From $900 to $4.5M Net Worth by Age 34 with Robert Jones

this is the bigger pockets podcast show 336 you're listening to bigger pockets radio simplifying real estate for investors large and small if you're here looking to learn about real estate investing without all the hype you're in the right place stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from bigger pockets calm your home for real estate investing online what's going on everyone this is Brandon host of the BiggerPockets podcast here with my co-host mr. David green what's up buddy not much man I'm worried one of my teachers I just bought when I was hanging out Aloha fancy fancy stuff and speaking of aloha today we are actually doing our show here in Hawaii sort of you'll hear a little bit more about what today's show is setup it's basically I've got our guest live in the studio with us he's coming in here in a few minutes a buddy of mine named Robert it's gonna be an awesome show I think you guys are gonna love it but David is still in California so you know what's up in California David oh it's beautiful out here the home-buying season is ramping up which is funny because we actually have a guest today who's a real estate agent and a really good one and there's a ton of information about what to look for in an agent how to have an age of finding deals what to avoid in addition to amazing advice on how to build wealth or real estate which this guy's done a great job of there yeah yeah it's it's pretty cool so I'm pumped I think you're gonna love this episode in fact today on the show I know it sounds like he's coming in a few seconds but in reality we already recorded this thing but though we are talking about all things like he talks about how he put together some no money down or low money down deals using something called cross-collateralization we walked through that in-depth how that's done he talked about how he got this amazing deal you're gonna be blown away by his deal deep dive on how good of a deal was but how not good of a deal was when he first bought it also see his trip to the Caribbean he spent three months guys sailing around the Caribbean or Caribbean depending on how you say that really really cool story there and then also why you may not want to become a real estate agent he actually is a real estate agent but explains why you may and why you may not so I think those are all like good points that he makes today so hang tight for that before we get to that let's get to today's high debut one take it yes today's quick tip we talked with Robert about the importance of finding your why look here's the reality for a long time real estate investing was a niche thing that only a few people could get into because they had the knowledge that you didn't have well the internet has changed that and bigger pockets in particular has changed that even more now there is no excuse for why you're not investing in real estate or growing your wealth or real estate because the information is out there and the knowledge is available what holds most people back is bravery now you could try to be braver just by willing yourself to do it but that's not gonna work for most people what does work for people is having a very big why not the letter y but the word wh-why what matters to you what drives you what are your goals what is propelling you what is motivating you they're all words that are describing the thing that's gonna push you through whatever your fears your excuses or your concerns really are yeah so if you find yourself not taking the action that you know we're telling you that you need to don't beat yourself up about it sit down have a long walk through the woods Cal Newport style whatever you got to do and ask yourself what is my why what motivates me what drives me and is it worth getting over the excuses that I have to stop me from taking action with deep stuff I just want to jump on in the show this is a fantastic show so let's get right into it without further ado let's introduce you to Robert and Jones all right welcome to the BiggerPockets podcast Robert how you doing I'm doing great how about you I'm doing good this is weird I don't think I've ever done a podcast directly across from somebody and very strange and then I feel honored good and David's over here so for those who don't know David is actually in what California Robert our guest today and I are here in Maui sitting across the table from each other spitting at each other while we're talking so yeah it looks like you guys are speed-dating it's kind of creepy pretty much are it's a good fit I can tell it is it is I like long walks on a beach and real estate how about you I like big bushy beards and I cannot lie I like big beards there you go all right so Robert and I know each other because I am good friends with here sister and brother-in-law in fact they're like two of my favorite people entire world a total digital minimalists which is funny cuz we at Cal Newport on like they're like perfect digital Manila minimalists and I look up to them a lot but anyway for years Catherine your sister has been like you need to talk to Robert you need to get to know him you need like you guys are the same person yeah and so we pretty much are the same person just I have a longer beard you have a much more impressive beard thank you I don't know it's impressive or dirty but whatever - all right so we're gonna go into your story today cuz honestly I don't know that much of it other than I know you do real estate and that you're kind of like me apparently and David's here on the camera being awesome so with that how'd you get into real estate yeah so I started in 2008 which fortuitous timing yes ya know a good thing we get to start no 5 and that was in the car business in my previous career and the service side of things reached a very noticeable glass ceiling after multiple promotions probably nine cars ya know in the service side so if your car was broke and you came and talked to me with the intent of managing and owning a dealership at some point okay well that's where you met your wife yep met my wife at the dealership came with a broken car and the rest is history as I say yeah I can't fix your car back fix your heart yeah something like that so yeah I hit a real noticeable ceiling and growing up I was always buying and selling stuff started with bicycles and trailers and dirt bikes then cars then trucks and my dad pretty much told me hey look at something with a larger profit margin it makes them you're great at selling things regret it and making deals you should get into real estate and really just to shut him up I went and had lunch with real estate legend Larry Kendall the founder of the group real estate he's known nationally for real estate sales training all that and like I said just to get my dad to shut up and if you've spent any time with that individual by the end of lunch I figured hey I should sell real estate for a living okay so you became an agent first correct okay yeah I knew nothing about investing really at all I didn't even know that it was a path that I could take so decided to go into sales first and then quickly after that got introduced and eyes opened a little bit that's cool that's cool okay so almost David by the way since David's off on the camera today or on the on the computer screen today if you have anything about say David just yell at me or jump in but although I'll just keep asking some questions so I took her walk us through that journey from I'm now a real estate agent to now I bought a property your first deal yeah so well very first house bought when we really young parents said hey you know smart people will buy a house so about my first house must 20 before I got in real estate that was the days if literally you have a pulse you can get a loan chair looking back at the deal if it's pretty pretty illegal by today's standards so own one house when I got a real estate okay three to six months into the business started doing an investment to her with one of our partners named Kevin he ran a tour just teaching other agents about investing and that's when things really you know light bulb came on red Rich Dad Poor Dad and thought hey I can buy a house with someone else to pay for him okay and I didn't click you know you can joke and they call me a slow learner but I asked the guy multiple times white let me get this right I can buy this house someone else will pay for it and I get to keep the house he's like yep and I was like okay rephrase the question in different ways like let me try this again I can buy a house without too much money down someone else to pay for it I get to keep the house and the third time I rephrase the question he's like okay listen dummy this is the way it works and that's all I needed to know you know I'm not a I wouldn't say that I'm a hard details guy but the core concept at that point I went home told Sarah hey we need to go out buy as many house as we can that's awesome where was this all at so I'm in Fort Collins Colorado so we're about an hour north of Denver so those familiar with the market know there are price points a little different than yeah well it's not David Green you know scale of one to ten like a David Green's of ten yeah Detroit's like a 1 we're probably like a hard six hard 7 yeah we a what is everything well uh little area that we started off talking about speed dating and now we're waiting you by numbers yeah our average single family price points about 425 right now Wow which is crazy for like the Midway and not that cars the Midwest but it kind of in like it's yeah when I think originally before I knew Denver prices I thought like Denver and Oklahoma City in Kansas City oh they're all the same right like but Denver is so much different which again just is more evidence why it's so important to know your market and not just rely on like just general things but why is that Denver and the surrounding metro area why is that so crazy any idea you know it's something we talked about a bit the the quality of life and the desirability of living there the listeners familiar if you're not FHFA gov is a website where you can look at since 1991 they track prices quarterly appreciation annual