The Iced Coffee Hour - "99% Will Lose Money!" Brandon Turner’s Shocking Prediction for the 2025 Housing Market

Episode Date: February 23, 2025

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I've been buying real estate now for 20 years, right? 13,000 units of billion dollars of real estate. Everything has changed. The entire market is flipped. The supply of homes for sale is low, and prices are 53% higher than they were five years ago. Just hang on. It is incredibly hard to lose. Then there are mortgage rates, which have more than doubled.

Where do you go to find good deals? There's a hundred strategies we could talk about. I'll take you every every few my favorite. There's a bidding more for literally every home in the market. This sounds really silly. It's not that hard to make a billion dollars when you're invested in real estate. because... At last year, we saw the lowest level of transactions in 29 years.

So starting from zero with no connections whatsoever, how confident are you that you can make a million dollars in a year? Given what I know right now, I'm 100% confident. I can make a million dollars from nothing my first year. Things have to bottom out, and they haven't bought them out yet. People think if they just, like, do the right thing, they probably won't get rich anyway. But I'm here to tell you, like, if you do these steps, you will get rich.

Brandon Turner, thank you so much for coming on the ice coffee hour. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much for letting us stay here in Maui. Really excited to talk to you on this one because you are the real estate guy. Thanks, man. No, thanks for coming out. It's always a pleasure. I mean, the last time we were in your neck of the woods in Vegas,

now we get to hang out in Maui and we had to play with some whales yesterday. That was a good time. Now I'm curious. I'm sure everyone is wondering, is now a good time to buy a house? Now is always a good time to buy a house when you have a long enough perspective, right? It's always a good time to buy a house when you have a perspective that says, hey, 10 years from now, I mean, in American history, there's never been a period of time where real estate's been lower 10 years in the future than it is today. Does that make sense? It's always

in every 10 year period of America, you can look back and say real estate is better than it was 10 years ago. And I don't see that changing. In fact, I see that getting even more pronounced over the next few years. How was it changed since 2020, though? The entire market is flipped. It's completely flipped. Everything is different today. Everything is different today. So, interest rates are double what they used to be. And so for those who are unaware what that means, it basically means your payment is like double of what it used to be. So if you had a house that was, you know, you're buying a $250,000 house and maybe your payment was, I don't know, let's call it $1,700 a month before. Now you might be paying $3,000 a month, give or take. And that's a big chunk.

But worse than that or equally bad, the compound the effect is prices are sometimes double what they were four years ago. So not only are, yeah, interest rates higher, which makes the payment higher, so is the property value, which makes the actual payment out of your pocket way higher. So the answer, the question, should you buy a house if you can afford it would be my, if you can afford it reasonably, yeah, house would be a great investment long term.

Now, if I push back on that, I'm looking around and I would love to buy a house. But it seems like renting is so much cheaper. Yeah. That why would I spend, let's just call it just for even numbers, $10,000 a month on a mortgage property taxes insurance, when I could rent the identical home, for $5,200 a month.

Yeah, this goes back to perspective, right? If you were to own that house for three years, 100%, I would not buy a house. If you're not living there for two years, one year, probably not. But if you're going to own that house or five years, seven years, 10 years, 20 years, you're going to make so much more than $10,000 a month on average over that time period,

because that house that you bought for whatever, call it a million dollars, is in 10 years from now it's going to be worth, call it $2 million, maybe two and a half million, maybe three. Like, prices are going up, especially because we have just a massive housing shortage in America. So when you look at over a long period of time, this isn't getting better. It's getting worse for affordability. Do you think that more houses will be built?

Do you think the regulatory environment is going to get a little bit more friendly to real estate developers? And that can kind of solve that issue a little bit? Or do you think that we're only going to get more tight? There's going to be more regulations and it's going to be harder to build new homes? Yeah, I mean, the government will have to do something, right? Like, here's the problem. in a nutshell, what happened. Great recession hit. Everyone lost, you know, a lot of bad things happened. They stopped building from like 2008, 9, 10, 11, 12. Nobody was building anything. They started picking

back up again, 12, 13, 14, 15, started, you know, building, which is great. But when you're not building and more and more people are either in coming to America and buying houses and, you know, people are having kids and kids are growing up, there became a housing shortage. But they're, what, the second, I don't know what you call the second great recession, you know, like 2000, you know, we'll call it COVID. Sure. COVID happened. everyone stopped building again. And it hasn't picked back up again. The only building being done is at the top of the market.

In fact, Wall Street Journal had an article just out the other day. It just said there's a lot of apartments available. They're just for the rich people. There's almost nothing being built for the average American right now. So what does that mean? Again, supply and demand. So the answer your question, it's a tremendous problem. The government has to do something.

Whether that, we can debate this and the government, they don't know what they're doing. So they can either release, you know, reduce regulation. and try to allow more building, which I don't see that happening. They can try to find a creative way to get more people into homes like California is doing right now

with the ADUs, which is really fascinating. San Diego especially is wild right now. And you could do that, or the government could just start subsidizing Americans' rent. And I think it's going to be a combination of all three.

That would be insane if the government subsidizes people's rents because that just means landlords are going to raise their prices. 100%. Yeah, so people are like, are you afraid of rent control? Are you afraid of like,

or you know, like, the government steps, would you do section eight all those things all the answers yeah of course I would love to have that like I don't mind regulation it just makes me richer and what I mean by that is the money the more the money money gets printed and pumped into the economy landlords are usually ones that end up with the money it's business owners and landlords get that money because it goes to the tenant fine they pay the rent landlords raise the rent we get more we yeah it doesn't solve the problem but that's how America likes to solve problems that's interesting because during COVID when they printed all the

money gave away all of this free money you're right yeah like the people that were received the actual stimulus checks and this and that. That just goes away like that. Yeah, flows right out. You see the wealthiest people during that time period gained the most amount of wealth, like by crazy magnitudes. Yeah, yeah. My wealth grew by tens of millions of dollars during COVID because my properties that I

owned just went up in value because the rents went up because people, yeah, it was a, it was a weird time. There was so much money in the economy. Yeah. So there's the argument that home values really aren't going up. It's simply that the United States government is printing more money. Sure. What are your thoughts on that?

it's probably true. Like in other words, if I had, yeah, my house is worth a million dollars today. It's going to be worth $2 million in 10 years. Okay, that's probably reasonable to say. But also the gallon of milk is worth, it was four today. It's going to be eight then. So in other words, yeah, inflation is causing the housing to go up. That's for sure.

But it goes back to the original point. Should you buy a house? Well, if you don't own the house, then now you still have nothing 10 years from now and your milk is still $8 a gallon. So, like, you can argue whether it's right or wrong, or you can argue whether or is it inflation? Is it just supply and demand? But regardless, if you own the asset,

then you're playing with the game, you're not fighting against it. And your payment is fixed, whereas people that rent their payment basically is at the whims of the market. Yeah, I mean, it's fixed as long, yeah, for as long as you get a good mortgage, which is super important, you get a fixed mortgage instead of a variable,

which most people are pretty good with that. Taxes and insurance, though, can kill people a little bit. You know, if you're, whatever, your taxes are at $10,000 a year, year and then it bumps it up to $20,000 a year, you have payments going up by, you know, almost $1,000 a month. That's real, but it's not, you know, it's not going to be completely hosed if you own a house with a fixed mortgage. Yeah. Now, for those are unfamiliar with you and what you do, can you give us a bit of a backstory of how you got started in real estate?

Sure. And in essence, almost what qualifies you to talk about this. Yeah. All right, it begins with Coldstone cream. You guys out of that ice cream? Coldstone. Yeah, great ice cream, right? So, I was singing for tips. So you literally, they don't do that anymore, do they? Do they sing for tips? It's been a long time. I didn't get sung to when I went there. Dude, yeah, back in the day. Because you don't tip. Yeah.

That's fine. So back in the day, you work at Coldstone and you sing when somebody puts a tip, like, you know, thank you for your dollar. Listen to us holler. I don't know why I remember that one. So you sing for tips. And that was my job. I was making $8 an hour plus tips average like $15 an hour.

And I decided to rent us like four bedroom apartment. And then I rented out each of the bedrooms to just guys from the local college, which is, you know, an experience in a. itself, but all of a sudden I was living for free. And so that's how I got into real estate. So just people know I did not come from money. My dad's a meat cutter. My mom did daycare in my house. Like we were very like blue collar, lower middle class. But I discovered like, oh, this is cool. So anyway, so I did that. I ended up buying a house just like a house and then rented out the bedrooms to a bunch of buddies. Did the same thing, live for free. Then I bought

a duplex. That was cool. Lived in one half, rent out the other. Where'd you get the idea to do that? It was kind of an accident, actually. I was bowling with some friends. And one of the person, that I was bowling with, I said, hey, do you have a place I can rent? And she's like, don't rent, just buy. And I was like, but that's crazy. I'm 18 or 19 years old. Like, why would, and they're like, no, don't trust me. She's like, just trust me, buy, don't rent. So I did. And yeah, that's literally where the idea came from. And yeah, and all those houses that I then bought and rented out the bedrooms, not only did I make cash flow, but they all went up in value over time. In fact, one of them, I just sold like that second, that first duplex I just sold

last year. And I made like, oh, about 100 grand over a decade, which just not a ton of money, but I only paid $80,000 for the property. And so anyway, that's how I got into it, is just scrappy, just trying. So we went from one to two, two to four, four to ten, twenty-five. And today we're at little over $13,000 across about 20 different states. There's a lot of in between there story, but that's the beginning. And what about your involvement with bigger pockets? Sure.

That's how I found you. Yeah. Yeah, bigger pockets. Bigger pockets. So I remember my very first property I ever had that was in that house. And that's when I decided, like, I'm going to be a really. estate guy. I'm going to buy real estate. So I remember I'm telling my dad. I was actually studying for the L-Sat.

You know the L-Sat, the law school entrance test, right? I'm studying for it, and I tell my dad, hey, I'm actually not going to go to law school. I changed my mind. I'm going to be a real estate investor. And he's like, that's crazy. Like, why would, like, secure job, all that? And he goes, what are you going to do, Brandon, if the tenant doesn't pay rent? I was like, oh, shoot, I don't know. I was like, you're right. I never mind. And I almost changed my mind. But what I did is, I went to Google. I typed in, I don't think it was Google,

dogpile. maybe. I'm like, whatever that old before Google everyone used, maybe Yahoo, what to do when tenants don't pay rent. And this little tiny blog forum called Bigger Pockets Pops Up. And I don't remember what the answer was. I remember I printed it out and I've had it for years somewhere in a file here, but I printed it out. But what it meant was there were answers to all those like problems. Like when people are like, yeah, but you shouldn't do real estate investing because of ABC. Every ABC out there, there is an answer from somebody who overcame that and then made millions and millions of dollars. So it like expanded my mind to say, okay, well, maybe I can do this.

So that's what got me into bigger pockets, actually. I was one of the very first signups on their website. I mean, it was basically just Josh Dorkin running in his basement. And I jumped in and started volunteering to edit blog posts for him. I was like, I can help out. Let me just edit blog post. I pretended I was good at English and grammar, which I was not. That led to the podcast. And so I started the podcast alongside Josh. And then the podcast just took off and became the biggest real estate podcast, and like, we were number two in the business category for almost a decade. That's incredible. Dave Ramsey and us, and I was like, you can never beat Dave.

That is so cool. So what's your most difficult deal that you've ever done so far across those 13,000 units? But you know what? Before we go on to that, you have to ask yourself the question, what does the future hold for business? Because these days, everything changes so quickly. If you ask nine different experts, you're going to get 10 different answers. Be really helpful to have a crystal wall.

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Oh, man. I'll give you a small example and then a larger example. Small example. I buy this house. I'm watching all the flipping shows. You know, the flipping TV shows are always on, right? Yeah. So I'm watching the flipping shows. And I'm like, I'm going to flip this house. And this giant duplex comes for sale. It's like 4,000 square feet, top bottom duplex. I mean, there's like literal like blood spatters on the ceiling from like shooting up like drug. It was wild. But like, I mean, nasty house. But good bones, good structure, amazing view of the town that I lived in. And I get the thing for like 45 grand. I'm like, this is going to be, I'm going to make so much money. I'm like, I'm going to put maybe 40 into it. I'm going to sell it for 200. I'm going to make 100 grand. Like, that was my thinking going into it.

I go to a hard money lender, which these are companies that lend money to house flippers. I go to a hard money lender. And I had worked with before and I knew he's like, yeah, no chance. I'm not going to lend that. And I was like, but here's all my numbers. He's like, no, it's going to be way more expensive than that. It's not worth that much money. And you know what my answer was to him?

Like, I didn't say this literally been in my head. It was like, screw you, man, watch me. And I went and talked to like 20 different lenders, found one guy willing to do it. I go in there. It didn't take 40 grand to fix up the property. It took more like 80 grand to fix the property up. So now I'm in for like 120. And I did most of the work myself.

A whole year of my life was working on this project. And my wife and I would work every day. The thing I put on the market for 180 instead of 200. Okay, it'll go a little cheaper. It doesn't sell it 180. Not 170. Not 160. Not 150.

Not 140. Not 120. 115. sell that. So I lose money on this deal. I mean, I lose probably 20 grand, call it. Uh, and that, that was the hardest. I mean, it was a year of my entire life and to lose money. I could have literally laid on the couch and done nothing and made more money watching like soap operas. Like, but the reason I love that story is had I kept it a duplex, it would have cash flowed over $1,000 a month back then. It would be probably two or $3,000 a month today.

Had I kept it as a duplex, I wouldn't have done as much work. It would have been probably more like, you know, $20, $30,000 or $40,000 with a work. It would have been a great duplex. Today, here we are, eight, nine years after I sold that, maybe 10 years after I sold that property, it's probably worth 700,000. No. Yeah. And so the lesson learned is like, yeah, flipping's fun.

