The Brendan Ecker Influence
Brendan Ecker discusses topics surrounding entrepreneurship, business, branding, personal development, and how to succeed in life while studying the quickest paths to health, wealth, love, happiness, freedom, and time. Brendan Ecker incorporates his experiences and inights from being a serial entrepreneur, author, investor, police officer, and former NCAA student athlete.
The Brendan Ecker Influence is a self improvement and growth hub with a primary focus on discussing the mindset required to survive in business, entrepreneurship, and every day life. On this show, we study the rich and teach you how to get rich. We explore the most effective strategies to increasing your earning capacity, chasing your dreams, conquering your fears, and dominating life's greatest challenges. Learn how to Succeed, Accomplish your Dreams, and Develop Multiple Income Streams.
"I talk about how I did it, how I still do it, but primarily, the foundations, mindset, and mental frameworks that helped me to crush my goals, and achieve everything I wanted in life". If you love the content, then be sure the leave a review, as this helps us grow the show and build something special for other motivated entrepreneurs like you. Welcome to the 1%.
The Brendan Ecker Influence
From Waiter to Real Estate Mogul | Steve Werner's $50 Million Success Story
Meet Steve Werner. He Quit His Job as a Waiter and Built a $50 Million Empire. Welcome to Real Estate Investing 101. Learn how to unlock Wealth Through Real Estate Investments: Exclusive Interview with Steve Werner, professional real estate investor and entrepreneur helping to educate business owners. Steve has acquired over 3,800 doors and has amassed a following of hundreds of thousands.
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In this episode, we chat with the highly successful real estate investor, Steve Werner, to uncover the secrets behind building a lucrative real estate portfolio. From identifying the best investment opportunities to navigating market trends, Steve shares invaluable insights and strategies that have led to their impressive success in the industry.
Whether you’re a seasoned investor or just starting out, this interview is packed with actionable advice that can help you elevate your real estate game. Learn how to make smart investments, avoid common pitfalls, and achieve financial freedom through real estate.
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Brendan Acker Influence, where I teach you how to succeed, accomplish your dreams and develop multiple income streams. Today's guest is Steve Werner, an experienced real estate investor who has generated over $50 million in sales with over 3,800 doors, but started off as a waiter with nothing in his pockets, having lived exclusively in only Airbnbs during the come up. Steve Werner has generated a massive following of over 120,000 people as well. You want to learn how to do it too. You're in the right place, but first be sure to smash that like button and be sure to buy my books Beyond the Beat and Hire me at my door in my office so you can better your life, get some self help and also learn how to improve and to get whatever you want. I teach you the secrets on how to succeed and I teach you the secrets on how to become a better entrepreneur and a better human being. So be sure to buy my books. Click the links in the description below. Let's get started.
Speaker 1:Let's meet Steve Werner. You quit your job as a waiter 12 years ago to become an entrepreneur. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, tell us about that a little bit more. And what's the experience? What was that moment like?
Speaker 3:Because we all understand that going into business and how hard that leap of faith is, especially when you know you're not going to be getting a stable paycheck anymore, so tell us more about that experience. Sure the so it? I went to a tony robbins event and, uh, at the time I had, I was working, I had a ski in, ski out condo um in vale, colorado. Like there were four of us splitting a ski in, ski out condo um in Vail, colorado, like there were four of us splitting a three bedroom condo. So definitely not living like high life or anything like that.
Speaker 3:Um, but I went to this Tony Robbins event and he asked the question you know, are you happy with where your life is right now? Are you going to be happy 10 years, 20 years, 30 years into the future? And I looked at that and I was like you know, my life didn't go the way that I wanted it to go. And, having that conversation with them, I was like man, I need to do something different. Well, we've all had that moment where we make a decision or we think about it, right, but then there's like the oh, I actually have to do something. So I went back and I quit my job and I liquidated my savings, my 401k, all the money that I had, and I moved to vegas and your point um, you said you know, like, what happens when you don't know, you that there's going to be a paycheck. Well, I thought, for sure, like all of that, savings, I thought I had enough for like three or four years. Um, it was gone within like three months.
Speaker 3:I did, I made like every mistake that you could possibly make towards my own business, right, I was like, oh, I need to buy this, I need a website, I need to buy. I was paying for radio, radio ads. For some reason, all the wrong things lost all of that money and then ended up having to move in with friends who had had they've had a couple successful businesses and they were nice enough. They said, okay, what did you do wrong? I remember I remember sitting at the bar with them. We went to a place called the frog bar in Treasure Island and we were sitting there and I still have the napkin we wrote out like what did you do wrong? What would you do differently? What do you need to learn? And they said if you're willing to do, take action towards those things, we will help you with those. We'll give you a place to live for a couple months. We'll help you get back on your feet, but you've got to actually move forward. You can't just sit around and play video games and sleep all day.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, yeah, I definitely. I would say that's 100% true and that's the experience I had first going into business, first starting my businesses. I'm like sweet, I'm the man, I have my own schedule, now I can, I'm in control of everything. And then it came clear that, oh, I'm in control of everything, so I have to manage my own money, I have to manage my own paycheck every week. You don't have that stable income, so you have to develop this drive towards consistently finding sales and making money, and that was probably one of my hardest parts. Tell us a little bit more about that courage and how important that is in order to take that leap of faith, because there really is this process that comes before, actually, you know, coming to the realization that, oh, I can do better in my life. I can do, I can have a better career, I can make more money.
Speaker 3:Sure the man I think it's. People ask me like if I knew what I knew now, would I still make that leap? Would I still make the same decision? The answer is yes, but I would have gone about it differently. I don't think people should burn the boats per se. This is something that also came from Tony Robbins. He was like you have to burn the boats. You have to make a decision and move forward, no matter what.
Speaker 3:I do think you need to make a decision and move forward, but I think you can do it in a smart way. Right, you can prepare long beforehand. You can say I want to open a business, I'm going to start doing X and do that while you still have a paycheck. Do that without dipping into savings. Do that like set up everything so that you don't have a super stressful intro to that world, like I see a lot of people start their business and within six months they're back shopping for a job, trying to get hired on somewhere because they didn't make it right.
Speaker 3:Just because you put a lot of pressure on yourself doesn't mean that you're suddenly going to create income. It doesn't mean that you're going to figure everything out. It is a long journey. It's people always. People always ask like how long did it take? I'm still learning stuff. Um, if you think that you're going to be massively successful right out of the gate, like you go to college for four years, then you start an entry-level job. Maybe 10 years later you'll have an executive level job. It takes time. Why do you think that you would start a business and within six months be a multimillionaire? Like? That's not the way it tends to go.
Speaker 1:It really is true. There's just so much to learn. There's so much to learn. There's so many. There's so much money you have to burn almost and churn through so you can actually learn properly. And that's kind of what I've learned was the process. And so, for real estate in particular, that's kind of where you built your empire. So let's talk a bit more about real estate. How are you able to get into real estate? How are you able to jump into the market? Because, as we know as a beginning real estate investor, it can be tricky coming out of that nine to five right, Learning all the tricks and the trades and meeting the right people. What's that secret?
Speaker 3:Sure. So that's a great question. There are two answers that I'm going to give. The first one is getting started in real estate is actually really, really simple while you're working a nine to five, because it doesn't require all of your time. It's not an actual business where you're out counting on doors, meeting with people. There's some of that involved, but really it's learning how to analyze a property, learning how to well first learning how to generate a lead.