appreciation five-year appreciation in northern Colorado is an unstoppable machine we've seen three hundred and sixty three percent appreciation since 1991 which second to DC puts us at the strongest mark in the entire country so it's a I think it's a combination of quality of life desirability now we don't see the ebbs and flows of some other markets see so we don't see the meteoric Rises in a single year but for sustained performance I mean I feel like we're living in the holy grail for real estate yeah all right so walk us through the very first investment property then what was it yeah so we we come from pretty modest means as a lot of your listeners and people you've interviewed my wife looked back at our checking account recently and when we started in real estate in 2008 we had $900 in our checking account and as a first year realtor coming into 2009 we couldn't use my income so my wife at the time was working at the bank making I think it was like twenty three thousand bucks a year something like that ballin so oh no we were just out of control it was you know we'd hit up the Chili's like once a quarter whoo share a meal have water so we talked to you know we talked about people that just keep hearing no we don't like the answer no so we talked to one letter no talk to another letter no talk another letter no and we found someone that yeah they'd get the loan done under Sarah's income alone which at that point in Fort Collins looking for a house under 150 thousand dollars it was quite challenging so we found at the time the most affordable single-family home in the city it was listed a hundred and forty nine thousand nine hundred dollars and the funny thing on that pre-qualification the lender called me like three weeks in and said hey you need to pay off Sarah's credit card you know she doesn't qualify the ratios I'm like okay and I said how much is it 186 bucks I was like okay cool the minimum payments 186 and he said no that's the balance the minimum payments seven dollars a month and we were that close qualifying ratios so we bought the house moved into it yeah so for us I you don't know what you don't know right so I didn't know anything about hard money anything about portfolio loans or these more creative ways to get in real estate I just knew that if I moved into the house I could do an owner-occupied loan I didn't need a big down payment and we could remodel while we're living there so we did an FHA loan which at the time it was 3% down not three and a half yep I am a licensed realtor so we were able to use my 3% Commission so we essentially got in the house for free that's awesome as we moved into the house and rented out my last house that house cashflow day entire $30 per month which I was stoked yeah in my mind I thought someone else hey there buy me a house yeah fantastic then while living in the new house we did a full floor-to-ceiling remodel while living there in nine hundred square feet including replacing the plumbing in the house so we had no plumbing for about two solid weeks shower at the gym pita bucket those character building attributes that's great yeah okay though alright so you did what a lot of people do and I want to talk on this for a second because I think it's one of the best ways to two things you did to the best strategies for getting started with real estate number one the obviously the FHA moving you know moving to a house by house three three and a half percent down especially then that alone doesn't mean it's gonna be a good deal right but well you did you bought a fixer-upper of something that needed to be a total remodel and you did the work yourself I do okay so you you use sweat equity you got in there but then the second thing you did which was cool is that you turn that first property into a rental and that's probably the number one way that I hear people get into real estate is yeah I just turn my house into a rental property so do you advise that for other people today when you're talking people your clients or or who are they yeah turn your old property in right I mean because they you're the Nagant have kind of like you gotta have them sell right because you are an agent you get money no absolutely it is a so investment real estate is a big part of my business yeah for building millionaires building investors so it is if the property makes sense which most of them do especially younger clients of mine they're living in houses that would make good sense as a rental so that is my absolute first and foremost advice yeah you know and even looking at tax strategies you still have three years to make a decision moving out of your primary yeah with capital gains rules so yeah I advise people to keep their existing home if they have the ability to yeah and in the laws related to qualification and income even for new landlords that's eased up over the last couple years so it makes that transition easier as far as qualifying for both mortgages it makes times there's more leniency there now too compared to a few years ago and if people are wondering what that means about the capital gains thing I'll explain that real quick and if I'm wrong here basically the government says hey if you live in a property two of the last five years you don't have to pay capital gains when you sell and again we're not CPAs but the gist is you're not paying cap gains if you live in the house two of the last five years it doesn't win the immediate two previous years it just means two of the last five correct so I actually did the same thing recently I lived in a house for several years sold it I may like I think was eighty five thousand dollars in profit well I should say I sold it but there was two years in between when I when I stopped living there and when I sold it made the $85,000 I still got the claim that two year thing that I lived in there to the last five it just wasn't the immediate recent to correct yes that's why you have a couple years it aside so and a lot of people ask me that question should I rent my house or should I sell it and it's it's a hard I mean I like to say yeah you should just rent it out because it gets you in the real estate but if you're in rented out and lose a hundred grand a taxes because you know maybe then you should have sold it and dumbs Runnels what you usually tell people when they say should I rent it or sell yeah ninety-five percent of the answer is keep it as a rental yep you know if they have the fortitude and the personality type that it's gonna work well and again it's a house that makes sense which in our market most houses will rent for what your mortgage is especially if you get the mortgage a few years ago and even if it's running skinny if you only owe one two three properties you can take on a little bit tighter deals as opposed to say owning ten twenty thirty so I think you could be a little more risk tolerant in the beginning on deals that might be a little tighter makes sense David you got anything you want to jump in with I have a couple questions I can ask if that's all right sure sure all right so one of the things you said is that you guys wanted to buy as many houses as you could once you realized what was kind of being described as house acting in a way week yes we can get a low downpayment and we can rent out part of the house you also I want to make sure I cover the strategy you talked about being an agent and using your commission for a down payment cuz not many people talk about that but that's an incredibly good strategy specifically for agents but I wanted to ask how are you avoiding over leveraging or the people who want to ask the question of well if you just buy a house every single year for the rest of your life what if you get too many of them what are you gonna do if the market turns stuff like that sure so I can say over the years our risk tolerance personally and when I say our or we it's my wife Sarah and I who owned all the properties we don't have partners outside of our marriage the our risk tolerance so in real estate or otherwise our risk tolerance has changed significantly so when we started like I said we had a nine hundred bucks in our checking account I did research what the implications were for foreclosure or bankruptcy yeah and whether you foreclose on one house or five houses it's the same punishment yeah so in the very beginning we took out a pretty significant amount of risk and we were quite leveraged I'd say the first five properties we were 95% 100% encumbered so we took on a pretty significant risk in the beginning as we move forward as Brandon mentioned through sweat equity time in the market appreciation and just improving the properties our equity positions started growing pretty significantly and once we started having more of a net worth and our income you know all of it started increasing my risk tolerance has changed by doing those things but again buying on the front end making your deal when you buy it you know we were we weren't doing anything really creative cuz I didn't know what I didn't know at that time so we're buying properties out of the MLS just stuff where other people didn't see value but we would try by the day we close we want to have equity in it and then build equity pretty quickly upon renovations and just cleaning the place out okay yeah that makes sense so can you walk us through like the rest I mean not the rest of your journey maybe over the next few years I mean you said you were buying property so like what did that look like what kind of properties were you buying were they all in Colorado how are you financing them how are you finding them just kind of walk it over the next few years yeah so we bought the first one it was working you know like I said we were stoked about 30 bucks a month cash flow hey this is sweet we got some extra money now and but again I didn't know about bigger pockets I didn't know about these resources so my perceptual map of what's possible in real estate was still pretty limited so we became very well-versed well-versed on conventional loans and what was available in that marketplace so initially we decided hey we can move once every year which I'm not giving advice related to owner-occupied lending laws and all that you know