BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 354: From Rookie Mistakes to Syndicating BIG Deals with Nichole Stohler

Episode Date: October 31, 2019

From single family to multifamily to hotels! On today’s show, Nichole Stohler sits down with Brandon and David and discusses her journey from purchasing a single family home to syndicating hotels! Nichole has a fascinating story that started with losing the first house she bought, grew into recommitting herself to learning the asset class of real estate, and ended with massive success through big deal syndications. You’ll love the advice she shares about managing managers, scaling the right way, and dealing with tenants according to three irrefutable laws. She goes on to discuss keeping properties clean, choosing the right partners, and analyzing economic factors when choosing a hotel or apartment complex. Nichole reveals tons of great tips when it comes to building wealth through various asset classes of real estate. This show has something for everyone! In This Episode We Cover: Her 3 irrefutable rules for dealing with tenants How she scaled from SFH to multifamily and hotels How she manages her managers What she learned from her first deal that lost her money Why she committed to really learning the asset class of real estate Why having clean apartments is so important to tenant relations Why so many investors make the mistake of not focusing on asset management Why she turned to hotels when she couldn’t find anything in the multifamily space How the 1031 exchange impacted her capital gains and depreciation recapture Which economic drivers she looks for when choosing a property to buy What she’s learned about operating syndications in the hotel space And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Pro Email Us: [e-mail] BiggerPockets Podcast 345: “Vivid Visions” and 90-Day Sprints—Brandon’s Approach to Mobile Home Park Investing (and Life!) BiggerPockets Events GoodReads Jo Nesbo Camilla Läckberg BiggerPockets Bookstore Check the full show notes on BiggerPockets: http://biggerpockets.com/show354 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 3.54. Once you've got the model down and you understand how it works and your first hotel is doing well and you can take that and people have confidence, okay, you know what you're doing. And then you can grow from there. And now we're only really limited by how fast we can find a good property. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio. Simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing,

without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. What's going on, everyone? This is Brandon Turner, host of the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my buddy, David Green. What's up, David Green?

It was fun hanging out with you last week. Oh my gosh, that's one of the more crazy experiences I've ever had in my entire life. Was that not just insane? That was insane. Yeah, we're talking about the BP Con. Of course, now it's been like a month since BPCon. But we just got back from it recording this episode a couple weeks, you know, before we released it.

But man, BPCon 2019 was insane. So many investors are 1,000 people, so many good lessons, stories, things I learn, things I'm excited about, grow my business with. And just like networking like crazy. Like, I mean, I'm, I would say I got a million dollars of value out of that, like, one event, just like stuff that's going to make me wealthy or happier, more successful in my entire life. So yeah, very, very cool. I'm excited for next year's BPCon, which we haven't announced yet.

But yeah, listen for it in the future when we announced BPCon 2020. And make sure you get your tickets early whenever we announced it because it's going to sell out just like 2019 did. But yeah, David, I got to tell you. I talk about this in the show later, but this morning I woke up and I walk out to my Lanai, which we call our porch. And you know, Ryan Murdoch lives next door to me. And I walk out and I take my dog potty outside.

And Ryan comes out and he goes, dude, you're not getting text messages. And I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, I've been texting you all morning. you're not getting a text message. And I said, I don't know. He's like, I think your phone's broken. Whatever. He was like, what would you want?

He goes, oh, we got our deal accepted. And we had put in a like, yeah, like over $30 million offer in on a huge portfolio of mobile home parks and very, very cool deals. Like a bunch of parks all combined together. A huge expansion stretch for me. We talk about on today's show. But anyway, what a day. What a day. Very cool, man.

Congratulations on that. This is the culmination. of a lot of hard work and thanks i mean probably preparation as well all coming together in one moment and isn't that a good example of what it's like when you just work and work and work and work and you feel like you're not getting anywhere and then one day boom yeah what's crazy is like remember we talked about a show that i did a few weeks back uh the time we're talking about my vision for my company vision like i'm looking at right now on my wall it says 50 million they was called the 50 million dollar surfers and the goal was to get

50 million dollars of real estate in the next three years i should end this year then at 44 million Or it's like just crazy. Like doing that in six months or seven months since I wrote that thing. But anyway, that's power of having an aligned vision and then a team. That's, we could talk an entire episode. We should talk a whole episode sometime on building a team because you're really good at that as well. Yeah. Yeah.

And I'm kind of right behind you as far as looking to start building people, looking for analysts and underwriters and people to start looking for deals and syndicating into apartment complexes. So I think that'd be really, really good. Both starting a team and joining a team, what you need to do. Yeah. We'll put that on the agenda. Anyway, but today's show is actually, we cover some of that stuff today. Today we're talking with an investor named Nicole Stoller. And Nicole is a real estate investor who is just, has an amazing story of first, like, failure.

Like actually, like jumping in, like a lot of you guys are trying to do and then not making it. And then taking the lessons learned and then applying it, like at a massive scale a few years later, taking the lessons learned from the failure. You're going to learn about that today. You can learn from her struggles and how to avoid those things. We talk a lot about growing. We talk about the stack, which is how you can grow your business really rapidly. And why she's buying a hotel, which is a fascinating niche that I've never really thought about.

But it has my mind spinning right now. I'm not even kidding. Like it's one of those squirrel moments for me. I'm like, this is going to, this is definitely one of my favorite shows we've done in a long time. So you guys are going to love it. But before we get to it, let's get to today's quick tip. I was waiting for you coming there. All right.

Today's quick tip, nice and simple. If you are not attending local real estate meetups in your area, networking is so important. So start attending local meetups in your area. If there aren't any, start one. If you want to check out all the meetups in your area, just go to BiggerPockets.com slash events. You can find all the events that are happening there.

And those are just unofficial. They're not BP-sponsored events. They're just people getting together because we like getting together with people. And that's just what it is. So go hang out at a local meetup in your area and do it today. And if again, if there's not one, start one. like David Green does. Amen.

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Nicole Stoller. Nicole, again, is a real estate investor in the Phoenix area who has an amazing story of going from small deals, failure to big stuff. You're going to love this. Without further ado, let's get to the interview with Nicole. All right, Nicole, welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast. Good to have you here today. I am so excited to be here. I've been listening to you guys for years. Oh, that's awesome. Well, very, very cool. Well, I'm excited to tell your story to the Bigger Pockets audience or have you tell your story to the BP audience because I was, I know a little bit about you just in reading kind of your bio and you've done some really cool stuff some stuff we haven't talked about on the show so let's kind of get into it uh what do we start with how did

you get into real estate investing we so it is a great story and it is a warning story and also a story about how important having a good network of people is in uh in your real estate investing journey. But basically, I read, so right out of college, recently married, my husband and I did not have very much money. He was still going to school full time. I was working a second job in addition to my college graduate degree job. And I was obsessed with personal finance books because these are the strategies and things that we were not really taught through college and growing up. So I came across Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. And that book just, it floored me.