Speaker 3:We don't buy our properties off of Zillow. We don't use realtors. You have to develop a way to get off-market leads so you get an off-market lead. Then, once you have an off-market lead, how do you negotiate buying it? How do you look at the numbers, know if it's a good deal, know if it's a bad deal, negotiate buying that deal and then move forward and manage it. You can do all of that stuff in five to 10 hours a week while you are working a full-time job to transition.
Speaker 3:So with real estate you have a couple of different options when you're exiting. You can do flips. We've all seen the shows on TV where people buy a house, they fix it up, they flip it. You're going to make some money there. You are going to have to pay taxes on it, which they don't really go into on the show. But you can generate some income.
Speaker 3:I like buy and hold a whole lot better. Each house you buy should pay you somewhere between three and $400 a week or a week a month after your expenses. If you look at things that way, if you know you make $4,000 a month, that means you need 10 properties. If you need $8,000 a month, that's 20 properties. You can move at a clip where you're buying a house every two to three months. There are months that we buy 10 houses. Now I didn't start buying 10 houses. I started buying one. I got that one going. A few months later I bought the second one. A few months later I bought the third one, then the fourth one, then the fifth one, and then you move a lot faster because you grow confidence. So we tell people a two to three year period to move into real estate. Full time is 100% like an acceptable curve and if you set that expectation instead of I'm going to quit my job today, I need to make $10,000 a month tomorrow, you're setting yourself up for failure. That's the difference.
Speaker 1:Awesome. And, yeah, I definitely agree with all of that advice too.
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Speaker 1:So, for going into real estate, and let's say you want to become an investor in particular, right, there's usually two classes. There's the people who want to buy a house and they want to have it 30 years, raise their family in it, and then there's also the situation where, well, I want to get into real estate investing. I want to make some passive income, as much as it can be passive, right, nothing is completely passive. And so for that person, what do you think is the best steps to take? So let's just say Joe Smith wants to start a real estate investing company.
Speaker 1:He doesn't have a real estate license, doesn't have a job. So how does that work once you don't have a job? Because one thing I learned in the beginning from real estate was got to have a job to get yourself in, you know, or you got to have a business that's making you enough money so you can use those profit and loss statements. So explain to the audience a little bit more about what it takes to start an investment company in order to make yourself some passive income for your future generational wealth.
Speaker 3:Sure. So we're still talking about single family houses. We can come back to apartments. We transitioned to apartments about four or five years ago now and we do everything through apartments, which is truly passive. But that is a different story. If we're talking about single family and you're talking about where you're getting started, the easiest way to get started is seller financing, especially right now, depending where you live in the US. We're hitting another recession. We're going to see stuff that happened in 08, 09, 2010. That stuff is all coming back.
Speaker 3:And what does that mean? If you don't have a job, you can still go buy a house. The deed and the mortgage are two separate documents. The mortgage is what gets paid to the bank. That can stay in the person's name and you take over the payment, which gets you the deed to the property. You can now sell the property.
Speaker 3:Wholesaling is another way that you can make money in real estate without needing any money. We tell people, if you really don't have a job, if you really don't have any savings and you don't want to go the seller financing route, the way that you can build up a bank account is through doing wholesale. So what does doing wholesale mean? It means you go out and you find a killer off-market property that has some potential, you get it under contract. That contract now has a value to it. Let's say the house is worth $150,000. You get it under contract for 120. Now you take that contract, you sell it to somebody for 130. You've now made 10 grand on that contract. You do have to pay taxes on it. So you're still going to be out there hustling. But if you do, if you do one of those a month for six or eight months, which is not unusual at the end of that you've now got a nice little nest egg where you can go invest in real estate.
Speaker 2:Awesome yeah, I think that's, I think that's great.
Speaker 1:And so for anybody trying to get into real estate, for example wholesaling, what are some of those risks that come with wholesaling? And maybe go into depth a little bit more, because wholesaling I remember in my real estate class that I had taken not so long ago, we, when we were going through it, half the class was super, super confused about it and what it was and what are some of those precautionary risks you should look for when getting into wholesaling?
Speaker 3:Sure. So there's if. So, if you structure it correctly, there are virtually no risk. So what you are doing, you are literally getting a contract. So the contract that you are getting is a purchase agreement. It's the same thing that any realtor would give you when you are making an offer on a house. Same thing. You can go, you can find these online. You can find them for free. We don't recommend doing that. I would talk to whatever state you were in. Talk to a real estate attorney. They're going to give you one for probably 200 bucks. Now you have a contract that is legally binding.
Speaker 3:The next piece is you need to generate an off-market lead. The way that you're going to generate off-market leads the easiest one. We run Facebook and TikTok ads. We get leads for between $20 to $30, $40, depending on how much the market and how saturated the market is. Now you're going to have to follow up with those leads. It's usually one out of 15 turns into something. So if you look at that, you're spending. Let's say your worst case scenario you're spending 30 bucks times 15. So now you're at like $500 for sitting down with a seller.
Speaker 3:The next thing where everybody goes wrong is they right away, go for the price. That's going to be the first thing the seller asks you. Instead, you want to find out the seller's situation. Why are they selling? What got them to this point? Are they behind on their payment? If they're behind on their payment, they're a distressed seller. Chances are that you're going to have a pretty good chance at making a deal, but you need to word things correctly. You need to focus on them instead of yourself. You asked specifically about risk, though.
Speaker 3:When you put the contract together and you say hey, mr Seller, you know, mr Joe Smith, you're going to sell me your house. I'm going to buy it for $120,000. Now here's the thing. I have a 14-day inspection period. That inspection period, when it is done, if I am unhappy with the inspection, this contract is null and void. If, for some reason, I think that it is, I'll come talk to you. I'll let you know.
Speaker 3:This now gives you a 14 day window. That's when you really have to hustle, because you have the contract. It's $120,000 contract. If you did your your evaluation correctly, it should be worth 150. You now have that window, that $30,000 window. You've got to leave some meat on it for whoever buys it. That's because chances are, they're going to fix and flip it. They're going to do something with it. So that means I've now got 14 days to go sell my contract. If I don't sell it around day 13, I'll probably go to them around day 10 and say, hey, we're having a hard time with a couple of things. It looks like the deal might not go through. And then you, day 14, if you don't have a buyer, you have two options. You can go back to them and say, hey, I need to renegotiate a little bit. The market is not what I thought it was. I either need it a little bit less or any different terms. If they go forward with that, that's great. Then you can get another 14 day period. If they don't, you just tear up the contract. You're not out any money, you're out some time and energy for doing the research and doing the work.
Speaker 3:If anybody doesn't think that wholesaling is real, their entire Facebook group's dedicated to this, where you will see one of my friends here. So I moved. I live in Lake Tahoe for the summer. I normally live in Austin. I came up here. I went to a couple of real estate groups. I met a guy that's doing somewhere between 14 and 16 properties a month. It's him and his wife. That's all they do is go around making offers, following basically what I just laid out for you, generating an off-market lead. They're using Facebook to generate the lead. Then they're going in, they're having conversations, they're getting the contracts and they're selling. It takes time, though it's not going to be. If you're listening to this and you're like I'm going to go do 10 houses next month, you're probably going to do one house in your first six months, because there's a lot to learn. That's the big. The cost here is time, but if you're willing to put in the time, if you're willing to learn, there's definitely money to be made 100%.
Speaker 1:Real estate's excellent. It's worked well for me. I'm still a beginner. I'm not going to claim that I own a bunch of real estate or anything. I'm not like you. You own. Tell us again. I think it was 1,600 doors About 3,800.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it's just. It's not just me. Nate Armstrong is my partner at Home Invest is me. Nate Armstrong is my partner at Home Invest. So Nate started on his own in early 2000s and he kind of had the same career path I did. He worked at Target and he started, though, doing what I said. He started buying a house on the weekends here and there. It took him about 18 months to get to the point where he had replaced his income from Target and then he quit. He had a family, he needed health care, so he stayed on Smart move. From there he grew, he got to the point that he was bringing on investors, and then he got to the point where he was turning a whole bunch of houses. So then he moved into multifamily. We joined up a couple of years ago.
