BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 300: How to Invest in Real Estate—The Ultimate Show for Getting Started with Josh Dorkin, Brandon Turner, and 11 Rockstar Investors

Episode Date: October 18, 2018

What is the best way to get started investing in real estate? The problem with this question is that there are SO many different pieces of advice. That’s why we’re excited to bring you one of the most unique episodes of the BiggerPockets Podcast we’ve ever had. In this episode, Josh Dorkin is back—and he and Brandon deliver a series of interviews with some of the past guests from the BiggerPockets Podcast, including David Greene, Kenyon Meadows, Andrew Cushman, Arianne Lemire, Darren Sager, Ryan Murdock, Tim Shiner, Anson Young, Zeona McIntyre, and Ben Leybovich. In This Episode We Cover: Why live and rent with Tim Shiner Darren Sager on what real estate investing strategy to focus on How to know if you’re ready with Ben Leybovich How Zeona McIntyre converts any kind of property into rentals Anson Young’s thoughts on when to tackle projects with grit and when to quit Why Kenyon Meadows thinks you should find an in-person mentor David Greene’s “one thing” How Arianne Lemire analyzes a deal each day Why Andrew Cushman focuses on process rather than outcome Ryan Murdock’s concept of cash reserves How to live-in flip with Mindy Jensen And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Store BiggerPockets Webinar BiggerPockets Events BiggerPockets Money Podcast Books Mentioned in this Show How to Invest in Real Estate by Josh Dorkin and Brandon Turner Investing in Real Estate with No or Low Money Down by Brandon Turner Set for Life by Scott Trench Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Real Estate Investing by BiggerPockets Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki Long-Distance Real Estate Investing by David Greene Emerging Real Estate Markets by David Lindahl My Wife Hates Loves Rent Houses by Tim and Crystal Shiner Entrepreneurial Reflections by Jay Rodgers Hamburger America by George Motz Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss Exactly What to Say by Phil M. Jones How I Turned $1,000 into Five Million in Real Estate in My Spare Time by William Nickerson Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman Finding and Funding Great Deals by Anson Young Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth High Performance Habits by Brendon Burchard Alternative Financial Medicine by Kenyon Meadows M.D. Building Wealth One House at a Time by John Schaub The ONE Thing by Gary Keller Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke Living with a SEAL by Jesse Itzler Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod The 4-hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason How to Sell Your Home by Mindy Jensen Tweetable Topics: “I really don’t care that much if I’m negative or positive. My bigger thing is appreciation.” —Tim Shiner (Tweet This!) “You can’t do something until you are ready to do it.” —Ben Leybovich (Tweet This!) “Everything that we do has a process.” —Brandon Turner (Tweet This!) “You can go for an online course or YouTube videos, but you cannot replace that in-person mentor.” —Kenyon Meadows (Tweet This!) “Stop thinking that what you need is someone to hold your hand and walk you through this.” —David Greene (Tweet This!) “Daily, consistent action will lead to great results.” —Arianne Lemire (Tweet This!) “Focus on the process and not the outcome.” —Andrew Cushman (Tweet This!) “Failure is not a failure if you learn from it.” —Andrew Cushman (Tweet This!) Connect with the Guests (through BiggerPockets) Tim Shiner Darren Sager Ben Leybovich Zeona McIntyre Anson Young Kenyon Meadows David Greene Arianne Lemire Andrew Cushman Ryan Murdock Mindy Jensen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I have an uncomfortable question for you. If your rent collection drop to 80% next month, how long would your cash flow hold up? What about 70% for the next three months? Would your cash reserves cover it? I talk all the time about scenario planning. Smart investors don't just model the upside. They also pressure test the downside.

This is even more important in a down market. And that's why I like Stessa's stress test report. It lets you model different rent collection scenarios, adjust expense assumptions, and instantly compare the results to your real bank balances. It's one of 12 professional grade reports inside Stessa Pro. Try it for yourself. Visit stessa.com slash mkTG slash bigger pockets

and get six months of Stessa Pro for free because it's better to discover your risk in a report than in a recession. A lot of property managers think their job is answering tenant emails and coordinating repairs. That's not the job. The job of a property manager is protecting and growing your operating income and earning your trust while they do it.

And that comes down to three numbers. Occupancy, delinquency, and net promoter score. If those numbers slip, your income slips. And your trust slips too. And most PMs don't hold themselves to performance standards. They focus on activity, not outcomes. Mind is different. They obsess over the metrics that actually grow your cash flow.

Go to mind.com slash show me to see how mine performs and get a month of management for free. Because if you're going to hire a property manager, hire one that manages your investment like an investment. Here's the thing about traveling. If you buy food at the airport, a burrito, salad, bag of peanuts, you start wondering if you should have opened a savings account for snacks. So wouldn't it be great if you could actually earn money while you're traveling? Well, you can. Airbnb has something called the co-host network. While you're away, you can hire a vetted local co-host with hosting experience to help take care of things. Communicating with guests, preparing your space, managing reservations,

everything runs smoothly while you're off making memories. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. This is the bigger pockets podcast. This is a bigger podcast show. Wait, wait. I say that. Excuse me. I say that. Excuse me. This is my show. Excuse me. This is my show. What are you doing? Is the bigger pockets podcast. Hold on. Ready. This is the bigger pockets podcast. The show. Dude, it's my show. Cue the music.

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 is going on, everybody?

This is Josh Jorken. host the official host the ex the ex the ex the ex host I'm sorry excuse you the ex host of the bigger pockets podcast the bigger pockets podcast the old the old host of the bigger pockets podcast with my co-host undeserving Brandon Turner I have come back everybody to take over my show back from the dead look at this and in has grown a disgusting beard his brain is getting too large

and I take over Handsome is the word you were looking for. Yeah, I don't know, man. What's up? You're back. You're back from the dead. Weird. What's up?

I think we hinted a few weeks ago that you were coming back. It was. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah, and this was going to be a two-part show, and we've decided to crunch it together into one epic. Monster show.

Monster, really, really long and quite entertaining and helpful show. It is. Yeah. And I would encourage you guys that this is going to be the longest show we've ever done, I think. But listen to it in two parts if you have to on your drive to work and home. Make sure you listen to the whole thing. Everything we talk about today, every interview we do, and we'll get to that in a minute, is solid. Solid.

Solid. So, yeah. So speaking of guests, yes, guests, plural. I'm back. Well, you're back. Let's talk about me. Let's not talk about you. We're going to talk about a guest today.

We actually, we actually have 11 guests today. We have 11. 12, including me. 12, including you, if you're a guest today. We can call you a guest today. I'm kind of a guest host. I am not here permanently, guys, unfortunately. I am back for today.

I just want to see Brandon Square. I want to make him a little uncomfortable. Thanks. That's weird. Today we're going to interview 11 of our past guests and we're simply going to ask them. We have a few questions, but mainly what is your best advice for new real estate investors. And like some of these are some of our fan favorites, people that people just love these guys and girls. Yeah.

It's what? Are you doing a Yoda impression? Yes. I don't even know what you're doing. Josh is clearly intoxicated. Who watched late night television knows what's happening. Are you over 50? Don't worry about it.

I don't think you're 50 yet. Anyway, they also share book recommendations. They do. Speaking of books. Let's get to today's. Quick tip. Oh, it's so much better with me. I don't know.

I don't know. Okay. Quick tip. Today's quick tip. All right. So the quick tip is, well, why are we doing this show? Why are we doing this weird show? Why are you back? Why is, it's because you're doing this show. We are super excited about something, Brandon. And I don't know quite how we made this happen given the fact that you can't stand me. And I can't stand. Yeah, I was going to say you can't stand me. But you like me. I just can't stand you. So it's a good relationship. I think you're awesome. Yeah. I think you're awesome. You like my beard especially. Anyway, it's horrible. But here's today's quick tip. Brandon and I have spent some time doing something that I've wanted to do. for a very long time. And that is to write a full book, my first full-length book, which is really

exciting. I mean, I know this is like your 732nd book. Welcome to being a published author, Josh. Well, I am a publisher. The air is a little better up here. Now I'm the author as well. So I'm very excited about this. So Brandon and I have a book coming out titled How to Invest. It comes out today. It comes out. It does. Can you just let me finish.

Go, go, go. It's titled, how to invest in real estate, the ultimate beginner's guide to getting started. Not to be confused with the ultimate beginner's guide, which we wrote five and a half years ago as a free ebook on the site. Correct. And that book has been downloaded by like well over a million people. I think millions and millions of downloads. I don't know exactly.

But that book served as inspiration. That was a guide. It was on the website. we gave it away as a free e-book. And what happened was we had countless people over the years reaching out to us, telling us how awesome the UBG was, and how they were just hoping that we could turn it into something a little more comprehensive. And so since Brandon fired me from the podcast, I had a little more time and decided to do this.

No, we've been hoping to do this for a while and collaborated on this book, which is absolutely fantastic, if I do so as the author. Well, it's fantastic, not just because, like, you know, you helped, you know, write it, which makes it more fantastic. But no, what's cool is that we took the kind of approach of like, let's take a bunch of stories of Bigger Pockets podcast guests, people that you've listened to for years on the show here. And we have over 40 stories throughout the book.

So every time we talk about a different type of investing, because here's the idea of the book, right? The big picture, and we'll move on in just a second. But the big picture is this. When somebody says, I want to invest in real estate, what does that even mean? We wanted to make one. Yeah, like what does that actually mean? What type of real estate, right?

So we wanted to make one book that like, we actually tentatively called it start here. The first title of this was called start here. Because we wanted to be able to hand people a book and say, start here. So if you're new, if you've done less than five deals, if you know people who have done less than five deals, get them this book. Even if you've done 100 deals, you'll probably learn something cool. But really the idea is we wanted to give one book to rule them all, one book to find them, one book to, I don't know the rest of that. Is that a Lord of the Rings? Lord of the Rings reference, yes.

But one book we wanted to be like, this is the, I know, this is the, that explains the beard. There you go. You're the troll. You're that short guy. What's his name? I don't know. Gimley. Gimley.

Gimley. Yeah, I'm Gimley. Yeah, I'm Gimley. Yeah, I'm Gimley. Just like him. That's funny. Anyways, okay, we're going to move on. But anyway, you guys, check out the book.

Where's your axe? I need an axe. Actually, I did axe throwing in Austin a few weeks ago. That was amazing. Anyway. Oh, nice. How to invest in real estate, the ultimate beginner's guide. You can get it today on biggerpockets.com slash how to invest or if it's easier,

just go to biggerpockets.com.com slash how to invest. You can get the book now. There are a bunch of launch-only stuff or a bunch of bonuses you get, including if you buy in the first couple weeks, you're going to get an invite to a special live Q&A webinar with Josh and I. I'm not, I might dance on the Q&A webinar, but you'd have to ask. Oh, I thought we were doing that as a bonus. No, no, no, no, no, no. I will dance for free. You don't need to pay for that. I'll dance for anybody anytime. but you come to a Q&A webinar. We'll hang out with you for a while,

answer your questions, but you've got to buy the book in the first two weeks to get that. Check it out. There's digital packages. There's ultimate packages where you get digital, audio, physical, everything shipped to your house.

So check it out, biggerpockets.com slash how to invest. No, we don't ship it via email, right? Yes, okay. Super fancy. All right. So we've talked long enough. I know you guys are like,

stop talking about the book. Yep. Well, we will in a minute. Oh, what do you want to add? We will in a minute. BiggerPockets.com, how to invest. Get the book today. There you go.

Let's make it the bestselling real estate book in the world. That's the goal. That's the goal. That is. All right, should we get to this thing? Let's get to the interviews. You guys are to love this. Again, 11 interviews with some of the best real estate investors that I know and a lot

of really fun interviews, a lot of laughs today. You guys are going to love this. No chitch out really in between. You got all your chitchat up front. Yep. We're just going to dive right into this thing. It's the advice. Vice is gold, Jerry, gold.

Gold. Yes. So also, guys, next week, check out the show. It was going to be a two-parter. It's not going to be. So check out the show. It's going to be great because, you know. You won't be back next week.

I won't be into. All right. Life will be better for you and your ears. I don't know. Is that from something? I don't know. We're moving on. I just made that up.

Yes. All right. We're moving on. Let's get to the interviews right now. All right. Thanks, guys. Tim, welcome to the show, man. So I have not had the pleasure of chatting with you on the podcast.

Of course, Mindy was subbing in for me that day. It's nice to meet you. It's nice to chat with you. Today's show, we're doing something very special. And we're going to focus on newbies. But before we do, let's give everybody like a 60 second brief on who you are. What do you do? What's your kind of real estate strategy?

Sure. Thanks for having me on, guys. I appreciate it. I'm excited about it being on this greatest hits album. Oh, yeah. 300 or 301. My original podcast was 221 with the substitute teacher Mindy Jensen and Brandon. And Brandon was in Hawaii.

So now it looks like he's not in Hawaii. So I will be next week. Next week. He's on his way. You were sunburned and there was birds chirping in the background of that one. 221. Keeping it professional. He was.

So my background is I'm like the antichrist on bigger pockets because I buy for, I buy for appreciation, which is like riverboat gambling. Bitcoin. I'm the Bitcoin of real estate. And so what my thing is is my wife and I, you know, I got some silver hair. And when you're young, you're trying to scrap a deal together. I get it. And you got to do whatever you got to do. But I'm in a different phase of my life. So all I buy is quality, real estate and fantastic school districts. Literally where I buy is the number one school district out of 963 in Texas. There's a cool little website called School Digger, like you're digging schools, to see what your town ranks with school districts.

districts. So I'm totally focused on school districts and appreciation. I love it. I actually, I, when I did your show, I changed a little bit. My entire world perspective changed a little bit because I'm like, Tim is obviously doing something right. That's true. I started growing a beard after that show. And it hasn't stopped. And it has not stopped. It's beautiful. Beautiful is the word you were looking for. Beautiful. All right. So other than, other than the unicorns and rainbows when I look at it. That's what I'm going for. That's the LSD. Oh, okay. Okay.

So other than the advice of like growing a beard, what do you suggest for newbie investors for getting started? So there's a couple of things. One is I'm always worried about couples having a conflict. The guy wants to be an investor. The girl doesn't. And, you know, happy wife, happy life. So you got to focus on that.

So one thing I would say is you're living on your launch pad. And what I mean by that is if you're living in a $200,000 house, you're probably going to go buy $100,000 rental. But if you live it, if you turn your current house, your launch pad into your rental. A couple things happened. One is you're going to be guaranteed that your next personal residence might be 250 or 300 and you just started out with, you know, 50% better rental. The other thing is you made your wife happy because now you're moving into a new house and you know the good and the bad and the ugly of your current house. And the most important thing,

I think we'd all agree from listing all the bigger pockets, but owner occupied houses, you can get in for three to five percent. Investment properties are 20%. So you could have bought a $100,000 house, took your 20 grand out of savings, or you can turn your $200,000 house, go buy a $300,000 house at 3% and put $9,000 down, make Mama happy and everyone's happy. And you know what's good and bad about your current place you're living in instead of buying your first house, having a foundation issue, having a hidden problem, and then you never buy your second house. So you're talking about just doing basically a living flip kind of strategy, yeah?