Like, it's cool to take a house, flip it, make some money. But if you just hang on to real estate, just hang on, it is incredibly hard to lose if you can just hold on. And I could have held on just fine. So that was the hardest deal I've done there. And then I got a $72 million apartment complex in Texas that, uh, Like, they, you know, we were making maybe a million dollars in cash flow. And then the government's just like, oh, by the way, taxes are now a million dollars higher. So it's just like, it's not quite a million, but it just wipes out so much cash flow.

So now we're just like, okay, well, we got to figure this out. So now we're looking at doing midterm rentals, like traveling nurse stuff inside of it, maybe doing some breaking up apartments into like a co-living sort of like rent by the room. We call micro apartments, like trying to figure out how, okay, when the taxes go up, how do we deal with it? How do we figure it out? And again, 20 years from now, not worried about that property, but right now, is there any recourse on that where you could go and say, actually, we don't think our property should be assessed at this? Yeah, it's a great question.

And yeah, everybody can do this, whether it's your primary residence, whether it's an investment property, you can challenge a tax assessment for sure. And we did, and you fight for it. And every area has got a little different process. And we did fight for it. And I think we got a little bit reduction on that. Insurance also went up at the same time, and that sucks. But that's just a, that's the game we're playing. Now, I'm curious, because I get these in the mail all of the things.

time. These mailers would say, we think you're overpaying on your property taxes. Hire us that we could fight it and bring it down and we'll get a percentage of the savings. Is that a scam? Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my out of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that

harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IDPrivatewealth.com. That's a great question. I get them as well. I've never hired one of them. I would guess this. It's probably not a scam. It's probably just a whole, like, it's probably a whole lot easier than people think to do it. And so they need to go do themselves. Kind of like that business filing thing that right now everyone's supposed to do. You know what I'm talking about? Like right now there's some like, I mean, obviously people are listening to this in the future, but there's something like, we have to file some business thing. The government changed the rule.

It's like one paper. It's free to do it online. You can do it in five minutes. But there's like a ton of companies right now that will do it for you for 500 bucks. And it's like, don't do that. It's a horrible scam. So get this. So I, our accountant emailed us saying, hey, you got to fill this out by like January

15th. Yeah. Fine. I Google it. I go through the form. And I realize at the very end, it says, perfect. Submit this for $179. And I realized, wait a second.

clicked on the first link. It was a sponsor thing. And this company has the same website and they charged you $180. And then they just went back and found the actual website. Did it for free. It's the same amount of time. I want to make sure I sign this form.

I don't know what this form is, but does it save money? Yeah. I feel like, yeah. So all it is, it's, the government's trying to collect information from small businesses who make under $5 million a year for an LLC or an S corporation. It's basically just a statement of who you are, how you make your money.

But it doesn't make you any money. No. I remember doing that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone knows I make less than $5 million. Dude, you just got called out.

No, it's just in one of your companies. Your other companies are fine. This is in your like hair care product company. Yeah. Okay. What's interesting is every time I hear someone talk about real estate, I'm like, this sounds easy. It sounds very doable.

And then I always take it to the nth degree. Yeah. I'm like, okay, if I were to go all in on real estate, what does that look like? And then I start getting nervous because I'm like, if I buy all of my real estate in Los Vegas, what's my like meteor plan? If, let's just say, Lake Mead dries up and then they can't source water, what happens to Las Vegas? If you

buy all in California, and then there's another California wildfire, there's an earthquake, or if you buy it all in like the Midwest and you have a tornado or what if like government then in 20 years is like, you know what, we are going to develop ultra high density living and it's going to be super cheap and super

affordable because maybe we actually have like a a government that's willing to do something like that, and then everyone moves into that. And then there's no reason for real estate. Maybe they deregulate and then all of these people go and they build all these super cheap, actual affordable homes that people can move into rather than mansions that everyone's been developing over the past 20 years. Like what is the, I would say, macro threat being a real estate investor? Well, let me first ask you this. Podcasting. When I think about going all in on podcasting in YouTube, I'm like, oh, but what if AI takes my place in five years from now

and there's no more longer podcast in YouTube anymore? What if my entire career that I build is just in the toilet in five years? Because I, because I, because I, went into something and then it got disrupted. That could happen, right? But it's not stopping you guys from doing this. It's not stopping me from doing it. It depends. Because right now, podcasting is kind of like the thing for, like, that's like our job.

You know, and we can pivot. But something like real estate, you're using your capital to then buy something that in the event of, you know, this meteorite plan or whatever could be completely worthless. Sure. And so there's so many other avenues. Like you could just invest in like international index funds. Like, Graham loves the new to get 3% return. Or you can buy, you know, like U.S.-based index funds.

Like there's so many different choices and real estate sounds very appetizing, but then I'm also concerned because that is also you can be subjected to macroeconomic things that just happened. For sure. I'm just trying to alleviate the fear, the decision making based on fear of saying, hey, what if something goes wrong? Maybe I shouldn't do it because of that, right? One of my favorite lines, I don't know where I first heard it, but no risk it, no biscuit. Like if you don't risk, you're not going to get the rewards, right? Real estate, like, yeah, you could go and get 3% returns and some like very ultra safe thing, that's fine. And if you are ultra rich or you have a lot. of money and you're not in the building phase that's that maybe is fine but for most people when they're getting into real estate investing like an art like that are listening to the show they're not sitting on 10 million dollars of capital that just want like what do i do with this money right they're probably sitting on 50 grand okay 50 grand at 3% per year they're never getting rich off that right so you have to take risk in order to get the biscuit if that makes sense so on one

regard there's that there is diversification though of course like i don't like putting all my eggs in one real estate basket i can't remember yeah yeah different location i mean we're in 20 states. I'm across different areas, even like forget open door capital, which is my, my large company. I'm also doing my own personal, like real estate. I have a few small properties here and there. I got a couple condos here in Maui that I do on Airbnb. I got a property I just closed actually, what, two days ago in Florida that I'm going to do rent by the room, which is a cool strategy we can maybe talk about. I got another one in Atlanta I'm closing on. So I've got different areas with different strategies. Now, you know, the more you diversify, the less expertise you have.

So there's a danger there. We've got to be careful not to get too wild and crazy. Because the money in real estate today is in being world class. Like if you're not world class, I would say the same thing with podcasting and YouTube and all that. Like you got to be world class. You can't just put up a video and hope to get a million views. You can't just buy a house and hope to make a ton of money.

Like if you're not good, then you're going to struggle. Mediocrity doesn't really have a place anymore in the business world in America. How do you find a good deal? Ooh. All right. Good deal. First of all, we got to define what a good deal. deal is. Most people, when I, like a newbie comes to me and they're like, how I want to find a good deal?

What is a good deal? Well, I mean, just something that makes me money. Well, how much? I want to make a thousand dollars a month. Okay, would you, if you put a million dollars into the deal, let me ask you this. If you put a, if you invested a million dollars into a deal and you made a $1,000 a month, horrible. Yeah, because of what, what, 1.2% return on your money? That's terrible. You might as well stick it in somewhere else. What if you put $1,000 into a deal and you made a $1,000 a month? Fantastic. That's a fantastic deal, right? So we have to define the terms. like, what do you mean that good deal? So I want to say, hey, I want, like personally, I like to get, let me call it 8 to 12 percent cash on cash return, which means in year one, I'm going to get back

8 to 12 percent of whatever I invested, just in year one. That doesn't account for the future. If you want to go like long term over a seven year hold, let's say, I want to maybe say, hey, I want 15 percent per year of my money, whether you calculate as an IRA, which gets a little in the weeds, it's IRA or average annual return. But I want to get like 15% plus per year. Where'd that number come from? It's double the stock market. It's like roughly like that's literally just a rule of thumb.

I'm like, well, if I'm going to do the risk of real estate and the work of real estate investing, I want to get an outsized return. I don't want to get 7% over the next 10 years per year when I could just dump that in the stock market. But where do you find that? Because I'm looking all the time. I don't see any deals in Vegas. Commercial real estate tends to cap out about six and a half percent.

When I look at any options that are out there on the market, you either have to do a substantial amount of work to renovate and raise rents or it's better just not to do that and to practically invest in anything else instead. Sure. Yeah, real estate does not work like it used to. I mean, this is a big thing. Real estate in 2025 is not real estate in 2020 or 19, 18, 17, whatever. The game has changed because of what we talked about earlier, right?

Interest rates are higher. Property values are higher. So what do we do? Well, we can just choose to set it out and just invest somewhere else, and that's fine. That's what some people do. I'm a much bigger fan of this idea of how do we make cash flow work. How do we make a good return in today's market? So that gets to what I call like the fringe of the real estate strategies where, again, the old

days, you find a house. It's listed by a real estate agent in Vegas. It's $280,000. You put 20% down. You make a nice 12% return on it. Everyone wins and you're all happy. It doesn't work. Just can't do it.

Your mortgage is higher than what the rent is because rents are not going up right now at the same pace that housing prices are. So we have to say, well, how do we make better cash flow? I'll give you a few examples. I mean, I have a list of like 20 of them. But one of them would be rent, I mentioned earlier, rent by the room. They also call it co-living. There's a company called Pad Split that does this.

They're kind of like the Airbnb of the co-living. No, this is going to sound wild. But imagine taking a five-bedroom house, adding three or four more bedrooms in it. You turn the garage into two bedrooms. You take the living room and turn it into a bedroom, maybe two bedrooms. And all of a sudden, you've got nine bedrooms in this house. for maybe 10 grand, 20 grand of work to get that. It's pretty simple to put up some simple walls

that are just kind of temporary walls. I mean, like they're real walls, but you could remove them later. So now you got nine bedrooms in this house. And that house normally would rent for $2,500 a month. And your mortgage would be $2,500 a month. You're just breaking even. So that's not a good deal.

But when you can charge now, let's call it $800 a month, for nine different bedrooms. What is that, $7,200 a month? And so you just went from $2,500 and break-even to $7,200. Now you got to pay something $8,000. some extra expenses. People are going to move out more often, water, sewer, garbage, all that you get to cover. But you easily can make $1,000 to $2,000 a month on one of these houses. Now, I know

people are listening going like, that's insane. Who's going to live in something like that? Half of America will live in something like that. You're single and you make less than $50,000 a year. Like, there's a good chance that you would rather pay $800 a month to live in one of those than $1,500 a month or $2,000 to live in a studio apartment. Does that make sense? So we had a buddy who did that in Vegas. He stopped to her. doing it because they kept having to call the police. Yeah, yeah. And he said, he wasn't doing pad split.

And that was in a sketchier part of town. But he did this. Two different properties were rented by the room. And the police got called many times because of dynamics. I think he had three fires. You had three fires. Like, I would talk to him and he'd be like, I had another fire. And I'm like, what number are you at?

Yeah. And he's like, the dude just set fire to the room. He just, like, had a breakdown and just lit it on fire. So I love stories like this. I call it like my uncle invested in real estate. once stories, right? Everyone's got like, yeah, my uncle, like when I tell people I do real estate, yeah, my uncle invest in real estate once and had three fires, right? Everyone's got that story. My uncle lost his shirt in real estate. I cautioned people around the idea of taking anecdotal

stories and applying it to principle, right? So I heard this happened, principle. There are tens of thousands, I would probably argue hundreds of thousands of units in America that are these rent by the room. And by and large, they work just fine. And so when you hear the stories, like when I hear a story, Like, yeah, my uncle tried real estate investing once, and man, the tenant burned down his house, and he, uh, you know, stole his wife and like the whole thing. You're like, well, did your uncle, like, screen for tenants? Did he use like a background check and a criminal check? And did he hold him to this up? And it's always, I mean, they don't know. But it's, of course, the answer is usually no. is just they're mediocre landlords or mediocre. Am I saying your buddies? I don't know.

And sometimes there's just crazy stories. I mean, I have a mobile home park. I think I said this on the show last time. Maybe not. I had a mobile home park where one of the tenants just like robbed a bank and then just went on the run like from the feds. Like, yeah, that's a weird story. We couldn't evict him as easy because we couldn't find the guy.

And it was like, it took months to get him out. Those stories will happen. I had another tenant in that same place. She was a prostitute who would advertise her services on like Craigslist or whatever, and she'd get people to come to her trailer, her mobile home. And they would come there, they would get undressed, they'd get all ready, and then her boyfriend would come out with a gun and rob them, send him out naked out into the night. And of course, they're not going to go to the police with it because they're there to...

Then all the neighbors. Yeah, yeah. So, like, it was just a really interesting scam that's actually pretty smart. Like, we have these stories, right? How did they get caught? Because they got caught because one of the guys who got in, got scammed. he calls a property management company from like a burner phone.

He's like, obviously, I'm not going to go to the police with this. I'm not going to say my name. But this is what just happened. You guys should really look into it. So then we had to look into it. We had to tell the police and they started investigating and the whole thing. Is there a sting operation?

I don't think there was a sting operation. I think they just confronted the lady and her boyfriend. And I think that scared him enough to leave. And they ended up getting evicted a little while later because they stopped paying rent. I think it disappeared. Yeah, anyway, those stories happen.

When you have thousands of units especially, you're going to have those crazy stories. I just, I caution people against the idea of like, they're a bad thing happened. Now, are there challenges with a thing like rent by the room? 100%. There are a massive challenge.

I'm not saying you should go do that. I don't do much of it. I'm very, very, very little of my portfolio is that way. However, it does work. There are many examples of people who are getting $1,000 to $2,000 in cash flow, each home, and they just learn how to manage correctly.

So this is that final point is every one of the strategies, and I can name a few more, like, ADU development. You build these little ADUs in the backyard. California's leading the way on that. I love it. assisted living, residential assisted living,

turning a house into a, you know, almost a rent by the room, but for elderly, right? Yeah, there's problems with that. Everything I say here, build to rent communities.

I love build to rent. You build a community of like five, 10, 20 houses and rent them all out. You can make really good money that way. Every one of these people listening, something pops into how he goes,

yeah, but this, yeah, but this. Yeah, but this. And that's hard. Like, oh, man,

imagine how difficult it would be to manage, like, a dozen tenants that live in one house. Yeah, you're right, that would be really hard. You know, it's also really hard being poor, right? Like being broke. That's really hard.