seek your own advice on that but we were informed that if we live in a property for a full year yeah that was a safe ground we intended and we did we absolutely lived in the properties we were doing everything by the books so our goal initially was once a year twelve months in a day we'd go look for the next house we'd move into it so 2009 we bought our first rental property number two a year later we started looking and we'll dig into this one a little bit more later but we did have a unique spot where we did an owner finance deal and that was my first experience there so two months later we moved into that one we bought a triplex and we were in there for just a couple months remodeling it and I again I didn't know the rules we didn't know we didn't know and then the light bulb someone told me hey man you don't have to stay here this is not a conventional loan so literally like two three months later we found another good deal like hey we did there was no rules telling us we had to stay for an owner-occupied loan so we bought another single-family home live there literally twelve months in a day started looking for another one went out bought another house then we tried to owner occupy a triplex for our fifth property and that's in 2011 when the guideline changes shifted and they added pending underwriter discretion interesting with all I got all the conventional guidelines they just added that cloud so even if you fit in the box yeah it said pending underwriter discretion so if it felt weird to them so we got declined for the first time after a while because we were fit in the box we had like I said we had a very skilled lender that knew how to navigate through this and we got to client it but it was a killer deal we're under contract on we didn't want to lose the deal and we needed to come up then shift it to an investor loan so we needed 90 thousand bucks in three days because the seller had a higher offer he wanted to get out of a deal so he wasn't adjusting dates for us or doing us any favors so that was our first I'd say set we had done a hard money deal but our real introduction of considering more creative solutions and creative financing where we got what I feel is kind of our first hard money private loan and I'll throw some big words here we cross collide lies against a prior one in the portfolio because you can't use on investment property you can't do it first in a second but you can at the same time concurrently do a second against a prior property and then show that you have funds down for the current purchase like a turn acquisition okay walk it walk it again because that's really really good stuff and it's really deep and so I want to make sure people understand the strategy so yes so the were a few years in there so we had other properties through our own efforts and through market appreciation that started having some equity yeah so we needed to come up with 90 grand and this wasn't with conventional means I reached out to in this let me step back here the hard money conversation I know is a you know it's scary right people don't want to go ask they don't want to ask their friends for money they don't ask her family for money yeah but this was our first opportunity to dig into that yeah and the phone calls were scary initially I'd say the first three were and then they felt really good yeah because the people I started calling anybody I thought my entire data base again I didn't know there was guys online that did this for a business or there's places to find money so I just called everybody I knew that I thought had money and what I experienced through that is the people that I thought had money that didn't have the money felt really good they were they felt proud that I thought they had the money that's not all Robert thinks I'm a big guy right yeah and then some guys did have the money some weren't interested but again grateful for the call yeah really really gracious about it and within a day and a half I had three people that were willing to lend me ninety thousand bucks in second position against prior properties in our portfolio so we told them it would be a formal no to be a recorded note against that property and it wouldn't exceed whatever their threshold was for comfort of total leverage against the property yeah so the investor we ended up working with his threshold was eighty percent combined leverage okay so we didn't have enough equity in one property so we put it against two properties nice on that one we split up you know forty grand here forty grand there record the notes or forty five suddenly we had a 90 grand we bought that triplex and what another iOpener for us we were planning on moving into it and we started packing boxes and then I had another one you know I'm a slow learner it's you know having these aha moments well that well crap we we don't need to move into this yeah it's not an owner-occupied loan yep so literally we were we were packing boxes to move into the house and realized we we don't need to move into the triplex and something this is a legitimate investment loan so two weeks later we found a four-bedroom single-family house and that one made more sense to the underwriter because it's a single-family home it had a bigger bedroom count it had a larger yard for our dog we could explain it in a letter to the underwriter so I think two months later we went and bought another single-family house and then we bought another four Plex using the you know chasing our tail again with a private second against prior real estate let's say yeah we've got another four Plex and then we bought a few more after that as we were entering the journey now where we did a couple more owner-occupied as our income increased we started moving it a little bit nicer home so those ones were easy to explain yeah and our tool belt we had more tools for creative financing solutions where we started buying more intentional investment properties even through all that we still did nine moves in eight year which it was moving a lot yeah which I enjoyed it wasn't that people think oh yeah that's terrible it was fun yeah and I get you know where you're at then why not do it exactly you know it's my wife noise joke around people meet us and they're all my god your wife is a saint for her to put off with all that garbage it's like well you know our lifestyle doesn't suck now so it's yeah you know where things have changed we're and I like David you jump in here a second too but I'm we waited the boat keys yeah where did living on the boat for three months come in into the story I'm just curious it like yeah where that was that and you can explain what that was sure yeah so we cashflow is this almost five years into my sales business things were getting a little intense as far as hours worked stress level buying the rentals and all that and we had set my wife and I'd like to travel a lot we want to travel a whole lot more than we do and we started looking at properties to buy out country we looked at Mexico and all their laws down there we considered Belize Nicaragua Dominican Republic and we started looking at you know as a foreigner buying property down there and started digging into that and almost every resource we dug into I mean there's even one book my brother-in-law I read that said if you're not okay losing 100 percent of your money close the book and don't even finish reading now and for a risk tolerance standpoint of crap I'm I'm not okay with that so the risk tolerant standpoint was part of it and I thought well man if we buy a property out of the country we're gonna get really sick he going there pretty quick yeah you know well I thought we liked moving around quite a bit and we'd like to exploring different areas and we didn't want to have just one place and then on the line I found some family that was living on a boat you know when YouTube was just starting to gain traction at that Wow yeah that's pretty cool so we set a goal like hey it'd be pretty awesome to live on a boat someday and before we really cemented that goal we thought we should take it for a test drive so in 2012 like I said five years from the business we were at I think five or six properties at that point we decided to take a little sabbatical which started out a we're gonna take a week off which that's gonna be vacation won't feel like life it won't be real yeah let's do two weeks and then we talked to the guy we're talking to let's how about a month we ended up leaving for three months and we flew into Trinidad to South Venezuela and sailed all the way through the Caribbean BVI's USV is Spanish calibra all that and ended in San Juan and it doesn't suck you know as far as a test drive or our travel goal yeah with our family because we have children now it cemented in our minds this is our goal that we want to achieve so how did you do that how do you take three months off cuz you told me earlier like you just turned your cell phone now it's like yeah how do you do that and own rental property and own a real estate business and like because we're here a lot of people listening right now going oh man I would love to live in a boat or I travel gear up for a few months or I would love to just go and sit on the beach for a few month whatever people want that sabbatical that break yeah but there they couldn't even imagine like what do they do when the tenant calls and has a broken pipe like what do you use how'd you survive that yeah so three months were it it was short enough we could still ask for favors yeah and it was prior to where we had a lot of professional help you know in the real estate side of things look like business that that was challenging we not challenging to manage but challenging from a momentum perspective yeah you know David you're an agent you know if if you're not beating the street in hustling and keeping up those contacts the momentum that it was an expensive trip from that capacity sure for the rentals my mother Stacy was a saint she was our go-to let's cool our voicemails both mine and sarah said don't even leave a message we're not gonna call you back you know now we did communicate via email yeah but you know our financial preet and some holes as far as frugality and just