The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Patrick Grimes, Founder of Invest on Main Street On Building Wealth Through Passive Investment Opportunities

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

Patrick Grimes, Founder of Invest on Main Street On Building Wealth Through Passive Investment Opportunities Investonmainstreet.com Investonmainstreet.com/book - Put in "ChrisVossShow" for FREE offer!... Invest on Main Street is a private equity firm that makes it easy for you to passively invest in commercial real estate syndications. We “enable investors to” take full advantage of the compelling benefits of multifamily ownership by leveraging our knowledge and network to acquire properties with stable cash flow and long-term appreciation. Patrick Grimes is the founder and CEO of InvestOnMainStreet.com, a private equity firm that enhances busy professionals’ quality of life by providing tax-shielded and inflation-hedged passive investments in alternative investments. Since 2007, Patrick has purchased distressed real estate assets, renovating and stabilizing them for long-term cash flow. He has raised over $50M to acquire a $600M+ portfolio including about 5,000 units in multifamily apartment communities in emerging markets across Texas and the southeastern U.S. He has also diversified with a partnership in an energy portfolio that includes 100+ natural gas and oil wells in 5+ locations across 5 states. Patrick is co-author of an Amazon #1 best-selling book, and he actively writes articles on investing and commercial real estate for Forbes and Inman. He holds both a BS and MS in Engineering, as well as an MBA.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm Moses Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends.
Starting point is 00:00:44 We certainly appreciate you guys coming by what a great wonderful time to spend your day your evening your car drive wherever you are uh doing the whole podcast listening experience with the chris vosh show in the sky remember 14 years 1400 episodes two to three new podcasts a weekday you've got to keep up with us because we're punching out so many brilliant and amazing people that are going to just explode your knowledge. You're just going to walk around and be a know-it-all. You're just going to walk up to people and go,
Starting point is 00:01:12 you want to know everything? And they're going to be like, I don't know. And you're like, well, I'm going to tell you anyway. So there you go. Hey, CNN's top anchor Jake Tapper will be joining us on the show. We're excited to have him. We've had a number of CNN people on the show. And as long to have him. We've had a number of CNN people on the show. And as long as MSNBC, CNN, and ABC, all that sort of good stuff.
Starting point is 00:01:31 So watch for all that great stuff. And of course, we can't free our newspaper people at Washington Post, New York Times, and all that good stuff. So there's great content is basically what I'm saying. And if you're not listening to every episode of this show with the finest minute of detail going, what i learn today you're not going to learn anything anyway in the meantime or for the show your family friends relatives go to goodreads.com uh forward slash chris voss youtube.com for chest chris voss linkedin.com forward slash chris voss and uh we're trying to be cool over there on tiktok we have an amazing gentleman on the show and uh he is coming to us today with his immense knowledge and you're trying to be cool over there on TikTok. We have an amazing gentleman on the show. He is coming to us today with his immense knowledge.
Starting point is 00:02:16 You're going to learn about investing and what to do with your money and how to improve the quality of your life and all sorts of good stuff. Patrick Grimes is on the show with us today. He's the founder and CEO of InvestOnMainStreet.com, a private equity firm that enhances busy professionals' quality of life by providing tax-shielded and inflation-hedged passive investments in alternative investments. He is the founder and with holdings that include a general partnership of multifamily real estate portfolio valued at $600 million plus, including about 5,000 units across the Southeastern United States and Texas. He's been active in real estate investments since 2007. You're going to learn a lot from him, including purchasing land and distressed assets, renovating them and destabilizing them.