You know, it's also being, like, so in other words, like you pick your hard and money is in hard. Like fast money, maybe the way it's saying that, fast money is in hard. When you can solve a hard challenge, like managing a bunch of tenants in one house, you're going to make a bunch of money. If you can manage the difficulty of getting licensed to do a residential assisted living in a community, super hard. I got a buddy doing that.

He won't, like every house makes them 15, thousand dollars a month in profit when he's done. Yeah, but what about staffing? Yep, that's hard. It's hard to find good staffing. It's hard to be poor. Yeah. I'm actually doing an ADU now.

Are you really? LA. Yeah, that's awesome. I love that strategy. I never thought I would put more money in Los Angeles. The ADU thing is, I think, one of the, you asked the question earlier. Should people buy real estate today? And the answer is, yeah, long term, if you can hang on to it, sure.

Yeah. It's a great idea. ADU is our way to hang on to it because you can build an ADU. I know, what do you spend it on yours? So I'm spending $200,000 in mine. I'm able to borrow the entire amount. is an alleged asset line at 5.26%. And I'm guessing I should be able to make

worst case a 10% cash on cash returns. So I should be able to net 20 grand a year from a $200,000 investment, which I'm paying $10,000 in interest. So it's basically a free $1,000 a month. Worst case scenario. Best case scenario, I make maybe a 15% cash return. And what's wild now,

if you wanted to maximize that even more, you could potentially Airbnb, if it's in the right area and the right legislation. Yeah, you could midterm rental it though. You get it staged like where, let's say a normal ADU might rent for whatever, $2,500 a month, right? That's cool. But if you put the furniture in there and then you go listed on like a furnished finder, you might be able to get $35 to $3,900 for that same unit.

Same thing. Maybe you cover a couple of the utilities, but all of a sudden you just jack your income even higher. And there's other strategies of while. You can do the same thing. You can also add sometimes multiple ADUs now. I mean, people in San Diego are putting like 10, 15, 20, ADUs on one lot and just property value, I mean, their value of their property goes up,

their cash flow goes up. It's a phenomenal strategy. I love that you're doing that. I didn't know. Yeah, I'm trying one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It goes well, I'm doing it on the other place, the duplex I used to live in.

Yeah. Turn that garage and do an ADU. Yeah. If that goes well, then I got the place in West LA where I want to do an ADU there. Yeah. Yeah, that game is strong. That's how Hawaii is surviving.

Here in Hawaii, every house pretty much has an ADU. That's the only way to make it. Like this house, where I'm at right now, I got an ADU right there. my parents are staying for the month in it. I got another ADU in the front yard, like another studio apartment. I could rent out that ADU if my parents weren't there.

I could rent that for $3,500 a month, maybe $4,000. I could rent the front unit for $2,000. My only, like, my mortgage on this place right now is only like eight. So like I could live almost for free in this house. I could have actually, I thought about it. This room we're in right here. I was like, I'm going to turn it into an ADU. Yeah.

I was going to turn that into the bathroom back there. And this was going to be a studio. I'd rent for $2,000 a month. And it would have been, you know, whatever. Would you have wanted to do that? I mean, I don't need to do it, but it's always an option. And if I didn't have as much money right now, if I wasn't as well off as I am, 100%. I mean, I have house hacked, which is the term we use when you live in one unit, rent the other,

I've house hacked almost continually nonstop for the past 20 years. Even living here in Hawaii, my last house, I just moved here, but the last house I was at for the last seven years, you've been there. My buddy Ryan Murdoch rented in the backyard. He paid $3, $3,500 a month for the last seven years, something like that. What are your thoughts on modular homes? I see these like storage crate homes or the things like a home you can buy on Amazon and it's like $40,000 to add an extra unit.

Yeah. Is that like, is there any company that's doing it like in a legit way or what are the issues with that? Yeah, it's a good question. I like, I like where the industry is going. The industry of like these small built homes, uh, boxables, a company that's doing it really well, right? They're out of Vegas. Love box.

Yeah, I love those little things. The thing, the problem with those is like, they can advertise stuff like, hey, you can get a caseta, they call it there, like you can get a boxable house for $50,000. Wow, that's awesome. But then you got to site prep your property and you got to get the water, sewer, garbage hookup, you had to do all that. That might be another permitting, all that might be another $50 grand. And then the house is only 400 square foot.

And so then you're like, okay, well, now I'm at $100,000 for a 400 square foot house. You actually could build a 400 square foot house for under $100,000 without doing one of those fancy, like, names. Now, the reason I like them is because we're moving into that direction where we're almost turning homes into like IKEA. Like, they're going to get, the prices will come down. It's going to, it's going to be one of the solutions to the affordable housing crisis in America. If ever, I mean, cities are falling one after another.

They're following California. California always leads the charge on this stuff, right? So California is doing the ADU thing. It's working really well. It's solving a lot of the affordability problems. We have a problem with parking, though. But Elon's going to solve that in next few years. And so, like, once we no longer need vehicles, and majority people will just hop in their automatic, you know, Tesla and whatever.

We don't, we don't worry about the parking much in the, you know, So it's a temporary problem with the parking right now. But that's solving the problem. City after city will be adopting this. It'll be across the whole country in the next few years. How many ways are there to make money in real estate? And what do you say are the best ways? Like, what are the ways that people also don't really think about?

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And this is the simplest way of explaining it. When you own a rental property, you get cash flow if you buy right. Like you get extra money every single month, profit in your pocket. Huge mistake people make, though. There's a difference between like what people think is cash flow and then pure cash flow. And when I say pure cash flow, I mean, it's been like put through the fire. Like gold is purified by throwing it through fire.

It's been purified through the fire. you own rental properties, you know, like, you can make, like, you know, I'm making 500 a month, 500 a month, 500 a month, 500 a month, $2,000 water heater. Yeah. Oh, dang it. 500 a month, 500 a month, 500 a month, 500 a month, 500 a month, $2,000 stove. So, like, you have to account for those big items that only happen once a decade, but there's 50 of them in a home.

And so, like, you count, like, they happen all the time. So as long as you're actually buying a property that makes money, pure cash flow, you get money every single month. That gets you financial freedom. You get enough of them. Like back when I started, I said I wanted $100 per month per unit. That was just my number 20 years ago I used. That's gone up maybe a little bit now.

But for simplicity, if you needed $100 an actual pure in your pocket post tax, like, because there's not a lot of tax anyway, we'll get to that. Local news is in decline across Canada. And this is bad news for all of us. With less local news, noise, rumors, and misinformation fill the void. And it gets harder to separate truth from fiction. That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us,

because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise. CBC News. In your pocket, $100 per month per unit. Okay, how many units do you need to retire? If you had $10,000 in bills and that would make you feel comfortable, okay, 100 units. And you might think that's great. How am I ever going to buy 100 houses? Well, you don't. You just get in a multifamily. You buy the house. Later on, you buy a duplex. And you're like, okay, I figured that out. You buy the 10 unit. Oh, I figured that out. You buy the 50 unit and you're done in three years. That's cash flow. Number two is appreciation. Obviously, property values go up over time. Yes, there's dips. But when you look at all of American history, property values always go up

over time over the long run. That's where wealth is built. Right. Like my, yeah, cash flow is cool. I can pay my bills with it. Great. But the reason I'm absurdly wealthy is because my property that I buy for, I mean, example, what I bought here in Hawaii, I bought it that while I just moved from, I paid 1.7 for. At the time, I was like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever done. I'm paying $1.7 million for a house. How could I be so dumb? Why would I do that?

That's stupid. And my buddy, David Green, who is my co-host on Bigger Pockets, David's like, man, in 30 years, what's that house worth? I'm like, probably like, three and a half. He's like, and you can rent out all the units separately on there because you could carve it up and rent it out if you had to, and you had to go move back home and work at Coldstone again. You could rent it out and break even?

I'm like, well, yeah, sure. He's like, so worst case scenario, Brandon, worst case is 30 years from now, you're worth $3 million more because you paid off the property. I'm like, oh, yeah, worst case is I'm really rich. It's like, okay, so that's appreciation. Now, ironically, I held it for seven years. I just sold it for $3.2 million. Actually, we closed today.

And so like three point, yeah, right, that's appreciation. That just added, you know, almost, whatever that is, almost a million and a half to my net worth. Plus, we paid the property off. That's the third way you make money in real estate. Property, you buy it at whatever, 1.7. And I had a mortgage for 1.2, I think it was. but at the end of seven years,

I only owed a million on it. I paid off almost $200,000 in that seven years. That's just money in my pocket. And if I own a rental property, the tenants are basically paying off my mortgage. So number three, so number one, cash flow, number two, appreciation.

Number three is that loan gets paid down. And number four is the tax benefits. In other words, if I make $100,000 a year as a landlord in cash flow, you make $100,000 a year from advertising and from YouTube, I keep all my money.

You're going to lose probably 30% of yours. Right? So in other words, I'm naturally just getting wealthier just by holding on to real estate. Then if I play my cards right and I do the game right, which I do, I offset if I'm careful, and again, you got to do this right. So please those listening, don't just go and assume this works. You got to follow the rules.

I can offset my active income. The money I make from book royalties and from YouTube, I can offset that and not pay taxes on that because I own real estate. So that's just like the government. It's just like me making money. If you save money, you're making money. It's basically the same thing. So that's how you make money in real estate, those four.

ways. Appreciation, cash flow, appreciation, loan pay down, and tax benefits. So who should not buy a home? Yeah, if you are not good at budgeting and you are not good at dealing with difficult problems, those two things. Really, what I mean by that is, like, if you're just bad with money, it's one thing to get you, you're bad with money and so you don't pay your rent and you, your landlord yells at you and you end up getting evicted. Like that sucks. It's not the end of the world. I mean, it's fine. But you go and put down 10, 20, 3,000. already $50,000 on a down payment, and then you're bad at managing money and you lose it. You lose all that money and you have now like a foreclosure on your record.

Like that's a much worse. So if you're not good with money, get good with money. Like pull yourself together, be a big boy or big girl and like learn how to have a simple budget. Like that's obvious. And then if you can't handle problems, like there are people out there who just like like can't handle it when things break. I mean, every day almost, I feel like something breaks here.

Or if I'm broken, it's just something that needs to be worked on continually. I mean, just, I don't know, like, my pool just wasn't working the other day. And I'm like, why? Now, that's, yeah, I got a pool. And so I have more things to take care of here. But, like, one day, oh, yeah, my water dispenser in the fridge is not working right now. I'm like, I don't know why. And, like, if your person's going to get overwhelmed and anxious and get all this anxiety around, like, oh, I just can't handle, like, the water is not working in the fridge.

I hate this. You don't buy it. Just call the landlord. They'll come fix your problem for you. Yeah, they'll take care of it. Now, what about people who should not invest in real estate? I think everyone should have missed in real estate. I really, you've got to be patient.

I guess that's the thing. If you get the long haul, real estate is a great way. In fact, I heard Cody Sanchez say this other day. Real estate's a great way on this show. I don't know. Real estate's a great way to preserve wealth. That's what she said.

So if you have money, you can dump it into real estate. It's a great way to do that. What I disagree with her on is she's like, real estate's not a great way to make your money. I disagree. I think you can turn real estate and make a lot of money.

You could flip houses. You could just get the cash. flow if you know how to do it right. So I think either way, whether you're somebody who has no money and you want to get wealthier, real estate's a great way to do that. It really is. A great way to build income. Better than almost any job out there. It's way more fun than almost any job. It's way more enjoyable. It's way less, I don't know, drudgery. Like everybody in real estate just actually kind of enjoys it, most people. But yeah, and if you're super rich, real estate's a great way to, you know, keep growing, preserve your money. Yeah. What would you say to someone like me,

where I look at the work of real estate and I think to myself, my time is better spent, either getting a better guest for the podcast, one extra YouTube video a month. Yep. That outweighs anything I can do in real estate. For sure, 100%.

In fact, I spend a lot of time talking people out of active real estate, but not out of real estate, just out of active real estate. So yeah, I don't think everybody should go buy a rental property. I think there's ways to, and this is not just a promo for my own company

because there's a million guys that do it like me. But you can invest with people like me and you can invest in companies, You can invest in a rate. You can invest in, you know, different private offerings, depending on, you know, certain legal things. But yeah, and you can still be involved in real estate. Now, should you go put 100% your money in real estate? Of course not.

Should you own your own house if you're wealthy? Yeah, I would definitely recommend that. Again, you buy a house. In fact, I would recommend, when I was younger, I used to try to buy the cheapest house possible. Like, that was like cheapest of house. But now I try to buy the most expensive house I can possibly do. Now, there's a reason I could pay, you know, whatever, almost four million. dollars for this house because it's going to be worth a whole lot more, you know, 10 years down

the road. But worst case, I could rent out the units and I could break even or even make money on this property. So, yeah, I think that you can find ways to invest in real estate. I'm not, I mean, rates are fine. Reits are pretty similar. Maybe a little bit outperform the stock market over time, depends on what data you look at and whose reports. But I like private offerings. I mean, I invest in a lot of other people's deals, people invest in my deals. And sometimes those go great. Sometimes those goes terrible. But I like having a bit of my net worth, a good chunk of it in real estate, no matter what. What's happened with your business over the last year, two years, give or take?

How does it change? Real estate business, like open-door capital? Yeah, we've slowed down dramatically. I mean, we bought last year, we bought $30 million of real estate. Most of that was self-storage and a little bit of mobile home park stuff. The year before, we bought a lot of multifamily. We slowed way down on the multifamily. Multifamily is fun, and I'll get back into it.

And in fact, the market's getting better for multifamily. are coming down. But the same thing I said earlier about houses, if interest rates are higher and property values are higher, it makes just the payment much, much higher. That's what happened in multifamily. It's just the same thing that happened. Interest rates made all the interest rates, taxes, insurance made multifamily not really work very well. So we just went from, yeah, I think our goal a year before, I don't think we quite hit it, but our goal was $300 million in real estate purchased, and then we did $30 million. Like that's like a, you know, Grant Cardone has a 10x rule. I did like the 10x slowdown. Like it's like, but who like, who cares? Like,

that's real estate, it's cyclical. So when it's good, it's great. We get in and we go hardcore, and then when it's not, we slow down a lot. We've shifted a little bit to lending. Like I launched a lending company that just does like hard money or DSCR loans. That's been super profitable and successful. We've leaned into the operations around mobile home parks because we have 6,000 mobile home units around the country.