No one in my family spoke that way. No one was entrepreneurial. Everybody went to go work for a company and then just retire after 40 plus years. And I'm a very action-oriented person. So I immediately signed us up for a real estate seminar. And it was actually, at the time we were living in Indiana. We flew out to Las Vegas for this seminar. And the entire purpose of the seminar was how do you creatively find property when you don't have any money?

And I will say that a lot of the strategies we were able to come back and 100% implement. We found property without having any money. Although we did need to put some down payments on. So I don't know, do you want me to go into how we found that property? Because I can. Sure. Yeah, let's do it. Okay.

So basically, we found. we found at the local university in the town that we were living in, when people would die, they would leave sometimes houses to this university. And the university at that time, this was 1999, said, hey, you know what, we're not really in the real estate business. This isn't really where we want to be focused. So they were very willing to be creative around those properties. So they offered seller financing, which we jumped at this opportunity. Now, we didn't. We didn't, did have to put some kind of money down. So this is 1999. What did we do? Credit card cash advances. So this is how we were able to come up with. And I want to say maybe it was about

$5,000 per property somewhere around there. So we ended up with these properties and we were super excited. Everything we'd been taught in the seminar, we applied, we found properties. But there were so many things that we didn't learn that we didn't know how to do. Like were they actually good properties. Just because you can find a property doesn't mean you should actually buy the property. They were not in the best areas. They were not going to rent. We didn't know how to analyze, you know, rent payments versus our regular payment, what was feasible, market research, all those kinds of things we didn't know how to do. On top of that, repairs, they weren't in the best shape. So they required repairs. My husband's getting up on the roof, doing it himself because we don't

have a lot of money. And we're using credit cards to pay for supplies. And he's got residents outside drinking beer watching him put the roof on, right? So not the best class of properties and not the best shape of properties. And then the final thing is really managing residents. There is an art to that, right? There's going to be a lot of sob stories. You have to have strict policies and procedures. So these were all the things that we did not know and we had not been taught.

And this was really at a time frame where I'm sure there was a lot of, local RIA in the state that we lived in at the time, but there, there really, there wasn't bigger pockets. There weren't online forums. There wasn't a lot of people that we could reach out to to give us some ideas of what to do. And we really ended up feeling very devastated, you know, dug ourselves into a pretty great hole at an early stage just beginning our careers. So we ended up giving back the property. So we lost all the money, all the credit, we had the a card debt, right, gave back the properties. And we were in a little tiny starter home. We ended up selling that home, moving in with my parents, and then basically digging our way out of debt,

you know, over the next couple of years. Wow. Wow. So there's so many good lessons in there. I mean, one thing I talk about a lot, you know, I wrote a book called The Book on Investing in Real Estate with No and No Money Down. But one point I make in there is investing in real estate with no money down doesn't mean having no money. And it's kind of a, it's a weird thought. But people, are instantly attracted to no money down strategies when they have no money for obvious reasons. But with real estate, like there are crazy things that happen all the time. And especially when you own multiple properties, if you don't have any, if you have no reserves, if you have no income from a good, you know, if you don't, if you're not making tons of extra money every month,

you can get sunk. I had a mentor once tell me when I was younger, when I just got started, he said, you can go broke buying good deals. And I didn't know what he meant at the time. And this is exactly what he meant. Like, it might have felt like a good deal. because you got it for no money down. Well, what an infinite return on investment, right? But not so much if you can't handle all the payments of the time. So, I mean, what lessons did you learn in that process? I mean, what would you tell somebody who's, you know, 20-something-year-old,

you excited about real estate, wants to do these creative finance deals? What would you tell them? The first thing would be, don't be so excited about the deal. Kind of to your point, Brandon. You know, really there's a lot of, in those resources on bigger pockets, for example, but make sure you know how to analyze the property. If you don't know how, find someone who can help you. And understand, do you have the capacity to manage residents?

And if not, then you'll need property management. And if you need property management, you need to build those costs in as well. And just as a side note, property manager does not mean that you get to sit back and collect checks. You still have to manage your manager as well. But so, so I would say don't get so enamored by your first deal. And especially if you're finding, you know, something creative like that, that you lose sight of all those pieces. And then for us, the big lesson that we learned is, you know, we were committed to real

estate. We didn't say, oh, gosh, we're done. We're never investing in real estate again. We recognize 100 percent. It was our fault. We knew that we need to learn. And so we said, gosh, how can we learn? How can we actually get this knowledge and understanding?

So my husband went to go work for a property management company so that he could get that knowledge and that background. That's smart. That's smart. Yeah, you know, David and I talk a lot about on the show here, this idea, too, of you just get that first deal. You're going to get a bunch of knowledge and experience, which is important. You don't have to hit a home run.

Now, we're not saying buy a bad deal your first deal, but you got to get somehow started. So how do you, and I think most people would agree, just you got to do something, right? But where do you reconcile being scared to pull the trigger on the first deal? But then with your story of like, of failing because you went too big too fast, like, is there a certain number of deals a person should maybe buy or not buy, like buy one, hold on to it? How do you kind of look at those, the two things, taking action versus doing it carefully? Yeah.

And I actually have people ask me this question. And being in tech, there's a lot of people in this industry that are, have a lot of analysis paralysis. That's really huge. We love spreadsheets and processes, but then pulling the trigger. So here's what I would say, figure out your tolerance. level for, you know, return your tolerance level for time, what kind of time you want to invest, right? So figure these things out. Let's say you have no time and you're very conservative.

Okay, so you need to be looking for a deal where you can look at, for example, if you're looking at a house, you want to look at the past 10 years what has been the rent in that particular city, town area, right? And what was the worst rent during that time? Now, granted, rents, I'm in Phoenix, our rents are continued to raise 8% per year. But let's just say in the past 10 years, what was the worst? Okay, now if you figure that's the worst, can you still make a good decent amount of income if you add, for example, if you have no time, you add property management. After you have reserve, can you make a good income still? And I can't say what that is. It might be for you. It's $200 a month. It might be $500. It kind of depends on the person. And I think the more deals you look at,

the more you'll start to understand what's realistic because you're not going to probably make $1,000 a month in today's market and a new single-family house that you're buying. But you look at that and you say, okay, what's the worst that can happen? Well, the market, the rents drop. And I see what it was 10 years ago. And I can still cover the mortgage and I can still make money. That's when you pull the trigger because, you know, otherwise you're, you don't, you're scared because you don't know what could happen. Just plan for the worst. And then you're good. Yeah, I think that you make some, some really good points right there. One of them that I loved was that you need to understand yourself and you have to know what works for you. Are you conservative? Do you have time but no money? Do you have money

but no time? Because the temptation when you're new is to look at what somebody else does and say, I want to go copy that. Oh, that's the deal that David buys. That's the deal. Brandon buys. Okay. I only want to buy that deal. But you don't live David and Brandon's life and you don't have our goals and it's completely different. It doesn't make sense to try to compare what you're trying to do with what we're trying to do. Real estate itself is a very powerful vehicle. It builds wealth very powerfully over time. But everyone has to come in with a different style. Not everybody plays the same way. If you're as Stefan Curry, you don't play like a Dennis Rodman. And I love that you admitted that that's one of the keys is to know yourself and know what you're looking for. For some people, turnkey is the absolute

best way to go because they make a really high income and they don't have time. For other people, it's going to take them so long to build capital that it would take 15 years. They need to be pounding the pavement, door knocking and driving for dollars, looking for something they can buy with seller financing that somebody else missed. There is something for everyone, though. And I love that you made that point that there's a way that anybody can do this if you know yourself. Yeah, that's really good.