Speaker 3:My background is actually in events. When I started my business, my event was, or my business was, all about public speaking and events. I got known in the real estate space for building really good sales events for real estate, so we would sell real estate coaching or we'd bring people into investment. On the passive investment side, nate and I ended up partnering about four years ago after we'd done several like I think we'd done several, like I think we'd done about 30 events together. We ended up partnering together. Where I go out and I do a lot of the fundraising, I'm very active bringing investment into the company. Nate is very active in finding the deals.
Speaker 1:Wow, so that's a pretty good structure. Then, if you're considering getting into real estate, is so? And, to be clear, you were mentioning leads a couple of minutes ago. Are those leads that you were mentioning for just real estate properties that are maybe houses in distress, or would that be like the wholesales where you're talking about?
Speaker 3:So it's so. They're incoming leads. You will get wholesalers that respond to you, which means that there there might be a deal there. But then you've got two people in the middle instead of just one. But the leads are for anyone who is looking to sell their house. You've probably seen like the we Buy Ugly Homes. It's not that kind of ad, but it's not too far off. It's somewhere.
Speaker 3:We try to make it a lot more personalized. We'll put our face on it. We use personal pictures because the biggest thing is people are asking can I know I can trust this person? So you want to use something personal to get them excited. Say, oh, this person is interesting. He looks like somebody from my community. Will he buy my house? You get the lead. Then you follow up. The first question they're always going to ask is how much will you pay me for my house? And you cannot give them an answer. Instead, you have to find out what their story is. Why are they selling the house? What do they want to do? How do they want to like? Why find out their whole situation before you make any kind of comment on what you would pay for the house? That's what's going to get you in the door with them. It's building rapport and learning to communicate versus just throw out numbers.
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Speaker 1:Perfect. And if you're trying to get into your first investment, what is the best first investment? Is it an Airbnb? Is it a single family rental, an apartment? Because you had mentioned before, if you do have capital, an apartment is pretty much fully passive. As you had mentioned something close to that, what would you say for a beginner? Let's just say, in both situations we'll go through the situation where you don't have a lot of capital and then a situation where you do have a lot of capital.
Speaker 3:Sure. So if you don't have a lot of capital, your best bet is going to be to buy a duplex or a triplex. I would not do an Airbnb. Here's why. If you look back pre-COVID 2019, airbnb levels were. Most communities did not have a lot of Airbnb offerings, which meant the prices were up. In Austin, we saw this during COVID. Everybody had extra money, so they were like oh and people are traveling, I'm going to buy an Airbnb. We saw the Airbnb market triple in the amount of offerings. What is that going to do to the price? It's going to push the price down.
Speaker 3:Now, that's one reason I don't like Airbnb. The second reason I don't like Airbnb it seems like a great idea, right Until you have cleaning fees, until you have your management fees, and you might say, well, it doesn't seem like that big of a deal, until your cleaner doesn't show up in between two bookings. Now what do you have to do? Either you have to go clean the place or you have to cancel a booking. This is gonna lead to negative reviews If you have, let's say, I know a lot of people that will run like two or three day rentals. Let's say, they have eight rentals lined up across the month and they miss two of them and then you have people calling you asking for things. Let's say somebody breaks something. It asking for things. Let's say somebody breaks something. It's not the most easy to manage and it is definitely not as profitable as it used to be because of inventory levels.
Speaker 3:I would much rather move towards either a midterm rental, which is where you're getting insurance payment for somebody that needs a place for six to eight months. They'll usually pay 200% over market. That's a great one. If I wanted to do something that was short-term, but I like just long-term, I want a year lease. Come in, lease the place from me, take responsibility for it. I don't believe in doing section eight. I think section eight is a bad idea. I've had a lot of bad experiences with section eight. We go through that sometime. I think just buying a buy and hold if you don't have a lot of capital, the way that you're going to do this is seller financing. So how do you find a duplex or a triplex? That's seller financed. Talk to landlords. There are burned out, tired landlords that are in their late 60s that are ready to be out of management. They will owner finance property to you for maybe 5k down. They just want some down money so that if you walk away from the deal they're covered.
Speaker 1:That's outstanding. Yes, and then, if you have large capital, if you have large numbers of capital, Sure.
Speaker 3:So this is more in my wheelhouse of what I play with right now. So we buy apartment buildings. Our deal right now that we have up we'll probably finish raising for in the next couple days is a $3.6 million raise. It's for a 72 unit in Lexington, kentucky. We manage the property that is on us. We find, we fund and we manage the property. We bring in investors with us. You get to join us in the upside in the property that is on us. So we find, we fund and we manage the property. We bring in investors with us. You get to join us in the upside in the property, which apartment buildings appreciate faster than single family houses as a whole.
Speaker 3:Now can you go find a multifamily? It doesn't appreciate. Sure, you can, I'm. Most of them, if they are bought correctly, will appreciate much quicker than a single family house, because apartment buildings gain value based on the amount of rent that they bring in. If the rents go up by 20%, the building goes up in value by about 20%. You can find places to argue with me in there, but this is a general rule of thumb. So we tend to double the value of an apartment building somewhere around five to seven years. That means if you put $100,000 in with us, you're going to get $200,000 out in five to seven years.
Speaker 3:We can't promise anything. It's real estate. There's all kinds of disclaimers, but that has been our experience. The other thing that you get with multifamily that you don't get nearly as much with single family is you end up with huge tax depreciation that you can put against your W-2 income. So let's say you're a highly paid W-2 employee. You make 250,000 a year. That means you're going to be paying $80,000 to $100,000 in tax. We can wipe virtually all of that out with a real estate investment making the investment free.
Speaker 3:So if you invest $100,000 into one of our investments this year, you could take $40,000 in losses. Next year you'll probably get $30,000. In year three you'll probably get $20,000. In losses Next year you'll probably get $30,000. In year three you'll probably get $20,000. That's your $100K investment back through tax strategy and now you have the investment for free. That's going to double in value. That's the main thing. I teach this over and over again. If you're looking to reach retirement by the time you're 40 instead of the time you're 65, the way you do it is by investing in passive real estate deals.
Speaker 1:Excellent, yes, it's definitely true. And then apartment complexes. What happens? What comes next? Or actually, before I ask that next question, what's the better location for apartments right now? So, is it in vacation spots? Might it be in suburban areas? What's the trending or the most proven best market for buying apartments? Where should you buy? One location-wise?
Speaker 3:Great question. It used to be Texas and Florida. Those were super hot. Florida is still pretty hot. We didn't like them as much.
Speaker 3:So there are three things that you really want to look for. The first one is is it a landlord friendly state? The reason being California, it can take me 18 months to evict somebody and cost me 50 grand. Nobody wants to be stuck with that right, because then we're losing money. Versus Kentucky, which we just talked about, where our investment was, kentucky is very landlord-friendly. What does that mean? That means if we evict somebody, we can have them out in 15 to 30 days with very minimal costs. That is number one. So you can Google landlord friendly states. There's 14 to 18 of them, depending what criteria you use.