Not flip, just live and rent. I mean, turn your first house into your rental. because oh okay that's what just i got it got we've all had all these people go man i just don't know where to get started well you're already living in your first rent house go by go buy another personal residence you'll be good to go so my things are our school districts and just get going with your first house because you know i hear it all the time where people just you know the wife doesn't want to do or the husband doesn't want to do it it's an easy way to start with your first one by buying a better house and turning your current house into a rental that's a fantastic tip yeah that's really

I actually don't think anybody on 300 episodes of the show has actually said, like, as a strategy, take your house. I mean, people do it accidentally all the time, like a lot of accidents. Yeah, they just move. I mean, that's the strategy. Just move. Just move. I can see a Nike swoosh with that. Just move.

Okay. What do you say to the guys who, you know, are living in a property where, you know, they might be a little cash flow negative if they were to rent that house? You know, on my episode 221, I basically, because I have other businesses and other revenue streams, I really don't care that much if I'm negative or positive. My bigger thing is appreciation. If I have a $300,000 house and it goes up 10%, I made 30 grand. Let's say it was negative 200 a month, two times 12 is 24. So your delta on that is, you know, like $27,000. So I look at a little bit different, but I'm in a different situation currently, and I'm 52 years old. But if you're 22 years old or 30 years old and you start obtaining all this negative

cash flow, it could sink you. But if you've got other things going on and you always say, when you pick the house, you pick the problem. You know, pick the property. You pick the problem. I hate the word problem. But, you know, you got different things on the lower end. And with the higher end stuff, I know that we talked about it, Brandon, the other strategy that we do out of the higher end that you couldn't do out of the lower end. If you've got lower end properties, those people are probably never going to be homeowners.

But what we do with my wife is buy for me, tear up your lease for free. So one of our renters and one of our high-end properties with 750 or 800 beacon score, we allow them to tear up. up the lease if they buy a different property, not our rent house, a different property from my wife. So now when that renter leaves, my wife makes a 3% pop. So, I mean, it's, and it works. I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm not one of these pie in the sky guys. Last year, my wife made $71,000 in commission selling properties to our renters because we have high-end rent houses.

That's awesome. Those people shouldn't be renters. And on that note, like, when I look at my most expensive properties that I own right now, the tenants are also the highest quality tenant I have. I get the least amount of phone calls. And those houses have appreciated, like, in the last few years, an incredible amount, more than my crappy little dumpy thing that did cash flow really well, right? And now actually, the good ones are now cash flowing because rent went up so much because

it's such a high demand area. Exactly. You just got to wait it out for a couple of years. You know, all my stuff wasn't positive day one, but as long as they keep printing more money, rents are going to go up and eventually you're going to be all right on that. one other things since you asked for one tip and we'll give me you like seven. Yeah. Keep going. Sorry.

So wind me up. Here we go. The other thing we do is we write the first $100 worth of repairs are on the tenant. And the reason being is it avoids some of those calls you were talking about, Brandon. So when someone calls, hey, I got a garbage disposal, well, you got to hit the reset and that's not $100. Or I got a loose doorknob. Well, thank you for telling me. I'll put that on your record that you need to get that fixed. So you kind of flip the script on it because once you start obtaining more properties, it's going to be more challenging to manage. So we put the first hundred bucks is on them. We explained to them that these houses are a retirement. We're going to take care of you. It's just we can't have a zillion of different calls on little doorknobs and things like that. What's the response to that? Yeah.

It's great. Once you explained it to them and just going see it from our side, but also realize there's no one that cares more about this house. I mean, this isn't, oh, we have one rent houses. You know, we've got, we've got 19 quality high-end rentals before we had some low-end apartments. we had a podcast a year and a half ago, we cleared up all of the lower end stuff. And now it's just quality stuff. Portfolios worth about $8 million. And it's just quality stuff. That's great.

That's great. Awesome, man. Anything anything else, Brandon? I'm up for any other final tips to leave us with before we get out of here, Tim, for a brand newbie, just getting started. I'm going to do a couple things. You know, a shameless plug. If I don't come on and plug, it's something, then we're in trouble.

But I'd send each of you guys copy of this book. And what's funny is it was made in the, my wife loves slash hates rental properties. And what it is. I just said it. Which is it. Make a decision. Exactly. But it's 16 chapters.

I thought about it when I saw Scott, Tranch and Mindy and y'all's four year in Denver. And I thought, I'm going to write a book with the guy's perspective on a chapter and then the girl's perspective. Guy girl, guy, girl. I made my wife look like Jensen, the Jetson lady. There you. Not Mindy Jensen, but.

A little animated cartoon wife. Yeah. Exactly. But the reason why all the money goes to the women's shelter, Safe Haven in Fort War, Texas. I'm not trying to make any money off it. But what it's for is when the guys into this and the girls not or vice versa, you got this book back and forth explaining the guy's perspective and the girl's perspective.

And what got me thinking about that is the book everyone recommends on your show. That guy wrote a lot of books. And then Kim Kiyosaki wrote a lot of books. And I read her book and it made me understand the female perspective. So I wanted to combine male. and female perspective all in one. And then the other thing that Mindy asks is, this is

the coolest book I've read in probably the last five years. What is it? This is a radio show. You do realize you keep showing pictures. It's a radio show, man. It's YouTube also. It's YouTube also.

This beard just gets, I mean, I'm like, it's like a tractor beep. It's distracting. It's disgusting. It's attractive. Attractive is the word you were looking for. This is something.

I think I can see a Cheeto in it. It's not. Saving it for later, all right? It's entrepreneurial reflection. I just met the author about a month ago. He's great guy. 78-year-old guy. His name is Jay Rogers, R-O-D-G-E-R-S.

And what's great about it, like he did a deal where he bought a condo in the Omni in downtown Fort Worth. And he was worried that they were going to discount out the final units and it would hurt his value. And so he ended up writing in the contract that if you discount any units, then I get the difference. So say it's 40 bucks a square foot, he's going to get it. So sure enough, they try to blow out a unit for like 300 grand and his was a multi-million dollar unit. So he put a contract on the $300,000 unit. He would have got it for like $23,000 because of the discount. So anyway,

his stuff is just super, a lot of real estate, a lot of higher end. It's like a book for an older entrepreneur. It's not blocking and tackling like Scott Trench is set for life, which is a great book to get started with. This is kind of algebra and calculus. Cool little book. Cool. Awesome. And obviously,

that would be your book recommendation then. There you go. There you go. All right. Fantastic. Well, Tim, thank you for coming on and sharing your energy and your wisdom. And we really appreciate it.

I appreciate it. And thank y'all for doing this greatest hits podcast. Yeah. It's much appreciated. Well, we're going to people connect with you at. You had a website and any of that? Yeah. Tim Shiner, like a black eye.

I remember, Tim Shiner.com. There you go. And I've got a poster there that's free, 25 habits of a future millionaire. It's got the podcast, 221 that I was on before with y'all. And I also want to recommend 242, Josh Randalls. Yeah, Josh, you and Josh were so freaking hilarious. And, Brandi, you were too, but they just had to figure out which Josh was talking. It was Josh that dated his sister.

That thing was crazy. That one had to cry. That's my favorite one so far. That's awesome. All right. This is a lot of fun. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks. Darren Sager, what up, man? It's, it's been a while. It's been a while. We've been chatting recently, but remind the audience who you are. You've been on the show before. You're all around bigger pockets, but very briefly, let people know what your story is.

I've been a real estate investor since 1998, primarily investing in Duplex's small multifamily homes near train stations with easy commutes in and out of New York, New Jersey into Manhattan. That's right. The train station thing was what I thought was so cool. That was cool. Very smart. Yeah, yeah. And you're also an agent, right?

I am an agent, yes. I primarily work with investors. I got my license really because there was no agents that really understood what I was trying to do. And it seems a lot of agents are that way still to this day. So, I mean, that could be another whole conversation as is. That's great. That's great. Cool, man.

So you've been doing this for a long time. You've got a very specific strategy that works well for you. What was the show that you were on previously? 48, right? It was like 48. That's been a long time. That was a long time ago. Yeah.

So if you guys have not listened to Darren's entire show, go listen to BiggerPockets.com. So I show 48. That's right. Last time I think, Josh, you were down in the basement. And Brandon was in some closet. in Washington State. He's usually in a closet somewhere. It has been too long.

Actually, you're in some rural area, right? Rural, rural area. All right. All right. I'm not making fun of Brandon today. So, let's is great. I miss this. This is good.

I'm coming back, baby. Yeah. Okay. I want to get to the topic of today's show, which is new investors, best advice for getting started. So, Darren, what is your. best advice that you would give a new investor about when they're going to get into real estate? Simply put, focus. I think the biggest problem that a new investor has when they come in

is that they get inundated with too much information. They sort of come out and try to take a shotgun approach, just trying to make something happen. And real estate investing is a rather large area. They actually try to learn too much too soon and they get overwhelmed by it. And if you're doing too much in a very short period of time, you're never going to get anything done. It's kind of like use the analogy of actually building a house. If you're a general contractor, you generally don't do, you don't build the entire house yourself. You know, you go out and sub different aspects of it out to different people who are specialized in it. So I think it's really important for a new investor to come in and really just focus on one area that they can get into and work on that consistently.

on a daily basis, just do a little bit every day towards that. Because otherwise, they're just going to go in a thousand different directions and not actually get anything to happen. Yeah. So how does somebody, I mean, we're talking about newbies here, right? So how does a newbie even know what strategy to start with? How do they know what to focus on? What would you recommend?

I think probably the easiest thing for a newer person to invest in is probably something. type of owner-occupied situation in a small multifamily house. I always consider it kind of like dipping your foot in a pool. I call it landlord light because by you owner-occupying a home, you don't have like basically standard landlord-tenant relationships in many states. Again, it depends upon the state that you're in, but they're more seen as a guest in your house, per se, and it's a little bit easier to deal with situations should they come up. So the very first thing I would do is, again, if you're starting off and you want to get into this, is try to find a two or a three that you possibly can buy.

But it's really work with a lender. Talk to a lender. Find out exactly what you can do. I get people call me up all the time. So, you know, where should I be going? Where should I invest? And the big question is, you know, what can you actually do? You know, and if you're not sitting at a lot of capital, you know, maybe an FHA loan is the way to go to get into a small multifamily,

only putting three and a half percent down. But that's probably the most sound advice to, I think, to get involved in real estate investing. Get into a small multifamily and see if you like it. Try to get into the absolute best place that you possibly can. I think a lot of people try to go into more challenging neighborhoods because they feel that the rate of return that they're going to have is going to be greater than other places. However, the experience that they may have is not going to be one that could lead to them I'm actually having a very long-term relationship with real estate investing.

It's like, Josh, like yourself. I mean, look at you. Oh, wow, you're dirty, man. I mean, like, I'm pulling all the, from a break, and you just come slugging, man. Ouch. No, it's true. It's true. Absolutely.

But, Josh, your bad experience, though, in the end, we all have to be very grateful for it. Because if it wasn't for you having that bad experiences, we wouldn't be talking at this very moment. So this is true. This is true. Hey, you talked about treating them like guests. And I think that's great. But you keep in mind, you know, obviously, and you know this, but just I want the listeners to know, you know, you still want to make sure you got proper paperwork and you do everything.

Oh, you do it at a business like level. I don't mean that you should be treating them like a house guest on a cordial level. That's not what I mean. What I mean is that the way, and I'm not an attorney and I only played one in high school drama. So you definitely should talk to your attorney about this. But it's my understanding that the way the law perceives the tenants being in your residence is different since they're underneath your roof versus a standard landlord tenant relationship when you don't occupy the unit on a small multifamily. Yeah, that whole idea of house hacking, like focusing on that. I think it's such a good first step.

I mean, that's how I started. Did you house hack to do, right? Like the beginning. Yeah. Yeah, like it's such a good, just intro thing. Now, what about somebody who just like cannot do that for whatever reason? Let's say their spouse will not live in a multifamily no matter what. Like, how does somebody then go, well, should I just not invest in real estate or do you have another backup plan for those people?

Well, obviously, I think it's best if, you know, if you have a spouse that you're both working towards the same goal. Yeah. So if, you know, Josh, when you came out a couple years ago and did our meetup in New York, you literally did not talk about real estate investing. I don't think at all. But people seem to like me, though, I think. Absolutely. Now, it was a great meetup.

What you spoke about for that entire time was your why. The purpose, yeah. Right, exactly. So if you're not both working towards that similar purpose, then you're not going to be on the same page, no matter what it is that you try to do. You both have to be, you know, both have to have the similar goals as to what it is you're trying to achieve. So you got to get your why straight no matter what. It doesn't matter, you know, what you possibly can get into.

So if your spouse doesn't want to go into a small multifamily and kind of take that step, then obviously you have to look at other prospective ways of getting in. If you want to start in small multifamily, you're obviously going to have to put more money down and you're going to have to choose a market that hopefully your spouse will be comfortable going to in the middle of the night. You know, you don't want to go into those rough neighborhoods where it could be a little bit more challenging just to chase higher returns. Because again, you're chasing higher returns, but you're also chasing what's going to be an impact upon your time. All right? And that's something that we really don't talk about all that much. Yeah, everyone loves, oh, what's the cap rate? You know,

what's it going to be? What's my internal way to return? But what's your time worth, right? It's, Is it worth to get those double-digit returns if it means that you're getting text in the middle of the night with issue after issue? To me, it's not. I'm much more conservative in that way. I'd rather make less and have much more peace in my life. I could not agree more, yeah. I think people have overlooked that a lot too, right? I mean, like, Josh, you started at that level.

I started at that level. Like, buy like the dumpy as cheapest house you can buy or like, you know, like even if it's in a little bit of a war zone or a little bit of a, yeah, I regret those. I mean, I learned a lot, but man, they're not my good properties today. Absolutely. And I think a lot of newer investors sometimes, if they're working with an agent who is really driven upon making a sale to making their living, then I don't think that's probably the best agent that they should be working with. I don't think in all reality that when it comes to working with a real estate agent, that

you should be working with an agent who doesn't actually walk the walk. if they don't have income-producing properties, and they're just out there, you know, providing new things saying you should buy here, because they're not actually going to add value at the end of the day after the sale. Anyone can really go out and make a sale as a real estate agent. And it's kind of funny. Michelle, my girlfriend, she just took the real estate exam,

and she said they covered real estate investing. She said, for one paragraph. Oh, yeah, that's nice. In the 75-hour class, you're in. in New Jersey. But that was it. So now suddenly, with the real estate license, we can go out as real estate agents and sell someone a billion dollar property, a million dollar investment.

And they only covered it for literally, she said, five minutes. Yeah, that's crazy. It's so true, though. I mean, like, yeah, most agents out there have little training. So I think I would actually add that as a good second tip today from you, right? It's like, find an investor-friendly agent, somebody who can help you focus. Like, once you have your focus, find an agent who can actually help you do that. great. When I got my license, it was the same thing. I don't think I spent three minutes on investing as an agent.