Starting point is 00:03:02 I was thinking about the 2008 thing for a second there when I went to the destabilization. He's been stabilizing them for a long-term cash flow. Helps investors build wealth through tax-advantaged cash flow and appreciation while limiting their exposure to market volatility and inflation, all the while providing safer, cleaner, improved living experiences for the residents. Welcome to the show, Patrick. How are you? I'm excited to be here, Chris. I've been listening to your show periodically on my morning runs and I've enjoyed your guests. Looking forward to it. There you go. And now you're guesting on the show. So here you are up on deck. Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. Yeah, so we have two. We have invest on and then main street.com invest on main and then
Starting point is 00:03:46 street all spelled out and then, uh, passive investing mastery.com passive mastery. And I know you're doing a giveaway, uh, for the Chris Voss show of, of your book. Uh, should we get that plug into a right to start the show? Sure. Yeah. If you're, if you're interested in, um, I tell my whole story, I co-wrote a book and I have some other great people. It's Persistence, Pivots, and Game Changers, Turning Challenges into Opportunities. Persistence, Pivots, and Game Changers. We got Phil Collins, lead guitarist at Def Leppard, me, NBA, NFL guys on here. It was really fun. Brian Tracy did the foreword. Really fun book to write. Tells my whole
Starting point is 00:04:26 story. And I'd be happy to send out a signed hard copy for free. This was more of a mission of giving back for me than it is a profit. So go to investonmainstreet.com slash book. Investon and then mainstreet.com slash book. Happy and put in the promo code chris voss show make sure you do that and my team will get a signed hard copy out to you there you go is it chris voss show of spaces or just one word uh we'll know what it is we look at them one by one it'd be like who who are these people there you go so uh check that out folks you can get it uh they're free a free signed copy too autographed as well i charge for mine so that's a good deal uh so patrick uh tell us give us a 30 000 overfoot of of how what
Starting point is 00:05:13 you do and how you do it yeah well i started like many of your listeners a hard-working professional and in engineering i did automation and robotics and invested a lot into the traditional path, right? The IRAs and 401ks. Didn't see that getting me where I wanted to get as soon as I wanted to get there. So I started investing in alternative investments, including real estate, long, long time ago. And from that, I kind of built a company, Invest on Main Street, we're in Passive Investing Mastery, which educational content platform, where we provide passive investments to investors that allow them to diversify out of the stock market. And a little bit of the non-traditional IRA, 401k sentiment roller coaster of the stock market, but into other
Starting point is 00:06:07 investments, which help to do things that are very useful today, like inflation hedging and tax advantage and protects from interest rates, that kind of thing. There you go. So, you know, the state of the market in housing is kind of interesting right now. And I'm sure a lot of people are really curious what your thoughts are, being the professional you are and the experience that you have in depth. What are your thoughts on, you know, where the market's going, what's going on? You know, we've had some people and we talked to recently about the BlackRock, you know, buying a lot of properties up. And I just saw a report this morning that housing starts are now up. So builders are trying to catch the wave of this limited inventory issue that we have.
Starting point is 00:06:51 There's things going on in San Francisco where they're talking about taking the downtown area of San Francisco that's currently losing a lot of commercial real estate investors and emptying out and turning some of those buildings into residential. What are your thoughts on what's going to happen? Maybe what the Fed's been doing recently. They just had their meeting, et cetera, et cetera. I threw a lot in there, so I gave you a lot to work on. I probably should have been taking notes. I have two master's degrees, so I'm a fervent note taker,
Starting point is 00:07:20 but I didn't bring my number two. I'll fall back anywhere you want me to. So I'll let you just take, what's going on in the housing market? Let's just take a big swing. Well, we really got to rewind a little bit because, you know, there's, you as well experienced some pain in the 2009 and 10 downturn, right, Chris? Yeah, I did. So my first real estate investment was actually in 2006 and 2007. And I did, trying to get rich quick.
Starting point is 00:07:48 I tried to double and triple my money. I was a snot-nosed engineer out of college. And I put everything I had into some pre-development, highly leveraged, personally guaranteed. And they raked me over the coals pretty bad in 9 and 10. And so I got a lesson at the very beginning about the cyclic nature of the real estate market and other markets. And essentially, the way capitalism is, is the tortoise, not the hare, which are hedges against recessions that are more likely to win in the upturn, but ride out a downturn. And there's a number of ways that we do that. And unlike how I was in 2009 and 10, just recovering, trying to stay alive
Starting point is 00:09:02 and ultimately losing it all. This time I have a much more healthy portfolio and I am of the mind that, and we're seeing today with our recessionary acquisitions fund, that there are incredible buys that provide returns like we saw in 2009 and 10. And you just got to go find them they're the off market not struggling assets not buildings that are dilapidated falling apart but but as you say there are owners of those buildings there are there are the investors that purchase them that are struggling it's the distressed owner not the operators not the distressed building so the opportunity is william barfitt said warren buffett says when people are fearful it's time to be greedy
Starting point is 00:09:49 um now's that time and and i am very much so happy to be positioned this time with a portfolio to ride this out and and and with the ability to create a fund to pick up as you say like some some larger funds are doing some of the incredible buys that we're seeing right now in the markets. And we can get into more specifics if you'd like. There you go. So you guys run, I believe, two funds, a recessionary acquisitions fund and a multifamily apartment community. Is basically people that want to do business with you. They're looking to invest in your funds. Right. So we actually have a number of funds
Starting point is 00:10:34 that we will rise and set depending upon, help our investors build out a more diversified portfolio. So we have about 26 properties on the multifamily apartment side. Those are that we've acquired. Those are throughout the landlord friendly areas in the Southeastern States and a little bit in the Midwest. Most of those are one or two fund, one or two within a single fund. I think the most we have is a seven property fund. So there's, there's quite a few funds that we've put together over the years. The multifamily apartments we tend to stand up a single deal for, and you invest in maybe one or two properties as we pull them out. We do have one now. Those are very different than the investments of even two years ago, because now it's a very different landscape. We have the recessionary
Starting point is 00:11:21 acquisitions fund, which is more of an open fund where we're raising the capital to take down properties very quickly that we find operators needing to get out of for their many personal reasons. And we can go through those. But it's a little bit like whack-a-mole in that fund where as soon as you see it pop up, you got to hit it hard or else it disappears. So that fund is more use the cash heavy to acquire backfill with debt and use the cash heavy to acquire backfill with debt. And then since we made the money on the buy, we do a 1031 exchange forward within the fund to continue to raise our investors position. And so it's a really exciting way to build wealth in this recession. There you go. There you go. And so they can take a look at the different funds. This is kind of interesting.
