Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Michael Glunk, Real Estate Investor and Colorado Licensed Real Estate Agent

Episode Date: August 3, 2023

I have been a real estate investor since 2006. My strategy has been to acquire property slowly over time. It’s this approach that allowed me to enjoy life along the way while I built my portfolio to meet, and then exceed, my financial freedom goal and quit the W2 world.I share my real estate investing expertise and adventures on the Michael Glunk YouTube Channel. I’m an AirBnB Superhost, VRBO Premier Host, and owner of both Long Term Rentals (LTRs) and Short Term Rentals (STRs) across multiple states. I’m also a Colorado Real Estate Agent who specializes in helping both investors and homeowners find solid real estate investments.Learn More: https://michaelglunk.com/Elite Real Estate Leaders Podcasthttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/elite-real-estate-leaders-podcastSource: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-michael-glunk-real-estate-investor-and-colorado-licensed-real-estate-agent

Welcome to the Elite Real Estate Leaders Podcast, brought to you by Trailstone Insurance Group, bringing you interviews with the best real estate and mortgage professionals, empowering you to understand the current trends in the housing market so that you make the American dream your reality. Enjoy today's episode. Hello and welcome to the Elite Real Estate Leaders Podcast. Today we have with us Michael Glunk, who's a real estate investor and Colorado licensed real estate agent. Michael, welcome to the program. Thank you very much.

Hey, so I'm excited to talk with you because it's always neat to learn from people's perspectives and see what's happening right here and what you're doing and serving your clients. But before we jump into how you're helping real estate investors, give us a little bit of your background, your story, and how did you get into the real estate industry? Yeah, definitely. So as you mentioned, I'm both an investor as well as an agent. And so a little bit of background because I think it gives some context into the way that I think I'm one of those people who likes to figure out what they want. So, for example, like, what are my

goals? And then I analyze ways to reverse engineer achieving those goals. So I kind of asked myself, okay, what's that end goal? And then how to work myself backwards to achieve that. And I do this with my clients as well. And so I knew kind of when I first started in the W2 world, which is where I originally started that I wanted to be financially independent. And so I had determined that real estate investing was my preferred route to achieve that goal. And so I calculated my, my FI number, which for those who don't know what that is, that's your financial independent number. And then I basically built a real estate investment strategy to achieve that goal. And so essentially, I determined the monthly income or cash flow in the real estate world that I need to be financially free and use that to kind of fuel my approach.

And because everybody's strategy is different. You know, my personal strategy, because I have three kids, I, of course, wanted to kind of spend as much time as possible with them and my wife. And so my process was to acquire property slowly over time. And it's really that approach that allowed me to enjoy my life along the way and allowed me to leave and quit the W2 world. And so now, as you mentioned, I kind of am full in on the real estate side. I have a YouTube channel that I share my experiences on. I own a bunch of long-term and short-term rentals multiple states. And of course, I'm a real estate agent in Colorado who specialize in helping both investors as well as homeowners find solid real estate investments.

but I definitely skew more towards that investor side. And I live in Evergreen. And while I, again, do help traditional clients, I primarily focus on investors finding solid investments, both in the foothills as well as front range and Grand County are my focus areas with them. With some investors, I do kind of work along the I 70 corridor out to the western slope as well. You know, you laid out a whole bunch of things there. And as you were talking, it made me think of a quote by Stephen Covey,

begin with the end in mind. And that's what you did and do with your clients when you pick that financial independence number. And that's really unique. You know, you hear a lot of people talk about goals and that's important to have goals, but you have a goal that's dialed into a specific number that's dialed into your specific family. And when you have that number and then start working backwards, you're beginning with the end of mind. So talk a little bit about that goal process. Of course, we know it's important to have goals.

but I really want to elaborate on that financial independence goal and then how you close the gap then with real estate investments. And you said another cool thing, which I thought was really nice, which is you didn't just go out and buy a, you know, whack of properties 15 or 20 at a time and get overwhelmed. You did it slowly over time and that's the same way to do it. 100%. You brought up a lot of great points there. And so when it comes to goals, I mean, the obvious answer is that if you don't have a goal, you don't know what you're striving towards, right? you don't know we're trying to achieve, which makes it, you know, hard to look at and analyze virtually any deal or any property. And so it can be tough, right? It was tough for me and it's tough for the clients that I work with initially to start, right? Especially when you're kind of kicking things off because everything looks good, everything looks interesting, and you're not exactly sure what you want

