KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Michael Burke: Expanding Your Horizons in Investment Real Estate

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

Don’t miss out! Subscribe to this podcast now for actionable strategies and expert insights from over 1,500 on-demand episodes.SummaryDiscover how to expand your real estate horizons beyond residential sales with renowned Marin County apartment specialist Michael Burke. This episode dives into his four decades of experience representing buyers and sellers of everything from duplexes to large apartment complexes. Learn the critical strategies for success in income property investments, including tax-deferring techniques, savvy financial analysis, and the unique mindset required to thrive in this lucrative, multi-unit market.Bullet Point TakeawaysTransitioning to Income Property: Learn the distinctions between residential and income property sales. Michael Burke's expertise reveals how to shift your focus to multi-family investments, offering a path to expanding your portfolio and business beyond traditional home sales.Mastering Financial & Legal Acumen: Discover the crucial importance of understanding tax-deferring techniques, analyzing income and expense statements, and reviewing leases. This financial literacy, a cornerstone of Michael's success, is essential for guiding clients in complex income property transactions.Building a Powerful Network: A key to expanding your horizons is leveraging a strong network. Michael's long-standing connections with commercial brokers and vendors demonstrate how a robust network of colleagues and experts can be invaluable for finding deals and navigating complicated negotiations.The Art of Resourceful Negotiation: Hear how Michael’s "vision, research, and resourcefulness" have been integral to successful negotiations, leading to win-win results for all parties involved, even in highly complicated deals and estate settlements.The Value of Specialization & Longevity: With over 40 years of experience, Michael Burke’s career highlights the power of specialization. By focusing on apartment building investments, he has become a top-producing expert, averaging more sales in his field than other agents do in an entire career.Topics:Michael Burke Real EstateReal Estate Investment StrategiesExpanding Real Estate CareerMulti-Family InvestmentsIncome Property Tax StrategiesCall-to-ActionReady to expand your horizons and unlock the potential of income property investments? Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast platform and learn from Michael Burke's unparalleled experience! Take your business further with the KGCI Real Estate On Air mobile app. Download it for free on iPhone and Android—just search ‘KGCI’ in the Apple App Store or Google Play.Grow your business with KGCI Real Estate On Air

Hey there, real estate pro. You ready to keep growing your business? While you found KGCI Real Estate on Air is more than 1,500 on-demand podcast packed with actionable strategies, expert advice, and tips from top performing agents, but if you want to keep growing, first, make sure you subscribe to this podcast right now so you don't miss a single episode. Then take your business to that next level by downloading the KGCI Real Estate on Air mobile app. Available for iPhone and Android, it's the perfect companion wherever you go. Just search KGCI in the Apple App Store or Google Play. Let's build success together. Hey everyone. This is Real Estate Riches podcast, and boy, is it going to be rich, full of the wealth and the tips and the tricks of all kinds of successful agents,

because that's what you want to be, right? A business builder who has success in their business, well, that's what we got going on here. And I'm going to have all kinds of agents, men, women, younger, older, sharing all their stuff because there's technology, or just how do you build your business? There's so many questions, right? So let's learn from some of the best. Gather your wealth and build your business. That's what this channel is all about.

And I'm excited to bring it to you. I'm Kathy Burns and I'll be your host. And stay tuned. Let's get at it, right? Hey, everybody's Kathy Burns here with Real Estate Riches. And my guest today is Michael Burke. And he is the team lead of the Paradise Luxury Group. Hey, Mike.

Hi, how are you? Great. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. You know, everybody's got their own talents, what they bring to the industry. And as I mentioned to you, my agenda here is to help the ones that are going to stick it out through the challenges. Because the truth is, if you've been in the industry for any period of time, there are always bumps in the road.

Oh, yeah. You just got to figure it out, right? It's like a cool, like, you know, it has its ups and downs. Right now, I don't know exactly where your business is here in southwest Florida. We have a full flood shift towards the buyer's market now. Yeah, I'm in North Carolina. Yeah, I can say there's definitely more buyers than there are sellers because they're coming here from everywhere just like they come to Florida, right?