So awesome, Darren. Well, listen, great advice. We really do appreciate it before we let you go. We'd love a book recommendation from you. I think this was the last recommendation I had, right? It was for Hamburger America. But I think it got thrown out. Actually, I probably said my most prize book that I have in my collection is actually this one. Hey, that's my book. So I don't know if you're aware, but this is actually the very first printed copy. What is the book, by the way? Yeah, I think that was. Low and No Money Down by Brandon Turner.

So, yeah, the very first printing that was ever done, Brandon actually sent it to my house. There was two of these. And I am absolutely, this is really my prize collection. But if I have to say a book right now that that's been a huge impact is probably Chris Boss has never split the difference. This is a fantastic book in a way you can apply. And also one that I've really been getting into recently is Phil M. Jones exactly what to say. Oh, I've seen that, but I haven't got it yet.

It is a fantastic book. You got to check it out. Great. I will. All right, where can people find out more about you? Where can they connect with you at? Josh, would you believe I still don't have a website? I believe it.

I know you. You're on bigger pockets and you got the amazing meetup. Absolutely. Yes, we do a good meetup. You've been a guest. And now that you're going to Hawaii, I don't know how we're going to be able to lure you back from like, Halfway around the world. Just do the meetup in Maui.

It'll be much better. Peter Lugar's. Fancy steak. You can find me on bigger pockets or you can email me at Darren Sager at yahoo.com. It's probably my best way to get a hold of me. Perfect. Well, thank you. All right, Ben Labovic, welcome to the show.

And let me first say congratulations on the recent closing. You just bought an apartment complex. Hey, Mazel. I sure did. As Burke says, welcome to the club. There you go. Ben, who are you? What are you doing real estate?

state. My name is Ben Labovich. A professionally trained violinist. I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I needed to figure out what to do with self because punching the clock wasn't going to be the wisest thing to do according to the docs. And of all of the things that I had intellectual, whether with all, you know, real estate turned out to be like the most optimal decision.

I thought. And so I got in. And the other reason I got in is I was plain stupid. just like everybody else, you know. Who does real estate unless you're stupid? You got to be stupid. This is the newbie show, Ben. Stop it.

Stop it. All right. So you got into real. By the way, you were episode number 14, number 61, and number 152. I'd encourage people to go out and listen to those to hear your full story. So you got into real estate. You're a multifamily guy. You just bought a 90, just syndicated a 98 unit.

So now you're in the syndication club. $10 million deal. It's going to be 15 when I'm done with it three years from now. Fantastic. That's great. But let's go back to the beginning. I mean, like, what is your tip? What is that number one tip you have for people who are just getting started today?

Well, my number one tip, I think, has nothing to do with real estate. It has to do with self. You have to know who you are and you have to know cycles. Like everybody always talks about real estate cycles and every kind of market cycle. Well, people don't understand usually that we as humans as people go through cycles. And doing something that is akin to trying to shove a square peg into a round hole with regard to where you are in an, you know, like your intellectual wealth state is a big, huge mistake, I think. And people don't give that enough credit. You can't do something before you are ready to do it, both, you know, spiritually and logically have the kind of the worth up here.

So what do you mean by cycle? I mean, like a personal cycle. I don't, I mean, like, I've interviewed you for probably like four to five hours now on this podcast. And I got to tell you, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. Well, the reason you can't relate is because you've been stuck in the five-year-old cycle ever since you five. So you don't have a hurdle to relate to pride in these things. All right. Tell us what you mean, cycle.

What is that? So, so when you are. When you are listening to this podcast and you are listening to Ben Labovich who started with buying duplexes and then sixplexes and then 10plexes and then 100 units, syndication, all that, you're like, I want to do that. I want to do that. The thing you don't understand is that it took me five years. It took me five years. Like I heard Burke talk about syndication and I said, this makes sense, kind of sort of, but it took me five years to grow into understanding what. that process and that game really is about i need people to kind of be cognizant of the fact that

you are not ready until you are ready to do something and we're all about hurrays and we're all about you know high fives and all that stuff that's not real life you need to know what your highest and best use in this moment will be if it's a duplex then that's what it is That's what it is. Don't push it. You will make a mistake. If you have enough intellectual worth to understand how to do a hundred unit and raise $3.5 million from partners and do all that stuff, if you have it, great, do that. But that's the biggest mistake I see people make, is trying to jump into pants of somebody that they haven't grown into. And that's where you make the mistakes. And you got to be careful. And the other piece of it is that we change.

There was a time when I was a duplex guy. And then there was a time I was a cash flow guy. I'm not a cash flow guy anymore because syndication is not a cash flow play. And that's a whole not another conversation. But I'm not that guy anymore. But it took time to develop the intellectual worth to be able to see things from a different focal point. So how do you balance between this idea of like I want to grow? I want to push myself to get to a next level.

But I also don't want to get out like I want to know myself and know what I'm capable of. So how would you balance that? between pushing to the next level. You weren't a 98 unit kind of guy before, right? You were a smaller multifamily. So like how do you know how to push yourself to that next level without getting over your head? That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that question, really.

You just know internally. That's what I'm saying is pay attention to self and pay attention to your cycles. Because this is not something that you can necessarily rationalize. This is just something you know internally where you are, intellectually and spiritually and emotionally where you are. You know, I am not big on high fives and hurrays. And if I can do it, you can do it. Maybe you can't.

And that's fine. We need both. We need you and we need me. You know, that's okay. How do you know you're ready? Like, you know, you just skip from like jumping from a duplex to big, big old 90, what was it, 91 units? I don't know what it was, but nonetheless, how does somebody know?

So, well, it's not 100 is what it's not. So the question, the question I have, no, this is a beginner show, right? So you're jumping a sub 100 units here, obviously. And so how does somebody know that they're even ready to start? How about that? I'm going to start because my back was to the wall. That's a very interesting conversation. My partner, Sam Grooms, left a big six-figure job with a publicly traded company as a CPA

working directly with SEC to go into real estate. I respect that a lot. Okay. He left something. There was a lot he could have lost by leaving. I didn't. I go on these podcasts and everybody tells me, oh, man, you're a struggle, you're a mess, how much you had to overcome.

No, I didn't have anything that I was losing. My back was to the wall. It was this or what? So how do you know that you are ready? You know that you are ready. That's all I can tell you is you know that you are ready. And you're never ready. When you put $200,000 cash on the line without a finance contingency,

not knowing if you are going to raise the money to be able to close. on the deal, you only do that if you are ready to do that. But that's how you know you're ready to do that because you do it. Yeah. Deep. Makes sense. Makes sense. All right, Ben, well, listen, man, thank you for your time before we let you go. Give us a book recommendation. What are you enjoying these days? Not this days. The book that started everything for me was actually by Nickerson. I think it's William Nickerson, how I turned 5,000 into 5 million or something like that, it's called. You can find it on, it's an old book. I don't know if it's been republished or what, but I remember I got it out of library.

You know, everybody talks about rich dad and all that, all that is good. And this is not an apartment book. This is just a book of how you start with very little and how you bridge into a little more, into a little more, into that mindset of starting with a little and bridging, finding a way to bridge the equity, bridge your experience, bridge your net worth. That book started me looking for the answers, basically. Love it. That's great.

Awesome, man. All right. Well, where can people connect with you at? Where can they find out more about you? You mean besides bigger pockets? Besides bigger pockets? They can email me through my website, just ask ben Y.com. They can find me on Facebook or Twitter or something like that.

Good chatting. Good luck to you. you go for 100 next time, man. A little short this time. That's funny. Great to be with you guys. You too. Take it easy.

Bye bye. Bye. All right. Ziana, welcome back to the Bigger Pockets podcast. How are you? Great. Thanks for having me. Howdy.

So Josh was not on the last episode with you either, was he? I don't think. No, so Josh knows nothing. No, Josh knows nothing. Wow. I mean, this is what my children think. But, you know, now that it's public, I'm screwed. Yeah.

All right. So, yeah, we did, we did meet at one of our bigger pockets meetup. So, yeah. And I remembered that, shockingly. I know. It's because I'm striking beautiful. I'm amazing. You've got like glitter, glitter shimmering down your hair.

I was going to burning man. Nice. I was just going to ask if you're going to burning man because I thought I remember you saying that. So very cool. Once that start. Have fun. All right.

So tell us who you are. How do you got, like, what's your real estate kind of story in the next like 60 seconds? Go. I'm Zana McIntyre and I do real estate through Airbnb. So I now own six properties, but I started with nothing. And I was just renting out a room in the house that I was renting. And then it kind of grew into renting a few different apartments. And then I've also segued into managing homes for other people. So now we manage on top of my six properties, we manage another 20 all over the world. So it's definitely something that's super doable to people, for people that don't have any properties on their own and they can use other people's properties to get into it

and build a whole bunch of savings and wealth through that. And then they can segue into buying their own properties. And you can do Airbnb just with, you know, a spare room in your house or in your basement. So I think it's a really accessible tool for people that are wanting to get started. Perfect. Nice. Nice. All right. And so what would what would be your tip then? I mean, And what newbie tip might be something along the lines of what you did, but maybe not? What would you recommend to somebody starting out? I think it's really important to just get started. And that's why Airbnb is such a great tool, is that you don't need to own anything.

You generally live somewhere so you can start just renting out your room if you're on a trip or you go camping or whatever. If you have a spare room, you can make money off of that. So just start renting that out. Fix up your basement, rent the RV that's parked in your driveway. Like get creative. I even know people that rent a tent in their backyard, and they pay for like half their mortgage with that. So there's lost ways.

Yeah, glamping. A tent and a fire. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. This one, I mean, the rest of it all, you know, I could get around. So they've got a property. They've got a yard.

They've got a tent set up on the property. Are you in San Francisco? No. Why is there for a home? It's like that expensive. That's a homeless guy. No, but okay, so this is in Colorado Springs. And in Colorado Springs, the camping, you know, the campgrounds just fill up.

It's so popular. And so these people were like, well, let's see what the campgrounds charge. They found out it was like 50 bucks a night. And they're like, sweet. We opened to open space. Let's just like put them here and say there's hiking trails. They didn't even provide a tent. They made them.

Oh, but they had a little fire pit and they provided like some smores fixings. And that was it. That's hysterical. What I love about this idea, right, is like even if you can't afford to go buy a property, like you said, you probably have an extra bedroom. Even if you're renting, you probably have an extra bedroom in your, right? It's just, it's doing something. Like, because doing something is better than doing nothing, right?

And so like even if it means a bedroom, I mean, actually my very first, my very first, you could call it rental, I had a four bedroom apartment I rented in college and I rented all four bedrooms eventually that's up on the couch. And I was living for free, making money to live on the couch, which, I wouldn't do today, but it was something, right? It was taking control of your finances versus being drug around. Exactly. All right.

So that works. I mean, I think that works pretty well when you're, you know, maybe in your 20s or or younger. I don't know how many folks, you know, in 50, 60, 70s want to necessarily rent out a room in their house to somebody. What would you say to somebody in that position? Would it be similar advice or? Well, it sort of depends. because I found that a lot of empty nesters like miss having some younger people around. And so they do like running out their spare room.

But a lot of people have like a separate entrance basement. And that's the way to do it as like a grown up is be like, okay, sweet. You know, let's just rent it out. And then you don't even have to interact with the people. You just provide them like a really thorough house manual and they know how to get in. And yeah, and you just do the cleans yourself if you want to go, you know, super basic. So that's exactly what I just did it. So we just bought a triplex in Maui, right?

So I'm going to live in one unit for a while, right? The back unit I'm going to rent out probably traditional rental because Hawaii's not real in love with vacation rentals, but that the basement will probably just rent out on Airbnb, you know, when people aren't coming to visit, like, you know, friends and family. But like, that's exactly like. I haven't been invited yet. You have been, I have been in talks with Josh's wife and you are on my calendar for coming out. So you may not know that, but Josh, you are actually booked. You were my first book.

Yes. Yes. And you know how much I charged you? That's what I'm talking about. That's family right there. No, I'm going to charge you a lot for that. Oh, you said of them. Anyway, Ziana, you're invited out anytime and everybody listen to the show.

You're not invited. No, that's such a bad. I just said you're not invited. All right. So, no, but like, I mean, like, the way I looked at that is that's going to help to be able to live in a really cool area. Like, you can do that even if you live in a not cool area. Like, I was surprised. I did a vacation rental for a short time.

And I was like in my area of Grace Harbor, Washington, not a tourist area. at all. And I still had it booked like almost every single night because people just naturally travel whether or not it's to a vacation place or not. Have you found the same thing in your like, have you found areas that are better or worse for vacation rentals? Well, I think if you're in a city, you just have more traffic in general. And I like areas near college towns because there's just a lot happening with that. There's a lot of events and there's a lot of students and parents and traveling professors. So that's usually what I'm looking for. Hospitals also have a lot of traveling nurses, so there's a lot going on there. But yeah, recently I was in St. Louis and I did a little

meetup and there were some people in Illinois just over the river. And I thought, oh, this is going to be like a bustling little town. It was nowhere. It was the middle of nowhere. And I went out there and they're booked all summer. They have a little attic space that they converted. And I was amazed that people were just totally in the boonies, but they loved it. So I just think it's so popular now that you can do it almost anywhere. So you're saying you could take pretty much any kind of property, any kind of room. And this is true, Brandon. I mean, look at the guy who works for us who has a trailer. He bought a trailer, lives in a condo, bought a trailer, moved into the trailer in Airbnb's house. So it's amazing. I guess there's a demand to travel and some people don't care

where they are, right? Yeah. Well, and the coolest part about Airbnb is I know a lot of lot of people that just have one unit and they live off of that. And with traditional long term, you can't, I mean, I don't know. I feel like no one can do that. You know, if you're making only three to 500 a month extra off your mortgage, you need like tons of properties. You need 15 properties to replace your income. But a lot of people can do four, five thousand a month on Airbnb plus and then they go live in a van or they just travel full time. And so it is like, I don't know, it's a game changer really for real estate, I think. That's awesome.

So awesome. So do you have any tips? I mean, you've been managing your own and other people's now. Do you have any like simple tips about managing like things that people just get wrong, like just real quick like this would make your experience a whole lot better? Pricing software. I like switch to that. I for the longest time was like, I know better than anyone. I'm going to just do all my prices.

And then I got too many listings and I thought, okay, finally I'll pay for it. And pricing software, I swear, gave me like 70% more. I mean, there's just dates that I would have known. never expected or prices that I thought was way too high, it would never book for. And it does. And so that's like really been a game changer. So even if you have one listing, I'm like pay for it. It's super cheap. It's only like 1%. But when you think of all the different softwares, you're just kind of go like, oh, everybody takes the percentage. What am I going to have at the end? So I was a little hesitant at first, but man, it really made a difference. That's awesome. That's awesome.

