The Introvert’s Edge: The Secret Titans Who Can Outsell Almost Anyone With Matthew Pollard

Are you interested in sales but afraid to fail as an introvert? Is your belief system holding you back from doing what you’re interested in? Tune in to this episode as Moneeka Sawyer welcomes Matthew Pollard, the author of The Introvert’s Edge, to share how you can get past the belief that you can’t sell as an introvert. Matthew highlights that you are what you are, and although you can’t change your personality, being an introvert is not a disadvantage. Matthew also shares how he prepares his mental space and energy before he enters the stage.

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The Introvert’s Edge: The Secret Titans Who Can Outsell Almost Anyone With Matthew Pollard

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am so excited to welcome Matthew Pollard to the show. Matthew is responsible for five multimillion-dollar business success stories all before the age of 30. His humble beginnings, the adversities he faced, and his epic rise to success show that anyone with the right motivation and right strategies can achieve anything they set their minds to.

Forbes calls him the real deal. Global Gurus list him as a Top 30 Sales Professional. Top Sales World Magazine names him a Top 50 Speaker and BigSpeak lists him as an International Top 10 Sales Trainer. He’s also the bestselling author of The Introvert’s Edge book series, which is sold over 75,000 copies and has been translated into 16 languages. That is so impressive. Matthew, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I’m ecstatic to be here. I love your energy. Thank you for bringing us all up.

Thank you. Matthew, I’m going to let you in on a little.

I’m ready.

I’m not super interested in a sales conversation. I’m more interested in a conversation about introverts. Does that sound okay to you?

That’s perfectly fine. As a matter of fact, a lot of the interviews I do are much more centered around the topic of introversion. People always are getting me in and saying, “I’ve got this boss or I’m trying to manage this team,” and there are just so many misconceptions in the world of introversion and extroversion. I believe the topic’s constantly evolving about what we believe is possible for us, so go for your life.

Perfect. Let’s start by you telling us your story. You teased us with that intro. Tell us a little bit, a high-level, two-minute version.

Funnily enough, we were talking about before how quite frequently people will hear somebody articulate, somebody that can get a message across and project extroversion upon them and one of the things that I’m always pushing more introverts to do, which I’m so glad you were excited to share your own fact that you’re introverted as well on this episode.

My focus is trying to get others, what I call titan introverts, to share their introverted story. They are people that are successful but also happen to be introverted. One of the biggest focuses for me is helping people realize that while I hopefully come across as articulate now, I started off with a reading speed of a sixth grader. I was super introverted in late high school and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

I was, by far, the least likely person to be here teaching people how to do it, which is perhaps why people now believe in the fact that I say that it’s possible. When I was in late high school, I had a reading speed of a sixth grader. I got diagnosed with this thing called Irlen Syndrome, which for the people that are watching via video means I put on this funny pair of colored lenses and miraculously I can learn to read.

I couldn’t learn to read like everybody else but I could start the process of learning. Day after day, I hustled to get into the top 20% of my state, which is how I graduated but my family could see I was exhausted. I was at a loss for what I wanted to do and they could see that I wouldn’t have stuck out college if I didn’t know what it was I wanted. We agreed that I was going to take a year off to find myself. I’m sure a lot of people reading have got kids like that.

It wasn’t allowed to sit on the couch and watch Oprah. By the way, Oprah is an introvert as well, for those people that think they can’t do small talk. My family wasn’t rich. I couldn’t travel to Europe and have a great gap year. We all agreed I was going to get a job and I took a job in a real estate agency but I wasn’t the person out selling. I was the guy in the back office doing day-day entry with a look on my face, “Don’t speak to me. I’m here to find myself for the year.”

Anyway, three weeks into that job, I get told that the person that managed that office had a phone call with his boss and they had decided to shut down their premise. I’m out of work and this is Australia at Christmas time. For those people that don’t know Australia, it’s summer and Christmas at the same time. We go on holiday on the 20th of December and we don’t come back until the 15th or 20th of January.

No one’s hiring except for these things called commission-only sales roles. For someone that struggled to talk to his own friend, let alone anyone else, it was super uncomfortable but they were the only jobs I could get. There were three jobs in the paper. I applied for all three. I got three interviews. I then got three job offers and I started at the field. Maybe they saw something in me I didn’t see myself.

I accepted a job doing business-to-business telecommunications door-to-door and my manager quickly put that to rest. He’s like, “Matt, we just hire everyone.” We had this saying, “We throw mud up against the wall and we see what sticks,” which is a great saying until you realize you are the mud. After five days of product training and not a single second of sales training, I get thrown on this road called Sydney Road in Melbourne, Australia. There are 1,000 stores on each side and I get told to go sell.