and you feel like kind of you choose something now, you're going to miss out on something later, right? A little bit of that promo, but actually the opposite is true. You end up missing out because, you know, most people don't have a goal and they end up doing nothing. And so from my approach, like I mentioned, was it was to do it slowly over time. I didn't want to do it in a way that would become overwhelming where I would burn out. I wanted something that was sustainable. And that's what I coach and teach to a lot of my clients as well. Take an approach that's sustainable. And it's going to be different, right? My approach is not going to be the same as your approach. But let's work together and find an approach that works that we can create a real estate investing guide that works for you in a way that is sustainable. And so, it's really just deciding on that goal being okay with the fact that your goal is going to shift along the way right you're going to set a goal and the goal you set in the beginning may not be where you're at in the end right so where you start is not always where you finish but set a goal right so for example maybe your goal from an investing perspective is that you want to get x dollars of cash flow per month on a property or per door or or maybe you live in an area and it's it's a you know an expensive

area, which is pretty common now in Colorado, and you want the rental to be within 30 minutes drive of your residence, right? And so in that scenario, maybe you're okay with a neutral and or slightly negative cash flow for the first couple years because you wanted to meet those certain goals. Whatever they are, you want to set those goals because if you don't have those guidelines and something to shoot for, again, you kind of get stuck in this cycle that we call analysis paralysis and end up going nowhere. Yeah, that's actually really interesting. this whole stuck thing and analysis paralysis. So how would you actually define that? And, you know, what would you say is the biggest thing that most that holds most investors back

from actually investing? Yeah, it's a really great question because I see this a lot, right? So to start, you know, analysis paralysis is really when you get stuck in this cycle of overthinking and over-analyzing something. And so in this case, when it comes to real estate investment, a lot of times people get, you know, stuck in this paralysis of analyzing properties, but never going anywhere because they constantly find something wrong or something that they could maybe learn a little more about and never actually move forward. The reality is you want to educate yourself, right? You don't want to just wing it.

But, you know, you want to educate yourself. And this can often happen when you have a good team, a solid investor-friendly agent, etc. But you want to make sure that you don't get hung up on, you know, thinking that you have to have the answers to everything. And more importantly, you know, you don't want to have to have the answers to everything to get started. Otherwise, you're never going to get started because the reality is you're never going to have the answers to everything. And so as an investor, you have to begin to become comfortable with being a little bit uncomfortable, right? And so you want to be working off a strong foundation of knowledge, of course, but total knowledge isn't the key when it comes to investing success. It's action.

And so that's really my goal. My goal is to help provide my clients and my channel viewers with enough knowledge and enough comfort to take action and take that step forward. You know, Michael, it makes me think of I'm a big reader and personal development listener of YouTube and podcasts. And the great Les Brown is known for saying jump and grow your wings on the way down. And that kind of defines the analysis paralysis. It's like, you know, you can, you know, if. this, then that, and analyze things till you're blue in the face, but just get going, get started, and then you'll figure it out along the way. And then the next time you go through that investment

property process, you're going to go, ooh, I learned this last time. I'm going to do it a little bit different. And every single time it gets better because like Tony Robbins teaches and can I, C-A-N-I, constant and never-ending improvement. 100%. I mean, I've been to this for over a decade and I'm always learning something new. And if you're not, then you're not pushing yourself. Yeah. Just out of curiosity, how many people are you helping that our first time investors versus veteran investors? I would say 90% of my clients are, well, let's put it to this late, 9% of my clients are investors, 10% are traditional clients. And of that 90,

around 40% are new investors and 60% are current investors that tend to focus more on flipping or burring, if you're not familiar with burying as burring is buy rehab, rent, refinance, repeat. So you're basically buying a property with the goal with the goal of trying to pull your money back out and push that money forward into the next property. Awesome. I love that. That's cool. I just started reading a new book literally yesterday and it's written by a trainer that trains financial advisors how to grow their business. And he started it off by saying, you know, of course you need to network and sales and referrals and all the the things that, you know, you had all the obvious choices. But he says, chapter one is all about mindset. You need to have the right mindset. You need to have an abundance mindset. You need to really dial in how you approach serving your clients. And it's not just, you know, give me,

give me more clients. So talk a little bit about the mindset you teach your clients when it comes to investing in real estate. Yeah, that's a great question, a really great, great point. I mean, I focus on what I refer to as a disruptive mindset, right? And so let me give a little bit of context to that. So you've got your goals, right, when you go out there and you go to look at an investment property. But oftentimes, you're excited in the beginning, but when the rubber meets the road, it oftentimes feels like everybody else is out there doing the same thing, right?