Starting point is 00:12:09 I was looking at your website and I think I can quote these without any sort of regulatory issue. These are projected returns. We should specify, I suppose. But your recessionary acquisitions fund has a 20% annual average return. That's pretty darn amazing well like i said the um we're the four prop and yes we can talk about them because we file as a reg d 506c with this sec which allows us to openly talk about our investments um and uh that that is actually uh quite a bit underneath what we've achieved in the first four acquisitions
Starting point is 00:12:47 using the strategy of the Recessionary Acquisition Fund. But we like to, as you say, it seems very high. But right now, we're making that return on the buy. We're not making that return by trying to buy something distressed and work hard to fix it up. That's kind of value add that a little bit of a buzzword that was in a lot of the real estate deals where you buy something kind of little below market, you renovate over a long period of time, and then you build the yield. We're actually making that on the acquisition. So we know before our earnest money goes hard, we have a high degree
Starting point is 00:13:27 of confidence. We're going to get a large return if half or all of our capital back within six to 14 months. And that's our strategy. And just a 1031 exchange those forward. So it does allow us to provide a lower risk approach because we're not hoping for a long-term hold we're not hoping rents are going to go up we're not hoping values will stay stable we buy we make it on the buy and then we trade it forward and make it on the buy and we trade it forward there you go i mean the fed just recently signaled that they probably are done with their their their federal rate increase that affects mortgage rates. And I think they may have come in for a somewhat soft landing.
Starting point is 00:14:14 I think the jury's still out on the commercial real estate things because banks own a lot of that, and there could be some issues there. But for the most part, you've probably got a lot of people that they, I don't know how many people did, but there was a lot of homeowners that bought homes on adjustable rate mortgages back when rates were bottomed out. And they're in trouble now because they bought on adjustable rates and stuff like that. And so it just kind of caught them because when the Fed started jacking those rates. And so there's lots of different variances out there in the market. So what are the benefits out there to real estate investing and investing with a company like yours? Well, it's a really good point. Just like many of your listeners, I was once a working professional doing high-tech automation robotics. I mean, I worked on the rotating robotics that assembled
Starting point is 00:15:18 the rotating part of Tesla's motors, rockets, solar cells, Lockheed Boeing. I worked on medical devices and I worked with some of the smartest people, much smarter than me, but some of the smartest people doing some of the coolest things. And like them, I also was heavily invested in the stock market or in my company stock. And I was a bit fearful. And I would listen to the fear mongering on the news about inflation and looming recessions. And I didn't, I knew that I, my, my retirement was all in, in this market. And even the financial advisors just had me more into things that kept rising and falling with the news. And the benefit is like what I did was I tried to go do it myself back in 2007. I didn't have any experience.
Starting point is 00:16:06 And I bought a land on my own, and they came and took it out. In fact, I was recourse since I personally guaranteed the loan like many people do on their single-family home, their own homes. And I did it in my own name to get more favorable debt. I actually tried to come after all my other assets. Oh, wow. So it's cross-collateralized. People don't realize if you go about it yourself, you tend to be cross-collateralized. So that is really risky. And if you do the American dream, which is climb the corporate ladder, put in stocks, and then become a landlord,
Starting point is 00:16:41 then you're typically buying smaller properties you can control by yourself like I did. And that was what I did after 2009 and 10, a bunch of single family homes. It was renovating. But I was moonlighting it while doing high tech and flying all over and getting a master's in engineering and a master's in business. I was really good at making money, but I was trying to be really good at being a real estate investor through the night. And it was a big toll, not only on my cashflow producing job, but it was a big toll on my family, friends, and hobbies. And the real benefit with working with a company like us is you don't have to do that. We come with decades of experience. We have dedicated acquisitions, asset managers, property managers, and we can
Starting point is 00:17:27 pool capital to diversify throughout many different locations. You get many of the benefits without personally guaranteeing that signing on properties in your own name, limiting your exposure to your invested capital without possible further recourse. And you get better deals you wouldn't have otherwise gotten because we have people scouring thousands of leads. And you can go enjoy your family, friends, and hobbies. Yeah, you don't have to work it 24-7. I've got a friend who's got a couple of rental properties, and he posts some of his stuff on Facebook.