I didn’t even know what to say. I took a deep breath and walked into my first door. Luckily, I was politely told to leave because shortly after that, I was sworn at and always got told to get a real job, which was always my favorite because this was the only job I could get. Door after door, this kept happening until I got to my 93rd door where I made my first sale. I remember I made about $70 and I was ecstatic for about 45 seconds until I realized I got to do this again tomorrow, the next day, and the next day.

For me, this was a defining moment because a lot of people either quit, which is what 18 of the 20 people in my training group did, or they agreed that this is the way it’s going to be and they grind it out. I’m all for grinding it out but not without a great strategy. I decided that sales had to be a system. I went to look for what that system could be. Remember, I had a reading speed of a sixth grader, so I wasn’t picking up a book, which is why my book being on audiobook was so important to me.

What I did find was YouTube and I typed in sales system and all these videos came up. Long story short, I’d spent sixteen hours a day either applying what I learned out in the field or practicing to go out the next day on the next piece of the system or improving what I didn’t know. On weekends, I’d still spend sixteen hours practicing and day after day, I’d do this but soon, it was like 48 doors before my next sale, then 31, then 28, then 26, and then 19.

Eventually, I got it down to making a sale every three doors. About six weeks in, my manager pulls me aside. I thought I was in trouble because no one even knew who I was. They barely knew my name. I was the quiet guy that handed my paperwork in downstairs and he said, “Matt, we’re blown away by this. We got our national sales report and it turns out you are the number one salesperson in the company.”

This was six weeks later and this was the largest sales and marketing company in the Southern hemisphere. Shortly after that, they promoted me. I don’t why people think that just because you can sell, you can manage. I had no idea how to manage. I was given twenty people. They all quit within 24 hours but I went back to YouTube, learned how to manage, and got promoted seven times. Fast forward shy of a decade, I’d started my own business about twelve months later and I’d been responsible for five multimillion-dollar success stories.

One of the things that I always share with people is, it doesn’t matter how introverted you feel that you are or how much you think the cards are stacked against you. I think that introverts have an edge. I know that you don’t want to focus on sales but I don’t think we have an edge in sales. We have an edge in networking, public speaking, podcast and hosting. The amount of detail you went into before we got onto this show, all of that is very much introverted behavior.

Your story makes me want to cry because it’s my story. I have a learning disability. Trying to get into school, when I was trying to learn to read, it’s the same thing. I couldn’t learn to read, even now. I went to UC Berkeley and got a degree there and I’m a very slow reader. My success has been weird. It doesn’t make any sense. They were scared that I had this disability. I’ve always had a hard time even reaching out on the phone to my friends.

The people that love me understand that Moneeka will not reach out. They have to reach out to me. I graduated during a recession. The only job I could get was a sales position and I was terrible. Within three months, I was the number one salesperson in the state of California. It was a California bank, so that was the entire company. It was the same thing. I was studying sixteen hours a day to figure out how to make this work because it was hard but I had to survive. I wasn’t going to go back and live at home. I love that story.

What’s interesting about what you said though, whenever I share my journey, there are so many introverts that have had similar journeys. Whether they’ve had a reading disability or not, they fell into sales or something horrific happened that pushed them to test the boundaries of their introversion and they discovered it wasn’t a boundary at all. It was an advantage because a planned presentation always outworks somebody that’s winging things eventually.

Introverts are more likely to hold onto that for our dear life because, without it, we’re terrible. If you think back about your sixteen-hour days, I know this for me. My sixteen-hour days felt terrible and I probably wouldn’t wish them on anybody. However, after six weeks, I was the best in the business. After three months, you were the best in the business. You got to benefit from that just like I did for the rest of my life.

For a lot of people, they’re like, “I don’t have the ability to dedicate eight hours practicing. Sure, I can do the eight hours in the office applying what I learned.” You got to remember that we’ve both shared that we went from terrified to sell to the best in the business. A lot of the people that are reading don’t need to be the best in the business. All they need to be is good at sales or good at networking. To do that, it doesn’t take anywhere near as much effort but even if you broke that amount of effort that we did to get to the best in the business over 6 months or 12 months, you’d go from terrible to average to good within weeks to amazing to the best in the business within a year.