Yeah. Cool. And last question here is how much work is it? actually to manage these properties. So, you know, I'm excited. I want to rent a room. I want to rent my garage, my basement, whatever it is. But how much time are you actually spending doing that? And obviously, you're doing more than just one. But, you know, for somebody getting started, what would that be? If it's just in your house, I don't think it has to be that time consuming. But it is, you're kind of taking on a side hustle. There's a part-time job associated with it because there is guest communication. When you have as many as I do, it's almost less work because there's so many different automations that you can do. But yeah, I think around like three to five,

it becomes like a part-time job and you really have to think about it like, this is hospitality. It's not long term. I've got to be like turning it all the time. And then it also really depends if you're cleaning it or not because cleaning obviously can be a lot of work. And so even if it's one bedroom in your house, yeah, maybe it's half an hour. But like, are you available in the middle of the day to like leave work and come and clean the house. So, you know, because people generally check out at like 11 or 12. So just kind of things like that that you have to think like, do I really have the flexibility to do this. Yeah. Yeah. The one. The one vacation went till I had for a while out here in Grace Harbor. I ended up not doing it after a while. I sold the property because it just ended up

being like you said with one property. I didn't have those efficiencies to be able to handle like numerous ones. So like all that work for one, I probably could have had 10 and had almost no more work if not less work because of that. And so I said I probably wouldn't get back into it unless I had a large enough volume to make it worthwhile. But then again, I'm at a different point in my investing, right? Like I have 100 other properties to take care of. So like that one was taking up too much of my time. But if I was getting started over again or if I bought a place in Hawaii, like I'd do it, of course, because it just like you do what you got to do to get started. So that's a fantastic time. So yeah, if you can live for free in Hawaii, nobody could do that. So that's amazing.

Exactly. Yeah. I'm going to do it. So what book recommendations do you have? Ooh, you said recommendations. Recommendation. One. No, you get one. Sorry. You can have one for Josh and one for me. I'll give you two.

I'm a nicer guy than Josh. The one I want to say is never split the difference because I think negotiation in life is huge. And I found out about that book from listening to your podcast. So Chris Boss was on there. Yeah. And it was incredible. So that's one of those books that like by the time I was done reading, I wanted to start reading it again because it's just so meaty.

And I wanted to really ingrain those skills. So I will have to revisit it. Cool. That's the second time that's been mentioned on this podcast. Yeah. That's awesome. No, that's good. That's good.

That's good. That's good. Yeah, it's great. Good. I wanted to also talk about Way of the Peaceful Warrior. So I know everybody wants to talk about business books. And I think that in business, it's like if you want to have a spiritual awakening, start your own business.

Because it's really all about you. It's about your limits, your beliefs, and like you getting your stuff straight. And so if you don't have yourself in check about like what is possible, then you're not going to grow. And so that book is all about like the magic of what you can create, you know, and believing in yourself. So anyway, it's a really good book, but it's more spiritual. Cool. Thank you. I'd not read it. Excellent. Like it out. Hey, where can people find you? Xionamacintyre.com. So I just my first and last time.

Z-E-O-N-A, McI-N-T-Y-R-E. And I have a blog and other podcasts, lots of recommendations for software. Good spot. All right. Good deal. Well, thank you, Louisiana. Very much. It's been awesome.

We'll talk to you again soon. Appreciate it. All right, Anson. Welcome to the show, man. It's good to have you. It's good to have you guys. For sure. This is a real treat to have both of you here in my life.

again. You know, that's what people usually say when they get me and Josh together. They're like, that's a treat. We're a treat. We're not going anywhere. No, I know you're not going anywhere, but like a virus. All right. So Anson has been on the Bigger Pockets podcast, not once, not twice, but three times.

Episode 34, 96, and 235. He also wrote a book for Bigger Pockets called Finding and Funding Great Deals. Did they get it right? All right. Okay. I had to make sure. I know. I was like, what if it was like finding and funding decent,

finding and funding decent deals, decent, mediocre deals? All right. All right. So for those who have not heard you, though, tell us who you are and what do you do in real estate. You have one minute. Go. All right. So I live in Denver.

I am a fix and flipper, a wholesaler, a wholesaler, a wholesaler. I'm also licensed or do occasional license stuff. Right now, I'm working on expanding. refining systems here, expanding out into other markets, and getting into long-term cash flow, which Brandon's been kicking my butt about for years now. So that's true. That's my focus for the next year,

but I'm still doing fixing flips, still doing that thing. Cool. Excellent. All right. That's great. All right. So today's show,

you know, we're talking to people about their best tips. And so we'd love to hear, what is your number one tip for newbies other than don't let your wife cut your hair? That's my wife cuts my hair My wife does a good job I just don't style it very well right

Jeez these guys Everyone's a comedian He's got a good foundation He's just not doing enough with it We got it all right So my number one I'm going to cheat a little And I'm going to say is to be specific And persistent

And so inside of there You know I want You know I want to understand I want to instill in the newbies that you have to stick with it and you have to have this consistency thing that people talk about. And then the specific piece would be a laser focus. And I know I've talked about this before a little bit, but when I started out, I didn't have a laser focus. It was like shiny objects everywhere.

And of course, when you're starting out, you can read, you know, 10 different bigger pockets books, you know, 20 different forum things. And then you have 30 things that you're trying to go pursue. But if you laser focus on one thing, let's say it's wholesaling. and you run after it with consistency, you're going to be successful. You can go on to those shiny objects once you've kind of mastered and made some money in that laser-focused niche. Yeah.

So pick a niche, pick a strategy. Niche, Josh. Good bless you. And then focus on that and go, you know, just go all out, learn everything you can. Is that kind of what you're saying? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's like that laser focus and then you have to stick consistent.

You can't just, you know, try it out for a month and see if it's for you and then quit because it didn't work out in that month. You've got to devote some time and effort and energy over a long run for that to work out. You know, I heard this really good analogy one time. It was like this guy was talking about there's two islands, right? You live on one island and then there's like they call it like Paradise Island or, you know, whatever. There's like reality island and like dream island, we'll call it, right? And he's like, everything you do, like, for example, wholesaling or you're going to start an Amazon business or you're going to whatever, it doesn't matter. Anything you're trying to do for financial freedom is like building a bridge.

And it takes a long time to build that bridge from one island to the other. But what people do is they build half the bridge. Then they're like, man, this is taking a long time. So they go back to the beginning and they start building another bridge and then another. And some people have dozens of bridges started across this thing, but they never do it. Or instead, if they just focused on one bridge, they would get there. And then they can go play with as many bridges as the thing. they want to at that point because they've got the one done.

That made a big impact when I heard that. No, it's huge. And you can branch off from that new island. Yeah. And that new island might be, you know, financial security or, you know, making more in a month than some people do in a year. And that gives you so many more options at that point. You can build that bridge to, you know, long-term wealth or forever cash flow or, you

know, more Amazon businesses or whatever you want. I think far too many people in entrepreneurship. and make no mistake, being a real estate investor is being an entrepreneur. I think far too many people fail because they quit. And that seems pretty obvious, but they quit before they had a chance to get anywhere. And it's this instant gratification thing that we've got, right? Hey, if I didn't get there in five minutes or on my first try, then I'm going to give up. Well, guess what?

The people who are the most successful in this world and real estate and everything else are, of the people who struggled and got there and were willing to fight it out, right? Well, you know, I actually tell people about this Josh all the time, right? I mean, look at Josh. He's not a very good looking guy. He's not, you know, his intelligence is a little lower for me. You know, he's got really nothing going for. But like, honestly, like the fact that Josh, like, worked in his basement for like 10 years

before I ever even like emerged into like somewhat helping Josh. Like, Josh, like your persistence on that one thing is what made you successful. That's why 90% of business fail. They wouldn't have done what you did. Anson, I would say the same thing about you. Like, you've been flipping forever now. And like most people wouldn't have gotten through those tough first years. Yeah, exactly.

And even on the, you know, that's kind of like the long term strategy. But even in the tiny things on a day-to-day business, like they'll, you know, someone will say, hey, I tried direct mail and it didn't work. Well, how many did you send? And how often did you send and who did you send it to? And like, well, I sent 500 out one time. And then they quit. Yep.

And of course, you're not going to see results there. You're not pushing that. snowball down the hill to gain that momentum. And so, and it's with that, like, oh, I tried networking and it didn't work. Well, did you spend the whole year? You said, hi to one guy and you walked away. Exactly. I went to the gym one time and I didn't get a six pack and so I was like, this sucks.

I quit. Oh, man. Yeah, they lied. You went to great clips once and you're like, I can't do this anymore. I'm going to cut it myself. I'm doing it myself. I didn't got my own hair. He got a floby.

It's all good. It's not cut. All right. All right. So I answer my question to you then is take us off of my hair. When is when do you grit and when do you quit? I like that phrase, right? When to grit, when to quit?

I didn't make that up. I heard that in a book. But like, how do you know when like, unless you've been working at wholesaleing for two years and like you've just not made any money or you've been in front of flip for two years, three years at, what point, how do you know you've done enough that it just is not going to work out for you? You don't have the personality or the luck or whatever. That's, no, that's a great question. And I love, I love that grit concept. I think the Angela Duckworth grit book is one of my favorites from last year.

And that's, and that's important, right? When to throw in the towel. And I think, I think if you're doing the right things, if you're taking the right actions with the right consistency, I don't see a way that you can honestly fail. Yeah. So there must be something in your process. or something that you're doing that is not creating the results that you want.

And so for throwing in the towel, I would definitely get with somebody who's more successful than you. Bigger Pockets is a great, not just to keep plugging this platform, but this concept of a nationwide network is something that I've been formulating in my head of where I kind of saw a turn in my own business

is this nationwide network of investors when I can call someone, somebody in Portland and talk business about fix and flip, it's different than sitting down and talking to someone, you know, across the coffee table here in Denver, because I'm not a threat to the guy in Portland. I mean, technically, I'm not a threat to the guy in Denver either. There's enough business to go around. But when when you can sit down and have a phone conversation with somebody who can open up their entire books and say, this is exactly what I'm doing, this is exactly who I'm mailing, this is what I'm sending, it's huge.

And so I would I would recommend before throwing in the towel, try and try and get help inside your processes. Because it could be as simple as, oh, you're mailing the wrong list or you're talking to the wrong people. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's really, really great advice. And I would say I concur. I've had some of the smartest people on the planet supposedly tell me to quit, you know, early, early in on the business. And I knew, you know, that I would be successful despite what they thought.

And so that's not always true, but, you know, as long as you continue to make headway and progress, I just can't see failure as an option. But that's, that's me, right? I mean. And I think a lot of people who, like, you mentioned this word process. And I love that. That's one of my favorite words, like my favorite concept. Like everything comes down to a process that we do, right? Everything in our life is like a process.

Like, you don't have a six pack because you're not doing the right process, right? Not you. I mean, you have a major than six pack. I've seen it. Like, you don't have a six-pack because you're not doing the right process. You're not a successful wholesaler or a flipper or a rental owner because you're not doing the right process. So, yeah, get that process nailed down and figure out why are you not doing the process correctly? Like, how many deals are you offering on?

Oh, none. Well, weird. You didn't get any accepted because you didn't offer on any. Like, how many did you analyze? Oh, you didn't analyze any? Well, of course you didn't offer any because you didn't, you know, like, it's like these processes that anyway. So I think that's perfect. Get with somebody else who can expose what you're doing wrong in the process.

Yeah. And I mean, this isn't rocket science. I mean, there's formulas out there of how to create a successful, you know, whatever, wholesaling business, fix and flip, whatever you want to do. If you're not having success, there's something wrong with what you're doing, first of all. And then people just, I think they'd throw in the towel too early. I mean, if they're going two years with no results, they should have, you know, a year and a half ago got help. Yep.

Yeah. Honestly. That's great. That's great. Awesome. Anson, thank you so much for the insight. Before we let you go, what would you say besides grit would be your new book recommendation? So this is thanks to Brandon.

I think Brendan Bouchard's high performance habits was my favorite book this year. And I've been trying to dig really deep into that book and into him as an author and speaker and all the things that he does. I feel like he gets that kind of process. and his process is how to become a high performer. And a lot of concepts in that book are stuff I haven't read regurgitated in a bunch of other books, which by now there's a lot of regurgitation going on. But there's a fresh look at kind of that whole concept. And so thanks for that recommendation, Brandon.

I think I saw it on Instagram or something. So it's an amazing book. Yeah, I do like that. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Well, all right, man. Well, before we let you go, where can people get in touch?

How can they reach out to you? usually I just point people towards my bigger pockets profile. Sure. So just look up Anson Young on bigger pockets and you'll find me there somewhere. Perfect. And you can just reach out, send me a message and we'll link up from there. Perfect. Excellent.

Excellent. All right, man. Well, thanks so much for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thank you guys. All right, Dr. Meadows. How you doing, man? Good to have you back on the show.

Well, I really appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for having me back. Yeah. So what have you been up to? I mean, it's been a while. You were on, I don't remember you were a while ago. So what are you been up to since you were last on the show? Well, you know, continuing to, number one, work full time as a physician, oncologist,

but I certainly continued to invest, I think a little over a year ago. I was on the show. And at that time, I had seven single family rentals, which has since grown to 10. Nice. So still acquiring some properties in my main Jacksonville market, continue to do a lot of private lending, both online and off. So flipping some houses, got lots of crowdfunding projects going on. Most are doing okay. Some have not, and they're working themselves out. So that's been it. And, you know, of course, doing occasional podcast

promotion of my book. And, you know, that's enough, man. That's awesome. What's the book called? The book's called Alternative Financial Medicine. And it basically, chronicles my, um, my path into investing in alternative assets of which real estate is a big portion of it, but also some other stuff, you know, like peer to peer lending and that kind of stuff. You know, it'll try it out a bunch of different things. Yeah.

Super cool. Super cool. All right. Let's get to the, the topic of today's show, which of course is advice for new investors, advice for people just starting out, they want to buy the first deal. What do you got? What are you going to tell those people? Well, you know, for me, when it comes down to it, finding an in-person mentor, okay?

You know, I'm an academic at heart, so I know how to really study a topic. And so I read all the classic books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad and everything. But when it's time to pull the trigger, I really felt like I needed an in-person mentor. You know, much like medicine, right? No matter how much schooling you get in the classroom, you've got to do a residency where you're working underneath a doctor. And so I was like, let me find somebody who's out there doing this rental thing, doing this house flipping thing that I can talk to, see how it actually works. and talk to people that have invested with them. So that was the main confidence step for me.

That's cool. Yeah, I mean, it's almost like an lost art, right? Like back in the day, everybody was like, like, apprentice was like how you do it, right? You were a blacksmith apprentice. And that kind of went away. I don't know, over the last, you know, whatever, 50 years. Well, you know, we're in such this information age, right, where I think people,

and it's great, but I think people sometimes can delude themselves into thinking like, hey man i'll just take an online course or just watch youtube videos or this and that but you cannot replace that that one-on-one you know why an in-person mentor i mean why not just pay that you know fifty thousand dollars from some guy you know on tv and why somebody in person well to be honest with you i mean part of my education was discovering you guys podcast and while you guys always are you wouldn't totally slam the sort of gurus out there selling courses i i i i Some of us would. I definitely got the sense that that wasn't a necessary step to go.

It seemed like most of the comments in that regard were kind of like, eh, you don't necessarily go that route because, you know, I certainly considered it. I had the financial means to do it. But I'm like, okay, let me find somebody like local who's not a guru. And it's just maybe interested in educating an investor that might like wind up partnering with them and stuff like that. Yeah.