Right. And I'm switching personally global because I see better opportunities globally. And instead of me trying to sell global, I want to refer global. That's my mission. That's one of my takeaways already. There you go. Yeah, thank you. It's funny because I'm coming to Miami for a convention for our company in October,

and I've been asking them, let me teach the agents how to wake up their audience of who they are to global marketing and how that they can market other properties without saying the agent's name, without saying where it's at, just the money, the concept of the town, finding the towns that people want to have other properties in, and teaching them how to expand their audience and think bigger and think outgoing referrals because it's an additional stream of income that can come to your business, right? That's so true. It's even like here, though, too, is like Naples area is 50% of our people,

our clientele is absentee homeowners because we're a vacation destination, a second home, And it's not about we don't sell homes. I'm sorry. We provide a service and provide a lifestyle based on their criteria. Right. Yeah. And as second home buyers, many second home buyers have third and fourth homes in the luxury arena, right? Exactly.

Yes. Yeah. So whether they be here or Miami. And yes, we have some people that have a place up in the mountains in the Carolinas too. Yes. Yeah. I was in a listing. I'll tell you what this agent did here in a second.

But I was in a new construction listing, $8 million on the water. And I love what this agent did. But I said, where are you getting your buyers from? And he goes, Florida. And I said, are they first-time buyers? Or are they, is this their primary home or their second home? He goes, typically their second home. And I said, okay, what's the age group?

And he goes 30 to 50, sometimes 60. And he goes, because this is a really contemporary home in a not contemporary area. So it stood out a lot. And I figured everything that he said, I figured he was going to answer that because it just makes sense to me that it was a second home buyer. And $8 million, which is interesting to be a second home, but that's not uncommon in luxury. Right. And they are from Florida, which they probably came from someplace else. We call those halfbacks or be backs. People come from the Midwest, sometimes they go back or to Carolinas, it's a halfback where they're staff back up.

So it was funny. But he did a really cool thing. And I thought it was a brilliant marketing move. So he's got this contemporary, stunning new construction home. And he partners with the builder to list it. But one of the things that he did was do a broker open from 10 to 4 o'clock in the afternoon. And he said to everybody, this is where you can come in and take all your B-roll. You can take all kinds of pictures here.

you can do videos, you can do everything. You can tag the house, you can tag me or not. But I thought, is that brilliant or what? He exposed every one of those realtors to that house. They also learned how much the commission that the seller was willing to pay. So the agents are all primed and ready for this. And now they're going to go do marketing like crazy on that house, looking for that buyer.

So he just expanded his marketing leverage dramatically, even if they didn't tag him, but I'll bet you most of them do. I mean, I sure did because I was blown away with the idea. It's a great idea. It's really good. I like it. Yeah. Yeah.

And I don't know what he's getting paired or what his piece is. It didn't matter because I started talking to him about what social media platform are you using. Because for me, I have been using Facebook and LinkedIn as my key target for luxury. I didn't think of Instagram. much for luxury. I was really wrong. Holy cow. He said last year alone he did 17 million just from Instagram, Instagram, which I'm thinking is a whole younger group. Nobody's paying attention to that. Oh, yes, they are. And so I'm switching gears. Then I said, what about TikTok? He goes, well, interesting, you'd mention that because I thought it was just a, you know, I'm on them too.

I'm on all of them, but I don't focus on them all. And so he goes, we've got to. We've got to a 70-year-old woman who was selling her listing, her home here in Lake Norman, which is where I'm at, and she said, she found them on TikTok. I said, get out of here. I love her. I'm 74. So I thought, well, I'm on TikTok, but I think I'm one of the only ones anywhere near my age that's on there. But I thought, I have to rethink where I'm marketing. Yeah. And what we do, today is not going to be the same tomorrow. Right. So do you do much on LinkedIn? No, that's not one of my foretays. We have quite a few marketing spokes, but LinkedIn is not one of them. Many videos, like YouTube videos. Yes, we have, I've dedicated it more to videos. And as we talk about now as the videos, we talk about the market

bet. I don't think people really care about stats or data as much as they used to. So we have gotten in the habit now is we pick like three communities. Because we live, down here in Southwest Florida, a lot of communities are gated for different types of lifestyles. I know Lake Norman. Can I name drop real quick? Sure. You know Bobby or Janet Falk?

Yes. Well, I'm good friends with them and also the temples being part of the KW family. Yeah. But anyways, so down here we have a lot of gated communities. So now we're doing videos about different gated communities, what the amenities are, what they look like, and showing the lifestyle. Yes. So as soon as I can match up a client's lifestyle, finding a house or a condo is so easy.