Think about how much time you spent learning your functional skills. Think about how much time you spent dedicated to perfecting the art of what you do and how hard it is to constantly be rejected and be told by people that they’re going with someone else or how much time you spend doing proposals because you don’t have time to do this. I promise you, the time you’ll save far outweighs the time you’ll spend within months.

What’s also interesting is, Matthew, I felt like being an introvert was a disease. Even when you say it, that you shared about you being an introvert too, my whole insides cringe. I feel like it’s something we have to pretend that we’re not or hide like, “I’ve got cancer. It’s something that’s going to be with me my entire life and I can’t get around it.” Part of that is just understanding I’m not good at sometimes at being there for my friends because it’s so hard for me to reach out. It hurts my heart and yet, I can’t pull myself out.

There are things about the way that I am and the way that I live that make me feel broken. A lot of that has to do with being an introvert. I know that my readers are going to be like, “You are not an introvert. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” If I’m on a stage or whatever, people will never believe that I’m an introvert. As a matter of fact, I was at Christmas with my family and I said in passing to my mother-in-law, “I’m an introvert.” She looked at me and says, “You are not an introvert. You are lying.”

I’ve been in this family for years and they don’t understand how difficult it is for me socially not to connect. As introverts, we connect well but to connect with lots of different people. Before we even get moving forward on this conversation, why don’t you define introvert and the evolution that word has been through as far as our understanding?

I would highlight that and I think that the word introversion and its definition have got way too complicated. Maybe there’s been too much grant money involved and because of that, we have to make it more complicated to get the next grant. I want to bring it back to bear terms. There are things that are highly sensitive. There are things where somebody can be shy and those aren’t necessarily somebody that’s introverted.

You can be introverted and be highly sensitive and shy but that doesn’t mean that you are. There are extroverts and this must be terrible for somebody to be extroverted and shy but there are people that are extroverted and shy. What I try to do is say, “There is more complexity to this but unless you want to spend the next six months researching it, let’s bring it back to its simplest frame.” That is where you draw your energy from.

For instance, I love speaking from the stage. It terrifies me. It feels like skydiving. I’m so relieved that I did it and it went well. I need to do what I saw you do before a show interview. I need to stop for a second and center myself. I can’t talk to anyone before I go on stage, but I love doing it. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t draw my energy.

I’m very good at networking. It’s why I’ve written a book on it. I love doing it but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t take energy from me. It also takes less energy from me than it used to because I’m not anxious anymore. I’m not worried and I also don’t beat myself up about it as much afterward. There are things you can do to take less energy but this is the thing that I want to highlight if you can frame it this way. If I’m hanging out with a group of people at a networking event, if I’m speaking from a stage, regardless of how much energy it takes from me, I’m an introvert if it takes energy from me.

I’m an extrovert if I get off those activities filled and charged. I am excited after I finished a keynote and I’ve got a whole bunch of energy but I’m like a five-year-old that’s over that has stayed up too late. I’ve got all of this energy and then eventually, I’m coming up to a crash. As an introvert, I need to understand that. If you draw energy from being by yourself or being with a small group of friends or close family, you’re an introvert.

If you charge up by being with people all the time and you need people, you are an extrovert. That doesn’t mean that you don’t still want quiet time. You don’t still crave it. In life, we need balance in everything that we do but that is the easiest way to define it. The biggest thing that I struggle with and this is why I founded National Introverts Week, which is the third week of March, is to highlight that introversion is not a disadvantage.

In fact, I believe that introverts are the secret titans that tend to be succeeding everywhere. The problem is we project extroversion upon them. As soon as somebody becomes successful, we, introverts, say, “They are clearly able to succeed because they’ve got that gift of gab. They’ve got that natural ability.” I want you to understand that as I said, Oprah Winfrey and David Letterman are both introverted. If you think that you can’t do small talk, you’re wrong.

The Introvert’s Edge: Introversion is not a disadvantage. In fact, introverts are actually the secret titans that tend to be succeeding everywhere.

Zig Ziglar the most well-known sales trainer of all time is also an introvert. Ivan Misner, the person that founded BNI, the world’s largest networking group is an introvert. Pick your discipline if you think you can’t be a great entrepreneur. I interviewed Brian Smith, the guy that founded the billion-dollar brand, Ugg Boots, on my show, The Introvert’s Edge and he talked about his introverted journey to success.

If you think you can’t be emotive, Bill Murray, that guy that did Groundhog Date, whether you love it or hate it, he’s dynamic and unpredictable but also an introvert. We can do all of those things. The thing that I struggle with though, is sometimes when I ask the question and this hurts me to my soul, is when I ask somebody. I spoke at a leadership conference for AA-ISP, which is the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals.