You know, another point you made, I want to pull out here is a lot of investors look at, we'll call them rose-colored real estate investors, right? the R-C-R-E-I. Rose-colored, I was hoping that would be a nice phrase like burr, but whatever. The rose-colored real thing. You needed a bow somewhere. Yeah, I did. They're so bow.

But no, they look at deals and they're like, okay, what's the best, you know, you know, rent is going to be between, and I'm guilty of this as well. Rent is going to be between, you know, 800 and 1,000. Well, let's run the numbers at 1,000. And let's say the expenses are going to be between 800 and, you know, 1,200. Well, let's assume expenses are, you know, 800. It's like new investors, especially because they're so excited and emotionally drawn into doing a deal that they look at it with these rose-colored glasses rather than what you

just said, which was so good, is what's worst-case scenario? Like what's, not saying, I mean, worst-case is an asteroid hits the building and blows up everybody, right? But like, what's the most likely worst-case scenario that could actually happen? And then can you still move forward? I think that's a fantastic. I think I actually put that in one of the books I wrote, the worst-case scenario analysis. Can you still survive by doing a worst-case scenario analysis? A-W-C- whatever. Anyway, very, very, very good point. So, okay, so what came next?

So you got, you, you did that thing. You bought, by way, how many houses did you buy in there? You said you bought houses. Yeah, they were actually, one was a fourplex. One was a triplex. There was a duplex and there was a single family. So all, you know, basically four. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. So a few things in there. You gave them back to the university. Is that way you had them financed? Okay. So getting back to the university said, hey, we can't do this and start it over. And then you quit real estate and just did nothing for the next 20 or 30 or 40 years until you retired on Social Security.

All right. End of show. Thank you guys for joining us today. Okay. Now, what came next? Obviously, you didn't do that. You took the lessons learned and applied it. So what came next?

So there's an interesting lesson in this next part that came next, which is my husband went to go work for this property management company. And two pieces. We had met a person at, we actually went to another. seminar too, but we met someone at a seminar. And he worked for this property management company. And we kept in touch with him. And when this all went down and we decided, okay, we're committed, we need to figure out how to learn this business. My husband called that person that he had met up and went to go work for him. Now, so that was a cool connection, very important person to give him that shot because he didn't really have a lot of experience. But he had a, you know, he had a degree

and he was just fresh out of college. So essentially, he went to go work for a really large developer that then managed their own very large multifamily, like 600 plus unit apartment complexes. So he wasn't really out there managing like a bunch of individual homes and he wasn't really in a property management company that wasn't tied to ownership. So what happened was he got this great experience in multifamily.

That became what he knew and what he understood. But when he thought about property management, he thought of ownership, which we came to learn later, are two different things. Yeah. Explain that. Well, so when we, we'll talk about as we moved further and we bought a fourplex and a sevenplex further on and we lived in a different state, we hired property management for that. And I think it was really eye-opening to him.

that we have different objectives and that hiring a separate entity to manage our investment, they did not have the same approach. They did not care about the investment like we did. Prior, he'd worked for this company where that was all their investment and they were managing it. So it was eye-opening to him that that property management was decoupled and maybe sometimes had opposite goals. Interesting. Yeah, just yesterday, I'm buying a triplex here on Maui right now and I close in a couple of days. I'm interviewing a couple property managers and I ask one of them about whether or not like the furnished rentals versus should I keep it furnished because Maui's a little different. I keep it furnished and go like traveling nurses, doctors, you know, visiting for a few months or should I go regular? And the lady said, no, definitely go long term. Definitely go long term. It's just a much better thing to do.

And what I thought was interesting is the only reason she said that is because for her it was a better thing because they don't have. have so much turnover and it's less work for them. Yet, so like a property, I mean, I thought it was as a perfect illustration of like, property managers are thinking about what's best for them, not necessarily what's best for you and what's best for the investment. But if I really, like, I mean, I'm still working the numbers. Should I do furnish or not furnished? But like, you got to take everything a property manager says with a grain of salt because

it's not their investment. It's their business. And the two are not always aligned. Absolutely. All right. So what did you do then? So we actually took, I would say we were not. aggressively investing in real estate then for a few years. And we moved out to Phoenix. And then we started

investing again. We bought a fourplex. Then we bought a sevenplex. And then from there, we took those, turned them over, bought a 28 unit with seller financing apartment complex, bought a 50 unit, and then transitioned into hotels. Okay. So we got a lot to cover there. So first of all, I love it. You You said you went from a four to a what? What was the next one? A four and a seven. We owned those about the same time. Yeah.

Okay. So here's what's cool about that. Because I, it's like, I teach this concept on BPL called the stack. And it basically means growing exponentially, rather than buying a house, buying a house, buying a house, buying a house.

So after 10 years, you have 10 houses. Let's say you buy one a year. The stack is this concept where you grow exponentially. You buy a house, then maybe a duplex, then maybe a fourplex, then a 10 unit, then a 20 unit, whatever. I love that you kind of did it. It was like 4, 7, 28, 50, and then hotel.

So the, The reason I teach that and talk a lot about it is because people sometimes get caught in comfortability, right? They get caught where I'm comfortable buying a fourplex and you could have stuck there forever. I'm just comfortable buying a single family house or I'm comfortable buying a duplex, but you obviously expand it. So I want to kind of talk through that journey. I just wanted to point that out that's awesome.

But before I get there, what changed in your investing strategy between the first phase, which was rough and then you decided to get back into it. What did you do differently with that first fourplex and then the seven? And obviously things are going better because you got buying. What was the difference? The big thing is we understood how to manage residents. Now, we did have property management to start. And that's when we learned that we had opposite objectives.

And my husband ended up taking it. When we got into the 28 unit, he ended up taking over the management at that point in time. But basically, we learned a lot more about how to evaluate the property. and I'm not going to say that every one of those properties was perfect because I think you continue to learn, right? The 28 unit was challenging, right? Especially going from 7 and a 4 to 28. But the key was that we really understood a lot more about,

you know, we did this kind of cash flow analysis and the commercial properties. We were really looking at the numbers. We were figuring out worst case scenarios. And, you know, just that part gave us more of a comfort, but I will say to your point, it is a little scary when you're signing off on, you know, now it's a 28 unit, right? It is a little bit intimidating, but you can do it.

And then you get through that and then you're ready for the take on the next one. So in your years of managing tenants, can you share with us maybe three irrefutable rules that you've learned for managing tenants that you would just never break? Well, I think the first is, and this is really important in today's world, too, is that you have to have policies that you adhere to. And you have to have them written down. We haven't had, especially when he was working for the big property management company, that was really key.