Starting point is 00:18:03 It's a nightmare. He's got to go through the whole eviction process when they stop like he went in the other day and they torn out like everything but the toilet they torn out the kit the the bathroom sink they torn the handles off the you know the spigots off the bathtubs and stuff and so he's having to like do all this stuff and i'm just like that sounds like a nightmare my uh my uh mother-in-law um she had to evict some people one time and they poured concrete down all the pipes wow i have not heard that one i've heard a lot of stuff but you know what when my when i found my future wife that's when I realized I had to stop the single family night moonlighting.
Starting point is 00:18:49 In fact, she was there for my very last refinance after we completed the renovation on my very last rental property. And I said, this is it. And then subsequently, we got married over the next couple of years, once in California, once in Beijing. And then I was ready to and I was high tech career was really doing well. And that's when we decided this time we're going to partner up. We're going to get into larger assets. We're going to build a private equity firm and we're going to scale it where we don't have to do it all on our own. And that's when things took off for us and our investors. Yeah, that's good. I see what he
Starting point is 00:19:25 goes through and it's insane. And then the other thing I'll see is there's these inspector TikTok videos and they show what some of these, uh, these owners that are, you know, you're buying the home from some guy selling it and the inspectors out there. And he goes, yeah, look at this, uh, this black mold job. Hey, you just painted right over it and you know, holes in the ceiling and stuff that get covered with paint. And as a investor, you're like, oh, I almost bought that. Wow. So how do you guys evaluate your real estate deals? So we have a very long... First of all, we have a big acquisitions engine. the recessionary
Starting point is 00:20:05 acquisitions fund is like a half dozen people sifting through thousands of leads just to find the deals and we're uncovering rocks we're not going to brokers we're not going to things that are on market we're doing direct to owner medium-sized uh some large different kinds of assets across the range. So we do a lot. The foundation of my theory, and I like to use that word foundation, is recession resilience. And it's always been that way. So if you look at where I went wrong before
Starting point is 00:20:38 was I didn't buy for cashflow, right? I didn't buy something that was producing income on day one. So if something happened and the market fell, couldn't ride it out right and i wasn't buying in recession resilient markets and you can look at the data online and you can see where some markets swung in 2009 and 10 took 12 years 14 years to recover phoenix is one of those, Las Vegas, Orlando. But there are other markets which just kind of leveled out for a couple of years and then started up again like Houston and some of the Southeastern states that tend to be tax advantaged, landlord friendly, and legislative
Starting point is 00:21:17 friendly. And that means lots of jobs are moving there. It's low cost of living. People are moving there. And even in a recession, they're still growing. They're not the big losers like San Francisco and Silicon Valley. And so you buy in these areas where you see them on an expansion curve and the tides rising, a lot less likely to have dramatic vacancies, right? Than you are in some of these places that took are taking a huge hit during covid and took a similar hit back in 2009 and 10. i know that uh like the whole middle of america i think is doing well like atlanta i think it's growing pretty crazy in different places uh
Starting point is 00:21:56 you know the the big remote work the big great resignation all that stuff has contributed to a lot of different places. And of course, people are always looking for inexpensive real estate that they can buy or rent because it's competitive out there. Now, what is a 1031 exchange? Let's talk about this and how are users using this to build wealth? Are you guys a 1031 exchange? So a 1031 exchange is a tool and I've actually searched for who made this quote. And it turns out, I even asked ChatGPT when I couldn't find it. Then I asked Google Bar, the AI platforms. The 1031 exchange is the most powerful wealth building tool still available to americans well but apparently
Starting point is 00:22:45 nobody said that it's just used a lot so i hope that doesn't disempower it but essentially it's just so common knowledge it's it's just common knowledge right so um but but if you don't you don't know until you know it then you know it but the the government and you didn't mention this earlier but we also invest in diversified energy funds. Oh, wow. Yeah. But and it turns out that like in energy, oil and gas interests, as well as the real estate space, those are tax advantaged assets. Why? Because the government wants us to feed, house and energize America.