If you can imagine, if you’re a tech company or a major organization, your senior leadership go to this conference. I did a survey of all of them about whether they were introverted or extroverted. I got some introverts and some extroverts but I got some, “I was introverted but don’t worry, I’m extroverted now,” like it was a bad thing that they were introverted.

It drives me nuts because the truth is that you can’t change your personality type. You are what you are and it’s not a disadvantage to be introverted. As a matter of fact, I love telling people I’m an introvert because first thing is when I go to an event and I mention that I’m an introvert, when I talk, everybody gets quiet to hear what I have to say. Extroverts will often look after me. When I go to conferences, I will say things.

I have spoken in Dubai and there were two MCs for that event. They were standing around talking to me and I said, “I apologize, guys. We’re getting to about fifteen minutes before I get on stage. I need to go and have my own time now. As an introvert, I need to bring my energy levels far down and I need to rehearse my script over and over again.” I say script because I script out what I’m going to say before I get into a story because stories are the reticular activating system of our brain.

I love getting into stories because then I find our brains are synchronized and it’s a study out of Princeton. I feel at ease and I see the audience warm to me as well. Stories are great at creating that artificial rapport that we, introverts, are amazing at turning into deeper rapport. By suggesting that I’m an introvert and that I need that fifteen-minute period, what happens is everybody that heard that protects me. I get to go away into my own space and rehearse what I’m going to say, which every speaker should do as opposed to people being upset with me that I’m not communicating with them.

If somebody walks up to talk to me, somebody that heard me will go up and say, “Matt’s happy to speak to you afterward but he is getting ready at the moment. He’s getting his mental space right to get up on stage,” and nobody says, “Matt, we’d prefer you to talk to us. We paid you a ton of money to come and speak but we’d love you to be horrible on stage so we can have a little bit of chit-chat now.”

Understanding that you’re introverted is powerful because quite frequently, some of the most senior people you’ll meet are also introverted. It creates a kinship with those people. With extroverts, they want to give you a bit of an extra go, so there’s no downside to mentioning it. I interviewed the Founder of WP Engine, Jason Cohen, and he said, “I’m in board meetings. I founded the company but all these extroverts will be yelling.”

“The moment I start to speak, everybody goes quiet to hear what the introvert has to say because I struggle to even keep eye contact and they know that. They know how much effort it takes for me. My friends know that I’m introverted, so they’ll reach out to me and they’ll leave me a voicemail message with the information they want me to know about the engagement that they’re hoping that I come to because they understand it.”

I did an article for the Chicago Tribune, where I talked about how to survive Christmas and the number one rule is to let your family know that you’re introverted so that when you disappear for an hour, they don’t think something’s wrong. They know that you’re recharging. Being honest about who you are is by far the most essential rule. If you lie to yourself and say, “I’m extroverted now or I’m supposed to behave more extroverted,” that’s a recipe for disaster. It won’t allow you to get more successful at anything. It also means that you are moving away from what is congruently you, which will lead you to kill your energy.

That is so true. That was so amazing. I find all of those same things. Being in crowds, it’s so interesting. I went through a book tour for my book, Choose Bliss. I was going all the way around the country talking on television and stuff like that. That took a huge amount of energy. It’s an unbelievably fun experience but it does take a huge amount of energy. I’m sure you’ve been through this. You’re on TV for 7 minutes and then you got to sleep for 4 hours to recover type of thing. I remember my PR agent saying, “Moneeka, you’re so good. Don’t memorize your answers. We write down the questions that they’re going to ask you. Just wing it.”

I was like, “You don’t understand. I need to memorize my answer so that I can wing it when I need to. I need to have a foundation right there, ready to catch me, then I can wing it if I need to,” but people just don’t get this whole talking about getting on stage and needing some time. I’m totally going to do that, Matthew. The next time I’m on stage, I’ll say, “I need a few minutes,” because I won’t admit that I’m an introvert and that takes me off my game. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the way that I’m built and I want to be on my game when I speak. I’ll do a better job for you.

You can have fun with it too. Sometimes, I’ll say, “I’m going to walk away for fifteen minutes because I need to charge up now. I know I told you I’m an introvert, so I don’t want you to think that I’ve run away and I’m not coming back. I will be back a couple of minutes before but I’m going to go and walk away and have my own space.” They’ll laugh it off. No need to be ashamed of your introversion.