I would say you also those, and actually, you know what? I'm going to say that it all comes down to policy. So your policy is, you know, if rent is not paid within, you know, that specific date, it's an immediate five-day, well, we're in Arizona. So we can do an immediate five-day notice if rent is not paid on time. And then there are late fees that you 100% enforce. You don't allow excuses. You also set your guidelines for your residents that, you know, if you're going to accept

pets or you're not, you adhere, you keep those and you don't change with different sob stories or situations that come across. I think that main thing is really consistent policy. The other thing is taking care of your residents. So if they're paying on time, et cetera, make sure the apartment is clean. You know, they have a good, I guess I should say, a good experience if they have issues.

Make sure that you're addressing those issues. Make sure that the park area, the pool, that these things are kept up to date. When there are maintenance issues, be responsive to that. Those are some of the things that, you know, people care about and will continue to live in your, apartment complex if they're getting that kind of service level. Yeah, so good.

I think anybody who is currently a landlord or is going to become one needs to hit that rewind button a couple times right now and go back and listen to that again because everything you said there is exactly, I mean, better said than I would say it, but exactly how I think of like the difference between a good, a good landlord and a bad one, somebody who succeeds and somebody who fails is that. It's a skill because a lot of people can buy real estate, but the best real estate deal in the world, the best deal in the entire world. is a horrible deal if you don't manage it correctly or manage your property manager correctly.

And yeah, policies taking care of residents so good. Yeah, really good. I think it's really good that we're pointing that out because a lot of the time we focus on analyzing a deal. Well, know your numbers and that's it. Once you buy it, it takes care of itself. But no, that's not the case at all. Managing the asset doesn't get talked about, but that's a huge, huge piece of if it's

successful or not. Yeah, it really is. So I got this performance coach. His name's Jason. He's awesome. And we meet together every other week. can we talk and he he has this he i wish i had the text right now i should read it to he said actually i'll pull it up here he said uh because we got a big deal accepted this morning a big offer

accepted he said i hope you're starting to understand that your only limiting factor is how fast you can accept the expansion and i love that that he said that how fast you accept the expansion so what i mean by that is what you just said a minute ago is like it was a little scary to do that fourplex and then the seven unit and then the 28 unit like but as my friend darren sager says don't be afraid of commas like it's just a comma So like it's difficult. You got to learn. But once you accept that expansion, that new level, like that becomes the norm.

So today I bet you could probably go and buy a 28 unit and probably be okay. Like you wouldn't be freaked out and scared to go by a 28 unit, but at the beginning you are. So anyway, just like a little mindset thing here is like, as my coach always tells me, breathe. Just like breathe and accept the expansion. Like you're filling up a balloon. Here's my analogy. I'm taking one from you, David. You're filling up a balloon.

And it's a little bit tough. But then just let us just stay there a little bit. Get the balloon used to that size. And then you can expand big. and just breathe and just feel that expansion. So anyway, very, very cool again, your story doing that. So let's get back to the four, the seven, the 28, the 50 unit. I want to actually ask you about the 50 unit.

That's a big jump from 28 to. I mean, 50 is now like, that's large multifamily. This is maybe like a little bit. Even I would say like it's a different almost a different investment than a 28 unit almost. Like did you find that or was it easier or harder? What did you learn in that process? And then let's go to hotel because I'm super interested in that. Yeah, so great point. The 50 unit was a dream property for the size and for the fact that I would say it was a C class, multi-family.

But we always had a wait list. It was really just, it was in a good location, like all the things, right? It was, and there was pride of ownership, not of every single resident, but for the majority. And that's why there was a wait list to come into the property. So, yes, things that change there. my husband needed to train and hire an on-site person, which we had never really had before. He would basically go to the 28 unit. And he might have had like a few people that did certain things and would get some kind of income for that,

but not having really this on-site person. That particular property had an actual office, right? So it had those types of things. So that was different. It was also partially Section 8. And that was interesting. because, and I remember that, you know, the way Section 8 works, at least here in Arizona, is that utilities, we had to pay for utilities. And so, you know, you're getting about 25 different

utility bills every single month that, you know, the bookkeeping company is dealing with. So there's some challenges and incremental work that comes along with that. But it still overall was just a really great property to own. Yeah, super cool. For decades, real estate has been a cornerstone of the world's largest portfolios. But it's also historically been sort of complex, time-consuming, and expensive. But imagine if real estate investing was suddenly easy, all the benefits of owning real, tangible assets without the complexity and expense. That's the power of the Fundrise flagship fund. Now you can invest in a $1.1 billion portfolio of real estate, starting with as little as $10. The portfolio features $4,700 single-family rental homes spread across the booming

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Again, that's biggerpockets.com slash dominion. Wouldn't it be great if your houseplants paid rent while you were out of town? I mean, they've got the whole place to themselves, lots of sunlight, zero responsibilities. But no, they just sit there waiting for someone to spray them with some cool mist like a bunch of leafy loafers. But guess what? Your home actually could be earning. you money while you're not there. Airbnb has a great feature called the co-host network, which makes hosting your home so easy. If you live far from your property or are away for extended periods,

you can hire a local co-host to take care of the hosting for you. These co-hosts are vetted locals who already have experience hosting on Airbnb. A co-host can handle all the details like messaging guests, creating your host space, and managing reservations. So everything runs smoothly. It's a practical way to earn a little extra money, maybe even some cash toward your next trip. Plus, you get to share your place with someone traveling to your area while you're off making memories somewhere else. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. All right. So why did you go then from a 50 unit to a motel? Because that's something I don't think we've ever talked about here on the show before, motel investing. Yeah. So a couple of things.

When I talked about in the beginning, you have to understand your tolerance and your time and those types of things. The other piece is, what is a realistic? Again, don't be super crazy, but what's your investment return that you want to see for the work? And especially if you're putting a lot of work into this kind of, you know, real estate, it is a lot of work. And for us, we looked around at the available apartment complexes. And of course, now, you know, we were selling the complex. We didn't actually want to, but we got an unsolicited offer three times and finally took it on the third. time. Now we're under 1031 exchange and we're looking around and we like to invest locally and that's partially because we want to physically be able to go and see the property. My husband, you know,

I would say we were self-managing even though we had an onsite. It was still under Mike's, my husband's management. So we weren't really looking to go out of state and we could not find apartment complexes in Phoenix that met our criteria. And by that I mean by that times, this would have been late 2016. There were enough people coming in, enough commercial private equity groups. There were enough folks coming from California buying apartment complexes that cap rates were around 6% at that time.

And for us, we just didn't feel like the work was worth that low of a return. And we had actually been networked, and talking with a hotel guy, I'm going to call him that. He had been, he's been in hotels 20 plus years about three years prior because we actually were already intrigued by hotels. And we thought this is an investment that we might want to invest in separately. It wasn't, it had nothing to do with selling our apartment complexes or anything like that. And for whatever reason, that was going to be a new build. It was a little bit complicated. We didn't actually end up doing it. When we got the unsolicited offer, we called him up right away and we said, a couple things. We're going to be 1031.