It's finding what they want to do, whether it's Mr. or Mrs. or either or, but finding what they'd like to do, whether it be golf, pickleball, be close to the beach, walking distance, dining, and shopping, all those things. So when people land on the website through our Google AdWords, one of the first conversations is, you know, I can find you a house. We're looking at homes at that time, our houses. But I dig deep into that lifestyle questions. Yeah, I think that's critical.

Well, you know, you're trying to meet their needs. So that makes sense, right? Yes, exactly. So I heard an interesting thing where an agent was saying that she does not do just like a video of the house. She goes, what I do is I do a video of the area. I talk about the amenities they're going on here. And she goes, and then I do a sample home that I have,

listed right now. And so this is a YouTube video, right? So she's already talked about the neighborhood. She's got the amenities. She's got fun things that are going on because she saves B-roll from like the cool little things that are happening. That's all incorporated into that video. And here's an example of a home. Then she does the home too. So that home is in there because it's a sampling of that area, right? And so that's a YouTube video that she does. And then the title would be want to know what it's like to live in, whatever that little town is, right? Correct. And so it's evergreen that way so much more than if you just did a video of the house, right?

So you got more bang for your buck, which I thought was brilliant. And you can take excerpts of that where the part that's just the house is for the website. But you can have that other, the full video for your YouTube. Exactly. And even like for Facebook, though, too, is like we put a flyer out there about a specific property, then link the B-roll about the amenities of the neighborhood that pops up also. See, that's great. That's great right there. A lot of people, see, this is where people need to start picking things up. You've got number one to show the whole picture, just like you're saying. And you've got to put it in where it's accessible to the property. And it's visible. And it's

got to be out there all the time. Now, you just said Google AdWords. Do you have a big ad budget that you do on Google? We do about $1,000 a month on Google AdWords. That's probably, that brings us, it's about 20 to 25% of our business. Is it? Okay. Yeah, we change it up, though. It's not always static. If we're getting weak AdWords and that just aren't getting a lot of play, we change them on. My operation manager, Hunter handles a lot of the technical stuff. But again, it just depends on what people are looking for and we do the research to find out what the hot words are. Like, I'm not going to go put in Naples real estate. It just doesn't. It's way too broad. So get back to these gated communities that we talked about. We can research behind the scenes

to see what people are searching for in the gated communities. And I'll plug those in. And just like when we do our videos, we label or tag as much as we can so that you get that the extra search engine juice from especially Facebook. Yeah. Or social media. Yeah. Do you do blogs at all? Well, we have a blog.

It's on one of our sites, yes. So we write an article for the local newspaper, so that gets there. But also, we have something very unique that a lot of agents don't have is we push out 100,000 email addresses a month. 100,000. I have a little gift or knack for finding homeowner directories and using them. I don't know. Homeowner directory has a, you know, the person's a local address, their northern address, if there is one, their email or emails and phone numbers, whether it be sales or businesses. So once we get a directory, we create a market report just for that community. So right now we're about up to 110 directories and that's pushing 100,000 emails. I'm sitting on over a million email addresses that we're having trouble seasoning them. You can't send out one big broadcast. Right. You can't? So we're doing what we can, but it's working. And our monthly market report is probably good portion of closer, I would say, 50% of our business. Wow. Well, that's powerful. Yeah, it is. Now, it's a longer nurture. Yeah, I get it. People are asking for home evaluation. So when they get the automated one, it's done by computer AI, it's not that good. So then we follow up and do one right from the MLS and then call them and qualify them at a higher level. You know, if they're just looking,

Great. Then we just drip in properties of relevance for long term. Great. And then at the same time is that they want any more information. We're usually front of mind. But I'm very, very careful. It's like, you know, you and I get a lot, your audience gets a lot of spam and junk. Yeah. But so if somebody's a long term, I'm not going to send them listings every week.

I might do it every other week or once a month just to be top of mind. Yeah. Yeah. I get it. So I did start doing something about a year ago where I took my blog that I was writing from my website and I asked ChatGPT to help me convert it into a, well, actually how I created the blog was I took videos of content that I was doing. Like, let's say you're talking about a town, right? And what's the town like in Orlando or wherever it is, Fort Myers or Naples? and you do a blog on Naples, right?