The fact is people always want you to operate at your best. The problem is that if you don’t educate them on what it takes to operate at your best, is that their fault? I don’t think it is. When it comes to being scripted, I wouldn’t suggest that being scripted is a bad thing. I would suggest though that you think about the concept of scripting because I talk about scripting a sale or a networking conversation.

The Introvert’s Edge: You don’t need to be ashamed of your introversion. People always want you to operate at your best. If you don’t educate them on what it takes to operate at your best, it’s not their fault.

I wrote out what I was going to say from the stage. The difference is when you think about scripting, we all hear that telemarketer that calls us at 7:30 at night who sound robotic and we feel that they’re reading. I speak at a bunch of conferences, especially around sales kickoff time and I’ve seen a lot of speakers who are tech kickoffs or medical finance.

I have spoken at a few real estate ones and funnily enough, there are a ton of introverts in real estate as well. What I find is they get up on stage and they’ve got their screen prompters. They’ve got their little paragraphs that they’re going to read and that’s lack of practice. I get people who say, “I don’t want to sound scripted.” I’m like, “I get it. We don’t want to be that tally marketer at 7:30 but let me ask you, what’s your favorite movie?”

I had a client that said it was Leonardo DiCaprio in Gangs of New York. He loved Leonardo DiCaprio. By the way, Leonardo DiCaprio was also an introvert. He said, “I just love Leonardo DiCaprio in that movie. Doesn’t he embody the part? He’s so authentic. He’s amazing in that.” I’m like, “That’s great. Now, remember that he’s reading from a script too. You tell me what’s the difference between that and telemarketing.” He said, “I’m assuming that Leonardo DiCaprio reads it over and over again and eventually, he practices it without the script and he just embodies the part. He becomes the character. He has to be a character actor, so he fits into that part.”

I said, “Great. What’s the difference between that and you speaking from stage?” The difference is this, you haven’t had enough practice, so you haven’t worked out what you’re going to say and then rehearsed it. Secondly, it’s easier for you. He’s pretending to be someone that he’s not. The goal of scripting is not for you to be someone that you’re not. It’s to work out what you want to say to present the best version of yourself.

As soon as you realize that, you can lean into it. For me, everything that I said on the concept of introversion, as I was saying it, there would be some people that were reading this and going, “There is no way that this person is introverted because he covered off on twenty facts and pieced them all together, made all those facts stick, and did it in such a comfortable way.” I would never have been able to do that if I didn’t write it out first to memorize it.

Now I did that years ago and I’ve benefited from that forever, since. The whole concept of scripting is to your point now. I have done nearly 200 interviews and when I first started, I would look at these are questions and I’d want people to stick to them. I was always worried they’d ask me a question outside the scope of what I was prepared for.

I tell people, “I’ve done 150 interviews. You better ask me something outside the box or your audience won’t get something new,” so because of that, I’m uncomfortable. It becomes from the synthesis of all of the different answers that I’ve now rehearsed. It’s very hard to take me off script because I have so many of them and I can deliver them all in a natural and authentic.

Let’s get back to what’s more relevant for our ladies around real estate. You talk about networking. In the real estate world, we’re looking for deals, looking to sell deals, looking for vendors and partners, so there’s networking, negotiation, and all of those pieces. I know that you contend that we have an edge as introverts in those situations, so let’s talk a little bit about your approach.

For instance, in networking. I know you talk about this unified message and I loved that by the way. I want to make sure that we get there so we can help the ladies understand how they can lean into their introversion around networking and negotiation rather than backing away from it in fear that they can’t hold up to what’s required.

One thing that I think, especially ladies like to do is be much more authentic and they don’t like pitching. It’s interesting. A lot of men, even if they don’t feel comfortable pitching, they will push themselves through it even if it makes them feel inauthentic. I have a lot of female clients and what I find is, unless they feel like it’s super congruent, they won’t feel comfortable doing it.

They always feel that networking is the epitome of used car sales. They go in and somebody asks them what they do. If they’re advanced, they’ll know how to do an elevator pitch, which is, “I do this for this group of people, even if they have this common objection,” which feels slimy and salesy. An example of that is I’m a sales and marketing coach that works with introverted professionals, even if they think that they can’t sell.

That sounds salesy. It’s, “Great to meet you. I’m trying to get a deal. This is what I do. I’d love to work with you because I’m trying to buy a new car. If you worked with me, I think that I would be able to afford the deposit for that.” It doesn’t come across well. It’s a horrible tacky way of doing it. People move away from that and they’re like, “I won’t say that. What I’ll say instead, ‘I work in real estate or I specialize with helping people find distressed properties,’ or whatever the statement is.”