making sure things are handled appropriately I can credit a lot of that to my parents and my mom helped us when we were gone for that first trip now if you ask her she will say she would never ever do it again it was not her favorite three months of the year but again we only owned six properties at that point five or six properties amounting to probably ten doors yeah you know so it was before it got a you know a little more time intensive at lease sure but it happened it was easy any big problems we got an email and any emergency whether your handle or someone else if there's a fire flood it has to be handled yeah yeah you know so whether I take the call or mom takes the call or a property manager takes Cal it has to be handled you know other issues that came up anybody can call a plumber anybody can call a handyman now did we pay a few more bucks for some of those things maybe and I didn't fix them personally but the reward the truth far outweighed any of those challenges that's so cool okay so in order to be doing all this traveling which is the goal that we all have is we want real estate to fund our life not our life to be all about real estate you have to put systems into place and a lot of people struggle with this because they're playing it at kind of a small scale but once you get into some bigger numbers more properties more projects systems become vitally important can you share some of the steps you took to systemize things so that you could be traveling and it didn't all fall apart yeah absolutely and I feel we're definitely still on this journey you know it's something we're still getting more skilled at but we do have a professional property manager now yeah that manages most of our units and even through that transition training the manager on what our expectations are what our budgetary limits are for certain problems that arise where I don't want the phone call you know so we are still in process of working on that but helping facilitate that we're hey if it's a B or C handle it this way shoot me an email just so I see it yeah but you don't need to call me we can authorize these events so on the management side that is helped significantly on the real estate side of things it is it's a function of two things one places where we do have communication I don't mind taking the random phone call yeah you know being in this business if it allows us to travel more I manage a lot of my business remotely if we are traveling for week ten days if it's something that needs boots on the ground we're in a at the group our company in Fort Collins the collaboration between partners is almost unheard of in a real estate world yeah it's unique that we're all broker owners so having the sense of camaraderie people willing to help out you know I've got partners it'll just step in and they'll bust out a showing for me you know and be the boots on the ground if not or needs to be written and unavailable they'll write the offer for me but again remotely if we have internet in cell phone I manage a lot of that and which I know that stresses some people out they want to be on vacation yeah but if it gives us the ability to do more and travel more and that works for the shorter vacations yeah yeah I think it's an interesting point like I mean obviously you don't want to take a vacation have to work the whole time right there's nobody's good goal but then some people just won't take a vacation because they can't dedicate a hundred percent of their time to vacationing right I mean I don't think I've taken a vacation in four years that I didn't do a bigger pockets webinar during the middle of it right every single because it's such a valuable thing both in terms of like helping people is something I like doing and it helps BiggerPockets grow as well and still like I do it every week no matter where in the world I am yeah and it's okay I mean if I if I said no I'm not gonna do a vacation unless I could do a hundred percent focused well then I'm just not gonna vacation I was like and I am working more and more towards the trying to unplug completely like you did on the on the boat trip you know occasionally and that's why you know David Green here is gonna take over doing some webinars you know Jake the new guy BiggerPockets gonna be doing some webinars so like you know we're working there but anyway I just encourage people who are listening to the show right now you know don't get stuck in that like I can't take a trip because you know I have to do a little bit of the reason that I can take over webinars and Jake can take over webinars is because you systemize what you do you broke it into chunks you said here's how it works here's a formula now we can practice within that formula and so we're good and then you're like okay you've got it down you can go do your thing so systems create freedom right you hear discipline creates freedom where we've all heard Jocko say that well discipline create systems and systems create freedom and now you're in the position where you can travel the world and enjoy a real estate or you can create this thing that now you bring opportunity for me to get in because you're leveraging me and it's a good chance for me and so that's just why I'm a big fan of systems in general is they open up doors for many people where only one person stood at one point yeah and the just the efficiency of having a team I don't have a team in the conventional sense of these large realtor teams where you know showing assistance - distance all that I don't have that but I do have a full-time assistant with our company I've got an entire escrow department a marketing team and all these other functions I mean the week we're recording I have two closings on Friday where we're gonna make twenty-one thousand bucks well in Hawaii yeah you know again it doesn't yeah right yeah so having my team members in the way they're trained we can facilitate this and it's uh yeah it's fantastic I couldn't imagine a better career I mean it's love it well all night no let me ask that question then I mean I'm assuming I know the answer but we'll go a little deeper do you think new investors we're getting started they have a job should they become a real estate agent and I know the answer is probably yeah they should consider it but then I'll even go deeper what kind of person should consider doing it and who should not consider becoming an agent sure so if it's becoming a realtor solely to save the 3% yeah my answer is a hard no okay you know if you're not full-time and in it you're gonna lose more than 3% on something you miss yeah you know you just don't have the depth of knowledge and your finger on the pulse of the market and not even argue to the agents are selling five six homes a year you're not doing enough business to keep your pulse your finger on the pulse of the market yeah if they want a career change and they want to do it as a career or a full-time investor where they're really actively analyzing those markets on a regular basis I think it's a very rewarding career and I think it's fantastic but if it's all I'm gonna get my license on top of my nine-to-five just cuz I don't want to pay that guy 3% I guarantee you'll lose more money and for that sake those investors looking for a realtor you know it shouldn't be the guy that has a good smile and you like yeah it should be someone that's eat sleeping and breathing what should you do you know the gains of the world that our investors and no investments and do a really high volume of business in that market to have your finger on the pulse cuz a lot of these markets especially right now we're on a cusp of will say some changes at least yeah it's important to have the right guy in your corner or gal you know but someone that gets it so I'm wondering like David I'm gonna turn to you and ask you kind of the same question like do anything you want to add to that anything you feel differently or the same like who should become an agent who shouldn't of our listeners that's a really good question you should become an agent if you want to learn the business of selling real estate and earn money from selling real estate if all you want to be is an investor in passive income is all you care about getting your license will not help you it might even hurt you in some ways because you now you have to disclose to people that you're buying the house from extra things because they may be taking your advice on the factor a licensed professional saying oh I'll buy your house for 100k if it's worth 300k you don't want to get sued because they come back and said well when he said he'd buy it for a hundred I assumed that's what it was worth because he's an agent and he's representing me but if you love real estate you might like selling it more than your current job and if you ask me there is a huge huge huge gap in the number of agents that know what the hell they're doing that's I don't know a nicer way to say it I became an agent cuz I was so frustrated with my state we see this all the time you know like they're just not good at their job and they don't care to be good at their job and you hit it on the head when you said they're just a friendly guy with a nice smile and a nice Cologne or you know a girl with a pretty head shot does it mean they'd understand money or finances or what goes into a deal or how to protect your wealth or how to represent your interests I routinely destroy agents on the other side of negotiating because they don't even know it's in the contract not even I'm it like half asleep and I'm beating up just because I know a few things that may never bother to learn because instead they're out there working on their Facebook and making smiley videos right so if you love real estate there's a need for agents who love real estate that's kind of why I'm growing my team has I have all these people that come to me and they say hey David I love real estate I want to sell houses and I want to learn it I'm like great we have it clients who need someone who understands how to save them money that's what our job is we're like a lawyer in court trying to get them out of trouble or trying to help their case or get them money not just a smiley person so that is the person who