So now, well, you've done a video first. So now you've got this video and it's really cool and it's got all this stuff. But the verbiage that's in there, I take the transcript from the video. I put it into chat GPT and I said, now you, I want you to utilize the tonality and the verbiage that was in the video so that you know my tone. Now create a blog with a strong SEO heading and make it a four-minute read with a call to action at the bottom that links them back to that YouTube, that specific one. And if they want to see the whole thing live in color, and then if they want to see the channel where I have others, it's a second link to that. And then if they want to book an appointment to talk about it, that's a third link. And all that is a blog and I do it as an article in LinkedIn.

That's impressive. And you know what? It was simple to do. And then I figured it out myself. Then I gave it over to my VA. I said, okay, here's the deal. Now convert all these videos that I'm doing. And what it did for my LinkedIn was incredible.

I started getting traffic like crazy. I joined different real estate groups and we would send those articles over to those different groups. So now I started getting asked by LinkedIn, and I don't pay for anything on LinkedIn. I started getting asked to make comments about different articles. So I'll do it just because you're a realtor in your season. You know, you got some input that you can share. And what that did for me was give me like I'm a top somebody in LinkedIn. And I just like it that it's in gold and says, she's really good.

And I'm like, yes, I'm really good. It helps the credibility, doesn't it? Right. Yeah, exactly. I loved it. And what it did, though, was it picked up all the other views that I post for, like, let's say I've got a property, a luxury property. I had a $5 million one I did a couple years back. I put it all over LinkedIn because money's on LinkedIn.

I did it on every platform. And now that I'm doing a lot of outgoing global, I'm focused on Portugal. So I have agents that I'm working with over there in Portugal, and they're sending me. their property pictures, their descriptions. And I'm getting, I'm kind of creating posts that are around who wants to own property in Portugal, who's interested in fractional ownership, who's interested in Lisbon or the Algarve or whatever? Because now I'm building a database of these people that are interested in it. And I will now start to nurture them. Okay, I've got some realtors out there. What's your price points? Here's the price points of some of the ones that I've got, because

I'm targeting the luxury market. That's my market. That's good. And this is where that international touch is coming from that you're talking about. Yes. And I just joined a global organization because I really want to take this to another level. And I also found out from a woman I interviewed right before you, she said all our real estate associations have a global division. And you can sign up for that and you can start thinking more global. I just thought, you know, your company has, Keller has companies in different countries. Yeah, we do. Yeah, we do too.

I mean, with the XP, there's 24 different countries that we're in. And there's just a lot of opportunity because people are really thinking global today. And some of these places are just amazing. And the price points are pretty great, too. And it's the same thing. We do a lot of business with Canadians, people from the UK. So while we deal with the original clients, you know, we're going back and touching base in the offices up there in Canada or the UK, of course,

KW. But we've done it. We have cross-pollinated to other companies, though, too, because some of the boutiques don't have the reach that we do. Right. Yeah. That's exactly it. And that's why these organizations, I think, are pretty powerful, too, because it kind of

blends that over as well. So, and there's a lot of people that, let's say they're from England, and they wouldn't mind having, like, have you heard of fractional ownership? Yeah, I have. Okay, good. And I'm thinking that makes sense. Like if I'm from England and I wish I had property back in England where my folks were because I go back there, it makes sense to invest in the property there. And it may be new to them fractional ownership, right? Correct. Right. And so now you start talking about it and say, you want to have a vacation place back there that's going to appreciate, you know, and you have ownership with other people? It's a hybrid of the timeshare. Except this one, you get the deal. D. You're on the D. Exactly. Big difference. Big difference. And so far, the only thing I'm hearing

about is that it's a cash deal. So for everybody, it's not financed, which again, put you in the luxury market, which is good. Yes, it is. Yeah. So I like it a lot. So what are your thoughts on AI? Do you do much with AI? We do to use chat GPT. We did use some texting through our contact manager of AI, but to me it just wasn't personal it's personal yeah so we don't use it there but we use it for a lot of our marketing and our blog posts and we do look up some script ideas so I know we touch the tip of the iceberg but I'm old school where I want to touch people and talk to them and be personal about it so I'm into quality versus quantity me too I hear agents say I want to to do 30 more deals this year. I go, why? I don't want to do 30 more deals. Just get another team