That’s the same as me. I’m a sales and marketing trainer and I’ve helped 2,500 or 3,500 small business owners. It’s still salesy. By the way, networking should always be about being interested before you try to be interesting. This strategy works on the basis that you don’t start talking about yourself straight away. Truthfully, if you do that, you’re missing out because the more you know about them, the better off you will be because you’ll have more ammunition to speak to them.

The Introvert’s Edge: Networking should always be about being interested before you try to be interesting.

When somebody comes to me, I’ll ask them questions and I’ll be interested. People love talking about themselves. The best thing for an introvert is we’re empathetic and great at active listening, so all we need to do is work out what questions to ask.

I always tell people, “If you don’t know who’s going to be in the room, you’ve let yourself down.” When I go to a networking event, the very first thing I do is look at the meetup page or the LinkedIn page event. I’ll always find myself to the people that are going. Even if I look at the event’s Facebook page and see who went last time by who’s tagged, I’ll look at them on LinkedIn and do profile shopping. I’ll look at all the profiles of all the people that are going.

This sounds like it takes a bunch of time. It’s nowhere near as painful though as walking into the room to the first person you speak, finding out they sell insurance, and now, you’re going to be sold insurance for the next twenty minutes. What I like to do is go through and look at all their profiles, then I’ll find 5 or 6 people that interest me. I’ll send them a LinkedIn connection saying, “I saw you went to this event last year or last month or I saw you going to this event,” depending on where you find them. “I’m interested in coming because I’m passionate about X. Do you feel that this is a group that I should come along to?”

If they respond yes, then great. When you get there, they’re going to recognize your face. You are going to recognize theirs. If you’re clever, they’ve told you yes. You can look at their profile, what they’ve posted, what they’re sharing, and what they’re commenting on. It’s pretty easy to come up with conversational topics.

I remember when I was looking for Dell to sponsor an event that I did. I connected with somebody and asked them that very similar statement. I asked if they were going to the event and connected with them and it was one of the senior executives for Dell. I went and quickly checked out to see if he had an Instagram profile. He did and he was ridiculously into Peloton. When I got to the event, he asked me how I was doing. I said, “I’m doing great. I’m annoyed with the weather because I’m a runner. When it’s raining, I can’t go and do my run. I find it so much better for my mental health when I’m out running every day,” then he spoke about Peloton for the next 30 minutes.

By the time he was done, he was like, “Matt, I spent the last 30 minutes talking about Peloton. I haven’t even asked you what you do.” From that moment on, I had the floor. You can do your research before asking great questions but sometimes it’s not as hard as you think. You can find something about them that gets them chatting for twenty minutes and they so appreciate the fact they’re able to talk about themselves. When they get to what it is that I do, I will respond with this, “I’m the Rapid Growth® Guy.”

I say it like I said I’m an accountant or I’m a bookkeeper. Here’s the difference, the Rapid Growth® Guy doesn’t mean anything and what happens is people then lean into that. They’re like, “Hang on a second. What exactly is that?” Now, the reason why that works is because of a few factors. One is called a hook statement. We’re creating interest in intrigue, so you can’t call yourself the Real Estate Lady because that automatically is going to get people to trigger, “They’re obviously in real estate.”

I had somebody call themselves the Data Wizard. They’re like, “What do you think?” I’m like, “You’re in data analytics. I’m pretty sure they’re going to get to that point. They’re not going to lean in and go, “What is that?” When I call myself the Rapid Growth® Guy, I say, “Thanks for asking. I’m the Rapid Growth® Guy.” They lean forward and they’re like, “What is that?” They’re interested but they’ve also talked about themselves for twenty minutes.

I now have complete license to tell them more because they’re going to ask. They’re going to ask because they’re interested and because they feel like they should give value back to me. They say, “What is that?” I respond with, “Thanks for asking. One of the things that I’d love to see more than anything in the world is an amazing introverted service provider with enough talent, skill, and belief in themselves to go and start a business their own.”

“One of the things I hate to see and I find it happens so often, is they end up stuck in this endless hamster wheeler, struggling to find interested people, trying to set themselves apart, trying to make the sale all while feeling like people only care about one thing, price. Do you know anyone like that?” They’ll respond with, “I’m like that.” Of course, they are because I’ve gone to the right networking event. I’ve researched who they are and I’ll respond with, “I’m on a mission to help people like yourself realize that you’re not a second-class citizen. Your path to success is different to that of an extrovert.”