So you guys had something to do with that. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, like, I do know people who have paid very expensive, like, you know, paid mentoring stuff. And some have worked out just fine. Some of them people spend a lot of money and are not in real estate right now. Well, right.

And for some people, right, some people need to spend over a certain threshold where like they've got that much invested and they're going to take action because they outlayed that much amount of money. So for some people, and I know that, I know people like that too. But I didn't, you know, I didn't feel like I needed to kind of. overpay, but, but I certainly thought that, um, just getting around somebody and it wasn't even so much a monetary thing. I demonstrated that I had studied a lot on my own and that I was willing to like do deals as long as I could get some comfort level. And they were more than willing to sit down with me and walk me through things. So yeah. Yeah, that's, that's so true. So why, I actually say, why would a mentor like from their standpoint want to work with somebody? Like if somebody's

listened to this show and they're like, well, I want to go out and work somebody. I got nothing. I'm not bringing it at a table, right? I'm just going to waste their time. Why would a mentor want to work with somebody who's new? Well, now, I will say this, right? I mean, if you come up to them and you haven't demonstrated that you have, like, any value to bring, meaning, like, after a few minutes of talking with these prospective mentors, it was obvious to them. I had studied about what it meant to be a landlord, what it meant to be a private lender. I knew at least the lingo and all that kind of stuff. So that gave them comfort and ease to say, okay, well, this guy's actually pretty motivated. He's a physician for God's sake. He certainly didn't have to like learn about

this. So they took me very seriously. Now, if you don't have like money or expertise, but if you demonstrate like, hey, I'm willing to do whatever the most kind of like grunt worky kind of thing that you have, if it's mailing out letters, if it's calling people, all that kind of unglamorous kind of stuff, I think if you tell somebody up front you're willing to do that, that's tremendous value too. Yeah. You know, so you got to have something though, because people get hit up all the time for people that want some of their time and expertise. And let's just be honest. I mean, it's valuable.

So, you know, they want, they want something to reciprocate. Yep. Yeah, that's true. And even if you don't think you have value, you probably have something. You have some grunt work you can do if nothing else. And just, just like you said, just having the education, like showing that you've at least done something so far to research and you've learned, you're not just relying on them for a free ride trying to teach you everything, right?

That's a lot of people make the mistake because they're looking for a mentor to teach them versus guide them. And then I, Ironically, too, it kind of like the highest level, like these people that are like, you know, really awesome real estate entrepreneurs, like when it comes to folks like me that might be like a money partner, like at the highest level, they don't even want uneducated money partners. They want people to know like what could go wrong in the deal and that kind of thing. And so they don't even, they won't even work with you unless you have some degree of education because they don't want to have to explain if things go wrong like what happened, you know, to that degree. You know what I mean? So, yeah. That's true. All right. So the big question, where do you find a mentor at?

Where do you, where does somebody who's new even find experienced real estate investors? Well, you know, asking around anybody in my social circle and believe it or not, you know, things got started with a pastor of mine who actually knew a real estate investor. Like that was kind of a surprising route. But of course, I went to my first couple of real estate investor association meetings, which I'd never gone to before and asked around about, you know, who were the kind of serious players. in there because we know at most Rias, most of the people at Aria are not doing a whole lot of deals.

But find out who the serious folks are there. And that's kind of where it branched off from. Yeah. So there's a lot of asking around. That's really what it is, right? It's asking around. It's being open to it. Absolutely.

Yeah. Like I had a mentor in person mentor named Kyle, right? He was my best friend's landlord. And so like I went painted houses for him for a summer and like did a few houses and did it cheap. I mean, I was paying houses for 300 bucks a pop. Like, because like, I just wanted his. I wanted his friendship.

And that actually, like, one of the best piece of advice I ever got for mentors is stop thinking about mentor in terms of mentor. Think friend. How do you build a friendship with somebody who's experienced? Yeah. Yeah. And like that pastor thing, like, you know how it came about like, and he was key, like his connections?

He just kind of mentioned in passing that he didn't take a salary from the church. And so I asked him afterwards, like, well, how do you support yourself? Oh, I got some rentals and this and that. And I do some private lending. And it's like, oh, okay, tell me about that. at, you know, and you just never know. Yeah. Yeah, that's so true.

One more thing I've noticed with mentors is people oftentimes will look and they'll say, well, you know, the first thing I say is, well, I need a mentor. And what I find is sometimes people use that almost as an excuse not to take action, right? Because they don't want to go read the book or they don't want to do anything. So they just keep saying, oh, I don't have a mentor, so I can't do anything. What do you say to those people? That, you know, like you said, man, that is, that's a cop out. I mean, come on.

I mean, if you're really motivated and everything, you're going to find a way. And again, you're going to do some prep work. and have an approach, I think. And so that's, that's no excuse. Absolutely not. They're all out over the place. Yeah, well, this is fantastic. I mean, the mentorship, it's super, super important, very vital.

I think it's a great tip you brought up. So before I let you go, let's jump into kind of the last question. I'm asking everybody this week. What book recommendation do you have? Maybe this is the one that you've recommended before on the show. Maybe something brand new you've read. Do you have any good book recommendations to throw our audience? Rich dad, poor dad's been said to death.

There was, but, but honestly, from a mindset stamp, point to think about, you know, your relationship to, to money and capital and time and everything. It's great. The, the building wealth one house at a time. I forget the author's name. John Schwab, right? I think it's Schwab. Yes, yes. Because, you know, that book was instrumental and me honing in on like, okay, I'm going to do the single family thing. Like, I'm not going to do apartments. I'm not going to do, you know, anything, you know, so that was, that was key for me. Yeah. That's perfect. I love it. All right. Well, Dr. Meadows, this has been fantastic. Again, like I may have you had a lot more time, but thank you so much for joining us.

And, you know, where can people get in touch? Where can they reach out to you? Well, you know, the book is available on Amazon, alternative financial medicine and blog site of the same thing. Alternativefinancialmedicine.com. Perfect. All right, dude. We'll talk to you later. All right.

Thanks. Mr. David Green. Whoa, stop. What? What? Hold on. I'm going to do this. All right.

You take it. David Green. You come in and take a. over my show like you're some hot stuff guy. I'm going to turn the tables on you, buddy. Well, I mean, Josh, to be honest, you made it so easy.

You basically, like, warmed up the seat. All I had to do is step into something that was already working. You set me up really nicely. I did. I did. Yeah. Yeah, and it wasn't hard to make it any better. So, yeah, well, well done. Thank you for that. I set the bar really low.

Well, so, yeah, we are, we are flipping the script again today on David. He is no longer today. He is not the host. He's a guest today. I don't know you are. I think I'm going to be host today. I'll be co-hosted today. It's fine. Whatever. If you need that, if you need that, if you need that, you know, you don't have the facial hair or the height or the good looks, so you might as

all take host. That's okay. All right. Josh sits on the Iron Throne and Brandon is just basically playing Tyrion right now. He's the jester. All right. David Green, who are you? For those people who have not listened to like, for those who have not listened to the show before,

which would be weird to listen to this episode and not listen to the show, but maybe not. Maybe this is a first time. Who are you, David Green? And besides being the regular host or assistant to the host of the Bigger Pockets podcast, who are you? What do you do? Assistant to the podcast. To the regional manager.

Right, right. No, I'm David Green. I play Brandon's sidekick on TV. I'm here for color commentary, the Al Boreland, his Tim Allen. Every once in a while, I say something somewhat intelligent,

or at least I try to. Former police officer, now I'm a real estate agent, host the podcast, real estate investor. I pretty much love all things real estate, so I'm excited to talk to you guys today. Awesome.

That was the shortest. That was like the shortest of all this. He's practiced. He's practiced. Yeah. Awesome. All right, David.

So we are talking to folks like you, successful real estate investors, about their best tip for newbies. So with that said, David Green, what is your best tip for new real estate investors? So if you read the book, the one thing, in chapter two, they talk about the domino effect, which is a theory based on geometric progression.

And the theory is that a domino... Whoa, whoa, this is getting too many three-syllable words. Let's keep this to like third grade level. Come on. Okay, geometric progression, explain. The theory is that a one-inch domino can knock down another domino that's one-and-a-half times bigger than itself. So one-inch domino can knock down a two-and-a-half-inch domino, which can knock down a 3.75 inch domino and so forth. Go on, what's the next one? 3.75.

I've always practiced up to three. I didn't expect that. I think Josh saw that coming. So anyway, 18th domino would be the size of the leading tower of Pisa. By the 31st domino is the size of Mount Everest. So the point would be you can typically knock down something 50% bigger than what you did the last time you did something. But we never assume we never think that by the 31st domino would be so big it could be taller than Mount Everest, right? And newbies get stuck trying to plan out every step of their journey.

I'm going to do this and then this and then this. And I need you bigger pockets to spell this out perfectly. So I know exactly where I'm going and I will never make a mistake. And the reality is life never works that way. You don't know what your next domino will look like until you knock down the ones in front of you. you don't know how big it will be. And you may think I could never knock down something that big, but you're looking at yourself on Domino 2.

When you're on Domino 30, Mount Everest is totally something you can take down. So don't get in your own way by thinking too much about how am I going to do this when it's like 10 steps down the road. You just got to get step one, crush it in that, then start looking for your next step and crush it at that. You can really simplify this whole process by saying, I need to excel where I am and look for my next step and then excel where that is. before the next one.

That's really good. I have nothing to say. I made the right move. Listeners. Listen to those guys. I'm out of here. All right. I got some questions asked on this.

Yeah, we got a question. That's great. And you got to read that book, guys. I mean, the one thing, if you haven't read it,

if you're in any form of entrepreneurial venture, I mean, you got to know. Anything in life, you got to read that book. So me and David Green here, actually like two weeks ago, I got to like,

which I know, Josh, you've hung out with him before, but I had not. I got to go hang out with Jay Papazan, like, you know, co-author of the one thing in person down in Austin. And it was like, had to hold in my inner fan girl the whole time, which was fantastic. So, yeah, definitely check that book out. So, okay, so we're talking about like when people get started, they get overwhelmed.

Everyone's like, oh, how am I going to do it, you know, Brandon, Josh, David Green, or, you know, any of the other people they hear on the podcast or read their books do because they get overwhelmed. But really, you're just saying they got to do that first deal. So I'm wondering, how important is that first deal, David? Like, I mean, like, do they need to get a home run the first deal to inspire them to do more? Do they just need to do anything? Like, what's your opinion on that? Hey, really quick, before you even answer his question. What?

What? Are you, you know, because I interpreted what you're saying as not being the first deal as I interpreted it as being the first step towards the first deal. And so obviously, I was right. I was just going to say, well, obviously your interpretation was incorrect. So how could I politician my way out of this? Pick her question. I shouldn't answer. The real issue here is freedom and love.

That's what we're talking about today. As thought, what's your pockets going to for you? All right. So the first deal might be the fourth domino. You don't know exactly where in that chain it is, right? Your first deal might just be getting over your fear of like agoraphobia and going to a meetup where you hear other people talk, right? or it might be conquering this idea that you think that I'm not worthy of wealth.

I don't want to be wealthy because that's, I don't deserve that. And you have to tackle that, right? The point is, once you've overcome that issue, your next issue, which will, well, I don't have my finances under control is a lot easier because you've already determined that you're worthy of wealth and you have the motivation you need to take the next step. And once your finances are under control, you'll feel this desire like, man, I really want to go invest something. I got all this cash makes it easy to go buy your first deal.

I actually want to. I did too, but I want to jump into that. I don't think we've ever taught. Yeah, you should write a book for Bigger Pockets someday, David. Weird. You should actually write a book on like long distance real estate investing and you could publish it at biggerpockets.com. That store and get it today.

But anyway, you, like, I'm wondering about the not being worthy of success. I don't think we've ever talked about that on the show before, but that's a legitimate fear or I don't think how a fear, but a feeling that people have. Can you expand on that for a minute? Yeah, that's huge. I mean, most of us, everybody wants the tactical. advice, like show me the step by step process to buy a house. And the problem is it's never the

same for everybody. So you really can't, you're asking for something you can't have. And even if you had it, it wouldn't do you any good because you wouldn't probably follow it. If you had what it takes to follow that, you would have already been started on that journey without waiting for it, right? Most of the problems is between our two ears and the demons that we struggle with regarding our own worthiness, how smart we are, preconceived ideas we have about wealth being bad or a fear of risk. Like we just interviewed Annie Duke who wrote the book Thinking and Betts and she was all about you have to change the relationship you have with risk from risk is bad, avoid it to risk is everywhere. How do I mitigate it? How do I kind of like write it like a wave rather than just

avoid it because the wave might knock me off? So that I think for most people, the first step is understanding that you are your own biggest enemy. It's not that property manager that sucked. It's not the agent that didn't return your call. It's the mindset you're bringing into this. You don't have the eye of the tiger. You don't have the whatever it takes, I'm going to do this. You're not willing to do the steps that it would need to take. And that's your domino, right? Maybe seven steps in, you get your first rental property. And then three dominoes later, you're buying a hundred unit complex. That happens all the time for people that take this journey. So my advice to the newbies would be stop thinking that what you need is someone to hold your hand and walk you through this. You need to start looking at

how you can untape your own potential that makes you special and use that for the purposes of real estate investing. I love that, man. I really, really love that. I, I, I, I, I, I just read this awesome book by Jesse Itzler called 30 Days with a Seal. Probably the funniest book I've ever read. And I'm trying to link up with that guy. So if you know Jesse, please put me in touch. But Jesse's a successful businessman. And he does this endurance racing.

And he comes across this guy, this specimen, who just blew his mind and invites the guy to come live with him for 30 days, a Navy seal. That's not weird. The book's hysterical. But it's also motivating. The interesting thing is the Navy SEAL that he invited has this fascinating story where, you know, he was, I'm going to butcher the story a little bit, but he was in the military. I mean, the guy was like 300 pounds. He was a hot mess.

Had, you know, lived this really, really hard life. And he decided one day that, you know, he wasn't going to live that life anymore. He made the decision. And that's what people who are listening to the show need to do. They have to make that decision. The decision is the first step. This guy went from being this overweight guy who just, you know, low self-esteem all these issues to becoming, he's the Guinness World Record holder on pull-ups.

I mean, he's an ultra, you know, endurance racer. Literally, I think they named him the fittest man on earth. And it was a decision that he said, I'm not going to let anything stop me. I'm going to be successful, no matter what gets my way. no matter what happens. And that's it, that's what it takes. I mean, that is really all that it takes is that decision. And once you've done that, you just go.

Well, once he decided I'm going to do this no matter what it takes, I guarantee you he started surrounding himself by people like that Navy SEAL, who also had that same mentality and it started bleeding into him. So for a lot of people, that's your domino. Go find other people that aren't making excuses that are holding themselves so high standard. Like Josh, did you ever read Extreme Ownership, the Jock-Willink book? Another name is good one. That's this whole theory is everything is my fault.