Starting point is 00:23:22 They need the government actually incentivizes the private sector to do that. And they'll do that through giving tax advantages. There are a number of ways. The reason being most of our cash flow from our real estate deals is non-tax for most of our investors. Sometimes their whole investment is a tax deduction. And when we sell an asset the profit from that sale if we do a 1031 exchange doesn't get taxed either it gets deferred into the next investment like for example and it's the same in the oil and gas funds we can do little unknown exception to the like-kind rule in the 1031 issues that in oil and gas interests, you can also exchange forward with and defer your profits,
Starting point is 00:24:08 which means that instead of 27 million, we bought a property in Jacksonville, Florida, 10 months later, we sold it for 37 million. It's a $10 million profit, so the government's gonna take half that by the time you're done. But if we did a 1031 exchange, which we did, we asked all the investors, hey, do you want to trade with us into our next asset? I think there was 70 investors and a couple of them said, no, I've got some
Starting point is 00:24:33 family issues. We paid them off. The rest of them traded with us into life at Spring Estates in Houston. And we went from, we added about a hundred 100 units we traded up to a larger property and now they're cash flowing and they didn't pay any there didn't pay any profit so all of the profits that were made in the first deal were exchanged and now they're cash flowing on a much larger number Wow and as long as we keep 1031 exchanging they won't have to pay taxes. And it is incredible because unlike the stock market, everything you sell is immediately taxable. If you do get cashflow, everything's immediately taxable. So 1031 exchange is just incredible because you can take a hundred thousand
Starting point is 00:25:17 dollars and you can continue to replicate it and increase it in a tax deferred manner. And you can do this as a passive investor. You just sit back and let it grow and increase it in a tax deferred manner. And you can do this as a passive investor. You just sit back and let it grow and let it accumulate and let it compound. And that's brilliant because, yeah, like you mentioned, one of the problems is anytime you, you know, if you're an individual housing investor, you know, you buy a house, you sell it, subject to tax. And the power of using that taxed money that you would normally pay to the irs you're now using to you know build more wealth and accrue more wealth and of course you'll eventually pay them
Starting point is 00:25:51 a lot more money but that's beside the point you're you're you're what's the word i'm looking for you're you're having interest you're compounding that you're just using that as a tool to to move to the next level and. And that's just brilliant and smart. And so people can do that with investing in your funds. Is that correct? Yeah. In fact, the recessionary acquisition fund is perhaps the most exciting 1031 opportunity because when you make your return on the acquisition, you buy right and you buy quickly.
Starting point is 00:26:24 You know, there are assets which the day we closed appreciated. When you make your return on the acquisition, you buy right and you can buy quickly. You know, there are assets which the day we closed appreciated for 25, 50, 75 percent more just just on the day we acquired it. Wow. And then we then we put up in essentially cash for the funds to close on it. The ability for us to immediately just trade that into another investment without paying taxes and on that next investment within the fund buy it right and then realize that gain and then do it immediately again and buy it right and realize that gain allows you to rapidly grow your wealth through n31 exchange it's perhaps the most's perhaps the coolest implementation of that strategy. And it's only made possible by this recession. I know that it takes a hit. And I think most people's real estate portfolios, if they're not in the growth states, at the very least,
Starting point is 00:27:19 they're either leveling off or they're subsiding some. But if you're not investing where the opportunities come in this recession, then you're not winning. You're not hedging, right? Any falls in your stock market portfolio and your real estate portfolio as the tide lowers, you're not hedging against that by investing into the upside of the downturn. Definitely makes sense to be diversified. You know, there's interesting things going on in the market right now, but if the Fed has soft-landed the inflationary market,
Starting point is 00:27:54 et cetera, et cetera, I think we're always going to have high job demand because the boomers left the job market early in the early resignation and many Gen Xers did too. And they're not coming back. And so, you know, it was, it was purported. It's been purported for 40 years. I've been reading about it forever in the wall street journal about how, when the baby boomers left that we might have some issues with, you know, people not having enough workers and stuff and, and they've left.