should become an agent you love real estate you're passionate about it you want to take what you learn for your own self and you want to apply it to your clients and if you do that man like the top is really nice 80% of the business goes from the top 20% of the agents and you can make really good money if it's just a thing you're ho-hum about stay far away from it because 80% of the agents have to split 20% of the business that bottom 80% they don't do hardly anything and it's really hard so Thank You Brandon for asking that because I think a lot of people think well I want to get my license to save money on commissions when I have to sell a house well you're assuming that you know how to sell a house that you'll actually do it better than someone who's good at it and that you're not taking affect all the fees you're gonna be paying to hold that license for the entire time and you gotta pay your broker and all the other stuff so yeah that's a really good point a real estate agent all I do is push a button and just put on the MLS that's all you have to do with an agency oh yeah and open a couple doors and write up a contract that's all Office Depot easy button you just click yeah just click the one button is just an easy chip and Joanna Gaines rocks so I want to sell real estate exactly yeah you know you hit the nail on the head the you know the granite and stainless makes me feel warm and fuzzy yeah while there is a desire for that from some clients that they want someone just to hold their hands the finding someone that has a passion to drill down and have an education for what we're doing like I said that is 20% or less of the market I mean I know I just I just had a conversation with a client who didn't want to pay a million dollars for a house that was listed at a million have the finishes that a million dollar house should have and when I broke it down by asking questions it turned out didn't have granite countertops it didn't have stainless steel plants is what you just said and the houses that did were 1.2 1.2 billion and I yeah we're talking about $5,000 for counters and maybe another six or seven for cabinets and appliances this is $12,000 you'd rather go spend 200 grand and pay it back over next 30 years with interest and her eyes just opened up like oh my god I never thought of it that way exactly well three people and scheduling one contractor that's hard I mean that's at least three or four phone calls where people just don't understand the value that an agent bring if they're good but there's so many bad agents out there we've we've created this problem for ourselves yeah sure so Robert walk us through where you had to date and what's your portfolio look like in size-wise and you can go into much as you want about sure what kind of cash flow do you see today where do you see herself headed in terms of your portfolio yeah so we at the immediate moment we've got 16 properties 26 doors which in our market our price point and we're sitting we're just shy of eight million dollars market value and about four million four and a half million in equity now which I you know you guys talked a few months ago about I definitely will yeah we got lucky and the timing of the market yeah you know that didn't hurt we're not all real estate gods by any means you know the market helped yes in granted you know a lot of sweat equity and all that stuff our cash flow we I still question whether we made the right decision weary fight about seven of them on to fifteen year notes yeah in efforts to try to achieve some of these goals to retire or long sabbatical quite young yeah so our cash flow were about just over ten thousand dollars a month right now net depending on our maintenance month about ten thousand a month which that we don't use any of the real estate money personally at all it's a completely separate machine yep yeah you know well you know depending I jokingly say depending on my financial midlifecrisis you know you go from debt pay down to we're done buying properties and then we go buy a few more and then we're done time properties and then in the last five months we bought three more so here we are and now we're at twenty six twenty six doors which like I said most of that's professionally managed yeah so it's run pretty smooth and it's good let me ask you this then I mean that's one thing cool about an expensive market is that you were able to I mean you not expensive it again out in New York San Francisco necessarily but like the higher tier you know you were at this level and then it like as the market goes up I mean okay here's a way I've explained it if you would have bought only thirty thousand dollar properties right and the market went up 50 percent you've just gained fifteen thousand dollars on each of those properties but you have a two hundred thousand dollar property and it goes up fifty percent you've now gained a hundred thousand dollars yeah equity now the same thing works the opposite way if the market drops you can be you know severely under so I want to talk a little bit about the expensive market young how like how do you invest in an expensive market are you still finding deals today I'm and what do you got to be careful of when you're in that market sure yeah the the numbers are definitely skinnier and significantly compared to some of the guys I hear in your podcasts you know oh yeah I paid 80 grand for a place and it rents for 1,200 a month I took holy crap I mean you know they're talking to one point five percent lever on rents which is or halftimes which yeah you don't see don't think all right but like you said you know the leverage and I never sell an appreciation we want the numbers to make sense without appreciation in the spreadsheet and that's what I tell my clients yeah if it doesn't make sense without this icing on the cake we probably shouldn't buy it but having that icing on the cake the icing is really thick I mean it's we bought a lot of properties you know when Sara and I were considering in our more risk tolerant days I told her I said I just want more expensive real estate yeah it to a degree when I felt like I saw the writing on the wall you know we didn't have a crystal ball but I felt like the market was going up and it was gonna be marching up for a while that was my strong belief I just started buying more expensive properties just so we had a more expensive real estate appreciating yeah you know so there's a few plays we made on 1031 exchanges were a tax-deferred exchange into another rental property where the cash flow didn't change much where the cash flow didn't change at all but we went from for an easy example psych we were from a $200,000 house that rented for 1,500 a month to a $400,000 house that rented for $3,000 a month it was the same cash flow but gross rents I was increasing our portfolio and increasing our gross rents yeah because for us it's a long-term hold for sure that's we're never gonna sell any of these without replacing them in some form ever is our goal right now now so I figured if we could increase our gross rents regardless of cash flow at the time because we don't need the money you know we'll use my real estate business in my agent business to pay our bills so we don't need the money so I wanted to increase dollars of real estate as well as our gross rents which right now there are 39 thousand ish 39 thousand and change a month the gross rents which once the property is free and clear yeah I thought I think we should probably figure it out yeah and that that that's interesting too too about these higher-end properties is I don't know if you found this one but I've definitely found it mole in hey there's some irony in here as well the more expensive a property is the easier that property typically is for me to manage like my most irritating tenants are the ones that are in my $30,000 houses yeah my best tenants are the ones that are in my 1.7 million dollar house is like property like and like Ryan like for whatever reason I just get higher quality people have less drum on their life now then maybe we'll demand a little bit more and they want a little bit nicer stuff and that's fine cuz then the property stays nice so I would personally this again where I'm at in mine I wanted cash flow above everything because I needed to get out of my job that was number one so I bought the worst properties didn't matter what they were as long as they cash flowed well today I would rather get a significantly less cash flow but buying a market where I can spend way more like have a way more expensive property and have way more chance for appreciation again I'm we're not saying I don't think anyone's the saying buy a bad deal loses money right like that loses money every month I don't want to lose money every month no matter what sure but I would almost like take a break even property in Maui over a property that made five hundred dollars a month in Grays Harbor Washington where I was at before because that one property it's not would be worth anything later on but I'd rather if I could like truly like net actually break even on a property here where means after maintenance repairs property management all that I at least know that the mortgage is getting paid down and the mortgage is a million dollar mortgage didn't pay down significant chunks every single month and appreciation even at three percent on a million dollar house or a half a million dollar house that's climbing quite a bit over time I should always win yeah and that's just definitely a shift that I've had in the last few years well in the end that for us the value of gray matter I call it you know even you know David as goodu systems as we all build as the portfolio start to increase and we're debating whether we're gonna go to the next step and really exponentially grow here in the future but there's only so much space between my ears yeah you know for headaches and like you said just garbage yeah you know so we've got tenants the whole spectrum in our market we've got the most affordable rentals you can have kind of our multifamily properties that rent for nine hundred thousand a door up to single-family runs for thirty-five hundred a month which in our market that's a very