We had a large amount at that point. So we needed to find a large property. Do you know of anything that's a good deal that makes sense? And also, can you help us? Because we don't know anything about running hotels. And if there's anything we learned from that very beginning is when you don't know about something. You either partner with someone or you get the education to be able to be confident with that particular real estate asset. Yeah. So good. So good. All right. So before we move on talking more in depth on the motel, hotel, what's the difference? Motel would imply that it would be like a roadside, you know, like one of those places. This is a actually like a horror movie takes place at a hotel. It's a franchise hotel. It's an actual name brand and, you know,

not, not in a scary place. Okay. So is a hotel. So before we go there, though, you mentioned you were under a 1031 exchange. Can you explain to those who maybe have not heard that term before what exactly 1031 is? And then maybe like, because I've been through it, some of the difficulties of that 45 day window. Right. So we have actually, we've used a 1031 a few times and one time we didn't and we wished we had. So I would always encourage people. people to explore that. So the minute, and I always say, if you even have just one house that's an investment property and you're thinking of selling it, investigate 1031 exchange. And it actually doesn't hurt you to at least get into one. So basically, you have an intermediary who holds the

funds and you have a time to identify a new property, which has to be like or greater than what you just sold. And I believe it's about the debt service. So at a point, you can see that this is growing your portfolio because you can't take the proceeds from a sale of a single family home and then just apply it to a less expensive single family home. It would either have to be the same or bigger. And you have to identify within certain time frames. But what the 1031 she exchange allows you to do is take the capital gate, like all the proceeds, basically, all the proceeds from the sale of the property, put them into, let's just say like a vault, which is the intermediary, they stay there.

And then you go find your new property and you leverage all of those funds into the new property and you don't pay capital gains tax. And more importantly, because this is what came to haunt me, you don't have to pay the depreciation recapture. Recapture. Yeah. Yeah, that's huge. Which maybe explain that for those who don't know what the depreciation is.

depreciation recapture. Right. So a huge benefit of real estate investing is that you could, so let's just say you have a single family home and you're making $5,000 a year on that particular property after everything. You can actually through depreciation and let's say the value and there's your CPA would do this and figure out the depreciation amount and it's basically 27 and a half years. That particular asset is depreciated.

So on paper, you can look like you did not make any money because maybe it's $5,000. And that just basically means you get to keep that $5,000 in your pocket and not pay taxes. Well, when you go to sell, though, the government says, okay, you no longer have that property. We need our tax revenue back that you didn't pay during those years you own the property. But the 1031 exchange allows you to not pay that. And it's so important because it's pretty easy to sit there and think, okay, well, I'm going to make X amount on this property and capital gains. It's really not that big of a deal that you. And in my case, I thought, well, it's not that big of a deal.

But the depreciation recapture, especially on these bigger properties, that is a huge deal, huge deal. Yeah. I think that can expand quite a bit too if you do like a cost segregation study or do an accelerated depreciation. And like, yeah, I sold it. I just sold, I told the 24 unit a few years ago, bought another 24 unit in Ohio, and they just sold that one and I'm buying a triplex. So I went actually, I went smaller, but it's about the same price. I actually were going to have to pay in a little bit because it wasn't exactly the same. I had to downsize.

But anyway, it's basically the same price, but I went from 24 units to three units and moving the debt from one to the other because it was going to be a whole lot more simple to manage a three unit than a 24 units. So, but yeah, that 45-day window that you got to identify in 45 days, that drove me. like crazy last time. I identified on day 45. This time I got lucky because I found the deal before. I sold the other one. But did you have that problem?

We were you stressed with, I have 45 days to find that property? The, when the hotel, so when we moved in the hotel, that one was not that bad because we had already been looking around the Phoenix metro area. And we realized that there just, there wasn't going to be a property.

So when we contacted the hotel guy, he was able to very quickly get back to us. with his ideas and thoughts. And so that one wasn't as bad, but we certainly had that in the past. It is very stressful. But then you think, okay, well, if you can't find anything, then you are going to have to pay. And at least I'd say just get into it and then try.

And then if you can't, you can't, unfortunately. Yeah. And this is much deeper than we need to go. And this is my confusing people. But there is something called a DST out there. It's called a DST where you can 1031 into a, it's kind of like a syndication. you can put your money into a DST and park it there and get like super low returns. In fact, I might even do a DST someday just to take people's 1031 money at super cheap rates

because they're kind of stuck and they have no other option. So you can put money into a DST, get a really low return for a while and then take the out of the DST and go put it into a deal when you find one. There is an avenue there. It just gets a little complicated. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time. But just write that down. If you're in that situation, you're at a 1031 right now and you're in the 45 day window.

Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's not 45. days to close, right? It's 45 days to identify. And then I can't remember six months to close or something like that. 180. 180 days.

Okay. And the DST stands for a Delaware statutory trust. Oh, look at that. David Green coming in with the brains. Actually, our producer Kevin, fill that in. He passes me the ball. All I got to do is lay it up. He'd be really good.

There you go. Just like, I don't know, any basketball examples you can give there. Don't try to give a sports analogy. I was going to let you come in with the, I was going to assist you with the analogy right there. You didn't take it. Like John Stockton to Carl Malone. Okay, there we go. So I want to ask you something, Nicole, for those people that are interested in owning a hotel, investing in hotels, you've already mentioned as a new person, you either need a partner with someone who knows or get the education.

Let's say that they have a little bit of an idea what they're doing. What should they be looking for in a deal? So when you're evaluating a hotel property, so some of the things are very much the same, right? you are absolutely looking at location. Are there economic drivers happening in that particular area? Why are people traveling? But it would be employers. It would be, you know, is there military base? What kinds of things exist around that area? And you also want to look at your competition. In hotels, just like in multifamily, you have A, B, and C. In hotels, you have different levels. You have like your high-end resort. You have boutique. You have limited service. You have upper mid-scale.

And they seem to add more and more categories because the brands keep coming out with new brands every year. But basically, who in your competition is, where are they? And how close are they to amenities? So when people are traveling, they want to be close to entertainment, work, restaurants, you know, those kinds of things they want to be close by. So you look at the location. You also want to look at the revenue per available room. and you want to look at the average daily rate. But that doesn't mean anything except for if you can compare it to the peers.

So there are things in industry called Star Reports, and those basically will say, hey, of your peer, similar type of hotels, similar category, similar area, right? This is how they're performing. And in our case, just like with multifamily, we always look for a value ad, right? we look for an opportunity that we can come in and improve operations. So you do the same thing.