Starting point is 00:28:24 And that's why we're in this huge demand you know you see companies laying off and it doesn't even matter the job growth is still going on so i think the fed has kind of realized now the way i'm reading the tea leaves uh and i used to do this for 20 years owning a mortgage company um you reading the tea leaves that they're gonna they've probably soft-landed the uh economy and they're going to, they've probably soft landed the economy and they're going to probably keep rates steady. And then of course, as we move to the next stages of this, I think there's going to be some commercial and bank fallout of commercial real estate. And hopefully much of that's going to just convert to residential because there is a really tight
Starting point is 00:29:01 grip on residential right now. And so I think that will create some interesting opportunities for real estate investing if they convert those buildings and try and get some of these big downtown cities going again. But the other thing is too, is if the Fed has soft landed it and we're cool, you do have a lot of money that's been printed, $10 to $18 trillion, I think it is, that you've got to deal with and the inflationary cost of that. But if they've soft-landed it, it's possible they could start lowering the Federal Reserve rate. That's what I'm getting to. And if they do that, then you're going to have lower rates and you'll be perfectly positioned to take advantage of those movements. Well, yeah, so i follow the economics i actually talk on i talked on a
Starting point is 00:29:47 panel recently in chicago kind of bantering with some other investors um at a conference about this so right now yeah depending upon how you like i think inflation is five or six percent you know and they're saying that if the up curve at the down curve matches the up curve then you know in eight or nine months we'll be totally out of this right yeah and and i do i do see that um i do think that they will they've they've at least said that they would space out any continued upticks right because they're seeing they're seeing momentum in the right direction which is really great and i think it's such a good feeling because you know like some countries not to get too far off in the weeds like Japan or in this situation where they can't get out of it they've lost control and the fact that
Starting point is 00:30:32 we saw control over inflation builds that market confidence that we needed and that we can use the knobs that we have to keep the dollar under control I think is incredible to your point about commercial, there's a word commercial used a lot. And I think that it's important today to break that into its parts that are not equal, right? Because there's commercial retail, like malls, which during COVID took a colossal dive.
Starting point is 00:31:02 But then there's commercial multifamily, large apartment buildings, which in our area, in our markets, where people flocked to, because we're in Atlanta, as you said, Texas, Houston, Dallas, Austin. We're in Cincinnati, Columbus. We're in Jacksonville.
Starting point is 00:31:20 We're in a lot of cities. We're in cities where people are flocking to. And while retail, commercial retail was tanking, we were doing amazing. We were doing five and 10% rent growth a year, which turns out to be very large gains for our investors. Now, what we're going to see now is, to point commercial office right but within the commercial office sector you still have some essential needs like medical office buildings they're not going to go anywhere yeah not with the boomers retiring yeah but i'm a perfect example like to your point
Starting point is 00:31:56 because my wife and i've got to the point now where we have freedom and we live in a beautiful place but my wife came and said during COVID, hey, she does production management for feature-length films, by the way. And they all went home like overnight. And she came out a week or two later and said, hey, I think we should move to Hawaii. So two and a half weeks later, we were part of the exodus. We actually packed up and landed in Lanikai on Oahu. And my wife was tearing while we watched the sunrise over the Moku Islands. It was pretty fantastic. But there's so much of that going on, to your
Starting point is 00:32:32 point, in the commercial office space. So it's not CRE, it's not commercial real estate overall, right? There are these individual areas. And the commercial office space, I think the numbers I'm looking at is there's 20 to 30% in some areas. And it's not equally distributed, of course, but in some areas where that's their occupancy. And so there is a trillion dollars in real estate debt that is up for renewal if it was a short-term debt just in the next year there will be an extraordinary fallout in commercial office and there is nobody to replace those uh for example where my wife worked at dreamworks they when they left um nobody very very few came back she's now at nickelodeon actually and um and now a lot of people are, and they're working remotely from just a server room.
Starting point is 00:33:29 So the office space emptied out, and now they're working from a – their position locally is just a CPU in a rack, right? Yeah. And now they're all working from home throughout the United States, and that is proliferately the case. There's lots of companies trying to claw them back. The ones that have have not done so well. Yeah, they're not doing well. So to your point, I do think an incredible opportunity can be had in an office space
Starting point is 00:33:57 conversion to residential. Yeah, there will be a lot of that. And I think it's potentially a really good opportunity. I'm not currently looking at that right now And I think it's potentially a really good opportunity. I'm not currently looking at that right now because I think of it as highly variable and speculative exactly how much you can populate. Especially in cities like San Francisco. The people just aren't there. The quality of life isn't the same. It's not necessarily if you build it, they will come. The city is not the same city.
Starting point is 00:34:25 Yeah. It's definitely, and that's what I was referring to earlier, so I'm glad you made that distinction, is the big, tall, commercial real estate building for offices and stuff. And I've been watching how they've been talking. Reporters are working that beat down there. They've been talking about converting those buildings. But you're right. I mean, will people stay there? Will people come? It's interesting. I mean,
Starting point is 00:34:48 it's interesting how remote work has just changed everything, but I think it's been good for residential real estate. As you say, people are moving about the country, trying to find higher quality of life rather than places such as San Francisco. I hate to kick San Francisco around, but I mean, it is what it is. I saw the rents go through the roof there before COVID. And so it's a great opportunity for everything that's going to go on. And hopefully, you know, the rates won't still keep going up and all those things. But, you know, people have to live somewhere. That's the one thing that used to be a constant in the mortgage business.