Maybe it's hard to find deals. Maybe it feels like everybody's going after the same thing that you want. This is a common thing in Colorado, right? For example, everybody that lives in the front range wants to get a ski house. And so this usually translates into call it a two to four bedroom place in the mountains. Or as another example, maybe if you're a new investor, you want a turnkey property because you want something easy to start. And so, you know, you have to start to think differently because there's a lot of competition out there. Even though, you know, the majority of people out there don't invest in real estate, there still are a good chunk of people that do.

And so, you know, you have to, you know, think and say to yourself, you know, how do I compete in a world where it seems everyone's going after the same seemingly limited target, right? or you need to kind of stop thinking that traditional sense of competition and eliminate the thought of stealing this larger piece of the pie from your competition. Instead, you have to change the game. And so you need to change the game in your favor so that others are going to be forced to change their game in order to compete with you, right? And so this is what I really work on with my clients in developing, this thought process of how to like look at things differently. And so I think people tend to digest things best, I think, with like a sports analogy. So let's maybe quickly go to one of those.

Like, do you know who by chance Dick Fosbury is? Um, no. Okay. So Dick Fosbury invented the Fosbury flop. So the Fosberry flop is the way that you jump. Oh, right, right. The high jump, the high bar. Yep, yep.

So he made this famous in the Olympics in Mexico, 1968. And so what most people mostly don't realize that before Dick Fosbury, like right now, people go over the high jump with their back facing the bar. Before that, you either hurtled it or you went over it with your chest. And shifts and changes and increments and gross and the high jumps were minuscule. Dick Fosbury comes along and he, revolutionized it with the way that he jumps with his back over it. And the reason he was able to do that was because he came with this disruptive mind that he looked at things differently. And what people

don't realize well, too, for those that that do know Dick Fosbury is that he was actually originally a gymnast, right? And so it's about coming in and challenging the convention, trying to disrupt the marketplace and think about things differently than somebody else. It's about taking that outside perspective and trying to see things differently, right? And so how does this relate to real estate? Well, you know, when when others see maybe a two-bed, one-batch property with 1,200 square feet, you know, you need to see an utilized 1,200 square foot floor plan, right? You'd be able to see, like, a property that has 1,200 square feet. If you see one of those, it only has two bedrooms, there's often a way to create an additional

bedroom or, you know, when others see a ranch with a basement, you need to see that exterior basement entrance as a way to make what is a ranch to everybody else into a duplex for you. Of course, you know, we're zoning appropriately. So there's a bunch of other examples there. I've done this personally myself as well, but this is something that I use to kind of teach my clients to think about, think differently and then think for that problem. And again, reverse engineer yourself and think to disruptively along the way. And it, there's nothing wrong with the traditional buy rent, buy, flip, all those ones that

you're talking about. But given the competitiveness in any market, you have to be thinking creatively like that. It reminds me of a TV show, I don't know, maybe three, four years ago I was watching on HGTV. And it was this couple, husband, a wife couple that would go out to property owners that would have like an unused garage or some unique spot in their property that wasn't being used, they would come in and go, I will give you a big chunk of money and I'm going to put money in and rehab your garage.

Let's say you're not using it. It's a junk. And then I'm going to market and bring in Airbnb customers. You don't have to lift a finger, but they're going to keep the split. And all of a sudden, here is this really unique, fresh perspective, disruptive way to think about their property and it was creating something out of nothing. So, you know, like you mentioned the example about the 200 square foot or the two bedroom. What are some of the other things that you're seeing that you're maybe making people aware of when you're working with your investors

to to potentially create some creative opportunities? 100%. So first and foremost, I'll hit on one point you mentioned in the beginning in that, you know, different markets call for different approaches. You have to be flexible depending on the dynamics of the market. So obviously, this economy now is different than the economy was a couple years ago and will probably different than the economy two years from now. Also, you know, locality comes into effect. So, for example, I mentioned that ski house example. So let me give you another example. And let's take Grand County, for example, where I do work up in there as well, too.