Speaker 3:That's the first one we look at. The second one is job growth. You want to see slow and steady job growth. You don't want to see massive spikes up, because what goes up comes right back down. We saw this in Austin. Although I live there, I tell people don't invest there. What we saw from 2019 to 2023, we saw this huge ramp up. Prices doubled because we had a huge tech boom. What happened? Facebook pulled out Indeed, pulled out. Google pulled out. Everything crashed overnight. So people that got stuck on that upward cycle now are upside down in their houses, upside down in their rentals, to the point that the cashflow from the rentals won't cover the mortgage. That's a bad, bad place to be in. So slow and steady job growth we like to see one and a half to 2% across the board.
Speaker 3:Number three rent to income ratio. So San Francisco, not to pick on California. It is beautiful and I love visiting there, but I don't ever want to live there. San Francisco average income $65,000. Average rent $5,500 a month. 95% of people's income goes to rent in California on average. Now I know that there are people there that make way more money. They're also spending a lot more to live in the city.
Speaker 3:Talk to a guy that made 150 K and he I was like so how's that working? And he was like I had to leave the city Cause. He's like after four years of living there I had no savings and I had no assets because all of my money was going to housing and food and transportation. You think about that like that's not sustainable. And if you own a rental there, let's say, suddenly California is a landlord-friendly state If you own a rental there but somebody loses their job, which we're having a recession right now. People are losing their jobs. People are getting paid less. Do you think people have more than a month in the bank Like they're going to be not paying their rent? That makes it really difficult on you, the landlord, because you either have to evict them, which might take you some time, and then you have a hard time getting the next person in. It leads to high turnover. So instead, what we look for is do you know what Dave Ramsey says you should spend on rent? Do you have a ballpark guess?
Speaker 1:I used to listen to Dave Ramsey a lot and now I'm more of a Robert Kiyosaki guy, so I couldn't tell you exactly what he says.
Speaker 3:Okay, no worries, that's a good change to make. Most financial planners would tell you 30% of your income should go towards your living expense. So if you look at Columbus Ohio I went to college just north of Columbus you look at Columbus Ohio. Average income there is lower. It's $45,000 a year. Average rent for a three-bedroom, two-bath house $950. Comes in right around 30%. That gives you. So it's so much easier to rent to people there. It's a better market.
Speaker 3:So you want to look at. The first one was landlord friendly. The second one was job growth. The third one was rent to income. Those are the really big ones that you want to look for.
Speaker 3:If you want to put one more on there, I can give you two more. The first one is stay out of places that are natural disasters. So that takes Florida and the East Coast of Texas off the board. If you look at Florida right now, yes, you can buy a rental property there still at a decent price. But the reason they're still decent in price, so they went up. Then we had the hurricanes. They came down because insurance there is almost impossible to get and it gets reset when you buy the house. So when you buy a new duplex there. Suddenly your insurance triples. That crushes your cash flow. It doesn't do you any good. So natural disasters and the other one that I'll give you as a bonus this is the one thing that we look for.
Speaker 3:This is kind of the secret sauce a state that is running a surplus budget. There's only five of them. The reason this is key in Texas everybody loved Texas for investment real estate. Then they changed the way property tax was assessed. They went from historic value to actual value, tripled and quadrupled people's taxes overnight. When you're making $400 and you now have a tax bill that just went up by 10 grand, all your cash flow is gone and you're negative. So what causes that to happen? When the state is not running a surplus budget and they're in deficit, they're going to find a way to get out of deficit. How do they do that? They raise taxes. So we like Kentucky quite a bit because they're running a surplus budget. They have for a long time. They're very business friendly, rent to income is good, job growth is good and they're landlord friendly. It ticks all the boxes.
Speaker 1:I agree. I think apartments are excellent. I just watched Arnold Schwarzenegger's documentary and he was saying when he moved to the United States, his first thing he needed to do in his mind was I need to buy an apartment complex. He needed to have that passive income Right. And so even Arnold knew being somebody who didn't even grow up in the United States right away that buy an apartment complex and that was his foundation. And there was a big Instagram reel that was going viral and it was one of the guys off Shark Tank. I always forget his name, but he was just mentioning how the first investment he would make if he only had $10,000 would be real estate for that foundation. So I completely agree.
Speaker 1:Why might some investors like Grant Cardone get into hotels? Is that like the next step up or is there other? Is there better reasons to invest in syndications and hotels? What's that big difference? Because it does seem like it's pretty similar to apartments, but it's probably got quite the amount of differences there. Pretty similar to apartments, but it's probably got quite the amount of differences there.
Speaker 3:So we don't invest in hotels. I can't speak directly to it. My thought process is there's a lot more management there, but if you know how to manage something, you're probably going to do all right with a hotel. As long as you're in a high traffic area and as long as you understand the management behind it, I think you can do really really well with a hotel. The Grant Cardone is doing syndications, which is the same thing that we do. That's where we go out. We ask people to invest money with us and they get to share in the upside. I think that is one of the best opportunities you can find and I'm glad that they're becoming more mainstream. I won't go too far down the rabbit hole, but whether you guys invest with me or whether you invest with Grant or somebody else in the syndication game, there are a couple of things. We have an ebook. It's called the Five Landmines of Passive Real Estate Investing. I'll run through them really quick.
Speaker 3:If you're thinking about passive investing, there are a couple of questions you need to ask the person you are going to invest with so you don't lose money. The first one is were they around during 08, 09, 2010?, if they did not survive the last downturn. The chances of them doing it this time are slim. The second thing that you really want to look at is what kind of return are you going to get? That's based on what class property. So you just brought up hotels. Hotels, technically, are a class of property. A class property is super fancy, brand new, all the amenities. B class properties are what was a class five years ago. C class properties are where 80% of people rent. They're cheaper, they're safe, they're clean. They're usually 10, 15, maybe 20 years old. At the most they're in good repair. During a recession, they always have a wait list because people that can't afford a single family house go there. That's what you want to be looking for Solid, c-class properties.
Speaker 3:The other thing that plays into your return is what we call a waterfall. Waterfall is what kind of return is the investor offering you? We do a 70-30. 70% to our investors, 30% to us for management. What you'll see some sneaky syndicators do is year three, that will change to a 60-40. Year four, that'll go to a 50-50. About the time the building starts really cranking out money You're for, that'll go to a 50-50. About the time the building starts really cranking out money, they'll switch the return on you and take most of the returns. You don't wanna be involved with somebody like that. Those are a few things to look out for. I can give you a high level other ones, but there's a lot that goes into it. But picking a great investment will change your financial life.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So speaking of that, let's say you're just getting into the game of real estate and now you're onto the point of the contract. So how do you know whether or not you're getting a good contract or whether or not maybe you might be getting scammed? How do you know whether to really check that and make sure everything's proper? Obviously, the right answer is consult with an attorney. But what are those little things that, just from an obvious standpoint, you should be able to identify with a good contract in real estate versus a bad contract? I think that's a super important question for a lot of our audience.
Speaker 3:So that's really interesting. The contract itself I wouldn't be as worried about. I would be more worried about have they done this before? So anyone can say whatever they want, but you can ask them hey, can you send me some of your past deals that you've done? Can you put me in touch with three people who have invested in your past deals? Those are questions that they should easily be able to answer. If you guys ask us for that, I have an email ready to go to fire off that has three of our past deals, three of our past investors. It shows the wins and losses and it puts you in touch with people that have nothing to do directly with me. They know me through investing with us. They know what we've returned.