Starting point is 00:35:22 We used to say the last thing people use a default on is their is their home because they got to live somewhere you got to sleep somewhere at night i i couldn't i couldn't agree more however during covid it's so funny because people for the first time didn't have to pay their rent checks oh yeah um it's a good thing that so we to ride out recessions we have have fixed or long term interest rates. So we buy so that we don't have to deal with the fluctuating interest rates. We also do low leverage so that we can cash flow at very, very low debt. So we put up a lot of capital, lowers our investors return, but it gives us protection. And that's kind of our foundation.
Starting point is 00:36:02 But a lot of people stopped paying their rents because the government was paying during covid and then when the government stopped they still stopped and really yeah and and it's rough on us because we we're having to evict now and that did result in a where you could usually evict in a, you know, in Texas, couple weeks or in a month and month and a half in Atlanta. It actually rose to two, four months because the courts finally came back online and were flooded with these past evictions. But the good news is that the fundamentals of the deals where we cash flow well on those deals even at recessionary occupancies as i was saying like what we expect to be the vacancy to be because we put a lot of capital down we fix the interest rates so the good news is uh although it slowed us down right now just
Starting point is 00:36:58 in the last six months um we're getting out all those people that are not the right tenants which allow us we're markets where people are moving to allow us to bring in to renovate improve the quality of life for these residents in the community bring in better residents that will pay and catch up to local market rates and so if you structured your deal if you structured the investment to be recession resilient, you got long term interest, you got your reasonable, didn't put too much debt on it, and you've got capital reserves on the sidelines, you're going to do great right now. Yeah. It's the people that got a little over their skis, as you say, and they got short term debt. They got high, leveraged it to the health. They didn't put a couple million,
Starting point is 00:37:46 six months in reserves in the bank. And those are the places we're buying from. Those are the operators that we are acquiring from right now. And I was there once. I did it and I did it in 2007 and eight and I lost it all in nine and 10. So I totally get it. You learned. You know, one learned, uh, you know,
Starting point is 00:38:06 one of the factors that's coming up here that I think is going to have some impact and probably some repossessions and some distressed homeowners that you be, you'll be able to buy and put your portfolio for people that invest with you, uh, is, uh, the expiration of the COVID, uh, student loan program. And evidently that expires in October and the Supreme Court hasn't agreed that that's legal to do or whatever their thing is.
Starting point is 00:38:33 And so you've got people that they usually would be paying $300, $500 a month and they haven't paid that for years and they probably acquired more debt and, I don't know, buying crap on Amazon and more credit cards. And when that kicks in, there's probably going to be some available real estate opportunities there, too, as well. Yeah, possibly. I think, yeah, the aggregate issue being that there's going to have to be a coming to Jesus that people are going to pay their bills. We did see in the last couple reports that individuals that for the first time, essentially in decades, investors or America did not pay down their credit
Starting point is 00:39:18 card debt with their tax return. So that is a sign that people, one one they're fearing they want to keep capital to to for a potential fallout and two they're not paying attention to their debt obligations right and so there's going to be a bit of a commercial reckoning and i'm sorry a consumer reckoning and i and that that means that what are they going to need they're going to need more affordable uh housing they're going to need b and c class apartment buildings and that's why i don't buy the luxury um you know brand new high-rise stuff but but yeah i i hear you there's a number of things that are going to happen credit card debt um people going back to work people finally paying their their rent checks again and um and people they get a little bit lazy
Starting point is 00:40:11 over covid right it was very clear because we used to walk units and we would walk 100 200 300 into individuals homes we'd walk into apartment buildings doing due diligence me personally and for the most part people were at work when we would do that prior to COVID, right? Kids were at school. And during COVID, nobody was at work. I mean, we were having a hard time getting in the buildings because they were all there. It made it much more difficult to walk through the buildings, you know? And it was much tougher.