If something happened and someone else screwed it up, it's my fault because I didn't train them better or I didn't monitor them more closely. And what happens is you start improving yourself when you look at everything like it's your fault and you get the benefit of all that self-improvement and putting yourself around people who think the same way is guaranteed to bleed over into the way you think and act and believe. Absolutely. Absolutely. Awesome. man. So domino one is get yourself together, figure out what you're going to do, get motivated, make the decision, and do it. There you go. And then you don't know where that domino path is going to take you,

but you know that if you can push yourself to get 50% bigger on every single next step that you take. So crush it at the step you're at, see what doors open and then go focus on crushing it there. I love it. Awesome, man. All right. Well, Mr. David Green, do you have any recent book recommendations you want to throw the audience today. Yeah, so good, they can't ignore you. Awesome book. I love everything about it. The author details the difference between people who have, I can't remember what he calls it, but it's this mindset that the world owes them. This is my dream and everybody else should work to fund it, right? I want to quit my job because I don't like it. Real estate owes it to me to go, to go make me wealthy so that I can retire early versus the craftsman mindset, which says,

I'm going to get so good at what I'm doing that I can name my price and I can do whatever I want because I bring so much value everywhere I go. Nobody would ever tell me no. And you can create the life that you want, right? That's what I would tell people to go read, especially if you're struggling with getting started. The problem might be you're looking to buy a house before you have a million other things in your life, maybe not a million, but a lot of other things in your life squared away. And that book can put you on the path to having the right mindset. I love it. Yeah, that's one of my favorite books also. Cool. Awesome, man. Well, where can people find you besides the Bigger Pockets podcast. You can check me out at greenincome.com. It's a blog where I post some of the deals that I'm

doing and articles I've written and stuff like that. I'm on Instagram at, David Green 24. It's another good place to add me. Awesome. David, thank you for letting me chime in and host today. I appreciate it. And you're doing an amazing job, man. Seriously, like you are absolutely outstanding. So keep it up. Thank you, Josh. I appreciate that. Brandon, thanks you too, man. Thank you.

All right. Ariane, welcome back to the Bigger Pockets podcast. How are you? Hey, thanks for having me back. Yeah. So you are, I believe you're actually the very first possibly second, I can't remember, interview in our new book that comes out, that kind of a case study that we put in the book. So, yeah, that's kind of cool. So most people are listening will read that. Yeah, I'm excited.

Yeah, so, because I love your story. That's why I put it there, because I love hearing your story of what you did and how you've built your empire. So that's what we're going to talk a little bit about today and then get into some newbie tips. So why don't we start there? Like in the next minute or so, like, who are you? What do you do? What's your real estate thing?

Okay, cool. I'm Ariane Lemire. My husband and I, Chris, his name is we have a flipping and wholesaling. business in Destin, Florida, and we also own a 24-unit rental portfolio here. Excellent. Super cool. That's very cool. All right.

So, Josh, you want to ask out? You want me to ask? No. I'll be nice. I'm giving you the floor. It's not true what I say about you. So, all right, Ariane, as a very experienced real estate investor who's done lots of different things, obviously, you know what it's like to get started.

So tell us, what is your top tip? for newbies looking to get started in real estate investing. My top tip, I think for people starting out, they need to remember that this business is a marathon and not a sprint. So block time daily to take one action. And then this could be as small as five minutes each day. Just make sure it's every day. You could like look at a property and analyze just one property to a quick analysis in five minutes. And then if you do that consistently every day, soon enough that it'll become a habit. And then use that habit as your foundation. to build on. And that's really where I think success in this business comes from.

Like daily consistent action will lead to great results. I love it. I love it. Yeah. And you know what? That goes for any business. In fact, Brandon and I, you know, had to write this book and this earlier today. I was like, Brandon, we should write that other book we've been talking about writing for a long time. And, you know, as I've been thinking about it, I'm like, well, what does it take to write a book? You sit down, you block time and you write.

every single day. And it doesn't matter, you know, if it's good or bad, you just got to do it, right? Like the result of what you get done is semi-relevant as long as you're doing it, right, and making forward progress. I actually just read an article in New York Times. It was an older one, but it was John Grisham, who was published like, you know, four million novels, right? And he has a rule and it's write one, I think it's one page a day. Like, if he can consistently write one page a day, he can pump out. And he's average like, you know, 1.3 books per year for the past 30 years or something like that. It's crazy. Like he's like, I just have to publish at least one page or right one page per day. It's the same concept, huh? Cool. I think if there, you know, if you're out

there or you're new, you're thinking, hey, when am I going to get my first deal? Well, we should ask you what have you done every day to get your first deal, right? So really results happen when you do the actions. And Brandon, you know, Brandon gives these webinars where we, we talk about, he talks about a lot of these actions that you can take. But we're not interviewing him. We're interviewing you. So, you know, you had talked about analyzing deals. What other actions could a newbie real estate investor take every single day in addition to what you've already mentioned to get them on the path towards getting that first deal? Yeah. Another one is like I'm an introvert, so it's actually hard for me to kind of pick at the phone and talk to people. So I think like if that's

you, like do that one that might be the hardest thing. Do it first thing in the morning, right? Like call, like one broker or one wholesaler or one other investor and talk to them about what properties might be coming into their pipeline that maybe they can't handle or if it's an agent, you know, that they think would fit your investment criteria. And just do that every day. And you'll be amazed at like how many deals start coming into your pipeline. If you just do that one small action, that really might just take two, three minutes. Yeah. But Arianna, I don't know any agents or brokers or wholesalers. What do I do then? I suggest using bigger pockets or Google and you'll find some people who are in your area that are active. You can also go to

your local real estate investment club and then just find the active agents and wholesalers there. Yeah, that's really good. And of course, if people go to bigger pockets.com slash events, they can see local meetups happening all around the country all the time. And don't you do something with an event? Did I read that? Yeah, we actually have one coming up next week, but it's this will air after that. Yeah. Well, there is. So you put on an event because just so we can network with more people. And I think bigger pockets is great, but having that physical interaction with people, like just solidifies the connections we make online too. So that's another thing you can do, guys. If there's no networking events in your area, if you don't know folks or can't find anything,

whether it be on Bigger Pockets or elsewhere, start your own. Yeah. I started our first networking event on Bigger Pockets, like when we just did like one or two deals. So it's not like you have to be a guru. Like, just put people together and you'll make things happen. So do you have any tips for people who maybe want to do that? Maybe they don't have a good meetup in their area or they want to start their own. Like what's worked for you? What hasn't worked for you? So I just picked like a local cafe that let us like hang out there for a couple of hours after work hours during the week.

We do it every Tuesday, 68. Then I put it on bigger pockets on the events page and some other local networking page. And usually we actually have about 20 plus people. That's awesome. And the beauty is you're at the. middle of the network now, right? You're the host. And so you get to kind of grow your brand, so to speak, and become that connector. Yes. It just develops some brand recognition, especially we flip and wholesale and sometimes the wholesaling has a bad rap, but if they know that you're a

reputable person and you're somewhat in a position where you're actually hosting these meetups, then you can talk to people more and they can see that you're a trustworthy person. Awesome. Fantastic. Yeah. So do you have any other daily actions that people could jump on right now to help them get to that first deal? I talked about analyzing deals, calling brokers, wholesalers, other flippers. One thing I started doing actually is like setting up a daily task list for myself. So I write down everything I want to do because we all have like 100 things you want to do. And then I prioritize the most the one that's the hardest and that will give us the most like I guess bank for the buck in terms of the action.

So I start doing that and then now I can get like before I would start on the easier. actions, right? And now when I start on the harder ones that give us the most return on time, then, like, it just takes my business so much further. Yeah, that's great. That is an incredible tip. I mean, so many people do that, right? You pull out your checklist. You start writing down things. You're like, okay, let me do the easy things first because it's easy, right? And do you guys ever, like, do this thing where I'll, like, add an item to my checklist that I already did just so I can check it off. I do that. I do that all the time. That's pretty weak, dude. No, I'm like, okay, all the things I got to do.

day, make checklist. Okay, good. I got that one. I don't know. Anyway, I have a tendency to want to do the easiest things first, like make a checklist and, you know, brush my teeth on that checklist. But no, like, I, if you consistently work on the hard problems, the ones that are actually important for moving your business forward. Yeah. Yeah, that's huge. I love that. So you might have a beginner, oh, sorry, you might have like a huge checklist where you're like, make business cards, make a logo, call broker. you know, write an offer. Like, if you have those four things, you should probably write an offer first and probably

broke before making your business cards and your logo. Yeah, that's fantastic. Oh, yeah. Yeah, business cards and logo definitely are like way down the food chain in terms of importance. It's get that deal, right? I mean, don't, I'm not a business. Don't worry about being a business.

Like, get that deal. And then you can worry about, you know, getting that business going. Yes. Income producing actions first. Awesome. There's a, so there's a thing called the Seinfeld strategy. Have you heard of that before? It's kind of cool.

I have not, but this sounds amazing. I'm super excited. You just like Jerry Seinfeld. All right. So, Jerry. Yeah, okay. So good job. Is that your, good job.

All right. So Jerry Seinfeld once told somebody, so this is like the myth anyway, that he told this guy who was an up-and-coming comedian, the comedian, the comedian asked him, how do I, you know, get famous like you? And he said, he's a very simple strategy for doing that. He, Josh is showing his dog, licking his face into the camera. And now licking his mouth. Now Josh is literally tongue-licking the dog.

You got to watch the video, guys. Yeah, all right. No, well, you kind of were. All right. So Jerry says, look, the lifeblood of any comedian is to have the best jokes, but most jokes fall flat. And so the only way to have a consistent good career is you have to have a lot of jokes. So he said, what I do is I take out a big, like, board, you know, poster board.

And I put a bunch of boxes all over it. And then a big red marker. And every day that I write at least one joke, I put a big red X on that day. And then if I miss it, I just leave that box blank. So he's like, over time, you start building like if you start writing joke every day, your goal is to write one every day. Once you have four, five, six, 10, 20 Xs in a row, your only job is don't break the chain. So like, you just got to keep you, you see that big visual, you know, red X's on your page

or on your on your board or whatever and you don't want to break that. So it goes back to your like, do something day. Like it's far more important to go to the gym every day for 20 minutes than it would be to go to the gym once a month for three hours, right? Right. And I like that visual because then you can see. Yeah, I'm actually, we're working. This is actually probably the first I'll mention it, but we're working on a journal that's going to come out. A real estate investor success journal.

Yeah, it's coming out here later this year. Anyway, in there, I specifically put in a bunch of those pages of just blank checkboxes because like I love that concept of don't break the chain. Well, it's like the Apple Watch. It's the rings on the Apple Watch. You know, like you want to get your daily rings complete. Last night, I was literally like, I had like 13, 14,000 steps, but Apple makes it even harder because you have to like, you have to do all these things to get these rings closed. And I had only exercised 28 minutes. So I hit my watch.

I said that I'm now exercising and doing an inside walk. And I started walking around the house just to get my extra two minutes. Of course, Apple's smarter than that. and after six minutes of walking around the house, said I didn't go anywhere or do anything. I accomplished nothing because I was going too slow and I wasn't actually doing this workout. So good for Apple on that.

Same thing. It's this motivation to knock it out. So yeah, get out there, make it happen, start analyzing deals, start calling people, start networking, go out, look at properties. I mean, there's so many things you can do every single day, even if it's five minutes a day. And, you know, within a few days or weeks, you'll be well on your way to make him moves. Look at that, Josh, summed it up.

All right. Ariane, do you have a book recommendation that you can throw our audience something you've read recently or something that impacted your life? Yes. I think this one's really good for people who are starting out set for life. Nice. Scott Trench. Scott Trench. I've heard of that guy before.

I know that guy. Yeah. He's kind of, you know, whatever, running a show. And I just really love how Scott explains the whole process. And really he goes from zero to financial freedom, but there it breaks it down in like three parts also. So what I really like the most is I feel like this topic doesn't get covered a lot, like going from zero to your first like 25K. I think that's where people struggle. And I actually started from negative.

I had like student loan debt. And nobody covers it because it's not a sexy topic. Like you never almost hear it in like podcasts or books or wherever. Because like who wants to talk about that? But I think he has some great actionable steps because that's really your foundation to build. this financial freedom. If you don't have that, I feel like sometimes people might get like a big deal and they never started from actually building their own financial foundation. I feel like it just goes away. So I think that's a very important part. Perfect. Good. Good. Good. Yeah. Scott Trench,

president of bigger pockets. That is. Yeah. Yeah. He's a big deal now. Nice. It is. Cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people reach out and get in touch with you. I'm always on my bigger pockets profile. So I think we'll put a link on the show notes. I can also email me at AriA-R-I at G-Houses.com. I think that's that's it. Perfect. All right. Well, thank you very much for being here today. All right. Thanks, Brandon. Thanks, Josh. All right. Andrew. Welcome to the show, man. It's good to have you back. Good to be back. Nice to see you here too. Although I've disappointed Brandon didn't wear his handsome shirt for you.

I didn't. Is that when he doesn't have a shirt on? No, I have a handsome shirt, you know. It's my handsome shirt. I'm all into visualization, but let's not do that. All right, all right. Today's whole show is like, let's rip on Brandon. This is great.

All right. I want to discuss who you are. I mean, people don't know who you are. Some people. I mean, you've been on the show, what, like 40 times now? So for those who have not heard you, who are you? What do you do? Andrew Cushman, I basically do apartment syndicate.

I took the standard path into real estate and got a chemical engineering degree. And, you know, like everybody does. And then did that for seven and a half years, discovered flipping houses in Southern California, flipped one, quit my job to go, you know, full bore into flipping houses, did that for four or five years. And then, you know, said, well, this isn't going to last forever. Where all these people are going to live? They're going to have to go to apartments because they can't buy a house for seven or ten years now because they got bankruptcy and foreclosures. And so my wife and I, who's my business partner, we said, you know, apartments are probably going

start a big cycle. That fortunately turned out to be true. We bought our first apartment complex in 2011. It was 92 units out in making Georgia. Since then, we've done about 1,800 units and been doing apartments full time for coming up on seven years now. That's awesome. Are you the one who made like 400 million phone calls before getting your first deal? Yes, 4,576. That is correct. I also knocked on about 3,000 doors too. Yeah, that's amazing. That's persistence right there. All right. So speaking of persistence, what does it take, man? Obviously, coming from the guy that did that, what is your number one tip for new real estate investors getting started? What do they need to do to actually become successful in real estate? Well, the good news is most people are going to be

better at it and won't have to be as persistent as I was. But that really is the mindset is, expect it to be hard and be relentlessly, relentlessly persistent. You know, most if you go into it thinking it's going to be easy, you're going to quickly get disillusions and end up, end up, you know, binge watching Netflix with a court of ice cream. You know, most true real estate success takes time and you're going to be an overnight success in five to ten years. Approach it with that mindset. Wow. Well, that completely violates everything that the infomercials tell me, I'm, I'm out of here. Yeah. Sorry. I, you know, unfortunately, I don't stay up late enough to watch those, so I don't get that message, yeah.

All right. So let's talk about persistence. I asked this question to somebody else today on the same kind of interview circuit we're doing, but I want to know your answer. How do you know when to be persistent and when to move on to something else? That is key. So for me, that answer is rip off and duplicate, which I mentioned before. So I find something that somebody else is already doing successfully and has already proven so that I know that that system works. and then so that and then just learn that and then go out and be persistent at executing that,

which is different than, hey, I got this great new business idea. I'm going to create an app. Well, okay, maybe you shouldn't be persistent at that. You have no way of knowing until the market tells you. But if you find somebody that has already perfected your real estate investing model and it's really working well, all you have to do is copy it and be persistent. And that's how you know that whether or not that's something you should be persistent at. You know, it's actually why I like the franchise model of like businesses more than just like I got an idea.