Instead of focusing on your functional skill, which you might find most introverts are usually amazing at, all it takes is focusing on three things outside the scope of your functional skill to create a rapid-growth business that revolves around you, your family, and your life, not the other way around. I’ll say, “Let me give you an example,” and then I’ll tell them a story. The story short circuit the logical mind which means you’re speaking directly to the emotional mind.

The Introvert’s Edge: As an introvert, your path to success is different from an extrovert. Most introverts are usually amazing when focusing on three things outside the scope of their functional skill to create a rapid growth business that revolves around you, your family, and your life.

The logical mind, by the way, is going, “This will work for me. That won’t. I don’t have time for this. I’m going to cut him off.” The emotional mind screams out, “Storytime,” and it listens. We’ve had people on cold calls use stories with C-level executives that logically, when somebody gives an objection using logical reasoning, they get eight seconds before the C-level executive hangs up. We get two and a half minutes before they hang up on average because of the short-circuiting of the logical mind.

When you use it in networking, you can tell a 3 or 4-minute story and people are still engaged. That’ll feel like ten minutes for you but I promise you, people will listen and you show them how you help people in the story. Notice, in the networking spiel, I didn’t even say what I do. I talked about what I love to see and what I hate to see in the mission that I’m on. It’s not about me. I talk about the change I want to see in the world and what I’m passionate about. People love to get behind that. It’s changing the flow of what you do to make it not about yourself.

This is the thing. Introverts should love this because for the first time, you’re going to hear a rule about sales, networking, and public speaking that’s going to feel totally great for you, which is this. In sales, networking, and public speaking, the number one rule in all of these version arenas is it’s not about you. The moment you make it about you, you fail.

I call myself the Rapid Growth® Guy to create that intrigue that leads into me talking about what I love to see and what I hate to see in the world and the mission that I’m on, the change that I want to make, and then I’ll tell a story about someone else like them who had the problems that they have or that they should have. I should know my niche by now and how I got them to a positive outcome.

They see it as me explaining because they asked, which is why they give me permission to explain. They’re still intrigued because until we get to the story, they don’t get to understand how I can help. Now for a lot of people, they feel like they have to convince and control customers to talk to them or they’re educating clients and they didn’t ask to be educated. This is a totally different model that gets people to lean in and it comes across as you’re not trying to sell. You’re trying to motivate and inspire them to take action on their own.

When you get to the end of telling the story, what I love to do is deliver a moral of the story and then say, “Does that make sense?” As soon as I say, “Does that make sense?” the person always, “That makes total sense. I’m exactly like Wendy. How did you work with Wendy?” You’re like, “It’s not the time to go into that,” and you set a separate meeting because the one thing you should never do in a networking event is sell.

As soon as you sell, everything goes totally wrong because you’ll say, “Thanks for asking.” You’ll start to talk, and next thing you know, somebody will walk up and go, “John, I was dying to see you,” and now you’ve been interrupted, so it’s broken. Plus, they came to networking events not to be sold to but to have people buy their stuff usually.

The moment you start selling at that event, even if they do say, “I want to move forward,” they will resent you for taking up their time and selling them something. By pushing back and saying, “Now’s not a great time for that. We’re all here to network but I’m happy to set up a separate meeting.” All of a sudden, they appreciate you and they’re like, “This person comes from an abundant place.” I have never known anyone to be seen as abundant and not get somebody’s respect.

I love that. That’s amazing, by the way, as you well know. Let’s say for instance, I’m going on a cruise in March where I will be speaking about my book, Choose Bliss. There are going to be 2,500 people there. I cannot research all the people. We do have a Facebook group. A lot of people are not going to log on. There will be people, hopefully, that I run into that I can do research on.

There are going to be an awful lot of networking opportunities where I have no idea who I’m talking to or anything. Let’s talk about that impromptu networking opportunity as an introvert. I’ll tell you, I’m scared to death because people come at me. They’re like, “I love your book,” and all this stuff. That’s great but then, what do I say? I feel like an idiot. I’m not that interesting.

You’re still lucky because a lot of people reading don’t have a book and people aren’t chasing up to them and because of that, you have a natural advantage. I’ll answer your question from your point but I’ll also answer it for those people that are going on a cruise or some event, where perhaps they haven’t done the research at all.

I would prefer, the other one, for my ladies is much more important.

It’s easy to cover both because firstly, I can tell you that usually, when you have 2,500 people at an event, usually, they create an app so that you can know all the different events that are going on and have an attendee list. When you say, “There are 2,500 people, I don’t have the time to do that,” we don’t have to research all 2,500.