member to help you. I say, let's just double our price point and let's do 15 deals and it's equivalent, you know? Yeah, that's true. I just, I'm always thinking, let's, I pay attention to my net, not my growth. And the last thing I want to do is increase my workload, unless I've got systems in place that are going to leverage it all out so that I'm not increasing my time because, you know, the older we get. I would like some time to greet them. Yeah. And that's high deep personalities or type A personalities though. It's tough for us to let go, isn't it? Very tough. Yeah. I'm learning. I am a control person. My daughter keeps saying, you know, you got to let go. I go, I'll do my best. Yeah. But I do have two VAs, which helped me tremendously. And when you get someone that you trust,

you can give. That's true. My operations manager is my business partner, my right hand. He's got the keys of the store, which is okay. And then we have a VA, two VA that we work very closely with. And we're still training them to work at a higher capacity, a higher level with us. But I do love some of the things that I could take off of his plate now and give to them. So I can do more things here in the office or some of the big project picture thinking with him. So you and I agree that this is really a relationship business.

Percent. I'm not a call. or never have been. I applaud the ones that can do it because it's a whole different. It's a different style completely. And I feel like it's more of a churn and burn. You know, you get their deal. You're done.

The agents that I've worked with don't really stay connected to those people. And they wouldn't have to make those calls if they just, once you build up your people, now you just nurture it and get all the family. Well, you know, that's a great observation because at one time I was one of those churn and burn people. You know, I was a dominant listing agent. And, you know, in half, not quite, quite a few, I don't know the exact number, but quite a few of our clientele, where the halfbacks are B-backs, they go back up north. So I would never see them. It was no really need to stay in touch with the high level. But back when the market shifted, you know, I'm working with more with buyers today,

which is okay. But the buyers I'm working with today, I love them. And there's something, they turns of some of my best friends. Yes. And so making the phone calls are really not about business. It's more social. And I know they refer me out on my team, which is awesome. So it's just a little bit different here. In Lake Norman, I do know that you have a lot of vacationers in that area. So you can appreciate what we have to deal with. So we wear many hats in the client environment. Yeah. When I first got into the business, I was dead broke. And I knew one person in the state, my daughter, and I was trying to build a career. But my background was financial planning. And I'm from Michigan originally. So what I did was on the lake here, I started

to study the lake because it's man-made. And I said, well, let me figure out the rules. And then I said, well, let me figure out if there's any second homeowners here. Whoa, I like this one out. if there's any second homeowners here. And so the only way to do that back then was to go one by one by one through the tax records. And so I started to create a list. And I thought, those are my people because those are the ones that may want to sell this, especially when the market turns. And they were.

So I kept reaching out to them. I didn't call them, though, because they didn't have phone numbers. So I would mail them. And I would also send out postcards in the, area to that because I also had a very limited budget to do anything. But I really learned the water and my mission was to live in that territory so that I could be exposed to the people that were living there. And I ended up renting a little cottage that was a garage converted to a one one bedroom cottage and it was on the water and it was great because now I'm in proximity to all these people

that are on the water. And that was how I really started to build it. And then we worked expired. I had a business partner at that time. And we just worked expires down that one peninsula that was all waterfront and we're classic car lovers. And she came in one day with a 65 fully restored vet humming with its side pipes on like beautiful. And I said, Patty, that is a perfect marketing machine. I said, we start going down here and calling on expires where they don't even open the door. I said, they're going to open the door because this is Ray City. And we're And the NASCAR right here. So we got her first $1.8 million listing with that car.

That very first weekend we went out because of the sound of it. They just fall in love, which, of course, if you love cars. I do. I got a 65 Shelby Cobra. Oh, that's a... She's a replica, but she is the love of my life. I can understand. Well, anyway, thanks so much, Michael.

I really appreciate having you on here. Good tips. and I'm sure everybody got benefits from it and we're going to have Michael's information on here. So if you're in Florida, any of this sounded interesting to you, be sure and reach out to him, all this contact information, all his social media, reach out to Michael, and it's been a pleasure. Thank you. It's a pleasure meeting you too, Kathy.

Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. So thanks for joining me on this episode of Real Estate Riches. Wasn't that great? I'm sure you've got a nugget or two. I know I did. So if you liked it, please subscribe, share it with everybody make some comments we really find that invaluable and if

you're thinking that you would love to talk about this a little bit more let's schedule a business strategy call I'll have the link below let's see if we can't mastermind together and see if we can't empower each other that would be great so until next time signing off hope to see you on the next one