You know, like I'm going to make an ice cream shop and I'm going to sell this ice. Like, yeah, you might be fine, but like I love the idea instead of I'm going to buy a dairy queen because you're you're ripping off the exact model. Somebody else has already proven thousands of times. And I'm just going to do what they've already done. And that's why franchises have like a way higher success rate. With real estate, it's the same thing. I mean, pretty much no matter what real estate avenue you want to go into, you can find a hundred. people who are doing the exact same thing somewhere in the country.

Right. And it can be really hard to be that persistent. You know, like I said, it took me six months and a few thousand phone calls. So sometimes people say, well, you know, how do you do that, right? How do you persist that long? And, you know, lots of people talk about, well, you have your why and all that. But in addition to that, I would tell people do three things. Find an accountability partner, right?

So it can be a friend. It can be a cousin. It can be the mailman. Somebody that a week later can say, hey, did you call the 10 brokers you said you were going to call? That doesn't need to be any more complicated than that. The other thing is just track your activities, track how many broker phone calls you made. Not that there's any true value in knowing that you made that many phone calls, but again,

it gets back to the accountability and knowing that you made progress. Because if you make 20 phone calls and you have no deals to show for it, you're going to feel like you accomplish nothing. But in reality, you worked on 20 relationships. You looked at maybe 20 bad deals, which means now you're going to be better at finding good ones. And, you know, so you did still accomplish something. So tracking it helps you be accountable to your accountability partner, accountable to yourself and let you know that you actually did accomplish something, even if you didn't get a deal. And then the final thing is, again, it is,

it is really hard to get a good deal or even make a good deal in this market. So focus on the process and not the outcome. The reality is, and no matter how good we think we are, we don't have full control over whether or not we get a deal. I can't say I'm going to get a deal in two weeks. It's just, I can't do that. But I can say, well, I'm going to call 40 brokers in the next two weeks, and I'm going to focus on making certain that I do that. And if I do that, it's a success. Will a deal come out of it? Hopefully, but it may not. And that actually doesn't matter because I'm focusing on the process. I love that. There's a quote from Hal Elrod, who you and I, all three of us know, he says in one of his Miracle Morning books, he said, every result you desire is preceded by a process.

when you define your process and commit to it for an extended period of time, the results take care of themselves. And I've said that quote so many times I've got to memorize now. See, Hal, of course, says it much better and more concisely than I did. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like, if you just define that process and then commit to it, be persistent. Like, I love that you said that be persistent about the process.

So let's talk to newbies. What are some processes that they, and we actually have talked to a couple of people today kind of similar themes, but what are some processes people can work in their business that they should be focusing on. Well, if you're trying to get deals, the number one, the highest value thing you can be doing is building relationships. And that's either what, you know, if you're in the single family world, that's with sellers, right?

Reaching out cold calling, direct mail knocking on doors. If you're in the multifamily world, it might be some of that, but it's probably going to be, you know, calling brokers and, you know, lenders and, you know, managers and your team. So that is a process, you know, like I said, you know, I, what I do is I block off time. I say, I'm going to call brokers for, you know, this I actually did this morning for two and a half hours, Thursday morning.

calling brokers, that is what I'm doing. So that is something that you can, you make very, very tactical, very specific, and you can hold yourself accountable for. So that's the kind of process that I would focus on. Just something that's, you know, simple and doable and attainable. You know, what you guys have been talking about and some of the themes of these other conversations we've had, what really is sticking to me is we're talking about the journey, not the destination. And, you know, I think a lot of new folks are like, well, I got to get to the destination already. And what the experience folks that we're talking to are really saying is you'll get there. But focus on the journey, you know, open your eyes, breathe in the fresh air as you walk down the street.

Look at the trees, right? That's when you go back and examine your life, that's the stuff that matters. It's not, hey, that I got there. Right. And so for real estate investors, if you figure, you figure. out the journey, if you figured out the calls and the tools and the processes, you know, the destination, all right, you'll get to that first one. But if, you know, if you kind of skip that and get to the destination, you're not really ready for the next destination. But if you've

kind of figured out all this other stuff, you get to the first one. The next one's going to soon follow and so is the next one and the next one. Is that a fairer assessment? Yeah. And I mean, I would say, particularly in real estate, success seems to take like a hockey stick type curve, right? Kind of flat, flat, flat, flat. And all of a sudden you get to like an inflection point where you just start to ramp up dramatically, where you have the systems and the people and the capability to do like really big deals or you can do high volume of houses. I mean, think about bigger pockets, Josh. I mean, you're at a point now where bigger pockets just rules, real estate education. And, you know, you can hire CEO and all this. Whereas, I mean,

the first three to five years, you weren't rolling in cash, right? So, I mean, you 14. Yeah, 12 years, exactly. So 12, right, overnight, a 12-year overnight success, right? So, you know, that to me, real estate really is similar. You're building a business. I mean, you might get a flip and make a chunk, a big chunk of money right off the bat. And that's great. And that does happen. Just don't expect to, you know, retire in six months. Right. Isn't that that's great. There's that quote that, I can't remember. It's probably not even really him. I think Edison or something was like, success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. I don't remember who said that, but something like that. But, You know, if you don't know who it is, just say Abe Lincoln.

Abe Lincoln, yeah, I think Abe Lincoln said it. No, but I always feel like that's kind of, I almost feel like that was my, like, my real estate journey. It's just like a lot of things that didn't work out the way I thought they would. You know, like I tried to flip houses and like, like the market crash. I tried to rentals and I got irritated with that. But like, as long as you just keep going and keep persistent on the things you know are working, like collecting cash flow and units, like over time, that worked for me.

And now I look back. I'm like, oh, wow, I'm glad I went through all those, like, it was like failure after failure after failure. So I think a lot of success is that. Yeah, a failure is not a failure if you learn from it and then build a system to not repeat it. I love it. That's good. That's tweetable right there. I might go tweet. All right, Andrew. Oh, good. I think that might be the first time I've ever been tweeted. I don't know. Good for you. You know, there's a point in all of our lives where we get tweeted, hopefully. Yep. What are we talking about? It just sounds weird. It sounds weird. All right, Andrew, before we let you go, man, do you have any book recommendations for the newbies out there?

And anything that you think would be really helpful? I do. And I really like, not surprisingly, it's a bigger pockets book, but David Green's long-distance real estate investing. Because not only to the, number one, it gets over people's biggest hurdle to investing. Oh, I live in California. It's too expensive. I can't do it, you know, et cetera, which, okay, maybe so. but go find a different market.

And David, in detail, goes through how to get over that and not only just do it, but do it successfully. But I also like the book because the principles apply whether you're doing single family or 150 units. I mean, you know, some of the technical stuff is a little bit different, but the same principles apply. So if you want to go flip houses or buy single family, read that book. If you want to do apartments, get that book plus Dave Lindahl's, multifamily millions,

and emerging markets. And those three get you, you know, are a good start. Fantastic. Hey man, where can people reach out and get in touch with you? LinkedIn and Bigger Pockets, of course, and then also just our website, vantage point acquisitions. It's probably easiest to Google it, but it's just V-P-A-C-Q.com, and there's a contact us form on there, and that comes straight to my email inbox.

Perfect. Good deal. Thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it. Good talking to you guys. Take care. Mr. Ryan Murdoch, welcome back to the Bigger Pock's Podcast. How are you doing?

Hey, guys. It's like to be here. Thanks for having me back. Hey, Josh. Yeah. Hi. How are you? No, too bad. I've never spoken to the man himself. So this is an honor to speak with the Almighty Josh Dorkin. And I would like to. The Almighty Dorkin. Yes. So here it is. It's an honor right here. No, it is. I appreciate everything you've done to take your idea and your platform and monetize it not only for yourself, but it's it's remarkable that in doing so, the other people that you've affected who have gained great success in their financial and personal life. So it's remarkable. And I I'd like to congratulate you and thank you. Thank you. Keep going. Keep going. Josh, like continue. Yeah. He's like, all right. All right. Hey, so today we're talking about newbie tips. And before we get into yours, can you remind folks of who you are in about a minute,

give them a quick background on who you are and what you do? Sure. Yeah, I'm a primary. Primarily, I'm a buy and hold investor. I started about 10 years ago, house hacking my first duplex and built my portfolio up to about 20 units. I think now I'm up to 50 of my own units plus a partnership on the mobile home park. During that time, I managed anywhere between 200 and 1,500 units or obviously my own units plus running a management company, managing units for other people. And then I went to work for an even larger management company for a period of four years up until a year ago, when I left that and just went back to self-managing my own portfolio because it was to the point that it could sustain me. That's awesome.

That's where we're at. Nice. And now today, you and I, so people might not know this. Ryan is actually my partner on, well, no, we're not officially partners, right? We are tenants in common. Or ticks. Or ticks. It's a good thing we do a podcast every so often because it's about the only time we actually speak.

I think you and I could do this podcast by text. We would both take that option. I think I've talked to you more in the last three minutes. minutes, and then I've talked to you in the last three months. Yeah, absolutely. And there's nothing wrong with that. Can you guys take this offline, Mr. Murdoch? Let's get to the question at hand here.

Shut up. All right. Ryan, so as an experienced real estate investor, obviously you know what it's like. And as an experienced manager, you also know what it's like for new real estate investors. What advice would you give to somebody just getting started on what's your best tip? My best tip, I think, would be the same thing that I preached last year when I was on the podcast, and that's to make sure that you have adequate reserves for whatever property and whatever the scope of work is for that property. You know, if you're going to be one of these guys that goes in and you want to buy something, no money down,

and you need the cash flow and perform from day one, that's fine. That's doable, but you better be confident in what you're buying. And that goes from not only physical inspection of the property, so you've done general building inspection, you've sent a camera down the sewer line. You've made sure that the thing is physically sound. But also the makeup of the tenants, the economic vacancy, who's paying, who's not paying, who are you going to be able to salvage, who is going to be evicted, and what are your turnover costs and everything else that's associated with that. I've seen so many people, especially new investors, but even experienced investors, get bit by buying something. They didn't anticipate what was going to be involved with it. And, you know, they were hit with a bunch of financial surprises. So the more

risk that you take, the more unknowns for a property, the better equipped you better be to deal with it from a reserve standpoint. And ideally, that's cash in your own bank account. Second would be access to reasonably priced borrowed money, whether it's a line of credit or a personal loan. But if you have a major system failure, a furnace that goes down, a sewer line that backs up, you've got to come up with a solution for that immediately. There's no putting that off. And if you don't have the ability to do that, whether it's, it's a $5,000 repair on a duplex or a $500,000 repair on a hundred unit complex. That can put you out of business instantly. And I've seen, I've seen too many people get bit. So that's what is a newbie do? You know, okay, so I need to

have reserves. Got it. How do I even start to figure out what that number is? You know, if there's an exact formula, I don't know it, but I would take it again back to whatever you did for inspection. So, you know, If you have a failure at a duplex and say $10,000, if it's a life and death situation, pretty much anybody could scrape together $10,000. If you can't, you're seriously in trouble. But if it's a bigger complex, a bigger property and you've got to scrape together, say, $100,000, $200,000 by tomorrow, most people can't make that up out of their day job income. So you've got a real problem.

So base your reserve estimate, just on the overall condition of the property and what are your knowns, what are your unknowns? And the more unknowns you have, the more money you're going to have to set aside and be ready to spend. Yeah, that's really good. Yeah, I know that, you know, I mean, I wrote the book right on no and low money down. But I always tell people like, that doesn't mean you should invest when you're flat broke. It doesn't mean if you can't afford to put food on the table or, you know, it just means you're using other people's money. And so what I tend to advise people is, look, if you are flat broke, it doesn't mean you can invest.

But maybe find a partner like somebody who's got some financial resources and they're your backup. You know, and like they know that they're your back. up. You know, again, it's better to have half of a deal and be secure than to try to do an entire thing by yourself. And the pressure and stress that comes when you have to tap into reserves is it's really frustrating and stressful if you're on edge, right? I mean, if you could barely afford to fix, you know, the floor or whatever it is, you know,

the broken toilet. I mean, you know, all these things happen. If you don't have that cash. And also, by the way, I mean, you know, you know, if you're working with a manager and your manager isn't even talking that language, isn't talking about reserves, isn't making sure that you've got them in your setup or says, you don't have to worry about reserves, you know, just 500 bucks. Time to find a new one.

Yeah. Yeah, because those problems are real and they happen and you have to deal with them when they happen. Yeah. So the same thing can be said about, you know, if you're buying a turnkey property or if you're buying just a deal and agent sends you and says, hey, this is a really good idea, you know, good deal because like expenses are real like if you're not analyzing for me i i don't know how many turnkey deals i've seen across my you know desk that they're oh yeah we're going to fix the property up you don't need to worry about repairs yes you do like just because you fix a property it doesn't

mean the tenant doesn't bust a hole in the door because they get mad and drunk like that still happens maybe vacancy happens yep yeah it doesn't matter how good it is yeah i don't i don't go into any property now even you know even a single family home or a duplex that i think is fine you always seem to spend 10 grand just on stuff that you didn't expect. I mean, you just always do. You walk to the door, it's going to cost $10,000, whether it's an eviction or turnover, you know, some sort of surprise. I don't care how diligent you've been. You always end up spending money that you didn't think you were going to have to spend and you've got to account for that. I had a, uh, my 24 unit I bought in Ohio. Like everything was perfectly fine. I had no,

like, I didn't have the $10,000 thing up front, right? Everything was just fine. And that was in a flood hits. And like, the neighbor moved some trees and it changed the way the water flows and it hit my property and destroyed like two units. And I'm like, yep, there goes my more than 10 grand. Like that kind of stuff happens. Yeah, because even if you had done perfect due diligence on that, you wouldn't. I'd never have known. Yep.

Never would have come up. Yeah. Yeah. Great example. Well, anyway. So in essence, be prepared, be aware, be ready, have either cash, access to credit lines, credit cards, whatever it is, but have money available. Don't go and broke.

or at least don't max out everything that you have in order to get into the property and not cash on the side. If credit cards are your backup plan, be careful with that too, because that's a slippery slope. So if you don't have a property that's cash flow, maybe it's cash flowing positive, but not great, and you put 10 or 15 or 20 grand on credit cards to fix something, now you've got additional debt at 23% interest, which you may not be able to dig out of from the cash flow of that property. So if that is your backup plan, beware that you don't dig yourself a deal. deeper hole. I mean, I've been there. I've done that. It's not a good place to be. So,

uh, you know, make sure that whatever your borrowed money is in your contingency plan, but you have the ability to repay that without making the situation worse. Awesome, man. Perfect. Great advice. And by the way, people want to listen to your whole episode, you were episode, uh, Ryan was episode 234, right? Yeah. That's not me too. Yeah. 234, the bigger pockets podcast. So check it out. You got a really good story on there and, and, uh, kind of hear, you know, your downs and ups. It was really, really powerful. So good stuff. Uh, All right. So before we get out of here, though,

do you have any recent book recommendations that didn't even read and consuming anything that's changed your life? Probably the book that had the biggest impact on me. And I think, like a lot of books and a lot of that have an impact on people, it's timing as to when you read them and what's going on in your life and where your mind is at any given point. I was fortunate enough. And I know this has been mentioned before, but four hour work week. I love that book.