They're a lot of work to manage. They're hard. And so we've really leaned into like operations. Like how do we maximize the profit? versus grow the portfolio. So this has been a, yeah, optimizing year. All right, question for you because I'm a podcast or two. I've been wondering this whole episode, what is that thing, the green bottle?

Oh, my gosh. Okay, magic mind. So, no joke, they sent us these things months ago. And they just sent it as like a gift. And I've been taking them everywhere with us. Every single podcast, I put them in the backpack because it could take them through TSA because it's like the liquid limit. But it's, uh, it just, it helps me focus before a podcast.

has like a little caffeine in it, not so much that it makes you all like, you know, jerked out. It's like a midday boost. It is what it is. But what I do is I take them with us in my backpack, and usually I'll just like, I'll have one right before a podcast.

It helps with mental clarity, focus. I really enjoy it. I love it. And then they offer to sponsor the podcast. So if you guys are interested, we do have a link down below in the description where you could get a discount. So if you guys are interested,

these things are honestly delicious. I love the taste of it. And, And I just, yeah, it's just, it's for mental clarity, focus, a little bit of energy and it doesn't get you all, like, wired out. Thank you for picking up on that. I love that. I love it. I appreciate it.

But no, honestly, I really like these. And he sneaks them to me, like, all of the time. Oh, I bring extras for Jack. And he brings extras and like, hey, man, take a magic mind. Take a magic bag. Because I'm usually, like, the same with a protein bar. Yeah. Eat them protein bars.

And we have, like, an unwritten agreement, we can kind of trade, like, magic minds and protein bars. So I'm happy they want to sponsor the podcast because I genuinely, because I've just been doing these for the last six months. That's the best sponsor of any podcast. Like, when you actually love the stuff and use it, like, it's like, win-win. I love it. 100%. So if you're interested, we could send a few. I would love it.

Please do. Really good. Please do. All right, we'll send you some. How do you get into real estate if you have no money? I'm asking this because I have a lot of friends, not that have no money, but like, don't have a lot of money because people think you need 20% down. The average cost for a home now in America is like crazy. And on top of that, with rates as high as they are, it's completely unaffordable for the average person.

And on top of that, how could you? can you do it like fast? Because there was a guy, we were at this networking event last night that you threw. And I was talking to this kid, not a kid, but he was 24. And he had 80 million dollars in real estate. He started when he was 19, but obviously the market was completely different five years ago. Like you could go in, you could pay, but five percent down with rates as low as they were. It would be affordable. You could actually make the payment. But now I feel like you just need to save up a ton for a big down payment and also have a strong enough income to be able to afford the monthly payment. Sure. Yeah. So getting into real estate with no money, a couple, a couple strategies.

First of all, the idea of an, you have heard of FHA loan? Yeah, it's 3.5% down payment on a loan, as long as you're living in the property for a year. And you can do that on a multifamily. This is my favorite strategy for new people getting into real estate. I've done it multiple times now. You buy a duplex or a triplex or a fourplex, either two, three, or four unit.

You can do it on a single family house as well. And then you live in one unit, rent the other ones out. So you can buy, let's call it a million dollar fourplex. And you live in one unit, you rent the other three units out. And you can probably in today's market break even. You midterm rental those, and now all of a sudden you're making profit. You Airbnb, now you're making a ton of profit. So that's one way to do it is kind of a combination of the house hacking with those fringe strategies.

The other way that I get into real estate, more from the investing side. How did you qualify for a loan, though? Yeah, I mean, A, like you, FHA is not too hard to qualify for. I mean, you think you got to have a 620 credit score, give or take. Now, if you're sub 620 credit score or you just don't have the income to justify it, you can bring in a partner into an FHA loan who has the income. to justify it. Say getting a cosigner. You can basically get a cosigner. That's a doable way. The thing is though if you're borrowing like $970,000, especially with the rates where they're

at right now, I feel like you'd need to be making like 20K a month. Yes, they can sometimes use though the income from those other units to help you qualify. Some depends on the lender. And like, I actually don't know if it's the rule or the lender's interpretation of the rule because some lender's like, yeah, we just use that. That's what I've heard as well. Yeah. And some lenders are like, nope, you have to own the property for, you have to be a landlord for two years. first before we'll let you do that. Yeah. That's possible.

And so, yeah, if you can qualify for that whole amount, yeah, the cosigner thing can help because now of a sudden they can use it. But they don't even technically call it a cosigner. I don't think with FHA. It's just like one person has to live in the property, the others don't. That's one of one of the strategy that could work. And honestly, a million dollars for a porpox is probably, I mean, that's like California prices.

But in most areas in the country, you can find that fourplex for. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you buy a little fixer up or two. Actually, one of my favorite strategies, again, for a certain type of person, it's a FHA loan product called the, 203K. It allows you to wrap in the repair costs and the purchase price into one lump, and you pay just three and a half percent of the total. So you're basically financing the entire

repairs through government money at, you know, super low amounts. So for example, let me, you have $300,000 property, could be a duplex, triplex, single family, whatever. It's $300,000, and it needs $100,000. So now you'd have $400,000. Normally, you put 20% down on $300, so that's 60, and then you need $100 for repairs. Now you're at $100,000. That's a lot of money. But instead, they take the total amount, three plus one. You're at 400,000. Take three and a half percent of that.

So what does that, like 15 grand, give or take? And you put the 15 grand down, and then they fund the $100,000 needed for the rehab. That's a cool program because, now, why would you do that? Because that property isn't worth $400,000. If you bought right, if you know what you're doing a little bit, you analyze it, right? You don't buy a $400,000. You don't buy a $300,000 house, put $100,000 into it just to have a $400,000 house. That'd be silly.

Just buy the $400,000 house. You do it because it. it's worth five or 600,000. So the reason I love that 203K loan is it's instant big equity. Like, you build an equity right away from the front. Like right away, you got equity. And two, because you remodeled the house, I mean, you put a hundred grand into it, you can get much higher rents. It's something I don't think a lot of people realize about landlording is like when you have a nice property, most properties aren't nice. Most rentals are not nice. I, like, I'm a boogey guy. I like nice stuff. So like if I was a tenant, I would pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

more for a house that looks like it was designed by Chip and Joanna Gaines, then I would just for a house that is white walls, boring, like ugly flooring, whatever. So you made this property nice. You're getting an extra $500 in income on each unit, let's just say. So your cash full is up $1,500 a month. So maybe it would have been a break-even. Now you're making $1,500 to live for free and you have a couple hundred thousand dollars of equity. Like win, win, win, win, win.

So anyway, I love that strategy. Two-O-3K loan, very, very cool. The other way to do it on the investment side, let's say you're like, well, I don't have a lot of money, but I don't really want to buy house for myself. I like being whatever. I like not owning a house or I already own one. The simple answer there is just partnerships. I mean, that's literally how I grew to 13,000 units.

I didn't do it myself. I have 2,500 partners. And so let's go real simple, though. I bought a triplex one time. I found a triplex. I really wanted this property. I knew it was going to cash flow. It was super cheap.

Now, again, this was 15 years ago. But back then it was like 50 grand for this four-plus. I didn't have any money, though. I was broke, I had no job. I was just trying to like flip. It was like way back when I was like working on that single house that I lost all the money at. But I knew the deal was going to work out.

So I just went to a buddy of mine, actually a guy from church. He was like the sound guy at church. We talked a lot. I knew he worked for the county as like an administrator, network administrator. I went to him and I was just telling him about this deal. I'm like, yeah, I just found this really cool triplex. Do you know anybody who'd want to like partner on it?

Like after I explained the deal. I never like to ask people directly. It's more because I don't want to be weird with family and friends or whatever. So I'm just like, do you know anybody? He's like, actually. we might be interested. What do you need? I'm like, probably just like 40 grand is really all it would take for the down payment on this thing. He's like, yeah, we can do that. And so he partnered with me. I did the work. I found the deal. I managed some contractors. I managed the property. He put in money. That was it. I got that deal. Every year we would meet together at a little Mexican restaurant. This is our routine for a good eight years. A little Mexican restaurant. We'd sit down. My wife and me, his wife and him, sit down. We'd get our food and then we'd write ourselves checks of the profit from the free. previous year. And it was always like five grand each of us would make. Again, not crazy money here, but it's a little tiny, like $100,000 triplex, whatever. But it was like five grand. They would make

every year, and I'd make $5 grand every year. And I put $0 into that. You can do that with a single family, a duplex, a 10 unit, 100 unit, an industrial, you know, warehouse, apartment complex, anything. There are people in America, a lot of them, who have a lot of money. Did you know the stats on how many millionaires are in America? I don't. I'll tell you. It's a lot. It's a lot. higher than you would think. Yeah, it's way higher than you think. There's so many people with money. I mean, I know you polled your audience recently.

I've pulled my audience recently. We have a lot of people with money that follow us. But they don't have time. They don't have passion or desire to go learn how to do this game. But here's the one thing about real estate. Real estate is sexy. And what I mean with that, if you poll, we should do this poll, actually. If you pulled 10,000 Americans and said, do you think real estate investing is a good idea

someday for you? Like, do you want to someday invest in real estate? What percentage are going to say yes? 99%. Everybody knows real estate's fun and cool and a good way to make money. Most people just don't think they can do it, but everyone likes the idea of it. There's just something American about real estate investing. So anyway, you get, now you're the expert.

You know what you're doing. You find the deals. You're just good at this because you listen to the podcast and read the books and all that. There are way more people out there that are rich with no time that would work with you than there are like people to do what you are. The bar is very low for finding deals. Nobody wants to work. Lots of people have money.

What's happening with interest rates? When are they going to come down? I don't think they are. I think interest rates are there. When you look at the last, you know, whatever, 40 years of American interest rates, we are right dead center even where they should be. Now, the government's going to,

I mean, the government doesn't necessarily move interest rates, but interest rates are moved, and the government kind of controls it based on what they want the economy to do or not do. So everything I'm about to say, you know, with a grain of salt, take that. But interest rates are way they are because that's generally where they've been. We've just been spoiled, like, little kids the last, you know, 10 years where it's like 3%.

Like, what's your lowest interest rate you ever got, you know? 2.8. Yes, I had a 2.9. I'm like, that is, that's stupid. Like, that's not, I don't think we're ever going to see it again. And I think we should take that approach that we will never see that again ever. If it happens, hallelujah, but I don't think we'll ever see it again. I think we'll see, I mean, where are we at right now, like six and a half, call it for a house, seven.

Depends on who you go to, right? But it went down. Obviously, it went way up to eight, went back down to about six. Now we're sitting at maybe seven. That's, I think, the next 10 years is five, six, seven, eight, five, six, seven, eight fluctuating in there. And how do you see that impacting the market, though, in the short term? Yeah, I mean, people are not moving as much right now.

They're not buying as much, and that's fine. But it's a relative thing. We get people used to, I mean, it happened already. When people were used to eight and raised dropped to six and a half, a bunch of people refinanced and moved. transaction happened we went back up again a little bit people slowed down and again that's the that's what happens and so like now if we don't get to two again like i don't think anybody expects to get to two again so when rates drop we'll get an influx to the market so they're still controlling the

market uh the government is somewhat trying to control the market real estate and they're trying to balance that with every other part of the market and it more or less seems to be working uh i mean they're they're kind of doing it yeah does it suck right now for a lot of aspects of real estate sure, it's a hard time to invest right now. But other ways to make it work, sure. It's kind of like dollar cost averaging, too. Like, if it's hard right now, sure. But we can still invest in real estate now.

And then when things get better, like, great, we're going to buy more real estate. And then if things go down, that's okay. I'm just going to find ways to make it work now. And then when it goes back up, so we just play that game. Yeah, this is something that Jack mentioned to me last night. We found very interesting. We were at this event that you hosted called like the top, what is it? The 50?

The 50. The 50. The 50 people pay $50,000 a year. And you're surrounded by people who have a hundred, million dollars plus worth of real estate. There's some ridiculous people there. Jack said that you pointed out, this person's going to be a billionaire. That person's going to be a billionaire.

That one's going to be a billionaire. What qualities do you look for? And how do you know? Yeah, good question. One, I think there's just this like, probably maybe most importantly is it is it's, it's not a hope. It's just like they just, like they know they're going to be a billionaire, right? Like they just, it's just like, it's not a weird thing.

They're just like, yeah, well, of course I am. Like when you, when you look, especially age and like time, like, Like the kid you were talking to, kid again, yeah, we're all old men talking about these 24-year-old kids. Yeah, but Arek,

who's coming on a podcast, actually, we're filming him in like three hours from now. Like, I'm, like, he's 24. Like,

is he an already $80 million of real estate? Like, as long as he doesn't drastically wreck something or the market doesn't completely tank, given a 30-year span, he definitely is going to get there. But the same way, some of the guys that,

if they're net worth is $200 million dollars right now. I mean, there's guys in the group that have a million-dollar net worth, and they're pretty relaxed, And they're like, yeah, I just like to buy a few more properties every year. And, yeah, I'm not going to say they're going to be a billionaire. But the guy that's at $150 million net worth, he owns 5,000 houses.

And he's, like, aggressive. And he knows, like, yeah, I'm going to keep growing this thing. I love it. How is he not, like, how is he not going to be a billion? Right, even if he just grows at 12 percent. Yeah, just like a decent number. I used to actually, I used to think I was going to be a billionaire. I've changed, though, over the past year.