You kind of want to look for they're not doing as well as the other hotels. And why is that? And then that can also be a negotiation too. Hey, I noticed what is happening here. And you can look at your factors and say, you know, I'm going to offer less or whatever the case may be. So I would say those are the things. And then, of course, just the basic. What's your mortgage going to be?

what your loan going to be like and can you clear that if look at about 2010 that was the worst year for the hotel industry so look at 2010 what were the average occupancies during that time frame and I think you know in Arizona we were probably talking about 50% but in some areas of the country may have been 30 right depending like it where the hotel is located so when you have those lower rates, are you going to be able to make the mortgage? Are you going to be able to pay the staff? And if you are, okay, it's not going to be great. Like, you're not going to be rolling in the cash, but you know that you've conservatively underwritten the deal. That's really good. So you mentioned staff. How much of your time is spent now like dealing with

because it's really what you did. You bought a business, right? You bought a business that provides housing temporary for people for, you know, by the night. Is like the majority of your business now, just like managing people and teams and hiring and firing or do you have how does that work? So it's a great question because in the hotel industry, you can also find the equivalent of property management type of companies. And there are different layers and different kinds of services. So in our case, what we have is we have the 20 year hotel guy who I would say is like an advisor, right?

So overseas. And he had the connections and said, okay, well, here is a good property management company, but all they do is hotels. And so what's important about that is that they do handle the staffing. They handle the payroll. They handle the bookkeeping for the hotel itself, right? So like, you know, paying for the linens and those kinds of things. They also handle, let's just say, all of a sudden, somebody quits and now you have a gap. It's maybe it's your night person, right? If you're your 24 or 7 desk, well, they have someone that can come step in. So you're not having to scramble. Or you're not having to go work that. So we pay a premium for that, right? So that does cut into our

revenue and our profit. But the reality is we want to continue to grow our business. We're actually in the process of our next hotel. We can't do that if we're having to, you know, day to day manage those kinds of things. So then it becomes more of managing the manager, as we talked about in the beginning. But there's just a few more moving pieces with that property management. I guess I'd never even realize that there would be property managers. for hotels. Like, I didn't know that was a thing. Do you, like, what is the typical rate?

Like, I mean, is it the same property management 10%? Are they way higher more like vacation rentals, which are like 50%. No, so the company we're working with is 2%. So that's, it's not bad at all. And, but it's 2% of, you know, the revenues and the more we make them. So actually, I would say they're pretty well aligned. And then, you know, staffing and now we hire a general manager. So we've got that on site as well.

But yeah, about 2%. When you find another motel, can you, or hotel, sorry, hotel, can you share a general manager over the two of them

and save some costs? Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I met at one of the hotel conferences. I met someone who did that. His two hotels are right in the airport area, and they're just a half mile from each other.

So yes, you can do that. And I think you would get some good economies of scale in that way. All right. So that's fascinating. I mean, the motel thing is, hotel thing is interesting.

So here's what I. Here's a love about that is that we talk about this all the time, but there's so many ways to make money in real estate, right? Like some people are like, well, you know, I do hotels. Some people are like, I do motels. Some people do, you know, low-end section 8, you know, single-family houses. And you can find an example of somebody's super wealthy in any of those niches. So it's very cool that you do that. You're going all in. It sounds like that that's your passion now, which is cool.

Are you still looking for other things as well, other types of real estate? Are you motel hotel-focused? We are hotel-focused. we're in the middle of a syndication right now that actually is supposed to close later this month. So that's our first syndication. So to your point about expanding and now once you've got the model down

and you understand how it works and your first hotel is doing well and you can take that and people have confidence, okay, you know what you're doing and then you can grow from there. And now we're only really limited by how fast we can find a good property, right? Where the numbers make sense,

which this one has, has been almost nine months in the making. So it definitely takes some time, at least in today's market. Yeah, that's cool. So let's talk on syndication real quick, unless, David, you were jumping. I was going to ask a question about that. Yeah, I want to know. For those who don't know, what is syndication?

And then let's talk about, like, what have you learned in that process? Okay, so a syndication is basically where you are pooling private money, typically for the down payment on a large property. but you could also be pooling that for what I want to say, repairs or large loans that you would need to upgrade and renovate the property as well. So basically, you have options. The option that we chose was a 506C, but you also have a 506B option. So you would work with a real estate, you know, and basically an SEC entity structure, like a lawyer that really understands law and contract. and documents around this.

So we did. And the 506B would mean that you are only having investors that you personally know. And there aren't really a lot of qualifications for those investors, but just that you know them and you've known them for a long time.

Not like I just met you. And now you're going to sign up. Apparently there's a length of time period. The 506C is for accredited investors only. And that means you can also widely talk about it. You can advertise it if you would want to. You could put it on Facebook, et cetera. So those are the- Yeah, why did you choose. So because I chose the 5060 because I have a big Instagram following and a podcast following. So I can talk about my 5060 all day long. Hey, everybody, check out by 5060. Is that why you did it?

Or does there another reason? Yeah. So I have a podcast and I did talk about it on my podcast. I would say, though, the reality is that we could have done 506B because we do know absolutely everyone and that is part of this first syndication. But from there on, I think what happens is as you grow and you expand, now you probably are going to be talking about people that you don't know that are friends of your original investors, right? So I can see where it makes sense either way. But yeah, we just did 506C.

we have learned that the paper, oh my gosh, it's pretty complicated to do this with a hotel. I think if we were going to do it again, we would probably raise more of a fund and then go versus what we did is we socialized the idea of this. We already were looking at hotels. People knew we owned a hotel within our social circles and within our work circles. And we identified a property and then we were able to really get like the deep. details around what are the returns, what can people expect, what people wanted to know, what is the property. So we couldn't really raise a bunch of funds initially, I would say,

without an actual property we could point to. Once we did, though, we actually get under contract. The time pressure there, I would say, is way more than on a 1031 exchange. Like the pressure to make sure that you've got all of the funds, that you've talked to all of the people, that you've answered all of their questions. There's a lot of process that we go through. And then because it's a hotel, it's slightly more complicated. First of all, we are leveraging a small business loan. So that's the government. And now our loan is very different than just working with a commercial lender like we used to in multifamily properties. So that adds a layer of complexity. We also have the franchise, the franchise company wants to vet out the people that are part of the partnership.

So that has also created, you know, just incremental work. And just it's been very intense for almost four months, I would say, just because of these moving pieces and the process and narrowing everything down and getting all the funds ready. Yeah. And this is all part of that expansion, that balloon filling up and you're learning all these things. and it's like, it's crazy and you're not sure what, you know, as you're figuring it out. But then like next time you're going to be at that new level. So you're building from that point.

That's your new like foundation and you're building from there. So super cool. I just like that's the story of your investing. So now I want to, I want to move out of the next segment of the show here, which is our deal deep dive. Deep dive. This is the part of the show where we dive deep into one particular property that you've recently bought, maybe a good one, maybe a bad one.

And we just want to dive into the details on it. So do you have a property in mind that we can pick apart? Let's talk about the one that we are looking at purchasing right now. Okay. That's cool. I like that. And we'll start with the basic, what is this? I think you already said it's a hotel.

It is a hotel. And how big is it? This is a 64 room upper midscale hotel. Okay. Another like name brand? Yes. Yes. Name brand.

