice for somebody doing that? I would say to find somebody to partner within that community, and you have to go in with the mindset of a win-win for everybody involved. In fact, I have two deals closing before the end of the year, and one of them is in Tulsa, and I got to know a guy in Tulsa on a recent trip, and I know what his goals are in life and kind of what his capacities are. And so, you know, he and I are going to work together. I'm going to be the money guy, and, you know, hopefully we have a good result on that. So he's going to beat my boots on the ground. Fantastic.

That's great. Last question. Do you think out of country investing is a smart move for new investors? Boy, you know, the only thing I've ever looked at was things in Puerto Rico and in Mexico. And, you know, you just have a lot of things that are outside your control there. And it's a long flight oftentimes to go and take care of those things. So I'm not to that point. So I don't have a good response for you.

Fair enough. All right. Let's move on to the last segment of the show. Famous for. All right. Number one, what is your favorite real estate book? You know, it's sort of a real estate slash business book. I do like the rich dad, poor dad, a poor quadrant.

Oh, yeah. Cash flow quadrant. Yeah. Cash flow quadrant. Yeah. So just was checking out the other day and, you know, a good mindset book for sure. Cool. What about a business book?

So I actually have it here with me. This is a non-traditional choice. This is not. your light bedtime reading, I recommend folks pick up a used old copy of the Kaplan-Schweiser CFA Level 1, Financial Reporting and Analysis. Yes, very boring, very boring. But within, you know, a phone book-sized book, you can really get a good brush up on accounting or if you're completely new to some of that stuff, it will really help you.

You really get to the point where you can prepare that stuff for the banks, etc. You know, cool. You know, what's interesting about that is, as you escalate in the levels of real estate investing from novice to become more advanced, I mean, you really do need to become more sophisticated in your knowledge base. And, you know, while I give grief to, you know, this book that is likely exceptionally boring, you know, you have to, you got to start to understand some of this stuff, huh? The pages are so thin. They're comparable like Bible book. pages. So, yeah, I can get, I get that. Yeah. All right. Mark, you got two kids. You're living in a pretty cool part of the world.

What do you do for fun? You know, besides the normal hiking and skiing, do a lot of backcountry skiing. You know, that's where you put skins on the skis, go uphill. So that's great exercise, a lot of fun. What are you talking about? I've never heard that term. You never heard of that? No, what is that? You put skins on your skis? It's called Alpine Touring, AT skiing. And so you put skins on the skis, you go up the hill. You can go check out stuff that, you know, the resorts can't offer. And yeah, you have to be careful with the avalanche danger. So I got to give that disclaimer.

But it's awesome. Great workout, great views. And then you get powder turns. Yeah, cool. That country is really cool. Yeah. And then a lot of road biking, too. This is a good area for road biking.

And I do want to encourage any bigger pockets listeners to come visit me, Glenwood Springs. I will give a 10% off BP discount. to anybody that wants to stay at one of my vacation rentals, but we may end up drinking beer and talking about real estate. That may be part of the deal. I'm coming. I'll see you tonight. Nice. That's awesome. That's awesome. All right.

Last question for me. And the last question of the famous four, what do you believe sets apart successful real estate investors from those who give up, fail, or never get started? You know, I liked what Brian said in that same episode we mentioned before about just the why. And I think that if your why is that you just don't like your boss and you think that real estate's going to solve your problems, you're going to have a tough time. I think that the why has to be multifaceted.

If you really want the freedom, if you want the lifestyle engineering that we talked about, you know, real estate can help you. But make sure you're doing it for the right reasons. I love it. I love it. Mark, thank you so much for coming on board. Are you already plugged your vacation rentals and your 10% discount? Where can people find out more about you? You know, I think BP is the best way for the community, and I look forward to hearing from folks, for sure.

Awesome. We will, of course, link to that in the show notes, so people can check you out there. At pickpockets.com slash show 156. There you go. All right, Mark, it's been a pleasure, man. Thanks for coming on board. Thanks for being a part of the BP family, and enjoy the snow. Thanks, guys.

Yeah, over a foot this week. Nice. Yeah, we've had almost a foot this week in Denver. So I feel you. Hi, man. Nice. All right. Thank you.

Appreciate it. Thanks. all right guys i don't know i was there was a lot of wisdom in there i hope you guys are able to get it all if you weren't get back in there listen up again it's uh i don't know the this show is difficult i it's funny because like you want to pick like hey we've done 156 shows which was my favorite which were my top 10 my top 15 and and i don't know about you but like i'm finding it harder and harder to do that uh just because the quality of the shows is so good. And just, I don't think I leave an interview without walking away with

something. Yeah. Yeah, same here. I mean, every guest we have now, I learn from continually and the shows we've recorded that are coming up soon, like they're incredible as well. Like, it's just been, it's been a really good run on this podcast with an amazing guest. So thank you guys to our amazing guests. Those people are listening to have been on the show. And if you are listening to the show and you think you could be an amazing guest, we would love to talk to you more about that. So go to biggerpockus.com slash guest and fill out the simple form there and let us know what you do and what you can bring to the bigger pockets table. Awesome, awesome. Hey, before we roll out, I want to read a review. This is from Desert Skier.

He left it on January 2nd. We've got a real estate investment group here in Dubai. And many of the members recommended Bigger Pockets, so I thought I'd give it a try. This is indeed a brilliant project for all those who value their freedom, time, and financial. I love listening to the other real estate investors and pick up on as many little deep details I have not thought. I've not thought about. I can't talk. I can't read. I'm convinced that the information provided allowed me to bring more astute decisions to my own business, which probably avoided many mistakes called experience. Great podcast. Thank you for bringing it to us. Well, that is pretty awesome. I love it. The listeners are everywhere. Dubai,

you name it. We've got listeners everywhere. So big thanks to you. And if you want to leave us a review, please do so, just jump on iTunes and you could leave us a rating and review and we would very much appreciate it. Otherwise, jump on the show notes, biggerpockets.com.com slash show 156. It's biggerpockets.com slash show 156. And I don't know, that's all I got.

What do you got? That's all I got. It's a great show. Go listen to last weeks if you haven't listened to it or next week except we're done. Take us out of here. Take us out. Okay.

Hey, guys, thanks again for being part of the Bigger Pockets community. Happy New Year. You know, use this time to crush your goals. We'll see you on the other side for Bigger Pockets. This is Brandon and Josh, signing off. 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 height, you're in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from BiggerPockets.com.

Your home for real estate investing. Investing online. Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I'm the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer. The show is produced by Ian K, copywriting is by Calico content, and editing is by Exodus

Media. If you'd like to learn more about real estate investing or to sign up for our free newsletter, please visit www.biggerpockets.com. The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only. All host and participant opinions are their own. Investment in any asset, real estate included, involves risk. So use your best judgment and consult with qualified advisors before investing. You should only risk capital you can afford to lose.

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