Like, a year ago, if you were to ask me, I was like, yeah, I should be a billionaire. Like, just based on the next 30 years of growth, of my portfolio. If I just keep doing what I'm doing with open door capital, with the properties, with raising whatever, yeah, I'll be a billionaire and that's fine. What changed is my motivation. Like, you know, I had another kid just a few weeks ago. And so I've got three now and I'm really enjoying that. And I'm like, I don't think I'm going to, I don't think I'm going to do for the next 30 years what I've done for the past 10. I think I'm going to slow down dramatically and that's okay. I've come to a place where I'm like, well, I don't need a billion dollars. If I wanted it,

I'm sure I could probably fight for it and have a pretty. a decent chance. So yeah, so you see it in some people. They have the, they have the ability to because they have a business mind and they've got a strategy to get there. This is going to sound silly, but it's not that hard to make, this is going to sound really silly. It's not that hard to make a billion dollars when you're investing in real estate because if you buy, I mean, if you buy $2 billion of real estate, and again, people are like, that's ridiculous, but you can do with partners, bringing people, raise money. When you're talking $100 million apartment complexes, it's not that many of them. So you buy it.

a couple billion dollars of real estate, and then over a time period, five, 10, 15 years, that goes from $2 billion to $4 billion. Okay, you just made $2 billion. Yeah, you had partners. Okay, so they get a bunch of the money. So they might get half that and you get the other billion. That's just how billionaires are made in real estate. It's not a super complex thing.

And the process of buying a $100 million apartment complex is really not that different. And in fact, I would argue it's easier than buying $100,000 house in a lot of ways. Because you have people, you have teams. I mean, yes, yes. Less competition. Yeah. And there's just, it's just so much more systematized and less drama. And so, like, if you can buy a million-dollar house or a million-dollar apartment, you can buy a 10-million or 50 or 100.

There's a little nuanced differences. But that's why I say it's not hard to be a billionaire in real estate. If you really wanted it and if you're willing to scale and you have that vision for getting there, shoot, yeah, it's not that hard. How was that guy able to get $80 million real estate at 24 years old? How did you do that? Yeah. Go listen to my episode when it comes out.

Here's his strategy, and this could work. And I feel like he should tell his story a bit better than I can. But I just tell you a bit of it is he utilizes a combination of seller financing, which is where the owner of the property will carry the mortgage, right? So imagine, if this is confusing, imagine Jack, you have a car. What do you drive? A Tesla. Okay.

Nice. Okay, you got a model Y. What's that thing worth? Yeah, whatever. What do you audit? What price did you pay and what it's worth today? Yeah. Top of the market, I purchased for 58 all in.

All right. And it's probably worth 30. Okay, that's fine. Do you own anything on it? No. Okay, so you own it free and clear. $30,000 is probably what it's worth. I want to buy that car from you.

But I don't have 30 grand. So can I just, can I have the car and I'm going to make payments to you? Is that cool? Just say yes. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to, I'm going to pay you. What's a good monthly payment for that, do you think?

I want $500 per month. Perfect. I'm going to pay you $5 a month for the next X number of years. I don't know how many years that is. Now, you are, I'm going to own the car. Like, it's going to be my car. It's mine. But you are going to have a lien on it.

In other words, if I don't pay you back, you can go and repossess my car. That's, I mean, that's done all the time, right? When you buy a car from a dealership, it's your car, technically. But the dealer or the financier, whoever ended up with the loan, they have a, they have that lien. They can just go in foreclose or not for clothes. repo it from you. Real estate, exactly the same way. And so you have a house worth $30,000. I want your house. And so obviously just trying to keep the math the same, I'm going to pay you

$500 a month for your $30,000 house for the next X number of years. And you get the monthly payment. Seller financing is fascinating. It's a great model. A lot of investors, my buddy Gabe, Gabe Hamill, he's built his entire portfolio, millions and millions of dollars. He's built it just off seller finance. That's all, pretty much all he's ever done. Now, why would a seller do that? Like, why would you do that? Because you want $500 a month. Like, yeah, you could, you could sell me your car for $30 grand.

I could give you $30,000. Well, now what? You got to pay taxes on it, which you're going to lose $10,000 just in taxes on that thing. So now you only get left with $20. And you're an old guy. What are you going to do with $20 grand? Stick in the stock market? Oh, that makes you nervous because, like, what if that goes down?

That's my retirement. But I like $500 a month. And I know the car. It's a nice car. I can take it back if I needed to. So that's why guys do seller financing. I've done seller financing for people. How does taxes work on that?

Because you mentioned the tax thing that if you get the $30,000 up front, you're going to pay tax on it. Yeah. How does that work in real estate? Are you only taxed on the monthly payment? Yeah, pretty much, I mean, the simplistic version of it. But yeah, so when you do seller financing, you only pay taxes on the money you're receiving. You don't pay it on the entire amount. So, again, let's say I wanted to buy a million dollar property from somebody.

In fact, my very first apartment complex, I bought a 24-unit apartment complex when I was 24-year-old. and the owner, they didn't want, it was like four, let's call it 500,000, it was roughly 500K for this 24 unit. They didn't, they didn't want to own anymore. They were, well, they wanted to travel. They were mid-70s, they had an RV. They wanted to go travel and see their grandkids

around the country, but they were relying on that income because they were running the company. I mean, they were running the day-to-day operations, but they didn't want to run the day-to-dade operations. So instead, they sold it to me. I paid them every single month, and they just went and traveled around. And so they just paid,

taxes every year on whatever they received in that year. And again, it's pretty low tax rate because you're just basically getting interest. I think it's an interest in money at that point. Yeah, pretty cool strategy. So when guys, like, get a lot of real estate for no money down, a lot of times what they're doing is they're doing a combination of some seller financing, like they might get the seller to carry a, whatever, million-dollar second mortgage. And then they go to a bank and they get the first.

mortgage for a $4 million one. So they have $4 million from the bank, they have a million from the seller, and there's the $5 million needed to buy this property, let's say. Does that make sense? So that's one strategy that a lot of people utilize to get big real estate deals for really no money out of pocket. Where do you go to find good deals? Because everything that I see, let's call it, the MLS.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone else is access to it. It's not really the cream of the crop, I'd just say. So where do you go? Yeah. So the couple of, there's a hundred strategies we could talk about. I'll take you a few my favorite. I still love what they call it driving for dollars.

It's almost no money. You can do it. Most people can do it if they got a little bit of free time. Get your car, go to the neighborhood you want to buy property and just drive around. And what you're looking for is properties that look like they have a problem. Like there might be something wrong. In fact, I like walking for dollars in my neighborhood. Like up here, and when you're walking and you're looking for those, you'll see them everywhere.

Like you guys are going to start seeing this stuff. Like you see a mailbox that's just stuffed full. And you're like, oh, interesting. They haven't checked their mail in weeks. I wonder what's going on there. Or the lawn is, you know, eight inches high. They haven't mowed their lawn in a long time. Or like there's not a single item outside their house.

Nothing. It's just completely empty. They don't have a, I mean, nothing. There's no bird feeder sitting there. There's nothing. Blinds are all closed. It's probably vacant. So what you're looking for is problem properties.

And then you just, it's all public data. You figure out where is the tax bill going for the person who owns that house. So you can write this down. There's an app out there. I have no affiliation with them, but they're called a deal deal. deal, oh shoot, deal machine. Yeah, deal machine. I've used them before.

It's great. Literally lets you do all this on an app. Yeah, you just be like, okay, that address, that one, that one looks interesting, that one looks interesting. And then you get the owner's address where the mail, the tax bill is going to. So if it's not that same place, which usually it's not, now you know where it's going. And you can, what they call skip trace, you can find their phone number. Call them up. Hey, I was just walking by that house over on 3rd Street.

I saw it looked vacant. I'm just a young, new real estate guy looking to buy. property and I just thought I'd reach out, hey, any chance you want to sell. And so the short answer, like, that's one strategy you're driving for dollars. The more meta or more like high level discussion is real estate investing like for good deals is a funnel. Like if you think about like funnels and business, right, like, hey, you're, I don't know, whatever, like your car dealership. And you have a thousand people drive by every hour. And out of those thousand, 10 people stop by and come inside. So it's like 0.1%. And out of those 10 people, you know,

two of them test drive a car and one of them takes the car home and drive it's just a very simple sales funnel we do it in every aspect of business that's all finding good deals is i have a thousand uh properties on my like list here of properties that i i think i might out of buy i'm going to contact them and i'm going to get a hold of a third of them and out of the third i'm going to get a hold of maybe 10% of them are going to have an interest in selling out of them maybe half of them will actually you know whatever agree to sell And so I might have a thousand possibilities, and then I buy one of those homes. It's just a funnel. And so the people who do a lot of real estate, I mean, we buy a lot of real estate, but they're big deals.

I got buddies, like my buddy Cam Caffyard, he'll buy 10 houses in a month. Like, how do you buy 10 houses in a month? It's because they are talking to thousands of, you know, hundreds or even thousands of people, and it's just a funnel. They're never surprised. Like the best real estate investors, all the people I interview, all the people that were at the 50 last night, like nobody's surprised when they get. deals because it's just a funnel.

Nobody's surprised they have a six-pack. It's not like you're looking down. You're like, oh, shoot, where'd this come from? Like, whoa, it's like I'd be shocked if I didn't, you know, well, I don't have a six-pack. But if I did the work for a six-pack, I just have a gym in my background to make it look cool. But if I did the work for years and year, I'd be shocked not to have one. If I sent out another strategy, if I sent out 10,000 mailers to people who own, let's

just say, for example, you own real estate that you don't live in that property. That's public data. We can pull that list real easy using a site like props. stream that's a website do 10,000 I send out 10,000 letters to 10,000 people that own a house but they don't live in the house. Well, what does that mean if they own a house and don't live in it? It's probably a rental. Okay, well, or it's just vacant. Either way, would somebody who owns a property that's vacant or rental, would they consider an offer on their property? Good chance. Like maybe, right? Like, I'm a landlord. If somebody wants to buy my property, the answer is

not no, it's how much, right? Like, I'm like, well, let's talk. All right, so you send out 10,000 letters. Now, you might get, let's call it 1% like a 1% like a lot of. of those people are going to call you back out of 10,000 letters. So is that, what, 100? Am I doing math right? So, like, okay, you get 100 phone calls. Out of them, someone we're going to be like, screw you, take me off your list, I hate you.

You know, like, you get those. And then, okay, fine. And then 50 of them, though, maybe you want to sell. You have a conversation. And most of them are just like, you know, you give them a low ball off or whatever the number that makes sense for you. And they're like, no, screw you.

But every once in a while, then, out of maybe 10,000 letters that cost you $10,000 to mail those out, you get two deals out of that. And out of those two deals, maybe one you flip and you make $80,000 on a flip, and one of them you holds a rental that makes you $500 a month in cash flow.

That's how you get deals. It's coming up. There's a lot of strategies, like a lot of different little things like driving around, mailers, TV commercials, a sign on the side of your car. All that stuff works.

Radio ads can work really, really well right now. All that strategy is just designed to get them in the funnel. And it's your ability to optimize a funnel that determines how successful you are when it comes to getting good deals. How do you negotiate the price down? Although really quick, before we go into that, let's talk about rent for a second, because isn't it crazy that one of your biggest monthly recurring expenses just goes out the door?

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between. All in all, nobody's selling better than Shopify. So if you want to upgrade your business, get started today with a $1 trial period when you go to Shopify.com slash ICH all lowercase. Thank you so much Shopify for sponsoring this episode. And now let's get back to the podcast. How do you negotiate the price down? Do you have any strategies? My favorite, yeah, my favorite strategy is simply to give people multiple options. Like Starbucks offers a tall, uh, grande and eventi, right? Just so you don't compare it to 7-Eleven's, you know, dollar coffee. So you can pay four, five, or 12. And you're like, hmm, I'll pay, I'll pay the five. Five sounds good, right? And you're not like, wait, that coffee over there's a dollar.

That's, so I love that same strategy, especially with properties that aren't. Like, if a property's got multiple offers and like they've already, like, you're competing, that's not going to work. But if I'm talking to a seller, I just give them a couple options. Hey, here's a few things I could do. I could pay, here's an example. I could pay, you know, $300,000 for your house. And, uh, as is, I can close like next week. Like, all cash. We'll get it done. Or I can pay $3.20. But for that extra $20,000, I would like you to do whatever.

I want you to include all the furniture in the house. I want you to keep there. And it's going to take me another month to close. So then the seller is like, oh, which one do I want? Which one do I want? They're going back and forth. Which one do I want? I don't care which one.

That literally doesn't matter. I gave them like two scenarios that I'd be happy with either way. And they're trying to figure out which one they're not thinking yes, no. They're thinking which one. That's my favorite negotiation strategy. It works really well. People do it on me now. Like I have friends that will negotiate.

with me on stuff, whether it's a real estate deal they want to buy for me. And they do that. I'm like, I know what you're doing. I tell you that. That's funny. But it works. Where do you think the best opportunity is right now? Is it in commercial, like some sort of like flex-based industrial or I don't know, residential

real estate, high density, self-storage. Self storage. Trailer parks. We were talking, or mobile home parks. We were talking yesterday or two days ago and you were saying that there was a lot of issues with commercial recently. Yeah. But that also means that there's a lot of opportunity.

For sure. Where do you think the best opportunity is? Yeah, the best strategy is the, I'll say the meta answer first. Like the best strategy is the one that fires you up the most and works in the location you're buying. That's it. Like, like, they all work. I can find it. I mean, last night at that dinner, right? We had like roughly 50 people there are doing things. Almost nobody in that group does the same thing. It was actually pretty wild. Like the differences, like there's a campground guy and there's a, you know, mobile home park guy and a self-storage guy. And all these things, right? That's that. So they all work. There is no.

best. It's like what's the best diet? I don't know. I like carnivore stuff. That's fun. Keto's cool. It all works. I can find fitness influencers that swear by everyone and have science to back it up, right? Like every fitness influencer has science data that backs up why theirs is the only one that works and everything else sucks. Yet that doesn't make sense, but they all have it. Same is true for real estate. So there is no best. I'll tell you my favorites right now, though. I love the concept of the rent by the room stuff if you're willing to go through the hard. I really like industrial warehouse. right now if you have the money and the knowledge to be able to pull that off like buying a big warehouse uh and renting it out to like a not even just like amazon i'm just like let's see you have a seven

different warehouse like seven bay warehouse you sent rented out to seven different companies in your area plumbing company a trucking company i love that stuff right now super scalable uh i really like assisted living like i mentioned residential assisted living um i like house flipping right now like i think it's a good market to flip house it's not the best market we've ever seen the flip houses but people are still buying nice houses right now. If you can handle the finances of flipping, I like flipping right now. So again, those are all good strategies.