Speaker 3:That's the first and easiest. The next one is you can actually run a check. So if they have their LLC set up, which they would need to have, you can just call and check on the LLC. You can see when it was started. You can see how much like do they have a bank account under it. You can see kind of the background of the LLC. That's going to give you some idea. If it was created yesterday, maybe you shouldn't invest there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's good advice. You want to use your history, you want to use what you know 100%. And I wanted to circle back on, for instance, the Florida properties. Right, so why would somebody like Patrick, but David or Donald Trump, why might they have a house in Palm Beach? Why, why do they still have it? Is it knowing that you're going to get, you know, natural disasters and hurricanes and you're going to have to pay for the insurance? Is it because you can take that as a loss? I mean, what is the real reason that so many wealthy billionaires, multimillionaires, will invest in Florida still? And those places are at high risk.
Speaker 3:So Florida does a couple things. One, if you're there six months and a day, it's your state of residence, which means you don't have to pay your state income tax. That's a big benefit. That's why Grant Cardone left California and went to Florida, because he was in California. He's getting whacked at like 28% and he's like, yeah, I want a 30% raise and they kept raising taxes in California. So he's like screw it, I'm going to Florida. Similar weather, no state tax. So that's the first piece.
Speaker 3:The second piece you talked about Trump. So, without being hyperpolitical, trump put into place some laws called the Jobs Act. What the Jobs Act allows you to do is rapidly depreciate your properties. The reason this is like love him or hate him. This is a brilliant strategy to get the economy moving by rapid depreciation. What that means if I own a building, I can depreciate the building not the land, but the building against my taxes. It's over 27 and a half years, so I can take the value of the building and break that up over 27 and a half years and take that as a loss against my taxes. What they're saying is hey, we know that the countertops, the stoves, the different things in the building are going to lose their value and need replaced. So we're giving you a tax break against that to help offset that cost.
Speaker 3:What the JOBS Act did was allowed accelerated depreciation. So instead of 27 years, you got it in five years. Now what did this do? This made it so that it was in my best interest to go buy a building, depreciate it in five years, take all that tax advantage, keep that money in my pocket so I'm out spending it. And then what happens? At the end of five years? I need to sell the building and buy a new building, because if you want to pay tax when you sell it, you would still have to pay that tax. You get all of that tax recouped to the government, but if I 1031 exchange it, I don't pay any tax. What does this do? This means every five years I'm selling my property so I can keep getting that tax break. I basically take all the tax depreciation out of this property. I sell it, I buy a new property. I take five years of tax out of that. Now I'm selling it. It gets the economy moving.
Speaker 3:So, going back to why does Trump own in Florida? He bought that building. Whether you're talking like whatever he owns down there, he can rapidly depreciate it and offset his costs. Number one. Number two if he's there six months in a day, that is his primary state of residence. He no longer has to pay state income tax. And third reason is Florida is actually a good place for appreciation, which is really what you're going after. People want to live in Florida. Now we always recommend when you buy real estate, buy for the cash flow and you want the appreciation on the back end. But if you can only have one, you want cash flow. In Florida you can get both, but somebody in their situation. They're more looking at how can I buy an expensive asset that will appreciate and give me a huge tax break? They're not looking for cash flow. They're in a different situation.
Speaker 1:So why might that be? Why might somebody like Trump look for more of the tax breaks versus the cash flow? Is it just because, hey, I've been in real estate my entire life, made billions of dollars? Now I'm just looking for a safe haven to keep it going.
Speaker 3:Pretty much that's exactly so if he buys something let's just play around with this for a second let's say he buys an 80 unit apartment building that is going to make him $4 million over a five-year period. Now he's going to get some depreciation in there. He's going to get some of that. Or he can buy a place that is going to massively appreciate because it is a bigger, more expensive place. He can buy a $30 million property that's beachfront. That's probably gonna go up by 20% over the next five years and he gets all of that tax break. So if he buys a $30 million property and they say the property is worth 20 million, that means that he gets 20 million off his taxes over the next five years. He's gonna get a better tax break there than he would with the apartments.
Speaker 3:It really depends on what his income situation is. I would guess that he has plenty of cash flow coming in from his multifamily. I don't know. He didn't share his taxes, sadly, so we can't put our eyes on that. But that is my guess. I don't know a hundred percent. I know Grant Cardone just kind of pulled that uh where he he was selling his beachfront property because he had done some fix ups and some renovations. He got massive appreciation and he had taken all the tax depreciation out of it.
Speaker 1:Smart, yeah, and that's where it should be done, you know that's the research I've done, um for the most part, and and that's where it should be done. You know that's the research I've done, um for the most part, and so that's why I'd like to have experts like you on, because obviously you know what you're talking about. Right and again, um, in terms of the 1031 tax exchange, let's, in layman's terms, as a beginner, what should some? What is a 1031 tax exchange? How does that make a difference in somebody's investing?
Speaker 3:Sure. So 1031 tax exchange. All that means is when you sell the property at the end, if you just sell the property, you're going to get hit with taxes. If you 1031 exchange it, it means that you are taking all of the profit and all the proceeds out of that property and you are buying another similar property. Similar means if it's an apartment building, you're buying an apartment building. If it's a single family house, you're buying a single family house. If you're buying land, you're buying land Similar to similar. That's the basis of it.
Speaker 3:You never actually take ownership of the money. This is the one you cannot put in your bank account. So when you sell it, when you go to the closing table, you're going to say, hey, it's going to my 1031 custodian, you're going to pay them a small fee, they're going to hold the money and they will put it in your next investment. This keeps the money moving in the economy. That's the whole point, Instead of you just putting it into your pocket. Economy that's the whole point, instead of you just putting it into your pocket.
Speaker 3:Now, something that's interesting. You kind of touched on Donald Trump, the idea of infinite banking, where you have a large asset and, instead of earning income. You borrow against the asset. If the asset let's say you have a real estate portfolio worth $5 million If that portfolio is going up at 12% a year and you borrow against it and you pay yourself back at 5%, you can borrow that 100, let's say it's 100 grand. You borrow 100 grand, you're paying it back at 5% interest, but it's appreciating at 12%. There's a negative there. You're basically getting that money for free. You're paying yourself $100,000 because it is a loan. There is no tax. You're paying it back within that year. But what's really paying it back is the appreciation on the portfolio. The portfolio appreciation pays back that loan. The next year you borrow another $100,000. Then you borrow another $100,000. This is what the wealthy do and that's how they don't have any tax because they're not making any income. They're borrowing into assets that they have built. You can do the same thing very easily with real estate.
Speaker 1:And so, since we're talking about leveraging a little bit, what are some things we should look for as investors, as new investors in particular, when it comes to leveraging? What to watch out for, what are some of those mistakes that people often make with over-leveraging, and how do you know whether or not you are over-leveraging?
Speaker 3:Credit cards. So I've seen a lot of people just take the credit card out and like swipe it to buy stuff that's supposedly an asset. Um, that's. I mean there are a couple different ways I could go with that. Question people that you need to build something that is worth money, like worth wealthy money. Right, a couple hundred grand is not going to get you to the point that you can borrow against it because it's not a big enough asset. So how do you get there? You have to buy something that appreciates in your sleep. Real estate does that really well. I've seen people try to buy art. I've seen people try to buy cars, try to buy watches. Stick to what you know. I'm not saying that you can't make money in watches. I'm not saying you can't make money in art. You can, but you need to be an expert in it. Real estate is one of the easiest classes to invest in and it's also one of the most forgiving. Get a home inspection, get a home warranty those two things are going to protect you if anything major happens. Get good insurance Is. Get a home warranty. Those two things are going to protect you if anything major happens. Get good insurance.
Speaker 3:Is it free to play this game? No, it is not. Do you need to be wealthy to play it? No, do you need to have a good job? Yeah, actually you don't. I'm going to take that back. It works easier if you have a good job and you have some savings. If you don't have a good job and you don't have any savings, you can still go do the owner finance route or go do the wholesale route to get started.