high rent yeah and like you said typically less headaches and the applications on the thirty five hundred month are just bonkers yeah I mean it's eight ten eight fifteen credit score's five pound dog no kids you know oh yeah you know $5,000 deposit for the damage no problem all that you know they make three four five six seven hundred grand a year yeah you know we're at your entry level you know your Section eight and a lot it's just different yeah you know and we do own the whole spectrum but I can say as we've progressed an our investing like you said I have noticed myself shift towards I don't have convenience as the right word or safety because the depth of the luxury market in our market it's not that deep yeah you know so if we flood the market with too many high-end rentals we're gonna bring everything down yeah but there is value I know investors listening will cringe when I say that I've bought five or five or six new construction homes brand new from the Builder really to turn into rentals really now we get very aggressive offers and we knew when their fiscal year ended specifically through a national builder and we knew when they had to get units out the door and got to four seventy-five thousand dollars off two days before the end of their fiscal year and they had to post numbers you know so having that extra depth of knowledge yeah but still they were brand new homes they had a warranty yeah we had the tenants called a warranty line instead of even calling us do you know so some of that's there's value to that yeah why you want a good agent not just a smiley friendly one yeah you know if people actually run true true accurate maintenance allocations and not have their property just turn into a raging pile of crap over the years so if they're on real numbers on maintenance I think they'd be surprised the the gap between newer not not new but newer properties compared to the 60s built piles of junk you know the numbers aren't as the gaps not as big as you'd think yeah some older investors that have invested in real estate and you ask them what advice do you have for me starting off everyone I've ever talked to has said location location location yes all this other stuff we talked about just goes right out the window from some of the center for 50 years and they say buy in the right area with the best schools the appreciation you get will trump any bit of cash flow that you thought was important and you won't have the headaches and there's something to be said for under standing like I think bran and I had a conversation about this and we were both trying to work our way through it that you could literally go buy a ten million dollar mansion in Beverly Hills and lose a couple thousand dollars a month because the rent wouldn't cover your mortgage but if you looked at your tax savings and your principal reduction and your increasing rent and the overall value of that mansion going from ten million to 20 million over 10 years or 20 years or something you would make insanely more money most if you bought a handful of cash flowing places somewhere in the Midwest you know that just crept up and when you get into that cash flow is all that matters mindset you you miss the big picture of what you're describing which is you built your net worth with that with a handful of properties so much more than the people we interview they say oh I've got a hundred and ten doors out there somewhere where they don't get much appreciation and they have a ton of headaches cuz not all money is good money some of it is just Blood Money man like you bought yourself a job you did not buy an investment that's all it's also where that we talked about like different phases of your investment right in the beginning like I said in the beginning cash flows all that matter I like to say cash flows you freedom but appreciation gives you wealth right so like the cash flow like even like again I don't regret buying that the $30,000 junk crap house that rented for $700 a month I don't regret that cuz it helped me get out of my job like those properties got me out which gave me the ability to start building more wealth and as my investment in yours I can see the euros it's kind of the same way it starts shifting you can start playing a little bit more appreciation so just cuz like we're talking this conversation now doesn't mean everyone listening is like oh you know screw it I'm gonna go and lose money on a Beverly Hills mansion like that's probably a terrible idea but leave it green first ten million dollars a call David he'll tell you it's a great deal but there is something said in fact just another day I was talking to a buddy of mine who said he just hung out on a boat with a billionaire this billionaire real estate investor and he got invited to some special was benign thing with a B yeah billionaire and the guy's advice was well I'm like basically the what he said is back in the starting in 70s and 80s I just read a book that said location location location and that I read one book and I was like alright so I was gonna buy and good location so he's like I just kept buying properties in the best locations around the country I could find and he made really good I remember what he did he had some actually job that made really good money he's like every property I bought lost money every single one I just I would buy property that lost money didn't matter he just lost money but I just I knew that one book told me to buy location so I just did and today all those properties are worth over a billion dollars because I just and that's probably how it worked for everyone else too gave such a good example those first cash flow properties that we're all buying they get us out of the rat race they get us out of the my noses in the grindstone all I can see is my boss and small thinking they're this little box that you step on that you can peek over the fence and as you peek over that fence you're like oh my god there's people that are making a lot more money than me that are not nearly as smart as I am right look at that guy he sits in front of his pool all day long he doesn't even try any what is he doing and when you get that perspective that's when you can start taking advantage of these other opportunities but you do need to get those first few deals which do need to cash flow and that's why we always talk about it and brandon has a perfect strategy for anyone who wants to do this and he calls it the stack Brandon can you tell us how how the stack works to do what we're saying I guess sure so for those that not heard the stack basically what it is it's your idea you're when you're first getting started you buy a house like a single-family house maybe or maybe I duplex whatever then a whole year later you double that you buy it no go from a house to a duplex now if you've already bought the house that was really hard to buy the house when you're getting started so then you buy the duplex and that was hard but it probably equally as hard as buying a single-family you got some experience and knowledge money coming in then the next gr whole year later you buy a four-plex or maybe two duplexes whatever don't get everyone don't get caught up on the actual like specifics here but then out eight Plex the year after 16 32 64 and maybe it looks more like 1 5 10 50,000 you know like oh I doubt you're gonna go from a 15,000 unit but whatever the idea of being exponential growth what the reason that's so powerful because it forces you continually outside of your comfort zone to scale exponentially versus what's what's comfortable is I'm gonna buy a house and then another house and another house and it might take you 20-30 years to get enough property to be able to make anything of it but when you scale exponentially it constantly pushes you outside that comfort zone so yeah you know we felt maybe wasn't sizeof units but it ended up being to a degree but our goal was to buy one house a year yeah you know and that well well that's getting real easy to this here we did - then we did three and then we had you know a couple months where we did three yeah you know we're yeah it just got easier and easier and it could even be like the stacked doesn't necessarily I mean you never could be you know hey I bought a hundred thousand of property this year about two hundred thousand dollars of properties next year then four hundred thousand year after the Nate huh you know there there's a lot of ways you could look at it yeah the key is growth are you growing are you stepping outside your comfort zone and you guys definitely have been yeah it we're at a cusp again where we've been comfortable for far too long yep so we gotta figure out what the next step is yeah maybe next is just relaxed and go sail around the world no boat yeah yeah yeah yeah we taper down or you know I could see us go in one of two directions but they're vastly different yeah you know slowing down paying off or really wrapping things up if beardy Brandon needs a partner in a mobile home complex yeah so it but you know David I want to backtrack you mentioned location we were adamant on that every single property owned except one is in Fort Collins yeah I firmly believe in our city and looking historically not just you know warm and fuzzies but looking at actual data of the performance we've seen because we have considered out-of-state and we've looked at other markets and I have some partners in my company that I've invested out of mark you know how to state and for all the reasons we just discussed yeah I believe I've made the right decision we'll see if that continues to hold true yeah and that you know on the stack the first one you just need to buy it yes yeah exactly I didn't care if it makes money yep like yeah I know that's a contradictory to bigger pockets yeah just get something as far as getting your feet wet yeah you just need to buy a house and it doesn't matter what it is yeah just to overcome that initial fear and start your perceptual map totally you just need to buy a house my brother older than me he owned a condo in Windsor that for a season like five years at lost 200 hours a month it's a turd I mean it is you know by any metrics of looking at a rental you think man this