If I had to just pick one for, let's say, you, I don't know why I'm just hypothetically. If I had to pick one for you, I would say you should go jack into residential assisted living. It'll take you a year to buy your first one. It'll take you a year to learn it. It's going to be hard. You got to get a license for something.

You've got to figure out how to get some staffing to run it. But you do it right. one year from now, you'll buy your first one, and you'll make 15 grand a month in profit, and you're done. Like, you're financially free. I mean, you're probably already financing free, but you're like that hypothetical you're there, right?

You buy one more year, you buy another one. Now you're making 30 grand. Now you're going to have to hire a little bit more high-level staff at that time, and then you buy a third one. Like that, for the amount of work, I'd probably do residential-assisted living. You know what yesterday we were out in the water on the boat, right?

We saw the whales in the distance. So I like to go paddleboarding with the whales. Like, I love that going out there. And if you want to get like a close encounter to a whale, we were doing on the boat yesterday, we maybe didn't notice. You don't paddle or you don't boat to where the whale is. When you see it on the horizon, you go in front of it, right? You can see the direction the whale's moving and you just want to get somewhere in front of it

because the whale's then going to come up to you. Like, you're not going to it. It comes to you. The reason I bring that up is when I look at American real estate, like where's the whale headed? Like, where's America society headed? as a real estate investor, if I want to get wealthy and ensure that things are going to go well, I want to get in front of the whale.

I want to get in front of the economy. Where is our economy moving? Let me start working in that sector right now so that when it catches up, I'm going to make a lot of money. Assisted living, there are so many old people in America right now. And we're not building affordable housing forum. So what are we going to do with them all later on? We're in 10 years from now. It's going to be a massive problem in America.

Okay, so assisted living is getting in front of the whale. You get good at it now. You're going to make a killing. 80Us like we talked about. That's a whale that's coming. It's affordable housing in America is maybe the biggest whale right now. America does not know what they're going to do. So get in front of it.

Section 8, like that's the whole program the government pays rent. They're going to have to broaden that. Okay, get good at that right now because that's where the whales's headed. Luxury multifamily, I don't want to touch that. Like real high-end, A class luxury multifamily. Maybe long term, it'll be fine. Yeah. But we've got a lot of that right now.

And we got a lot of people that. don't want it. So I'm not going to get in front of that well. What markets do you like to buy in? Like, what locations? Anything but, no, okay. I'm going to say five states that I really, I do not buy in because they're hard. I have chosen, that's not my heart. You got to pick a hard. I like certain things that are hard. Like, I buy mobile home parks that are half empty and I try to fill them up. It's the hardest thing ever. But that's my heart. I just picked it. Politically, though, there are five states I don't want to buy in because I don't like that hard. You can probably guess what they

out with California, Oregon, Washington, New York, and Michigan. I don't like those. And probably not Illinois if I wanted to add a six one on there. Now, what's similar about all those states? They're all just really left-leaning states. Now, it's not a political thing. You know, Seattle had a rule or a legislation going through a little while ago. It didn't pass for obvious reasons I'm about to say, but they wanted to make it so if you were a landlord, the tenant will get equity and ownership in your property. No. Yeah. They wanted to give tenants ownership and equity because they They deserve it because they're living there. Housing's a right.

And so if you are a tenant, you get to own your landlord's property in the longer. You live there, the more. Yeah. That's ridiculous. It would just ruin tenants. It would just ruin everybody. Like, as a tenant, like, hey, we need $800,000 for a new roof. So, hey, Ms. Johnson, I know you're just working at the grocery store, but we're

going to need you to cop up $40,000 out of your share. Like, it would never work, right? Like, this is silly. That, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't stop liberal governments from just being silly. And that stuff starts passing. Sometimes silly things start passing. And there's a lot of just legislation that doesn't help me as a landlord in those five or six states.

So it has nothing to do with the politics of it. Like some people, I'm sure maybe it actually helps people. Good. Doesn't help me. And so therefore I'm going to avoid those states. Wow. What about locations you really like if you're to pick maybe like the top three states? Yeah.

I like Florida a lot. A lot of people moving there. I like Arizona a lot. I like to move in there. I like Nevada a lot. A lot of people moving there. Again, all generally conservative states, not crazy. property taxes aren't insane.

I like Texas, but property taxes are just too crazy. Can you make it work? Yeah, that's just not a hard I want to face. And I own, I mean, I own hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate in Texas. I'm just like, I really am getting tired of the property tax problem. And what about buying for cash flow versus appreciation? Yeah. That's why I don't believe you should, I don't believe you should choose.

I mean, again, there are nuances here. But I don't think, I think you buy real estate in areas that will appreciate and you use strategies that cash flow today. So, for example, if I can't cash flow in Vegas, but I believe in Vegas appreciation, which I do. I think Vegas has a lot of things going for it. So I'm just going to buy in Vegas, but I'm going to utilize one of those strategies that will allow me to get cash flow today. So I might go to Vegas and find a duplex that would break even, but I'm going to, again, maybe it's a midterm rental on each side. Midterm rents aren't governed by the short-term rental laws.

And so I can get higher rent without I'm going to do violate short-term rental laws. Now I get cash flow and I get appreciation. So I don't think you should settle for one or the other. That makes sense. How do you be a good landlord? What are your tricks? You take care, I mean, take care of people. Like, that sounds so like cheesy, but majority of landlords just don't care about their tenants in any way, shape, or form.

They just don't care. And they don't care in two interesting ways. Sometimes they just are way too, like, mean and harsh. And I'm not going to fix up anything on your property. And I'm not going to do that, which is really bad for the landlord because their property falls apart. they get worse tenants. There's no, like, retention. So, like, if you're a jerk to your tenant,

you don't treat them right, you don't fix things when they're broken, you're gonna have our time. The opposite side, though, of being a bad landlord is being too kind and nice. I should say nice, not kind. You're too nice to your tenant.

An example is like, hey, I know Ms. Johnson that you, you know, it's been a hard year, but you're five days later in your rent. But you know what? It's okay. Don't worry about it. I'll just get it in when you can.

Now, that's a really nice thing to do. And she's like, oh, thank you so much. Okay, next month. Ms. Johnson's like, hey, you know, I'm a little bit behind. I had some problems go on with whatever. I got to pay rent a week late. Okay, that's fine, Ms. Johnson.

Hey, you're doing well. Next month, it's a couple weeks late. Next month, it's a month late. Next month, it's two months late. And now you've got a problem as a landlord. So what do you do? You evict Ms. Johnson. She can't catch up.

You got to evict her. So whose fault is that? It's the landlord's fault. Because you were trying to be nice instead of, like, firm. I guess. I'm not saying you go like, hey, you're late in your rent and I'm going to evict you today. But it's just like, hey, Ms. Johnson, like, the rent is due on the first. I need it on the first. My mortgage payment comes out on the third. It's got to be in. So there's going to be a fine. I hate to do that. And if you want to waive it the first time, wave it the first time,

you want to be a nice guy. But we've got to institute rules. That is being a good landlord because it actually helps Ms. Johnson and it helps you. So, yeah, be good to your tenants. It's like the key to being a good landlord. Yeah. For me, I always struggled with that because I, fell in the camp of usually being too nice and generous and for a while i think looking back now i do have regrets about doing this but i would never raise the rent if the tenant always paid on time never any issues took care of the places around i really hated raising the rent because my thought was that i'd rather earn a little less and just keep them there sure 10 plus years i would love that it's less turnover for me they get to save some money everyone wins 20 20 my expenses went

through the roof. Yeah. And I had several places in Los Angeles that were rent controlled. I couldn't raise the rent on them. And when I was able to raise the rent, four years later, my expenses have ballooned to such a point where even if I maximize that rent increase, which I, which I did, I think it only came to about 4% in a year. But I hadn't raised the rent in like the six years prior to that.

So now I'm raising 4%. But my insurance is up 50%. My property taxes went up. everything went up so much to the point where now I look back and I think I should have been raising the rent. Maybe just given some like, hey, I'm going to raise the rent, but I'm going to give you a 15 days free. And that way it balances. Yeah, there's other ways to be kind and to give back. And here's the other side of that is let's say you don't raise rent for five years.

You sell the property. Yes. You're way below rent. What is the new buyer going to do? They're going to jack up the rent $2,000 on Ms. Johnson. Now she definitely can't afford it because she's not used to that. where if you would have raised it along the way to a normal inflationary rate,

not been gouging them, but you're just being good and you're just raising it the way that you, yeah, that we wouldn't have a problem. She would be able to afford it because she'd been used to that long time or she would have found somewhere else along the way on her terms

and not just the massive rent raises. Yeah, so I think in hindsight, I should have raised the rent more. Good to hear you say that. Lesson learned. Yeah. I hear with rent control, would a lot of mom and pop landlords suffer

the same thing that you experienced was rent control trying to kind of mandates you to or it commands you to increase the rent. Yeah. Maximally every single year. Yeah. You don't. You're just screwed.

Yep. And you screw over the 10 as well. Yeah. In fact, that's when when people are asked to be like, are you worried about rent control? I'm like that really. Like,

and Grant Caron has a great viral video. I don't know who show he was on, but he said like, yeah, if they mandate rent control, I'm going to be worth like five billion dollars more in the future. It's because like every, like if they mandate four percent a year,

he's only underwriting. And same with us. Like we're underwriting three percent, two percent rent growth maybe. Like if they mandate four percent, or the like that's what we're going to raise it to. So all of a sudden rent's going to go up higher. So who does that benefit?

Benefits of the landlord. So long term, rent control doesn't hurt me. It's going to long term, again, help the people at the top. Like, it's not a system I like. It's just a system that exists. And so I can either like, I can work in it or I can just get angry about it and post on social media how dumb it is, which people will below this video. But it's like, that is what it is. What are your thoughts about Section 8?

I love it. Investing in those years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love investing in Section 8. I think that Section 8, which is called something else now, but we all still call it Section 8. Section 8 is where the government pays part or all of the tenants rent. It is a really good program to get into, because it's really hard to get into because there's so many people who want it. So once you're on it, you don't want to screw that up.

Like you've been waiting eight years to get Section 8 and finally you get on it. So you're going to do everything in your power not to screw it up. So I like Section 8 because it makes people better tenants a lot of times. You still have to screen your tenant. A lot of landlords make the mistake of going, well, the government's paying for their rent, so it's going to be great. So they just let in anybody. Now, make sure they're still a good person. They haven't got evictions on their record.

They've done a decent job of being a human being over the last few years. And then Section 8 can be great. Again, I think the U.S. government is going to have to widely expand. I mean, maybe 10x or 100x that Section 8 program. I think it's just a trial right now for what's coming in the future. Yeah. Get it in now. Yeah.

My only experience of Section 8 was not a pleasant one to be on. Yeah. I mean, obviously the rank gets paid every single month on time. That was a benefit. But the inspections. Sometimes the tenant would go in and the tenant was really dirty or would break something. And Section 8 would come in and say, landlord, you have to replace this. I'm going to replace it and then it's going to break again or the tenant's not going to take care of it. And then I got to replace it again. Yes. I even had a situation where I was remodeling the unit next door to the Section 8 tenant. And there was some paint ship. that were on the exterior because there's in the middle of painting and Section 8 says, we're not paying the rent until you clean up all of these paint chips because it's a hazard for children.

Yeah. As if there are no children around here. You know, this person is not a child, by any means. Well, this is our policy and you have to abide by it. There's so many little things like that where I really didn't like the level of scrutiny that they went through the property

and just silly fixes that I felt that tenant should be paying for that. I shouldn't, but they may. mandate the landlord take care of it. Yeah, I haven't had as much of that. I mean, we have a lot of sectionate tenants. I haven't had as much of that. I think some of that's probably California, right?

Like, again, why I don't like to invest in California. I think California just has a, I don't know, you guys got a weird vibe. I know why you left. But some of that, too, keeps landlords on. Because it's needed for a reason because it wouldn't exist if you didn't have a bunch of bad landlords out there just trying to take advantage of the system. So they put that in there, and maybe it's a little overboard, but it keeps you really maintaining a good enough property.

So it's one of those, yeah, I'll survive with it. But yeah, I like Section 8. Here's an interesting factoid about Section 8. Section 8 pays higher amounts. And this is one of those like, how do we get, it's a fringe strategy, when I'm like my 20 fringe strategies that I talk about. Section 8 pays more based on bedroom count. Yes.

Right? And it's drastic a lot of times because a lot of Section 8 people have a lot of kids. It's pretty common to be on Section 8 because you have a lot of kids. You maybe don't have much time for working and so you'd have less money. So there are not a lot of landlords who have a six-bedroom house out there. So supply and demand, section 8's like, oh, we need more six-bedroom houses because we got all these people with five kids. Let's offer more money for a six-bedroom.

So you might see something like that. And you can literally Google this, like, look up like what section eight is in your county. But it might be $2,000 a month for a two-bedroom, $2,500 for a three-bedroom, $2,800 for a four-bedroom, 32 for a $3.32 for a five-bedroom, 55 for a seven-bedroom. You know, like it can, in some areas, based on their needs, drastically, increase. So I got a buddy out in Washington, D.C. does this. He'll buy a house. Similarly, I said adding bedrooms. He'll add like eight bedrooms to it. He'll have eight bedrooms in a house. He'll remodel the basement, put really nice bedrooms. And then he goes over the top to

make it a nice property, like really nice. But then he's getting just ridiculously high rents from the government. And the person moving in is like, this is the nicest house I've ever seen. Like he screens them well and it's a beautiful house, beautiful property. They are never going to be a problem because they never want to lose that. So the government's paying $8,500 a month? In some areas, yeah. I mean, every county depends on what the average is in the area and then it's bedroom count, but in some areas, it can be, I mean, I've seen over 10 grand in some areas

for certain size houses. And then after disasters, I mean, like, this is in Section 8, but like, you're paying $25 grand a month for houses in Maui after the fires. Like, it's just like, yeah, it's supply and demand. That's incredible. Yeah. What are purchases that you think every person should make? Doesn't have to be real estate related, just in general.