Starting point is 00:40:44 And we're going to have to see people go back to work again and we're going to see those kids get back into school again um and i think the country's going to be better off once we once we see all that happen you know once we get through this whole i can't wait till we're years beyond covet at least i think we can't wait uh i don't want to tempt fate knock on wood you know so we don't want to do that whole thing ever again. Let's just skip that whole COVID from happening. Anything more we need to tease out on you guys and how you guys do it? Well, I think this has been a great conversation and I'm happy to be here. I'd love to chat with anybody. I think that most of your listeners are on a path right now. They're
Starting point is 00:41:26 probably very successful. They're investing in themselves just by listening to your show, getting inspiration from the entrepreneurs and business owners. And the traditional path that I took, which is kind of the revered path in the American dream. And I'm writing a TED Talk on this right now. But the idea is that I believe that there is a fallacy out there in the American dream. And that is working, climbing the ladder at some kind of revered career, whether you're working at Tesla or Apple or trying to reach partner at a law firm or residency as a surgeon somewhere. The challenge is what is being told is you need to climb that ladder at that profession
Starting point is 00:42:11 and you need to make all the money that you can along the way. And what the government wants to do is continue to do that. But what they don't incentivize in America is for each individual become the financial manager of their own financial future because in some ways you are the chief investment officer of yourself and of your family's financial future and when you look at what makes up and they don't incentivize identifying as that as well as an engineer like I was or a doctor or a dentist. What I try and do is help people realize that they're fearful. You know that you are. You're fearful because you're watching the news. You've got most of your income and it may get robbed by
Starting point is 00:43:00 a bank collapse. It's dwindling down because inflation is increasing. Maybe your real estate deals are at risk because of interest rates and your whole retirement accounts on this rollercoaster swing. And it turns out that the wealthy are not as afraid. Why? Because 8% of the middle class have eight percent of the middle class's portfolio is in what are called traditional investments those that your employer your financial planner all are pointing you towards right but the high income earners and ultra wealthy are 25 and 50 percent of their assets in alternative investments. This is what I learned when I was hardworking, 24-7, high-tech, professional, doing robotics and automation, some of the coolest projects,
Starting point is 00:43:53 is that I didn't have to be on the roller coaster. And I could reach out to diversified energy funds. I could get into different kinds of commercial real estate assets that are hedged against inflation, protected from interest rates, and where you can win in a downturn. And all those market cycles are not all down at one time. And so I like to promote that individuals take a step back. And until you really can build that financial foundation to ensure your security and ensure your safety, even in an economic downturn, which is what we help our investors do, how are you going to rise to self-actualization from Maslow's hierarchy of needs? If you're waking up in fear every day that you may lose your only income source, that
Starting point is 00:44:45 your portfolio might take a hit and it's all in one index. And I like to just share that with investors because I think it's a good message to get out there that there's other ways and we can help anybody who's interested, happy to chat with them. There you go. Is there a minimum investment to working with you folks? Yeah. So our investments are $100,000 and we do take qualified retirement funds. So if you're heavily indexed in your IRA 401k, you can self-direct that. You can 1031 exchange a rental property that you have into a partner position with us as well. So there are creative ways that individuals make that work.
Starting point is 00:45:25 Okay. So the best thing is to reach out to you and talk to you guys about how to do it. There you go. And give us a plug in for the book. So people have it, if you would, please.
Starting point is 00:45:35 Yeah. Persistence, pivots and game changers, turning challenges and opportunities. And, you know, I'm here. I still had hair back then.
Starting point is 00:45:43 It was not that long ago during covid but um yeah i've got you know phil collins the guitarist of deaf leopard nfl nba players coaches with some really amazing people i had such a great time this it was really fun we tell our whole stories hopefully it adds and contributes to the journey of your listeners i talk about my journey through high tech and real estate losing it all getting it back and then trading up and then founding Invest on Main Street in there. We send a signed hard copy out to all of our investors, but I'm happy to offer it to your listeners as well. And just an opportunity to give back. We're doing this now, not because we have to, but because we like it. We like the impact that we have on society and we like
Starting point is 00:46:25 the relationships we have with our investors. There you go. There you go. Well, it's been wonderful to have you on. Give us your.com one more time, if you would. Yeah. So we have investon and then main and then street.com. And if you want the book, you go to investonmainstreet.com slash book, and then type in the promo code chris voss show uh once you've done that make sure you set up a call i'd love to chat with you and if we're building out an educational platform it's called passiveinvestingmastery.com passiveinvestingmastery.com and we're building that out right now i'd be happy to see you happy to see you there as well there you go thanks for coming on patrick really appreciate it thanks well. There you go. Thanks for coming on, Patrick. We really appreciate it.
Starting point is 00:47:06 Thanks, Chris. There you go. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4Chess Chris Foss, youtube.com, 4Chess Chris Foss, linkedin.com, 4Chess Chris Foss, and follow us over on TikTok. We're starting to try and be cool over there. I think it's working.
Starting point is 00:47:17 Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. There we go, Patrick.

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