Okay. Is upper midscale some? to in real estate, we talk about A, class, B, class C class. Do you guys have a different classification? Yes. And so the piece of this particular hotel is it's limited service. So that would mean that there is free breakfast, but that is the only food and beverage component. So there's not a restaurant. There's not room service. That's what the limited service means. And it also means that there's certain expectations. It's really targeted toward a business traveler, right? So not necessarily a resort where people are hanging out, although it does have a pool. But yeah,

And then upper mid-scale is classification based on aesthetics and based on the brand as well. Okay. Beautiful. Okay. How did you find this deal? So we found it also through networking with our hotel guy. And he's really plugged in with hotel people all over the state of Arizona. And we looked at properties else like in Tucson, outside of the Phoenix metro area.

But yes, we found it through our hotel guy. Cool. Let's see. How much was the property? How much do you, are you buying it for? So we are buying it for 5.2. But our loan is for 5.5 because we have 300K that we need to put into property improvements.

What kind of improvements? So what do you do to improve? Yeah. So it's a great. So in the host. industry, there is a term called PIP, not to be confused with those in corporate America, but it does mean performance improvement plan, which is kind of negative. But essentially what happens is the hotel brand and all the things that you get as a result of being a part of the

brand, they have standards that they want to maintain. And they certainly don't want someone staying at a hotel that is not what they expected because it's old and tired and hasn't been updated. So the performance improvement plan are specifications that are required and within certain time frame, certain components and different timeframes to be to implement in the hotel. In this case, this hotel is in, it's fully converted, but it's in the conversion physical aesthetic process from one brand to another. So the exterior has already been converted. The lobby is already updated and refresh, but the rooms are dated. They are looking like from 20 years ago and they're okay, but do you know when you stay in a hotel and it's dated like that? It's almost like it doesn't feel

clean, right? You just don't even want to touch anything. So we'll be updating all of the rooms. And that is where the 300K comes in. All right. So how did you negotiate this deal? Okay, so the original asking price was 5.7. And so basically, I think the current owner was looking at it and said, okay, this is what it will be worth. But the reality is we had to make that investment. So we asked for copies of all the quotes that he had received for that renovation. And we also checked with the franchise company to see, you know, just to, to make sure that we understood what those costs would be.

And then we negotiated from there. And the other thing that had happened with this particular hotel is that hotels are seasonal. Although in some parts of the country, they're not so much. Like Orlando, I think has a year-round people that are staying there. But in Arizona, our seasonality is that summer is the worst time. These people are not traveling to Arizona

when it's 115 out in July. So our best season comes into October. on through up until May. The person that owns the hotel right now essentially did a conversion. Now just think about this. It's construction, right? It's branding that's not fully available.

You're probably not on the corporate travel booking sites, all those things as you convert. They did this during the busy season, which impacted their revenue greatly. So my husband also used that as part of the negotiation, saying, hey, I know, you know, you know, You know, you think their hotel could do this, but I'm looking at actuals and you didn't. So he leveraged that plus the construction.

Yeah, I always find when people are selling properties, it's always like people are so generous with their, this is what the property performs. I'm like, yeah, in its best, you know, rose-colored glass analysis. But, you know, it's not always the case. So great, great negotiation strategy there. How did you fund the property? I guess we already know that. Syndication, right?

syndication through a SBA and the particular loan that we're using is the 504C SBA loan. Interesting. All right. And what, do you mind me asking like, and I don't know if you can say, if you can't say this, let me know, but like what kind of returns do you offer investors? Like, is there a cash flow that you expect or is this mostly backloaded at the end when when you refire or sell? Like, where's the investor return come from?

And what do you kind of predict? Yeah, so we leverage. So yes, we have an annual cash flow that you, but it's not a, it's not a preferred rate of return, but there is a cash flow that starts at 10% and then goes up as the revenues increase. So as you renovate, now people, you know, want to stay because the rooms aren't 20 years old, et cetera. And then there is, you know, a seven year, so the back end, the selling of the property.

But the total is an IRA of close to 18. That's great. No, I have a question, it's not one of the deal deep type questions, but when you go to sell, say five years later, whenever it is, is the formulas the same as multifamily where you're going to use the NOI and a cap rate or is it more complex because it's a hotel? Yeah, no, the formula's the same. We did a waterfall. It's exactly all of the same processes. There's, you know, basically pay for performance on how you manage the property and you have to hit the hurdle. Investors are paid back, right?

You have to hit the hurdle before you actually get paid as the syndicator or as the sponsor. Yeah, all of that is exactly the same. Very cool. Beautiful. Okay. So with this hotel, what are your plans? What are you going to do with it? So we're pretty excited about it because we're going to be testing a few interesting strategies

with this particular hotel. But just out of the gate, some really basic things. We'll be going after corporate contracts, which are not in place today. And the location is really close to a lot. of businesses, right? And some major, major tech companies in that area. The other piece is a huge thing in the hotel market, especially in like a limited service where it's free breakfast and Wi-Fi.

And it's not that many amenities and it's a good quality hotel is the traveling sports teams for kids. So, you know, they want a book. They've got like 40 kids coming in and they're going to play soccer or they've got tournaments. and there is a facility just two miles away from the hotel. So we'll be, and there's actually travel agencies, that that's all they do is book travel for these traveling sports teams. So we'll be going after corporate and traveling sport teams. And then we're going to be really active also in the community because I have this theory

that people don't know. And people actually write me, they say, I didn't know regular people could invest in an own hotels, right? You see a name brand and you think it's like a big corporation. So something that we're going to test is making sure that people understand we're local and our hotel is involved in local organizations, local charities and really being a part of the community that we are not just like this name brand, some faceless corporation, some big private equity. It's us. We're here. So we're going to be testing that out because I think that's really important for. people to understand and know. And I think as people want to support more local businesses,

that will be something for them to understand as well. Yeah, that's so smart. I've always, I've always liked when I see business to say, like, locally owned and operated. I naturally am drawn to those. Like, even if they are a brand name, it's like, you know, an Applebee's, but it says locally owned and operated, I'm instantly like, oh, that's cool. I should go there. Like, I just, I don't know. I think I bet you if they've done, I bet you they've done studies, but that show just by having a, like, that advertisement, it probably increases conversions and, and and people showing up. So yeah, that's neat.

All right. So, you know, I guess we don't only have an outcome yet, but I guess final, like, what lessons have you learned overall from this deal so far? I would, oh gosh, I would say start the socializing with more investors than you think you need earlier. Yeah. That would be the other thing.

I think that, you know, I would say 90% of the people we talked to ended up being very, you know, excited and investing with us in this particular property, but we probably didn't talk to enough people. So I think that would be an important. So try to raise more. This is all going back to the whole conservative thing, right? When you're buying a property, underwrite it as the worst could happen. When you're raising funds, raise more than you actually need and be really way above

that for just factors and things that will happen. I would say that is a huge lesson that we learned. And then the other thing is that we would structure this syndication a little bit differently, more of as a fund so that it allows us less of this time sensitivity and then more power to go after a property with funds already in in a location and ready to go. That makes perfect sense. Yeah, the investor thing is important. I got to notice that too is I had, you know, we had a $5 million fund we raised for and we had $6 million, like immediately people said $6 million committed, but then actually wired in money is about half of that. Now I haven't pushed too hard. I could

probably get a little bit more. But I've always heard that you, even though people committed to it, they might not jump in. So raise more than you think you're going to need. Yeah, the deal I got accepted this morning. I just heard this morning is like, I mean, that was a, I'm going to have to raise 15 million for that one. So it's like three times or four or five times bigger than I did I did already.