thing sucks yeah it still is positive if you look at all the benefits of owning real estate with taxes and appreciation and all that and now just this year he's a millionaire you know so even riding through yeah that went through a pretty cyclical market you know but that was one of his first rentals of getting his feet wet yeah and now he owns you know a good number of doors in Arizona and it's kicking butt that's on owning what most people would consider a loser and take their chips and go home you know uh real estate sucks I don't want to do this anymore because it didn't work out even though it didn't didn't work out it's still a winner yeah even though it feels like a loser side let me advise anybody just buy a house yeah I love that all right so that's awesome so let let's shift a little bit I wanna get deeper into one of your properties give people an idea of what that looks like so when we go to the deal deep dive all right deal deep dive is the part of show where we dive deep into one of your particular deals so you got a deal in mind I do we're gonna drill you on like seven questions and I don't actually have my questions at one of you cuz I don't have my computer in front of me today yeah so I'm gonna hopefully not screw this up number one what kind of deal was this and where was it at yeah so in Fort Collins is a triplex or conforming legal triplex okay for people that know Fort Collins it's on Mountain Avenue it's on about the most expensive Street in the city of Fort Collins all right David do you remember how did yeah how did you find this deal yeah so you know I Julie say that someone had to punch me in the face with a light bulb to turn on it was through my real-estate business okay it was one of my sellers who asked me to list a stripe flex and I was just getting everything ready getting ready to list it going through I'd sold another property for her and at the time we only owned two properties my perceptual map wasn't very big I you don't know what you don't know and back then and there was a lot I didn't know throughout the course of getting ready to list it she had told me a few times well yeah and if people don't qualify you know I could help with the loan and I just you know with my very limited knowledge at that time at though well we don't want those buyers like if they don't qualify we don't want them to buy the house because I'll be a pain and the deal probably won't close so by about the third or fourth time she said that and one of my partners said hey man that's a pretty cool property can I buy it and I went home thinking well I should try to buy well I can't buy it and I don't know if I thought about her Sarah slapped me in the face and stayed dummy she said she'll help ya call her and ask her if she'll help with alone so we called the seller said hey you know you've mentioned tradition and fines from the property we said it's probably worth at the time I think we said was worth three ten three fifteen I said what if I give you three twenty five for it and you know you have respecting boundaries of an agent not let the market you know property go to market all that but would you be interested in doing the loan and she said yeah sure way to get a relationship and she said well how much money do you have dammit I said well that's the thing I don't really have any money would you use and financing the whole property and she said great I said okay and then she said uh you know what interest rate I said well I pulled up on the internet and show the banks I said you know the banks will lend me the money about X if I went and got an owner-occupied loan which at that time we could have in that stage of the journey yeah so we did a thirty-year fix 100% financed triplex at four point seven five Wow so at closing we actually got paid because of the tenant secure deposits okay i rated rents and all of that we got paid at closing to own a triplex on one of the most desirable streets in the entire city you know and as far as framing perception of a win-win deal yeah the property when she owned it was grossly under nted she was only getting combined about fifteen hundred a month in rents and once we moved in we did some immediate renovations just personally I was doing all that and the first cycle we turned it over we doubled the rents Wow but our fixed payment to hurt was 1700 months so she was making more money with no maintenance liability yeah so she was thrilled with the deal it truly was you know when went for her we were stoked because we got into a cool property on one of the most desirable streets in Fort Collins and now it is built in 1885 which for us is quite old yeah so there's some different maintenance liabilities but that property that we paid 325 for is now worth somewhere in the 900 range and we are getting like 4,600 a month in gross rents so it's you ever talk to her she kick yourself first we don't but it's no we you know older invent you an older gal selling off part of the portfolio it's more of a headache yeah but it's one of those things again the light bulb didn't come on I just didn't know hard money was a thing or private loans were a thing or god forbid opening my the doors in my brain to think hey I need be aware of these things we're not writing about this there there are people that would not about that deal because you said I offered 325 and she wanted 315 yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that number would have just no I'm not overpaying yep that's true that it's yeah I agree David yeah that's one thing we have been skilled about in some of that area is seen the forest through the trees you know what I tell all my investors if any any deal we're looking at I don't care if you're under paying for overpaying for it whatever if any deal doesn't work over a number of ten to fifteen thousand dollars you shouldn't be investing in real estate in our probably mean you don't want to blow 10 G's on a thirty thousand dollar house I get that but if you buy a house for example in in Fort Collins market Northern Colorado market and God forbid the day after closing septic system goes out and you have to pay ten fifteen G's to fix it yeah if you're so pissed off that you never wanted to invest in real estate to start with yeah you probably shouldn't be investing in real estate yeah you know I think you need to go in it with your big-boy pants on or big-girl pants a little bit and know that there are unforeseen challenges you know speaking of unforeseen challenges will sidebar really quick we've got a property which was our first experience with methamphetamine oh that's right you mentioned that they're down in the dig in on that a little bit yes so it was after we owned it for a while we don't it for a number of years we got notified of a police report of some bad stuff going on and in the moment it was a very unpleasant experience and out of my insurance doesn't touch it out of pocket we spent thirty two thousand dollars fixing the problem which is a newer investor that that's a problem yeah you know that's unpleasant we paid for it all and I had a number of investor friends and client and then my friends that don't invest all my god how much do you regret buying that yeah yeah you know and we got a lot of like Oh your sucker dude like that just so we paid three hundred and five thousand dollars for the property today it's probably worth 675 do you really don't really care about $32,000 yeah and not just on flipping about a large amount of money yeah but again seeing the forest through the trees it's all good yeah you know it over ways the headaches and the challenges but anyway back to the deep dive you literally answered every single question yeah I pulled it up and I was going down them the only thing less is what did you learn from the deal and you might have answered that when you said I learned to see the forest not the trees yeah that I mean it was really in that moment and you know to really try to expand your perceptual map you know I mean once you started mean they talked about your reticular activated be talking about a green Jeep all you're gonna see is green Jeep yeah right yeah you know so I didn't know any about hard money but then once I knew about hard money like all crap like that there's a whole different ball game here I'm not aware of and even to this day as we've done reasonably well I know there's so much more than I'm not you know mobile home parks or apartments or syndications or all this other stuff that hello my biggest encouragement for the listeners would be there's so much good information available on bigger pockets and other resources if you're not taking advantage of it you're an idiot and you shouldn't you really shouldn't be investing now because it's free it is there's so many resources now if they were around when I started I'm an idiot I was the you know I I just didn't know there was this other Avenue it mean wealth of information yeah so you don't you don't need to go into it blindly anymore just trip through it you know you can depth of knowledge starting isn't there a meme going around where he whispers it's free real estate yeah I've seen it go it's free real estate that's bigger pockets for you right there yeah you're exactly right and I think what I love about your story the most that you just said is you you made so much equity on each of these deals even though you did what some people would say like what an amateur would look at is overpaying and instead you've instead of having to do this over ten deals you did it over one you probably have very little headaches on a property that's $900,000 properties they're the tenants are like top-notch you don't have to deal with them very often you could totally afford to upgrade that house with really nice stuff so you get really good tenants they probably don't call you very often when things break they don't want to bug you they fix it themselves you you just end up with the perfect investment as opposed to the job of now managing 15 properties to get the same result where it's a constant headache from the tenants that are asking you for everything every month yeah if you could if you're an engineer and you could design like a can and laser printer that