Speaker 3:I know people who have built up great portfolios through owner financing. I was one of them when I started. I started. I started. We didn't get into this into my story. I started in 2001. I read Rich Dad, poor Dad. I was in college. I got fired from my job bartending. I went out. I read this book. I was like I'm gonna get started. Took me six months to get my first owner finance place. Within the next three years I bought more than 50 properties, almost all of them owner financed. I just learned how to have those conversations. I sold everything in 2005 and 2006. I ended up as a working in Vail, back in restaurants, went to Tony Robbins and I was like why am I doing this? Like I know how to do something way better. I need to stop being a ski bum. I need to get on like, get my game going, and that's how.
Speaker 1:I'm here. Yeah, you know it's funny. I actually usually start my podcast with the story, so I apologize for that. I definitely I'll probably end up pushing that little clip right to the beginning, cause I think it's always important to start with that story and where you know successful people like yourself started right, cause you ain't successful until you've been through the ringer, until you've taken the losses, until you've taken some hits, and so definitely very important there.
Speaker 1:And so, when it comes to some of those bigger investments, that or like the market today, for example, where do you see the market going? I mean, like you said before, we're probably going through an 08, 09 situation, something similar to that. What do you see kind of happening in these next few months? Right Again, you don't have to get too political. But what do you project? Or just go through a couple of different scenarios, what do you think might happen if Trump wins, perhaps with real estate market and then Kamala, or in that sense, without being too try to be, try to not be too political, or you be as political as you want.
Speaker 3:No, no, it's all good. Well, okay, first off, we saw the apartment building game got really interesting earlier this year. So what happened is, in apartments and larger loans, you can take what's called a bridge loan. This is usually a two to three year loan that people take expecting the property to appreciate. Well, what happened is because interest rates jumped so quickly. This is one of the fastest times in history for interest rates. When that happened, what happened is people could not get enough cash out of the property to refinance. In order to refinance, you have to be at 90% occupancy and you have to have around 30% in equity available. Because the interest rate changed, people couldn't get out of their loans. This led to people like mass foreclosure.
Speaker 3:Foreclosures don't happen the same way in multifamily properties. The bank continues to run the property. What it causes is people had to sell the properties at a small loss or break even. This made for a huge opportunity for us. Nate and I were out buying everything that we possibly could for the last six to eight months. We got some phenomenal deals because of it.
Speaker 3:That is starting to tail off because a lot of those have worked their way through the market, but there's still some there. That's one thing that happened in multifamily, in single family. What's really interesting, we've seen like there's a lot going on. It's stagnation. We've seen inventory grow because people are not buying, especially in middle-class housing Luxury housing. People are still buying because there's cash, but in middle-class housing Luxury housing people are still buying because there's cash, but in middle-class housing we've seen inventory grow and sales start to slip. What happens when inventory gets high enough? Eventually pricing comes down. There are two things going on with pricing right now. One is people bought in 2001 and 2002, they got some equity on paper, but now that equity is evaporating because they have to lower the price. If there's not enough room to go down, we're eventually we're reaching. There are people who bought two years ago that now have to sell because they lost their job, because the economy is changing right. They either lost their job, they got downsized, whatever, not to minimize those people, but they've had something happen. Those people don't have enough equity to take a price cut and they're not able to sell their house.
Speaker 3:Now the Biden administration stepped in and they said we're going to stop foreclosures. If you apply through this form on a site, we will not allow you to be foreclosed on. All of those houses are sitting Now. Not everybody knows about that anti-foreclosure. They're supposedly going to resubsidize, redo the loan after the election. It expires in February, so they timed it so that whoever gets elected is going to have to deal with this, which is kind of interesting. Not that many people know about it. I do think it's a decent thing because we don't need to see a bunch of foreclosures. But that's what happens in the marketplace and that's how the market corrects itself. When you're holding the places up from being foreclosed on, you're supporting people that now cannot afford that. You're stopping the economy from fixing itself. It will eventually correct.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so people have said you know. Even Warren Buffett, even he had said, you know, invest in, invest. When the market goes down, Prices, houses will be on a discount.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we have seen a lot of. We've seen distressed stuff come up. We've also. So we monitor credit, we monitor credit cards, we monitor late payments on houses 30, 60, 90-day late payments and we measure car repos. All of those are up by a lot. House late payments are up about 50% a little over 50%, depending where you're looking.
Speaker 3:Credit cards went from. This is like an interesting side note. Pre-covid, america had close to the lowest amount they'd ever had in the bank. In the bank, debt levels were mid. Most people weren't maxed out on credit cards. They were living paycheck to paycheck. The start of COVID saw a dip and then we saw the highest amount in savings we have ever seen Coming out of COVID. Everybody spent like no tomorrow. So we saw savings go down to the lowest amount we had ever seen in history. We also saw credit card. Then, because of the inflation period, credit cards are all now maxed out.
Speaker 3:For the most part, people have been spending on credit cards waiting for the economy to adjust, not realizing the economy is not going to adjust. This crushes us. So that's why you're starting to see the car payments Car payment. Not that long ago, average car payment was 300 bucks. Average car payment now is almost 600. It's killing people and now they're all waking up and they're screaming about it, but it's too late. So what do I think we're going to see in the market? All of those things are leading to distressed sellers in the single family marketplace. We're going to see wait lists for rentals.
Speaker 3:And then who gets elected? This is going to be an interesting one. So, two months before election, we will see spending start to slow down. We will see investment definitely start to slow down. We will see investment definitely start to slow down. My guess, if Republicans get elected after the election, we will see the floodgates open, because there are a lot of wealthy people right now sitting in cash. They're sitting there waiting, and especially at 5%, which is what you can get in a good bank account now they're sitting in cash, they're waiting. I know so many people that I've talked to for investment that are like it's not quite there yet. We haven't seen like it's bad, but it's not like blood is not in the streets yet the next six months. I think we're going to see that and then I think, following the election, if Republicans get in, we'll see the floodgates open. Democrats get in. We'll see the floodgates open. Democrats get in. It depends what their initiatives are.
Speaker 3:Biden put out that he was going to try to do it with 1031 tax exchange. He's not going to do that. He put it out to get a headline because he himself uses it Most. Like most politicians whether you're Republican or Democrat are invested in real estate. They use that as a wealth tool. That's what it's there for. They're not going to do away with it, but it's funny that he called that out.
Speaker 3:He also proposed nationwide rent control. This is right before he withdrew from the election and I think it was to try to make a splash. There is no way you are going to enforce nationwide rent control One of the silliest things I've ever seen. What was interesting I don't know if you saw Grant Cardone's response to it they were going to implement a 5% rent control cap. Okay, if I get my rental prices by 5% a year, I'm still doing fine. It's where you try to put it in at like 1% or 2%, or you say that there is a fine for turning over a unit, which is what they've done in California. That's where you start to get into trouble. So if Biden gets well, it's not Biden. If Democrats Kamala get elected, it's going to depend on what their policies are. I still think we'll see some investment where I think it will really help if Trump does get elected, especially for real estate.
Speaker 3:For just talking real estate the JOBS Act, which allows for advanced depreciation that has been that expires. It's right now. It is at 80 percent. It's going to go down to 60 percent. That's going to go down to 40 percent, 80%. It's going to go down to 60%. That's going to go down to 40%. Um, if that, if he does not get back in, if he gets back in, he has made the commitment that he's going to make it a permanent part of law.
Speaker 3:If that happens, that would be one of the best things for the economy because it causes churn. It causes things to be bought and sold, which is what causes a red hot economy to be bought and sold, which is what causes a red hot economy. So how do we get there through that? That's kind of my take on it. I think we'll see apartment buildings.