And so a personal example for me that I think shows how you can bring this to life that I've done myself and have coached clients on as well is, you know, my wife wanted a ski house, just like everybody else in the front range, right? And so we had this goal set to get a ski house, and we gave ourselves a five-year time frame, kind of quickly skipping to the results. In three years, we had two ski houses. Oh, and by the way, we got those two ski houses for free. So what I mean by free,

well, by the time we were done, we owned two ski houses, had both in finance, but with zero of our own dollars in them, and they're both printing off cash. And this happened because we're able to create equity in the property at a lower cost than the market was creating it at. And so when you talk about thinking differently

and thinking about opportunities, let's think about the market not in place, right? So when you think about the mountain, the community marketplace, it's expensive to build in the mountains. And there's a lot of factors, but two of the main factors that you deal with are labor expenses. It's more expensive, as well as your building time frame is contracted because of the winters. So again, kind of going to this disruptive thinking reverse engineering mode, what I've coached my clients on as well, too, is thinking differently. And one of the things that have actually deployed myself

is, you know, is this approach as well. And so, you know, I asked myself, what if I didn't have to rely, What if my clients didn't have to rely on the expensive local labor? You know, what if we could decrease that build time, which inevitably led me to modular construction, which for those not familiar with modular construction, it's essentially stick built someplace else more affordably and then transported to your location. And so this has allowed me as well as clients to create, well, I think it's a much higher quality product in less time and for less money. And since you're able to do it more affordably, and in my case, actually, just to give you

a specific example, since I was able to do it more affordable, I had so much equity built up that by the time I refinanced my construction loan to a traditional loan, I was able to pull out all of my money plus a little bit extra back out. And so again, a disruptive mindset is helpful. It's also an open mindset and a positive mindset is crucial because, you know, you aren't going to go anywhere telling yourself that you can't do something. You get the place to by asking yourself, how can you make that particular something happen? What do you have to do to achieve that something? That's why I work with with my clients will teach and coaching that as well too. And then figuring out how to make it happen. And a great way to do that is to leverage somebody that has experience doing it, right? So somebody like myself in real estate, you know, you think about your team, you think about your real estate agent, you think about your lender, you think about your insurance, you think about your potential property manager and or handyman if you're going to manage your property yourself. So who on your team can you leverage to help build that knowledge set and grow as you grow?

Yeah, that's a big piece that you bring up is leveraging and leveraging other people's money, resources, time, network. And you know, you could take that example and probably just spend half a day brainstorming concepts. And, you know, like you could go, hey, if I wanted to get that ski house and show some client how to do the same thing, but we wanted to use very little of our own money, why don't we put together a brain trust, mastermind kind of a group and go, who else would benefit from that?

Why don't I partner? Why don't I bring together a, you know, whatever, home inspector, a builder, a lender, a real estate investor and all of us go together and we bring this project to life. Maybe it even becomes one or two or three things. So I think that anytime someone has a great idea before you kick the can down the road and go, nope, maybe sit there and go, well, what if it was a good idea? What would happen there? And I love how you are thinking creatively, thinking big and looking at it from a different perspective.

I think that's a huge piece. It kind of reminds me when you were in school and your English. teacher said, hey, before you turn that paper in, why don't you read it out loud so that when you hear yourself reading it, you can tell if maybe some of the grammar is off. So it's that perspective shift. And I just love how you are explaining. You're doing things, yes, the traditional way, but when you can look at some of these opportunities in a fresh light, you might uncover some opportunities that other real estate investor real estate agents would not have seen it before. I 100% agree. And actually, I wanted to say,

that I can't count how many people I've talked to that have said, you know, oh, short-term rental is no longer a thing or long-term rental isn't a thing where they kind of give up on whatever it is that can make money because they've heard from other people like, oh, we have to move on to the next thing. So I absolutely love, Michael, that you are providing this way to really think differently about each of those investing options and not necessarily just giving up on them because maybe they were a fad. So I absolutely love that.

Yeah, you know, you hit the nail on the head there. The reality is if you want, if you don't, if you want something to happen, you'll find a way to make it happen. If you don't, you'll find the excuse. And my goal is help people find ways to make it happen. I love that. I love it. Well, I tell you what, Michael, it's been really enlightening hearing your approach to real estate investing. And if someone is listening to this thinking, let me tap into that mindset.

What's the best way they can learn more and then also reach out and connect with you? Definitely. So if they want to learn more about me, they can go to my website, Michael Glunk.com or my YouTube channel, which is just my name, Michael Glunk. And if they want to connect with me, they can feel free to either email me. My email is M. Glunk at gmolk. Or they can call or text me anytime at 970718-28-28-60. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. Likewise. Take care. Thank you for listening to the Elite Real Estate Leaders podcast. Brought to you, by Trailstone Insurance Group. To learn more about the topics mentioned on today's show

or listen to past episodes, visit www.org.com.