And like I said, I was fortunate enough to read it when I was close to a lot of the ideas in that book. But I really needed to read that book. and just shift my mindset a little further to kind of push me over the edge. And that book really hit home. It was about a year ago right now that I read it. And I think it was about a month after I read that book. I left my day job and I went to Thailand for a month and live the four-hour workweek lifestyle and never

look back. It was fantastic. So, you know, I'm not certainly not down to it every week as a four-hour work week, but the principles in that book and sort of the mindset and getting there, you know, has really stuck with me. And even my work week, I mean, I like what I do now. know, the property management stuff, the consulting, I like what I do. So even, you know, I guess four-hour work week, I would equate that to just four hours of stuff maybe that you don't like to do.

And if the rest of the week is still working, but working on things that you enjoy, then, you know, you fulfilled that as well. So that was a great book. You say real estate, you say consulting. In reality, what you mean is real estate mercenary. You are my real estate mercenary. Right. Ryan is my real estate mercenary right now. Yes. Call it, which will. Yeah. Yeah. Allegiance to nobody but the almighty dollar. So yeah, I'll go anywhere doing it. Actually, no, I legitimately hired Ryan to fly out to Ohio to like check out my property and see what we can make it work better and optimize better because I was like,

I don't want to go to Ohio. That's going to mess me up. I flew right over the apartments on a helicopter, dropped down on a rope swung in through the windows, man. Yeah, that's all. The real estate mercenary. Yeah. Yeah, that's going to be a new show on HBO. Before we kick you out of here, man, how do people get in touch?

How do they find you? What's the story? I'm on bigger pockets all the time, so you can shoot me a message there. I'm on Facebook. You can check on my website, which is lighthouseam.com. So lighthouse asset management, lighthouseam. com. I have an Instagram, but I couldn't even tell you what it is.

I'm still trying to figure it out when I post there. But yeah, usually bigger pockets are Facebook, the easiest way to get me. Perfect. Awesome. All right, Mindy Jensen. Wow, look at this. This is cool. This is cool.

I'm excited to talk to you guys. It's been a while since you've been, you know, on a podcast. podcast. Oh, wait, you have your own podcast now. The Bigger Pockets Money Podcast. Yes. I have a fancy new podcast. I don't need your podcast anymore. Oh, you're too cool for school now. Mindy, for those people who have no idea who you are, who have not yet listened to the Bigger Pockets Money Podcasts. And by the way, if you haven't listened to the Bigger Pockets Money Podcast, please tune in today, listen to Mindy, Scott, talk about all sorts of cool money topics, get you nice and financially sound.

Tell people about who you are and what your real estate background is. So my name is Mindy Jensen. I am the community manager for BiggerPockets.com. If you're on Bigger Pockets, I'm your first colleague. I am all over the website. I am the podcast host for Bigger Pockets Money podcast. And I have been investing in real estate pretty much since before Brandon was born. So like the last 20 years.

17 years. 17 years. Oh, you're 17. I was going to say, no, I've been investing for 20 years. Don't tell me my story. Brandon, I know. it. So my method of investing is called a live-in flip. That is where I buy an incredibly unattractive house. I move into it and I rip it apart while I'm living in it. I live through the

drywall dust and the new roof and all of that. It's super awesome fun. Explain some things. Yes. And in two years, I sell it. The government tells me, thank you for making the world the more beautiful place. You can keep all your profits right in your pocket. We'll take none because I lived in it as my primary residence. So it is a- Don't you love the government? I love the government. You know what? I'm going to go with for this instance. I love the government. I love the IRS, who gives me up to $500,000 tax-free. I love it. Since I'm hearing. All right, Mindy Jensen, Thank you. Thank you. All right. So with that in mind, I think I know where we're going with this, but what advice do you have for new real estate investors? Somebody thinking about doing it for the first time.

What would you tell them? So since I started so long ago, I was really young and I knew everything. It didn't occur to me to be nervous. But I think that some people really get nervous when they think about investing in real estate. So if you are nervous, start small. You don't have to jump in and buy a hundred unit complex. Use your own residence as your investment. You've got the live in flip, which I do. There's, I know we've already talked about house hacking where you use part of your property to rent out to other people. They help you pay your mortgage. You're bringing money in that you can then go and invest in real estate in another way. So, you know, if you're really nervous about it, look at your own house. See what ways you can use your house as an investment.

What I love about that, especially the live and flip, and I want to zone in on there a little bit, because we haven't talked about that today much, is like you can live in a really, really nice house. Like you could potentially live in a really great neighborhood and a really great house. I mean, granted, you have to fix it up. So either you do that right away, hopefully, or you do what you and I probably do, which is wait until the day you move out to finish it. But like, either way, like, you know, like I legitimately like am moving like this week.

I'm packing up all my stuff right now and we're finally finishing all this stuff. But still, like, we've lived in a great house. Everybody does that. But we live in a great house in a great neighborhood. and we're going to see like $100,000 in profit. That's going to be tax-free because of the whole two-year exclusion. Like, I love that. So do you have any other tips for people like how to do that?

Like what should they look for when they're going to do a live-in flip? Like should they plan that ahead of time? Or do you kind of just stumble into it? Like, okay, this one will work out well. How does somebody approach that? Well, I stumbled into it because all I could afford was really run down and unattractive. But there are a couple of tips to making a live-in flip more successful. First of all, you don't want the nicest house in a crappy neighborhood.

You want the crappiest house in a nice neighborhood because when people are looking for a $100,000 house, they're looking in a $100,000 neighborhood. If they're looking for a $200,000 house, they're not looking in that same $100,000 neighborhood. So you want a house that you can buy low and bring up to the value that everybody else in the neighborhood has. I love that. You know, my first house here in Colorado, we went to this neighborhood. And it was decent. And we found this house that blew our minds.

It was like this super eco house and gorgeous and amazing. But it was like $50 or $100,000 more than everything else in the neighborhood. And we were like all ready to pull the trigger. And then we'd like, you know, rationality hit us. And we're like, wait a second. No, we're doing this completely backwards. And thank goodness that we decided not to buy it. Yeah, because you can lose.

all the potential profit just by having the house located in the wrong neighborhood. And the wrong neighborhood doesn't necessarily mean a bad neighborhood. It just means, you know, it's not the right neighborhood for that particular house. Exactly. If you are going to live in flip, look for things that are really important to the stability of the property. It doesn't matter that there's no dishwasher or that the last owners took the refrigerator. It matters that the foundation is broken or that they smoked meth in the back bathroom or, you know, whatever. don't want to live in a meth house.

Wait, is that, I was going to say, is that a, is that a benefit or a detriment to the deal? The meth and the bathroom. That, yeah. Should we look for that or looking? Maybe Brandon has living in a meth house. He does live in Hokkoma or wherever the heck he is these days. I'm in Montesano, Montesano, Washington now.

Yes. Why do you always pronounce that differently? You say Montesano, Montesano. No, I say Montesano, but if, but if people don't know what I'm talking about, I say Montesano because then they can spell it easier. Then people are like, oh, I get it. They can spell it. That's why.

Legitimately, that's why. If I'm trying to spell it, I say Monta Sano and then people like, oh, A-N-O. Wow. I know why I retired. All right. So, Mindy, I want to know how bad is too bad to buy a fixer-upper if you're going to live in one of the, you know, live in the house. It's a fixer-upper. How bad would you recommend is too bad?

Talking for first-timers, you have to be comfortable with every single thing that needs to be done. So are you comfortable with having the roof half off? Probably okay in Colorado if it just happened. Definitely not okay over in Monta, whatever, Washington, where it rains more frequently. So, you know, look at Dino. Montecito. Monticello. Suddenly you went from like, you know, the Pacific Northwest to the beautiful California coast.

Yeah. That's Montecito. Yeah, well, Brandon can't be concerned. strain to one location. Back to me, Brandon. Back to me. Not the first time people have compared me to Chuck Norris. Okay.

Back to me. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. This is the one time you'll ever be compared to Chuck Norris. So go ahead. I need this moment. I need this moment. What does Brandon and Chuck Norris have in common?

They're both men. We've got. Legs. Okay. Facial hair, beautiful beards. Can we get back to the? Strength like a lion? Oh my God.

Did you say strength like a lion? Like with a straight face? Okay. Strength like a lion. Look at these guns. You haven't seen me lift things. I can lift things. Boxes.

You are 100% correct. The only thing I've ever seen you lift is Rosie. You do realize we're down to two listeners now. I'm sorry to both being. I'm the grandma. Yeah. Those are the two people who can't figure out how to turn off the podcast. How do I turn this thing off?

I'm Josh's mom. Anyway, so what makes a property too bad bringing this back in? Josh and I have a conversation. Let's just mute Brandon. So, you know, you look at the outside. Are any of the elements getting in? There are some houses that are just too bad. You know, is it stable?

Is it going to fall down? That's not a good. good property to try to rehab. The house that I'm currently in was horrifically unattractive when I bought it. But it was a very solid house. As I walked through it, my feet didn't bounce. I didn't, you know, bounce all over the house as I was walking. It was very solidly built. There were no appliances. Well, I don't care. I can go buy appliances. That's not a big deal. But there was no mold, which is good. All the water worked. Copper theft can be a big problem in foreclosed houses. this was a foreclosure.

So although copper was still available, was still in place. The electrical worked. So it was... So look for something whole. Look for something that's not going to collapse on you for your first house. And... Well, and if it's your first house,

you know, buying something where absolutely everything needs to be fixed can really drain your spirit. So get something with ugly carpeting and horrible paint. Get something with really ugly fixtures, but all the pipes work. It's nothing to change out a light fixture. Turn off the electricity first, my DIY tip for the day. Same with the water.

But it's, you know, electricity isn't that hard. Plumbing isn't that hard. And there are tons of books and tons of classes and tons of YouTube videos. They'll show you how to do absolutely everything. And if you're not wanting to do electricity, just go hire an electrician. I mean, they're not that expensive. Pro tip, have all of your things ready. So if you want an electrician to switch out your,

electrical, you know, your electrical fixtures, have them all ready for him to go. So you only have one call charge. Good tip. Good tip. All right. Before we let you go, Mindy, last last question along this live and flip thing. You know, obviously it could get pretty overwhelming, like you said, if you've got everything wrong. But presumably my assumption would be you want to knock one thing out, right? So start with one room, get that one room done. Go to the next room, go to the next room, and kind of work that way. Is that an effective strategy, at least since I haven't done one, I would assume that would be the way I would do it. That is an effective strategy with an asterisk, because there are some things that you want to get done all at the same time. You want the drywall guys.

Yeah, you want the drywall guys to come out and drywall everything in one fell swoop. That is a huge mess, and you don't want to deal with that more than once. But you know, you can do everything but the drywall and then move on to the next room and do everything but the drywall. So for the most part, doing it room by room is great. There are some jobs that you want to batch together. But yeah, have one space that you don't touch. So we did that with our bedroom. We had a bedroom.

We closed the door. No dust got in. We put even we put towels underneath the crack on the door so that nothing would get in. So this was one area where sometimes you come in and you're like, I am done. I can't do this today. I need a break. And you go to your bedroom. You watch TV.

It's this space that isn't all ripped up. and it makes it worthwhile again. It makes you get through that one day. It's to call it DCFS on you because the kids room had dust everywhere. The kids had their own space at the foot of our bed. Oh, okay. Very good. Very good.

All right. They were little. Live and flip. I love that. I love the idea of like, yeah, start small. You don't need to start huge. Don't get overwhelmed. Just do what you got to do where you can do it.

And if that's a live and flip, that is a great way to get there. So before we get out of here, Mindy, do you have a book recommendation? Anything that you've read lately that's changed your life or improved your life or you just think it's a cool book? So the book that I always recommend is the richest man in Babylon because it is a money book that was written in the 1920s, I think. It was published in the 1920s. And it just shows that money is not different. 100 years ago versus now, don't spend everything you make, invest with people who know what they're doing. And it was written in King James Bible version English, which is my favorite, like Shakespearean

English. It is pretty fun to read. It is fun to read. Richest Man in Babylon is one of my favorite books. It's fantastic. Everybody should read that book if they're going to get into real estate investing without a doubt. So great recommendation. Cool. Well, Mindy, thank you so much for coming on the show. We appreciate it. And we will talk to you soon. It's always fun to talk to you guys. Thanks a lot.

All right. That was our show. No, that's, that's actually, I'm supposed to say that. No, I'm saying that now. You guys, that was, that was show 301 on the Bigger Pocket podcast. I am your host, the only host, temporary, the original host. Substitute. Joshua Dorian.

You're like a substitute teacher today. The greatest. I'm like Ali. I'm the Ali of hosting. I don't know if that's true. You're the substitute teacher of hosting, but that's okay. You're flashbacking me, man. That was a former career.

That was a former career of yours. Yeah, you're making me, whoa. Anyway, for those people who are still here, there's like six people and one of them is my mom. Hi, Mom. I hope you guys enjoyed today show. Yeah, what's up, mom? There's way more than six people, and we do hope you enjoy the show because it was awesome. Those interviews were fantastic.

Yeah, yeah. Really, really good advice today on getting started. I hope if you're just getting started, I hope you walk away from this motivated and educated to go out and crush it because now is the time to start taking advantage of all this cool resources, all this good knowledge, and building your own financial plan for freedom. Yes, and leave us feedback on what you thought about the show. Any questions you've got for our guests and hopefully they can jump in. Otherwise, of course, do remember to leave us ratings and reviews on places like iTunes and SoundCloud and Stitcher. I don't know if SoundCloud's still around.

I don't even know where they are. I think so. Yeah. Stitcher, iTunes. You name it, wherever you're listening to this thing. And, you know, we launched the book today. If you buy the book, if you buy the book, you know, make when it's not on Amazon today, but it will be at some point in the future when it is, but you guys leave us a review there and let us know that you like the book. If you like the book, it helps us. And if you buy it from any of the other retailers.

Yeah, Barnes & Noble, whatever. Barnes & Noble. Yeah, leave us ratings, reviews. They do help us tremendously. Biggerpockets.com slash how to invest. Biggerpockets.com slash how to invest. Biggerpockets.com slash how to invest. Get it today.

Make me a bestselling author. I mean, this is about me at this point. Brandon, he's sold enough. Me, you need to become a best selling author. Now he just piggybacks. There you go. Hey, guys, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

It's been fun coming back. And thank you for having me on your show, Brandon. Thank you, Josh, for being a substitute host. This has been great today. Until next time, I'm your host. Joshua Dorkin. 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 hype, 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 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 E&K, copywriting is by Calicoke 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. And remember, past performance is not indicative of future results. BiggerPockets LLC disclaims all liability for direct, indirect, consequential, or other damages arising from a reliance on information presented in this podcast.