Oh, that's a great question. I think everyone needs a Ninja Creamy. We talked about that Jack yesterday. What is that? It's a ninja, oh, this is like a commercial for Ninja Cream. I'm the best sales guy for Ninja Creamy. I have no stock in that company, but I should. Ninja is a brand of like blenders or stuff, right?

Yeah, you buy Ninja Cream at Costco, but you put, you make a liquid of some kind and different recipes, freeze it overnight, blend it, not blend it, whatever you want to call it, mix it the next day, and it makes it the next day, and it makes it. the best consistency ice cream ever. So here's a secret. You put in the Fair Life chocolate milk from Costco, 150 calories with 30 grams of protein, a scoop of way protein powder,

and then a little bit of salt, a little bit of like non-share. If you're trying to keep it healthy, like, what do you call it, monk fruit, like sweetener, and freeze it overnight, next day make it. It is the greatest tasting ice cream with like 50 grams of protein,

less than 300 calories. Everybody needs to own energy cream. It's up best. JJ was ranting and reading about the ninja cream. And I wanted to buy one. The only problem is I felt like I had to try it out for myself. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

If we have time, we probably won't. You got to fly it on social media and he was just like singing its prayers. Yeah. I want a true. Dude, it's so good. Yeah. Yeah. It takes five minutes to make or four minutes to make a dish of ice cream.

And there's a lot of recipes and you can go down to TikTok, like get on the algorithm and that's all you'll see as ninja creamy recipes. Anyway, everyone should have a ninja creamy. I think everyone should have a gold journal, like a habit tracking journal where they track their daily habits. I think we talked about this on the show last time. Every morning, just track your habits that you care most about. It's like the ultimate life hack. You just track the stuff you want to do because at the end of the day, you get the results of what you repeatedly do. If you want a six-pack, there's something that you repeatedly do to get you that.

If you want a better marriage, there are things you can do that will get you that. If you want to be a better dad, you want more money, you want to save more money, whatever it is. There's just things we do. And nobody tracks that stuff. If you want to completely change your life, alter it forever, just start tracking your habits. Now, the other thing we're curious about Is your business inefficient? Because we're talking to some of your team. Yeah. And a lot of people say that there's a lot of, like, almost a chain of command.

Yeah. That they have to get through to get to you. And a lot of times things fizzle out on the way out. But they don't get all the way up and they just kind of lose steam. Explain for those people listening right now that may not be familiar. Like, how many businesses do you operate? You're throwing out X capital and X this and this. I like roughly call it seven or eight businesses.

So if you have, like, I have a loan company. called Better Life Ref. I've got the Open Door Capital. I've got the Better Life Tribe, which is about a thousand. It's like membership, a thousand real estate investors. All that goes to charity.

I've got the media company and I've got this thing called First Deal. It's like first deal. Get your first deal. And then a couple of small, random things. Yeah, there's definitely a hierarchy,

you could call it, or organizational chart, you could say. It's because, and ultimately, like, yeah, I had a friend the other day said this. He said, hey, Brandon, some people buy real estate and some people build businesses that buy real estate.

Right. So you can say some people, some people do the thing and some people build businesses around the thing. I am trying to build businesses around the thing, not do the thing. If that may, it's a subtle difference, right? Like some people podcast and some people build podcasting businesses. The end result is probably the same. The difference is, you know, the, the, the, the corporatization. And I hate corporate, like corporate stuff. I hate the, it's Hawaiian shirt Friday and get your TPS report in and all that. But when you're trying to run seven, eight businesses at one time, especially. with one face, like where I'm the head of all of them, I'm the face. I have to have layers. I have to have operational efficiency inside of those. And sometimes that is inefficient. Like trying to get a video made, like somebody, my mortgage company needs a video made for social media. Okay, that has to go through several different people. And that is inefficient. That's annoying. I can't be as nimble. It's like moving the Titanic. It's just harder. However, that's really the only way to have 100, I don't know I call 150 employees I think that work for me right now spread out. It kind of has to be that way.

But it's also what allows me to grow, you know, millions and millions and millions of dollars every year in revenue and be able to handle that. Do you think any of it's worth scaling back? I think we were talking to your social media team. It's way bigger than what we expected. It's bigger than our social media team. And I feel like putting out a good amount of content. Yeah.

Yeah. No, it definitely bigger than your, I mean, yeah, definitely bigger than yours. and some of that is operational inefficiencies, probably. I would argue that you guys, this may come across sounding bad even to my team, I don't mean that, but you guys are probably the equivalent of 10 people that would work for you, right?

In other words, you could probably hire each 10 people to do the equivalent of what you guys know and can do. I don't do anything. I mean, like, I show up, and the button, record buttons already there, pretty much, right? And so for that, I have to have, I think, more people. If I got involved, because I'm good at, if I was good at it, like you guys are. Yeah, I just think, yeah, you're the equivalent of 10 people.

Is it worth scaling back? 100%. I have too many companies. I know that. I would be more effective by far if I scaled back. This is a hard thing. Once they're already running, they're all profitable, it's like that lie. It's like, oh, I can do it all.

I can do it all. But you can never do it all. And so, yeah, we are constantly pruning. There's a great book by Mike McAllowicz, called The Pumpkin Plan, which basically says, whether it's different. businesses or divisions within your business, the way to grow a massive pumpkin is by starting with a lot of them and then trimming, all the ones that are not good enough until you're left with one. And then you pour all your energy into the one. So right now I've got a lot of pumpkins

and trimming is a good idea. Now, in terms of money, have you found that money can buy happiness? Oh, yeah, 100%. I think money can buy happiness, but I think that money can also buy misery. Money can buy anything. I mean, and what I mean, there's a pat answer. Money buys experiences or money buys stuff that can make you happy, sure, money can buy stuff that makes you unhappy. So I'm not saying money always buys happiness. But if you have money, you can do things that make you happier. So that's why, yes, of course. I think money is dangerous.

Like, I think, I mean, I'm a Christian guy. I'm a Bible, you know, believing Christian guy. I was even a youth pastor for a while. And the Bible talks a lot about wealth being dangerous, like bad. And Christians especially don't like to talk about that very much. Like, it's way more fun to talk about problems. prosperity and how great. Like when you have money, you can give away a lot. But Jesus himself warns about money more than he does about almost anything else. And so I look at money in a very similar

light to alcohol, actually. Alcohol can make you have a fun time. Like if you drink alcohol and you're a bunch of people, you can have a good time. It'll loosen you up a little bit. Great. Is it dangerous? A thousand percent. Does that mean we should never drink? Maybe for some, for sure. A lot of people shouldn't drink. Does that mean I'm never going to drink again? Not necessarily. But I have to be very cognizant of the dangers of money and the dangers of alcohol. You know, they say money reveals who you are, maybe. I think it does. But I think money can also just take anybody and make them worse, if that makes sense.

Yeah. You just start, if you're not careful, if you're not careful about money. So what are like the best practices then? If you're getting more money at a faster rate or you're growing in wealth, like what are the things that, like, is it staying grounded? Is it like having friends that are not wealthy? Is it like giving away money? I think it's all of that.

I think it's acknowledging the dangers of money, I think, is step one. Just saying like money can be bad for people. It can be bad for me. It can make me a more greedy person. If I'm not careful, it can make me believe that money is a thing that my happiness is found in or that my validation, my self-worth is in my money. And if I lose my money. So, yeah, things like giving away a good chunk of money, I think, is a good way to

then release that hold of money on you. Like you can't serve. I think that's the famous line in the Bible. You can't serve both God and money. And so you have to stop serving money, period, if you want to. What does that mean? It means it can't control you. And so by giving it away, you're saying, hey, this doesn't control me.

I can always make more back. So I like making money. It's a tremendous amount of fun to build wealth and make money and help other people make money because money solves a lot of problems. Like I love not being worried about how I'm going to pay the bills. That's really nice. I love being able to give away millions of dollars to help people that don't have that ability.

And I think, I think, again, from a spiritual side, I think that God has given certain people the ability to make money. That's not so we can buy a bigger jet. Like I didn't think maybe a jet will come someday, but that's not why he made me good at making money. It's not why he made you good at making money. I think he made you good at making money

for another purpose. So spending your life trying to figure out what that purpose is, I think is a really good way to live your life. But what about for the people who sell their companies, or they come into a lot of money, and immediately they get depressed. Yeah, they're miserable. Almost all of them are miserable. Uh, and I think a lot of that's

actually because their validation, uh, their internal self-worth is in their career and they lose their career. It's gone. And so like, it could happen with me when I left bigger pockets. Like I was my, I was known as the bigger pockets guy. Everyone knew me as a bigger pockets guy. And all of a sudden it was gone, uh, because I just left. Uh, but it didn't bother me because I had another thing. First of all, my self, my identity wasn't in bigger pockets. It was in, I mean, the number of things, but one of them was it was in my brand. And that sounds weird. And I know I should say, like, my identity isn't, you know, God or whatever, like Christians

would say. But, like, my identity was largely in my brand, which I took with me. My identity was in me as a real estate investor. That was part of it, which I took with me. I already had real estate. So when I left part of my identity, I didn't lose all of it, which is, I think, is often what people have. So I think people need to, before leaving a company, should probably try to figure out

where their identity is actually at. You mentioned while we're on the boat, once again, I think it was yesterday, that every time you've had money since you were a kid, you have probably blowing it. Yeah. What do you mean by that? Like, how could, like you said, you can't serve two gods. It's like you're also really smart with your money, but at the same time, you've just consistently just bought frivolous things. I just, I mean, I like, I like fun stuff. So, like, I don't know, even when I was a kid, I just want to go and buy whatever.

I mean, just stupid stuff, right? That's just temporary. And so I just know that about myself, but if I don't have money, I won't spend it on the dumb stuff. Like when I got, I got some, the company I invested in got sold, I got a bunch of money. And the first thing I did was about that Ford Raptor that sit out there. Like I was like, I'm going to get a Raptor. And then the rest of all the rest of the money, all of it, I just bought this house with, like the one that we're in right now, right?

Because I will, I will then, I have zero problem buying real estate with my money. Like, I will blow my money on real estate because I know that's just a bank account. This house is a bank account. It's just one that I can't easily access. And I bought the house almost in cash. And then someday when I sell it, I get that cash back. So it's just a really hard to reach bank account. Here's the other reason I do that.

When I was younger, I used to play a lot of monopoly. A lot of monopoly. My buddy Boone Greenlee, shout at the Boone Greenlee. And I, in high school, in the summer one time, we played every single day of the summer. We played 100 games of Monopoly, I think, over 100 days, something like that. It was wild. So I love Monopoly. And I'm really good at it.

And the reason I'm good at it is because my strategy is to get rid of my money as fast as possible. Like, you will never play Monopoly as well as when you have no money sitting in in front of you because then it like then it matters you're watching a football game like what's the best part of a football game is when the team's down by six points they've got 90 yards to run or get down the field and there's two minutes left on the clock that's the best football you'll ever watch because like there you have to win you have to get to that end of the end of that's when they play the best so i play the best when i don't have just millions of dollars just sitting and making you know it's got to be working it's got to be out there i got to feel a little bit like

I got to feel broke. If I don't feel broke, I get lazy. Do you have any controversial takes about money or any misconceptions that you feel like people have? That's a good question. I mean, part of it is that people always say money just refines who you are and it just makes you more of who you are.

I think that money makes you a worse person for most of the time. So that would be probably one hot take on money. I think that people spend way too much time focused on saving money rather than making money. I think it's way easier to make money than save money. And I think people are like,

I don't want to want to buy that latte. And I could pick up, you know, that's kind of a lot of your brand. It's like, you're like, wait, being cheap. I have never been cheap. Like I'm the opposite of cheap. People make fun of me for that. I just like, I'm just, just buy whatever I want generally.

But that's because I can, I can go and generate a lot more money, a lot easier than I can save $50 a month on whatever. Like, I probably have hundreds of dollars right now in subscriptions that I'm not using across different. I have every one of the video things that are out there. I probably have, let's call it $200 in video streaming services that I'm paying for that I'm not currently really using. I've got kids. I don't watch TV. I don't watch anything. All I need is Disney Plus.

I'd be fine. Should I go and cancel all of them? Maybe. Or should that part of my brain just not even worry about that. Instead, be worried about how can I go and make an extra million dollars for better life that I can give away to Tim Tebow so he can go fight human trafficking and save a bunch of women and kids from slavery. Yeah, that's what I want my brain working on. I don't want my brain ever focused on like, how do I save another $50? But now, do you think it's you?

Do you think the average person is the capability to just say, well, I'm going to keep my $200 a month streaming? I mean, okay, there's a point in your life you need to pull that back, for sure. And this is not everybody, this is me. There was a moment in my life when I was younger where, I mean, shoot, we, like, we were struggling.

I was probably 23 years old. My wife and I were struggling. Like, just couldn't figure out there's no money ever. So I read Dave Ramsey's total money makeover and he's like, give every dollar a name and get the envelope budget out there. And I did that. And immediately I realized I was spending like $1,000 a month more than we were making.

We were making like two grand a month. We were spending three. Yeah, for sure we needed to budget and pull back and do all the work of canceling subscriptions and all that. And so yeah, have a baseline so you're not stupid. But I just think that making money is more fun and it's easier than saving money. Why do you think rich people are seen as evil and specifically land? landlords. Yeah. They're, you know, a leach on this system and that nobody should be turning housing into a profit business. People are, uh, they want what they don't earn. Uh, they don't, they want what they haven't earned and they think that everything should be given to them. I think a lot of people have that view. Now, are there bad landlords out there? I'm sure there are. Uh, is it unfair? Yeah, capitalism is kind of unfair. Is it the system we have? Yes. Uh, show me a better system that works for everybody. And I,

I would love to learn more. But everything that's tried just doesn't work. Like what works is capitalism. And so, yeah, I think people just get, people see wealthy, successful people, and it makes them feel bad about themselves. And so, for example, if I see, if I see somebody with a six pack, my immediate reaction, like my, like, soul is, I don't like that person. They're probably a bad husband.