just shoots out $100 bills yes that it's that property yeah I mean it's even being a hundred and what is it now a hundred and thirty-five years old yeah like I said there are some different maintenance issues it prints money yeah I mean we make net probably twenty five hundred month off one property that's crazy which like you said for the basic investor or the you know the first-time investor when we bought it it lost two to three hundred dollars a month yeah you know just rents compared to mortgage not even a factory maintenance you know they would I ran it through your whole calculator like oh my god this thing we had $1,000 a month yeah you know so it didn't it didn't pan out just looking at it you know just by the numbers in a calculator at all yeah but seeing the bigger picture I mean it's it's our favorite property it's our baby that's cool that's cool I like that sorry low that's neat I also have a property I was 18 I think with 1888 or 1890 and that's one of my if not my favorite one of my favorite properties I really like it a lot yeah there's a little bit more different maintenance if I'd actually don't know don't have bad maintenance concerns there but a little bit when they do happen they're a little more expensive to deal with a $10,000 boy knowing the stuff but overall like man that property is prints money for me to use so anyway very cool all right well we are gonna move on we're actually gonna skip the fire round because I don't have any fire on questions because I don't know a computer in front of me today and those are ones from the forums so we're gonna just kind of bypass that completely and jump right into the famous for all right famous for these are the same four questions we ask every guest every week and we're going to throw them at you right now so number one Robert yes favorite real estate investing book I don't know if I'd say favorite but most impactful Rich Dad port I have to defer get everybody nice you know that's what got the just the candle lit you know of hey yeah and for me I didn't have you know my parents are amazing they taught us you know all sorts great things but as far as a depth of financial education short of like hey don't go on a bunch of debt you know buy a house when you're young beyond that I don't know that I knew the term asset and liability and some of those base foundation blocks so it was instrumental in changing our thought process on that cool yeah number two next question what is your favorite business book business I got a cheat and say a few I you know Brian and I were talking that I love audible and that you can crank it up a to X speed so I can just cram so much more in it pieces of a lot of books you know never split the difference Christmas recently there was some gold nuggets there that were just exceptional Brandon's delightful wife Heather Turner and the book on managing rental properties with their pockets that for my business I'm ashamed to say that I lesson to more recently this year but it will change my business in the way I manage my real estate business in that the hours it's gonna save me of explaining this to every single young investor I work with because I do I my business I build a lot of young investors we've got a lot of young guys that are I mean I've got a buddy that owns eleven doors another one of six another one with eight my little brother Ben 24 years old is working on his fourth unit right now Noah that's got a legal duplex finishing a basement kickin but for those young investors again you know David talks about you know ramping up a high volume real estate business I don't have the time to go through some of that so that book my 15 copies keep my office and just every closing hey read through this if it doesn't handle the topic give me how a little spit ball through it yeah so that's exceptional what else there's an older book smart talk by loot ice I don't know for mindset is very good I mean there's before our workweek parts of it yeah you know if I could take 25 percent of each of these books and just jam together yeah it'd be the unicorn of business books was that a coke and I just fell you gotta go get that ride we gotta show these people with that's hilarious yeah every wasn't I like sitting in my office here Allison I hear dunk don't don't splash coconut balls off a tree bounces down into the pool yeah into the pool this time I didn't it sounded like it might have put a jack here we go this thing Maui fresh by coconut we're gonna have to cut this thing open later that cool here Oh catch it's heavy nice catch all right anyway funny okay where were we we were talking business books David next up what are some of your hobbies hobbies like working on houses nice we like traveling like we talked about venturing into sailing Rob big sailors but we will be yeah lotta old man sports softball volleyball mountain biking you know off-road and all that stuff we stay pretty active cool yeah alright last question for me what do you think separates successful real estate investors from those who give up fail or never get started you know the probably grip I mean it boils down to you or you know I've heard it defined as do you have a big enough why yeah and you're white doesn't even e be real estate why do you want a des because if you don't have a passion or does I mean everybody's yeah I wanna make some money y'all want to be rich but no one's willing to do what it takes to do it if you're wise big enough I think you'll find out how yeah and some bravery you know taking that first step yeah just getting after it cuz there's no there's no excuse anymore for education there's no excuse anymore for ability yeah you know in the land of the free in the USA and the knowledge that's available those are not excuses anymore you know you just got a you got a one and bad enough to get after it I don't think we've talked about I don't know if anybody's ever used that word bravery before here on the show for that answer that question can you think of any that ever been given David I I can't like nothing even close to that bravery but I love that like at some level you have to be willing to disco you know what I'm scared I'm gonna do it anyway I'm nervous I'm gonna do it anyway yeah well if you're that guy like us that first rentals yeah joined a real stay and accompany you mind you that the desk fees 30 well they pay for that I'll has 37 thousand dollars a year desk fee and we had a $900 in her checking account you know or if you're in that Marty you know if you're in the Detroit or Kansas wherever else and you've got 50 bucks yeah there's ways to buy houses yeah you know you just got to get through enough nose to find the guy that says yes yeah which but if you're in that situation who cares if your credit score gets screwed up the risk be brave be bold well you gave a good example in your deep dive of how you did that very same thing didn't have any money made it work for the other person like all the pieces were in place because it was a great deal you could add value to the rent so it was a really good location you just went all out and said whatever I gotta do to get this property I'm gonna do it and it wasn't even that hard it was like oh yeah okay I can do that yeah I mean you know in turn yourself talk is telling y'all this is a little bit scary but like you said everybody was stoked and smiling laughing at closing yeah you know it was you know be bold be brave or find a wife if you don't know well I find a why yeah very very good very good so all I David all you take the last question and well rabbi standing up I like that find a why we should write a blog post on that and put the cover of like alphabet soup like some got to get spoon and they're looking for the why why a t-shirt this is find your why and then you can do the alphabet soup yeah that's even better that's why you're the marketer marketer there we can sell it for $20 and make five bucks a t-shirt mmm dancer the stars you don't need right yeah yeah alright last question Robert this has been fantastic I've really loved you as a guest I also think I should point out that you sound a lot like I think Brian the dog from Family Guy fantastic and we did interview Mark Kent him in one of the producers a Family Guy so he would ever need like a job and he needs a backup for Brian I think we could probably connect yeah if we need some additional voice effort you know you can get some additional streams of income abundance style here you go I can get voiceover Brian that'd be great you're like the perfect guest okay for those who want to buy a house in Colorado sell a house or just simply learn more about your fascinating brain how can they that more about you yeah so I'm not on a lot of platforms but my website is easy it's Robert for real-estate rubber fo ROFR real estate so really easy Roberts real estate you can't forget it it's stuck on my trouser on my scooter my bicycles my wife says I should tattoo it on my forehead you fetch it and remember it yeah that way if you're looking at a mirror you can see it and uh but yeah that's easy that's where I'm at real calm cool alright well there's been a fantastic show thank you very much for joining me in the thishe ed not the she shed the c shed today and she said by the sea yeah the c shed by the she shed and I don't know a David I know you take it out today alright thank you very much Robert this is David Green for Brandon speed-dating real estate bachelor turner signing off you're listening to BiggerPockets radio simplifying real estate for investors large and small if you're here looking to learn about real estate investing without all the Heights you're in the right place stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from BiggerPockets calm your home for real estate investing online

Channel: BiggerPockets

Views: 107,724

Rating: 4.8880405 out of 5

Keywords: biggerpockets, real estate, real estate investing, investing, rentals, rental property, investing in real estate, income property, bigger pockets, passive income, net worth, real estate agent, real estate investor, biggerpockets podcast, bp podcast

Id: Sk6MViYEtBo

Length: 74min 15sec (4455 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 27 2019