Speaker 3:Right now there are still some great deals to be had as well as some great rates, so rates come through. Sorry, I'm going to take a step back. The reason there are great rates in multifamily most multifamily loans are assumable. So if there was a good rate five years ago which there was and they now need to sell it, they can sell it to us, we can assume the loan, we get the new tax breaks, they get out of this position, they can 1031 and do a new one and we get to get that low interest rate. So the one that we have in Kentucky we're getting at 4%. Those are all over the place right now. If you know where to look and if you know how to do owner financing, Thank you for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that was a great response too, by the way, to a question today that would just make the world go crazy, right, but honestly, it's an important question. I think it's important and it's really. I try to not make questions like that political, because you know, elections, whether we like it or not, do affect the market, right. They do affect whether the prices of houses go up or down, so I think that's important to that was important to hit on that for sure. Now one last little question when it comes to softwares and good websites that can keep track of stuff and help you automate maybe it's bookkeeping what are some of those best softwares that you would recommend to help just kind of? Just kind of streamline your process a little bit, so you don't have to do the whole learning curve and figure it out yourself?
Speaker 3:Man, depending on what you need big, big like asterisks there, right, if you need a sales funnel, I would say go high level. I used to be a huge ClickFunnels guy. I would choose go high level. If you need a funnel, a funnel is for selling stuff. If you need a CRM, it's helpful as well. It's got a decent CRM in it, depending. If you don't know what a CRM is, you probably don't need one. If you need a CRM and you don't want to mess around with all that stuff, I use a program called Streak for my Gmail. There's also one called I think it's called MixMatch. Both of those plug into Gmail and work really well as a CRM right inside of Gmail. They're also free for up to 500 contacts, which a lot of small business people like. That works really well. Those two I like a lot. I also. I mean, if it's just a simple one page website, just use Wix or just. I mean, I'm complicated enough. I know how to build a WordPress site. I went to school for art and web design, um, so I can do that stuff. If you just need a simple one page site, though, um, I would just look at like Wix. You can build really cheap, really fast. Have it up, it's done. Um, some other things that I really like I'm trying to think of, like my daily tech stack, if you will. I use Apple Notes for pretty much everything.
Speaker 3:I was a PC guy for 25 years. I built PCs. One of my first businesses back in college was building PCs. I went to a Mac. They ran a special three years ago now Gosh, yeah, it'll be three years this fall, so two and a half years ago. They ran a special in December where you could try a Mac if it was your first time buying a Mac and if you didn't like it, you had 60 days to return it for the full purchase price back. And I had so many people tell me how much I would love using a Mac and how great it was I was already on iPhone I said, okay, I'll try it, I don't have anything left to lose.
Speaker 3:It was time to get a new computer, and what I really wanted and I tried to get to for years with a PC was a laptop, because I travel all the time was a laptop that could run multiple monitors and do everything that I needed it to. I had a five grand laptop that fried itself in like a year and a half due to overheating. That's how it grand laptop that fried itself in like a year and a half due to overheating. I went and got a MacBook pro. Ran way better.
Speaker 3:It's super small, I can pick it up, I can take it anywhere. Right now I have four monitors hooked up. I have like all of my video stuff. I have everything in the world. It runs everything flawlessly. It also the. I know people are like yeah, but I like the pc, just try it. If you like your ipad, your mac is going to work a lot like it.
Speaker 3:The thing that I love I can get my text messages. So one monitor is all just communication. Um, it has slack open. Um, it's got my message. Uh, my messages, like you would get on your phone, appear on my computer makes it really easy. Um, that piece I absolutely love. I can also share files really easily. It's all in the cloud, but I can also just shift it to my phone.
Speaker 3:But going back to apple notes, apple notes is one of my. I use it I don't know 100 times a day, probably, if I'm, I'm walking, if I have thoughts. You might've heard of second brain. This answer might take longer than you want. But if you've heard of like the second brain, we all have thousands of thoughts a day. The successful people know how to distill their thoughts and take action on them. If I have a thought that I feel is useful, I'll open my phone, I'll press it. I'll take a quick note that appears on my computer twice a week. I will go through my quick notes right now. If I'm looking at them, I have 41 quick notes. Those are things that just came out of my brain Two times a week. I'll just sit down and I'll go through those and I'll put them into folders. Sometimes they're projects that I'm working on, a real estate project, a social media piece that I want to do, a question that I want to answer, a chapter for my book, things like that. Sometimes it will go into other things that I'm working on. I'm just reading through the stuff that's there so that all gets moved around.
Speaker 3:The second big thing that I do with Apple Notes this is probably my favorite app. I don't know if it's my favorite, but it's one of them. It's called ReadWise, so I read all the time. I think everybody should dedicate some time every day to reading. I used to read books. You can see my books behind me here. I used to have a ton of paper books. I like paper books better, but now I read on Kindle because I can highlight the thing, like whatever, with my finger and I can send it to my Apple Notes.
Speaker 3:So now I have if I look at my book notes, I've got more than 400 books that have tagged notes and they're hashtagged. So if it's a personal development story, if it's personal development, if it's a story that I use, if it's a quote that I want to talk about, if it's something I need to implement, if it's something I want to think about, they all have tags. So what I'll do? They go in my quick notes, then my two days a week I'll go through and I'll pull those notes and I'll put them in the book. So, tools of the Titans, one of my favorite books. I've probably reread it five times because I always pull something new out of it. I love that book. There's so much in there and every time, every time, there's something new that like pops out. I'm like every day, right, that I probably have 50 pages of notes from that book. But that book has also made me a ton of money. It's got so much in it, right, but that anytime I want to reference it, I can do one of two things in Apple Notes. I can look under a hashtag and it'll pull up from all the books, all the stuff it also. Then, if I want to go through, like okay, what did I learn from Tim Ferriss, I can go through and look at all of that.
Speaker 3:The other thing do you watch YouTube videos? I'm guessing you probably do. Oh yeah, oh yeah. So ReadWise can open the video. It has a transcript of it that follows the video and you can take notes in ReadWise. Alongside of it it's got a pane where you can just type notes. Those notes get transferred to my Apple Notes and I tag them the same way I tag the book notes, because we've all watched a million YouTube videos on how to do stuff. But then we think about how to do it and we're like I wish I could find that it also timestamps it so that if I click on it it will take me to the video exactly where the guy was talking about it. It's one of the most useful things to the video exactly where the guy was talking about it. It's one of the most useful things I use it for podcast research all the time.
Speaker 1:Readwise is awesome. Yeah, I use it too. I use a lot of the same platforms you're using Yep, my Apple Notes, same thing. I actually use ClickUp. But I love ChatGPT 4.0. I think that works really good because now I can just scan a document that you just run through. It's beautiful. It's beautiful Luma AI that can, like, create this, create a picture, create a video out of, like a still picture. It's pretty insane, just amazing technology today. So that's why I like to talk about the software a little bit too, because you know, even with real estate investing, you got to keep your leads in check. You got to keep your leads in order and you got to be able to scrape for new leads, right. So that's why I think it's important to cover that a little bit. Is there anything else, any other great real estate advice that you can tell us? That I didn't ask. I try to ask as many good questions as I can, but you know there's there's going to be questions I wish I would have answered and I didn't.
Speaker 3:I mean we covered. We covered a lot of the stuff. If you're just getting started, the thing that I would tell you is just pick up the phone and have a conversation. We have a guy that's in our coaching program. We coach real estate as well. We have a guy that's in our coaching program and this is the story of most people. They get really excited to start and they're like okay, okay, I've watched all the videos. We have about 60 hours of training content. I've watched all the videos, I've done all the worksheets, I'm ready to go. What do I do? You pick up the phone and you make a phone call. Oh, I can't do that. Sure you can. Oh, I can't do that.