So yeah, I got to start meeting more investors. And it's that whole thing. So yeah, start the networking is so key. Even if you don't think you're going to syndicate right now. You're not going to buy a motel, hotel, hotel, apartment, mobile home park, whatever now. But you're like five years in the future I might. start building your network right now, start connecting with people in that world

and building your name as somebody reputable because it's going to come back and help you a ton. So true. Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, let's move on to the last segment of the show. I think we'll forego the fire round this week

and head right over to the world famous. Famous for. All right. This is a famous four. Part of the show where we ask each guest, the same four questions every week. And we want to know what you got to say. Before we get to that, let's hear from Jay Scott about what's going on this week over on the Bigger Pockets business podcast.

Hey there, Brandon and Bigger Pockets podcast listeners. This is Jay Scott, your co-host for the Bigger Pockets Business Podcast. This week on the business podcast, we have a familiar face. We have Ryan Dossy with us. He was a guest on the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast, episode 335. But instead of talking about real estate with us, he's talking about his business Call Porter, which is a business that helps real estate investors answer their direct mail phone calls. So anybody that's in the real estate world is going to want to hear this episode with Ryan.

So tune in this week on the Bigger Pockets Business Podcast. Now, back to Brandon and your famous four. All right. Thanks, Jay. And Nicole, number one, what is your favorite, your current favorite real estate related book? All right. Can I say two? Sure.

Okay. The first, what do you say? I said it'll cost you extra. Okay, all right. I'm good with that. So the first, this is going to sound not that exciting. It's basically the tax strategy book that's on bigger pockets that was written by Amanda Hahn part of Keystone CPA.

Now, why? Because I read this book and I realized that we probably had a ton of, leakage and it was our fault again because we didn't work with one we didn't work with a real estate specific CPA at the time that I read this book and two your CPA is not their job to question and to bring so you need to bring strategies and ideas to them let them tell you know but you need to do it and this book just taught me that we probably made a lot of mistakes there too as well there you good okay very good what was what about your favorite business book. Wait, did you have a second book? You said the two real estate ones.

Yeah, well, so I was just going to say, I have a case study actually slash blueprint that's actually going on my website. And it's called How We Overcame a False Start. Oh, cool. To go from 100K4plex to 14 million in eight years. So that's awesome. That's my second one. Okay. Good deal. Good deal. Okay, business book. That's going to be Michael Hyatt's your best year ever. And the reason I really like that book is that I am very guilty of working a lot and being just in the grind and the hustle. And Michael Hyatt focuses on you should have well-rounded. You need to make time for these other pieces in your life and not be so hardcore hustle all the time.

So I really like that book for setting some goals in those other areas and working through those throughout your year. Yeah, Michael Hyatt is great. I like that guy. We should get Michael Hyatt on the podcast sometime. Maybe in the business podcast. Maybe the real estate one. Anyway, he's fantastic.

All right. Next question, David. What about some of your hobbies? Okay, I have one. I love Scandinavian murder mysteries. Really? So it's like Joe Nesbo, Camelia Lackberg. They have a specific category for Scandinavian murder mysteries?

Yes. Well, I don't know. I just go to Goodreads and I'll pick out the few authors that are Scandinavian. Okay, here's why. because I love mysteries to begin with, but those, because the names are weird, the names of the streets are odd, it makes you pause and it makes me have to read a little bit harder than if I were to just pick up, you know, a book by a U.S. author, I'm going to skim it and be done with it very quickly. Yeah. So, yeah, I love those. All right.

Very good. Very good. Last question, I guess. What do you think separates successful real estate investors from those who give up fail? or never get started? I think it is making a plan. Now, let me talk about this really quick. So I'm in tech and I love processes, procedures, strategies, love all that.

I think when something goes wrong, get quiet, take the emotion out of it and make a plan with actionable steps you're going to take. So that blew up, okay, fine. What am I going to do about it? I think it's just having that focus to say, okay, move on and here's the next step I'm going to take. So making a plan. Yeah, so good. Yeah.

Well, cool. Well, thank you, Nicole. Last question of the day for me. Can you tell us where people can find out more about you? Sure. You can reach me at my website, which I do need to clarify for a second. I'm in tech. And I have a podcast for people in tech where we talk about.

real estate investing, but also other things that other tech people are doing to build wealth. So the website is called the richer, R-I-C-H-E-R-E-R-GEEK dot com. Nice. And you can reach me there. The richer geek. I like that. That's awesome. All right.

Well, Nicole, thank you so much for joining us. It's been fantastic. Learned a ton today. I'm excited about the hotel thing. I think that's really, really neat. Definitely something I'd, when I'm done with the mobile home park thing, I am going to look more in two. I think that's super cool.

I'm, this is one of those like, what do they call them? Like, squirrel moments, right? I really want me to go look into those right now. And in fact, just this morning, one of my best friends sent me a text message and said, hey, can you help me analyze this motel in this case? It was a motel in a vacation area, like a kind of a woodsy national forest vacation area. And I'm like, I don't know anything about it, but that sounds super cool. So anyway, that's why this was super cool timing to talk with you today.

Obviously, a little bit differently, but I might have to pick your brain a little bit more at some point in the future. on this. So we'll see. Anyway, Nicole, thank you. I appreciate it. You brought so much good stuff today. David Green, you want to take us out? Absolutely. But first, let's hear this week's Bigger Pockets Pro Member Success Story. All right, so I'll do that. Today I want to give a shout to one of our pro members who recently closed his fifth deal. His name was Andre Taylor. He's from St. Louis, Missouri. He's got five multi-unit properties now, which is awesome. Andre recently bought a duplex for 62 grand. He's got some mold on the first floor. And after he takes care of that, he plans to flip it. So very, very cool. So check out Andre's profile. You can link, we'll late to it

at our show notes page at biggerpockets.com. So I show 354. And as always, if you want the chance to have your deal highlighted here, email podcast at biggerpockets.com and put the word pro deal in the subject line. And we might be talking about you. And now finally, David, do you want to take us out? I would love to. Thank you, Nicole. This is David Green for Brandon. Can I buy a vowel Turner signing off. That's pretty good. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from BiggerPockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. I think that's the first,

that's the most in-depth we've ever got on hotels that I've been a part of. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And not motels, like I kept saying. Well, I like how you said. It's where people get, you know, murdered and killed. Yeah, yeah, that's what I have. Scary movie motels. Yes.

Exactly, yeah, the motels are where you get murdered. The motel is the thing that has the sign with the letters you can take off and on that says, like, free Wi-Fi. Exactly. Like that's something that you should be really. Oh, my God, pull over there. They have free Wi-Fi. Yeah. That's hilarious.

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