Right? Like, that's what I'm like, they're probably really bad with their kids. They're probably horrible. All they do is go to the gym all day. I immediately find ways to make me not like them. Why? Like, what does it matter if they have a six pack? It's because it makes me go, I don't have a six pack.

And if I don't have a six pack and he does, it must mean that I'm a worse person. Something inside of me is not good. I don't want to feel that way. I don't like that negative emotion. Therefore, I have to fight that with something else. So I see somebody rich and I'm like, well, they're rich. They must be evil. That explains why I'm not rich because I'm not evil.

That makes sense. It does. Yeah, we demonize people. because we don't want to internally reflect that it might be our fault. We don't want to believe that we're the bad guy in our lives, but a lot of times we are. If you were to start over today,

zero dollars, zero connections, but all of the knowledge in your head, could you be a millionaire in a year? And if so, how? Yeah, 100% I could. And I say that in a couple fronts, let's go with just real estate because that's what we've been talking about today.

I think it'd actually be easier in a lot of other avenues. Real estate is a slower game. But yeah, I would, if I had all my knowledge and I had my charisma, I could go out there and find a $5 million apartment complex that I could buy for four that needs a bunch of work. And I could go and raise the money and get that.

How could you raise the money if you like? Yeah, just go to a bunch of local real estate meetups. Like there's meetups around the, no track record. You'd be able to sell it anyways. I think I could sell it anyways. I think you just go higher enough. There's a video that Hormosey put out a couple years ago that got a lot of like,

went viral and got a lot of like angry people where he said, yeah, it's easy to make a million dollars. Just buy a $10 million asset for $9 million and sell it for $10. And it was like, oh, it's so easy. like, well, wouldn't everyone do it? Well, it's not easy. But if I had a year and, like, gun to my head, like, had to get it done, yes, I can find a $10 million apartment complex for nine and I could probably sell it for 10. I could find a strategy to do that. Yeah, I'm very confident that wealth is a skill. Wealth is not an outcome. It's just a skill you have, and anybody with that skill can generate it.

Do you believe in fate, or do you think we create our own destiny? I think we create our own destiny within bounds, right? So, again, not trying to be. to over-spiritualize everything, but you've heard of the story, Jonah, like Jonah in the whale or Jonah gets swallowed by a big whale or a fish, whatever. It's a science story. But in this story, Jonah, he's like, like God was like, you're going to go to whatever, this city, and you're going to go tell them all that they're being bad. And he's like, no, I'm not.

And so he runs the other direction. And then this giant, like, storm comes and he gets eaten by a fish or whale, and it spits him back out on the land later on. It's a great kind of metaphor, I guess you could say. And I, it's a story illustrates like, you got to follow what God wants you to do. I think that's an exception, not the rule. In other words, I don't think God or if you're, you know, the universe or fate or whatever,

I don't think it says, like, you will go to this college and you will do this and you'll have this career. But I think there are cases where it's like you're good at these things. This is the bounds of which you are capable. You are not, like, you are charismatic. You're good at talking to people. You're good at money and you're good at this. So therefore you're, like, that's probably the general bounds and area you're going to go.

So anyway, I think the Jonah thing, I don't think fate says you will do this exact thing. I think that's a rare occasion. I don't think God's telling me to go and build a real state empire. I think I chose that, but within the bounds of the skills that I have. You mentioned that you think women are more attracted to guys that can demonstrate commitment. And that growing a large beard is exactly that. That's it. Is this just coping? Is this just coping? It might be a little bit of coping, a little bit of making myself feel better about the beer. No, but I really believe, I think that there are just signals that a guy can give off that signal to a female, and the same thing works the other way around, that they will be a good mate.

So whether that's a biological thing, an evolutionary thing, or just a common sense, right? Like, a guy who's bigger is generally considered more attractive than a guy who is smaller. Like, if you have no muscle whatsoever, a guy who talks really, really quiet and small is not as attractive as a guy who's got a big, loud voice. Why? Because it signals, like, protection. It signals, you know, like power and leadership, which then is from a, again, kind of Hey, I can protect the people in my life.

So the beard, the beard tells one of two things. It either tells the woman that this guy can commit to something for a long period of time. Just like a guy going to the gym, he can commit to the gym, he can commit to a beard, or it tells the woman that you're trying to cover something up. I don't know. Maybe I have a really weak chin. You know, I respect the beard a lot because if I see someone walking around with a beard as miraculous as the one you have. Miraculous, I never heard of that.

I automatically think like this is, This is a really just persony person. Like, they have something to them that makes them a lot of whatever they are. You know what I mean? And, like, they're at least very sure of themselves. And I think that that's, that's a good thing. I agree. I think that a beard makes you kind of a caricature of yourself.

And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that there's too many vanilla people in the world. And so whether it's a beard or cool glasses or interesting haircut or the way that you talk or you're Alex Formosier wearing like cutoffs and like the big muscle. shirts like it just adds like this like oh that that's a that's a that's a character yeah I like does your wife like the beard she does I always say like actually from the beginning I said oh when people say how long do you want the beard to go how long you let it go for him like as long as my wife likes it and every length that's been my wife has liked it even more so I'm going to keep it

until she says I don't like it does she grab it uh no I mean I don't think she like no I don't think she got my kids grab it like this is a handle for the kids to get my attention like they crank it uh but yeah it's It's fun. It's a good way to go through life. How much would it cost to shave it off? Millions. Like, I'm not even kidding. If you offered me a million dollars right now, it wouldn't do it.

Not a chance. 10 million we could have a conversation. 10 million of charity, okay, fine. We'll have that talk, but it's too much, too much my identity. I mean, my Instagram is beardy Brandon, right? Like, I mean, it's a big piece of who I am. And yeah. How long would it take to grow it back?

This would probably take a bit, Three years to get to that length. That's what I'd guess. It doesn't grow anymore. It stays right here. So you don't trim it anymore? I mean, just like the crazy flyways, but it's about this long.

The thing is it has a, it has a shape to it. We shape it, yeah. Okay, you do shape it. Yeah. And then this too, this is all, you know, done like the sides and everything. Because it's not like, you know, it's not wide. Yeah, for long, before I started going to an actual good barber

who knew what they were doing, like I just let it go and it started just looking like a homeless person's beard because it just goes out. And so I learned that good, barbers will shape a beard into something. And there's a lot of different styles. And this is just the one that she picked. And I go with expertise. It's very cool.

Thank you. So, so, do you want to touch it? Yeah. You know, you ever seen that episode of a family guy where there's like two bald guys in an elevator and then there's a third one that's not bald? And then they're sitting there in the elevator.

And then the haired guy leaves and the two bald guy looked at each other and go, I thought he'd never leave. And they'd lick each other's head. What? Yeah. That is the best. It's such a great. That is so funny.

That's what bald guys do. So bearded guys, you don't know this because we don't do it in front of you. When guys with long beers see each other, we wait until everyone's gone and we go up and we avatar where like the hair meets and they do that. Yeah, we do that. We like, we rub our hair together and we form a bond. Feels very good. Yeah, dude, it's magical actually.

Like, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful moment. I'm going to have a beard like that at some point in my life. I think you should grow it out. 100%. I think you should just from right now, this point forward, grow it out. Demonstrate commitment. Hardcore commitment.

That'll do it. If I end up finding a wife because of it. But you owe me. Big time. Last time I was on this podcast, we talked about you needed a haircut in order to find a wife. So this time you need a beard. This is the focus of our podcast. Who knows it will be in a couple of years?

I'll need something else. Muscles, huge, giant. That's definitely. But only on one half of your body. That's a commitment. That's commitment. It's a restraint because you're not working out both, but it's also like commitment because you can show the muscles.

And you're a character. Win, win, win. That's good thing. I think we figured it out for him. What about any relationship advice that you have? You know, yeah, Heather and I, we met in college. She was the first girl I ever dated, first girl I ever kissed, called my shot when I saw her from my dorm room.

I said, that's the girl I'm going to marry, and I went down there and, you know, four years later. Yeah, four years later, proposed. Man, I'm going to steal a line from Esther Pearl. Esther Pearl, have you guys ever had her on the podcast? No, but John Deloney references her all the time. Oh, she's amazing. All the time.

Yeah, Esther Pearl says, in your life, you will have five marriages. I hope they're all to the same person. And I think about that quote every day. Because what I'm like, what I take that as is like the marriage that I had with Heather before kids was fun. We went to Europe. We traveled around.

I mean, Graham, you're in it right now. It's a fun marriage. It's great. The marriage with little kids is a totally different marriage. And so many couples don't make it through that marriage. It's just a different marriage. And if all you do is lament the marriage you used to have and say, I mean, like I did life I used, to have that.

It was so good. Now I've got this hard life with. little kids, like, you're going to always be miserable. And then the next marriage, when you have older, I'd say, like, older kids, right, that are like teenagers. That's totally different. Again, and most people don't, they don't make it through the transitions, and they lose themselves in the process. And then the marriage, like, after the kids are out of the house, is real tough for people. And then when you're old, you have that marriage. And it's, again, a very different marriage. So my best advice is just what I heard from Esther Pearl is, like,

focus on the transitions and just accept that that marriage is over for now. And there's always going to be pieces again, but I will never again have that marriage with Heather. That's okay. It was beautiful while it lasted. Now we have a new marriage. And this marriage is beautiful as well, even though it's hard and challenging and difficult. And, uh, yeah. Do you have any book recommendations for in one long time? What are your top five? Oh, man, I'm such a reader. I love reading. Uh, the newest one, my favorite book is always the one I'm reading. Like, I just get into every book and I'm like, this is the best. Uh, don't believe everything you think by Joseph, like, Nguyen. I'm actually sure to say his last name, but don't believe anything you think was phenomenal.

It's kind of a book on like, almost Buddhism. I love that one. The one thing, Gary Keller, J. Pappas, and the one thing is just about focus. I just apparently don't follow what I read, but I love the book, the one thing. I absolutely love the compound effect from Darren Hardy. It's like, do the action over and over and over. That made a big impact on me. I'm going to say from a, it's not a business book.

It's a fiction book, but I think it's one of the greatest leadership books ever written. I loved it. Is Red Rising. Have you read that one? phenomenal. Yeah, it didn't, Mikey. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

It's such a good book. Hey, Mikey. Yeah. Hey, Mikey. What's up, Mikey? Good choice of books. Red Rising, you can get at Target. It's like a popular book.

But in terms of like how to lead and inspire a team, like, it's like, I want to be Darrow. Like I even thought about naming my kid Darrow. He's like the main character. It's like, dang, that guy. Um, last book, man, rich dad, poor dad. I gotta give it. Tukia, I mean, that's classic. I interviewed 500 people on the Bigger Pockets podcast, but real estate investors

millionaires, 90% of them named that book as the book that, like, most impacted their life. And when I got interviewed, like, when it was my turn to be interviewed, I would always say that book. Yeah. Like when people ask me, it's, it changes your mindset more than any other book, uh, in the finance space. I think it just alters how you think about money and wealth and building it. And it makes you believe actually internalize I could be wealthy someday.

I could not struggle. There's a different life out there. It's like looking through the narnia, like the cupboard door and be. like, oh, there's a whole other world in there. Yeah, blows people's mind. Yeah. And you didn't ask us to do this, but because I think it would actually help out a lot of viewers here, you have like a coaching thing, right, where you help people get through

buying their first property. And if they don't in the first year, then they get all their money back or something. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And like there's a guarantee that is. Yeah, yeah. The guarantee is that you will buy your first property. Yeah.

There's a lot of, okay, so yeah, there's a lot of, I don't know, d-bag, real estate influences out there. that'll charge you know 50 or 100,000 dollars. Like, I'm going to help you be a real estate investor. And then people go into it. And then they don't buy anything. They never do anything. And they take advantage of people.

It's a really shady industry in a lot of ways. Like, do you know about this practice? Like, you'll go to like a seminar. It's not just in real estate, but you go to a seminar for like a weekend boot camp, fine. And day one, they're going to teach you negotiation skills. That's what you need to succeed. We're going to teach you how to negotiate. Well, what are we going to practice on?

We're going to practice on your credit card companies. We're going to get you to raise your credit limit on your credit card. That's how you're going to practice negotiation. So they call up their credit card companies. They do the script and they raise it from $5,000 to $25,000. The next day, guess what the price of the program is? And I've seen these documents from some of these companies. It's insane.

They leave the price blank so they can fill the price in when the sales guys talking to the person with the price that their credit card was just raised to. It is so shady. I hate that stuff. So anyway, so I have a program. It's called First Deal. It's literally how to get your first deal. It's like $6,000.

And then, yeah, if you don't buy a deal. but you did the work, you get your money back if it doesn't work, but I don't think anybody's going to ask for the refund because either get a deal you didn't do the work or was you going to keep working with you until you did. It's not like the desire for wealth goes away. So, yeah, we just, I just meet with people every single week on a group call and we have a bunch of advisors.

So anyway, first deal. You guys want to buy real estate, link down below. You didn't ask us to do that, but I just want to, yeah, yeah, thanks for coming on the show. You're a good man. You're like a good wing. He's a good wing man, you know? Oh, stuff.

Yeah, you're like the guy at the bar who's like, yeah, my buddy over here. He's got a good thing. Anyway, thanks, man. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you guys for watching. It really means a lot. We flew to Hawaii just for this.

We had to fly to Maui. You had to. We had to do that. So, so hard. Yeah. Oh, it had the worst hotel room ever. She had to put up with this. If you appreciate us being on a six and a half hour flight to get here for this, for like two hours.

We spent 12 hours on an airplane for two hours of a podcast. Hit the like button and subscribe. That's it. It would mean the world to us. and it's free to subscribe. Just hit the subscribe button. That's it. Thank you guys.

Or don't if you don't want to. You don't have to. Yeah, you don't have to. You mean a lot to this. Buy some index funds. At the very least. Thanks for watching. Until next time.