Speaker 3:It usually will take people anywhere between, like the short end, 30 days, all the way up to like six months, and then they'll start having conversations and the fear is the same for everybody. What are these guys going to think about me? I don't know enough. Oh, my goodness, they're going to laugh at me. None of that stuff is true and most you're going to get hung up on. Who cares? The people that you're talking to want to sell their house. If you're talking to a landlord, they are not going to be upset about somebody saying you know, all this sounds great about your property. Would you think about selling it? No, I think I'm good holding it, okay. Thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 3:That's how I made the 50 deals I did in three years. Was that conversation? And this was before we had any of this stuff that we're talking about now. I used to. I was the only college kid I knew that got the newspaper. I would get the newspaper. I would put it with thumbtacks on my kitchen wall so I had to look at it because every day I would look at I'm really visual. I would look at it and I'd be like crap, I haven't called the leads. I would call every single for rent ad in the paper and have that conversation. Tell me a little bit about the place. Oh yeah, that sounds great.
Speaker 3:By the way, I don't know if you'd ever thought about this. Would you ever think about selling? I'm actually an investor. I'm just getting started. I have a couple of properties. I'm looking for the next one. I just wanted to get to know you a little bit. Within a year I talked to every landlord and they would laugh because this is back when we had caller ID and answering machines. They would see my caller ID and they'd be like, hey, you called about my other property like four months ago. We're like, okay, well, do you want to sell this one? Do you want to sell that one? And then a really funny thing happened about two years in people started calling me when they were ready to sell because they knew that I would buy. I had stuck with it long enough to see the results. So, going back to what question didn't you ask?
Speaker 3:How you get started is as simple as picking up the phone and sticking to it. We've had, at this point, more than a thousand people come through our trainings. We know the people that are going to be successful, usually within three days, the things that we look for, the things that make people successful. It's usually six months until they get their first property. They usually get their second property within three months. Then they usually get their third property within a month. Then they usually do two properties within the next two to three months, but it's that first six months window.
Speaker 3:Anyone can watch videos. Knowledge is cheap. We live in this. So this is an Elon Musk quote, and we could go for a while on this. Elon Musk had this quote where we are basically cyborgs. He talked about this on Joe Rogan and it was hilarious. He was like we're basically a cyborg when we have, when we want a question answered, we pick up our phone, we type it in or we say you know, hey, whatever answer this question. Now we have ChatGPT who answers it. How long is it before ChatGPT takes over all of our AI talk software? Right, if you saw the Apple keynote, the next iPhone is going to be connected to ChatGPT and be on board with the iPhone. You're going to be able to ask it anything and it will give you a reasonable answer.
Speaker 3:We live in an age where we have infinite resource when it comes to information. What we do not have, and what will continue to be the hardest thing is taking action. If you take action, you will get results. You might not get the result that you want. Let's think about it as going to the gym.
Speaker 3:I'm super passionate about this, because taking action is the only thing that separates the haves from the have-nots. If you go to the gym and you're like you know what, I want really big biceps and you start doing a bunch of squats, you realize I'm not getting big biceps. Maybe I should try something different. At least you're at the gym, you've built the routine, you're there, you're doing something, so start doing squats. Start doing something different. That's the same thing here. If you start calling landlords, you might talk to 10 or 15 of them and never get your script right. If you keep at it, our brain is a magical computer that will figure out the right things to say to get the result that you want and, before you know it, you will have a house. It is not that hard to do it, but action is the thing that separates everybody, and only you know whether or not you can take action. It, but you can't. Action is the thing that separates everybody, and only you know whether or not you can take action, like you, the listener.
Speaker 1:If you think you can take action, that's absolutely great advice. For sure, 100%, because it is true. Elon Musk did say that these little phones are an extension of us. You know these phones are we really are a cyborg, and so because we have that information at our fingertips, right Like you, have unlimited amounts of leads without you even having to get a software. Really because you can use Instagram, go on Realtor, type in Realtor, and then you look up people on Facebook and you'll find a whole list of Realtors. Maybe some of them have received hundreds and hundreds of messages.
Speaker 1:But you know, the point is about the value proposition, putting yourself out there, because what I've learned just from being a full time cop and a part time cop? Eventually, the longer you're sitting in a nine to five, kind of just waiting for more money and kind of hoping everything works out, it just puts you in this bad position where you're not really safe. You know you have to think and you have to think bigger. Right Like you, don't like an artist can make a painting for what was it.
Speaker 1:It was like a real painting that's I don't know who it was, but he painted like a blue line through this entire painting. That's it. That was all he did and he sold it for like a million dollars, and it's just. It just goes to show that you know everything is truly value proposition and what people want at that time. And if you can understand that, you can make so much more money, not just for yourself but for your family, which is even more important right, the generational wealth. So I definitely think that's so important. And, yeah, you know, contact your leads, take action, because it works. They'll make way more money, especially, you know, with an agency like mine. For example, a lot of our clients we the lowest we'll typically charge is about $1,000 a month. So the lowest we're making is $1,000 a month and that's pretty good. So you have to think of it in terms of that and, especially with real estate, in terms of the long-term game. And is there anything that you would like to promote or any kind of programs, books, anything like that?
Speaker 3:Sure, I'll just give the quick rundown, stevecoffee. That's the full URL S-T-E-V-E dot. C-o-f-f-e-e. There are three things you can do there. One we have our guide for how to get started in passive real estate investing. It's called the Five Landmines of Passive Real Estate. That is completely free. It's an ebook. It comes with some videos as well. That is free.
Speaker 3:Whether you invest with me or whether you invest with somebody else, I don't really care. You should be investing in real estate, if at all passively, if you have the income to support it. So that's the first one. The second one is we have a nonprofit where we go in and we teach financial literacy in schools. If there is some way that I can help you with that, we also do it at businesses, anywhere that people need help with financial literacy. I think it is the biggest thing that plagues our country right now. We've got all these people running around. They can name the latest sports stars, they can name the latest Instagram people, but they don't understand how to set up a simple keyword, simple budget that will set them up for financial freedom. It is super easy and anyone can do it, but nobody is doing it. So we want to help people with that If you'd like me to come speak.
Speaker 3:I've spoken more than 800 events. I love being on stage and I'm pretty good at it. You can book a call with me there. And, last but not least, if you're interested in investing with us stevecoffee, you can book time on my calendar. I'll go through our latest deals. I'll show you why it would or would not be a good fit for you and I can point you in the right direction.
Speaker 1:All righty, thank you very much for coming on the show today. I can't wait to have you on again. This was a very important interview, ladies and gentlemen, for you. I want to have experts on like these so you can learn more, so you can make better investments in your life and so you can get ahead, especially during times like these. We're going through World War Three financial collapse, so it's important to be prepared always. So, again, thank you so much for coming on the show. Hey, it is my pleasure. Absolutely, yep and yep. I will create some content for this, obviously, and we'll probably post this within about a month forward from today.
Speaker 3:Okay, if you reach out and you email me, I'm happy to promote it however I can. We have a newsletter. We have a pretty good email list. I'm happy to put it out, happy to get you some coverage.
Speaker 1:Absolutely yeah. And last thing I'll say is we also do marketing for agencies like yours and their investment companies like yours. So if you guys ever want to get just a little bit as a little bit more social media omnipresence out there, we can always help with that too okay, I appreciate it. Thanks so much, alrighty take it easy, have a good day. You so much, thank you.