I met one of the senior people at IBM who endorsed my book at a conference where I was speaking at the conference but there were like 3,000 people at that event. I got somebody from my team to run through and quickly profile scan all the people that were there and handpick maybe 50 profiles to do a deep dive into and then send a message saying, “I saw you were going to this conference. I’m heading to that conference too. I hope we can squeeze in a time to connect.”

By the time I went to that three-day conference, half of my day was booked out with 30-minute meetings. I went to a conference that was more like a bunch of scheduled meetings. For those people that feel uncomfortable with, the people that are constantly sending in messages saying, “We should catch up for 30 minutes to do a sales call,” that’s not the same as doing what you are doing.

You’re reaching out to them saying, “I’m coming to the same conference you are,” and that highlights that you’re interested in a similar topic. You would just like to meet them for a specific reason and it doesn’t need to be salesy. It’s that you want to get a chance to meet them because their profile looked interesting and network. People go to conferences, by the way, for a chance to network.

You’re not telling somebody, “I didn’t have plans. Stop working and meet with me instead.” You’re saying, “You want a network, so let’s network.” By the way, half the people you reach out to statistically are going to be introverted. They’re going to go a pre-planned meeting as opposed to walking in and not knowing everyone. That’s, by the way, what the person at IBM did. He reached out and said, “We’ll catch up for 30 minutes.”

We caught up for 30 minutes. I find out something that wasn’t on his profile. He was about to be awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award for ISP and because of that, the next thing I knew, he and I are best of friends. He is endorsing my book and he’s also an introvert, by the way. He’s impassioned to drive my books in front of everybody at the organization. Again, just because there are lots of people doesn’t mean you could spend the entire week running into people that were the wrong people.

While it doesn’t feel as time intensive as going through 2,500 profiles, it’s easy to go through a whole bunch of profiles and quickly go, “Yes. No. I’m fully stacked.” You may not be all the right people but you’ll get a few of them. Now, when you go to events and you have done no research whatsoever, my suggestion is to stay true to who are. What do I mean by that? I’ll give you an example.

We’ve picked on insurance salespeople before, so let’s use an insurance example. I worked with a guy who sold insurance. He said, “Matt, networking’s the worst for me. I’m an introverted guy. I do the whole being interested thing but the moment I say that I sell insurance, it’s like I watch their eyes explode and they’re like, “How do I get away from this person I’m about to get a sales pitch?” I said, “What we’ve got to do is stop using the word insurance because if you use the word insurance, people put you in a box. They’re like, ‘I know what that is and that’s one step above-used car sales.'”

By the way, when I used to say I was a sales trainer, people had the same reaction. Especially introverts who I wanted to serve would always give me these reasons for why they couldn’t sell as an introvert. Now I was on the defensive explaining why they could, as opposed to getting them to lean in. I said, “Help me understand though because I’m big on leading with passions. Who are you most passionate about serving?” His response was, “I just like helping everybody.”

I said, “Really, everybody? Help me understand a person that earns $50,000 versus a person that earns $150,000. Which one of those groups would you prefer to serve?” He said “The people that would make $150,000.” I said, “Why?” He said, “They can buy more insurance products.” I’m like, “That’s not passion. That’s more I want to sell you stuff so I can buy a new car.”

Let’s get a little bit deeper for a second. Let’s imagine for a second, there were two choices. One was a person that had grown up poor, studied hard, got a scholarship to Harvard, went to Harvard, worked hard, won dux of the class, won all these awards, and got employed by a large organization. Now he earns $250,000 a year as a C-level executive in a big organization with a big team. As opposed to somebody that dropped out of school, saved up a ton of money, and now they’ve started a business. They’ve got a ton of staff working for them and make about $250,000 a year.

They’re earning the same. Their life trajectories were different. He said, “The small business owner.” I said, “What do you mean obviously? This person studied hard and got into Harvard. What do you mean?” He said, “For me, I feel like they deserve it more.” I’m like, “Talk to me about that for a second.” He said, “I had this grandfather,” and he started telling me this story about his grandfather and how his grandfather saved up and bought a farm.

He looked after all of his staff but then his grandfather got sick. He had to sell the farm to pay for medical treatment and also because he couldn’t work. He said, “I watched my grandfather fade away and die in this tiny little apartment in front of the TV for the last decades of his life.” He said, “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone and I’d love to stop that from happening.” I’m like, “I’m confused. You sell life insurance. How could this possibly have helped like he didn’t die?” I was blown away at how much he knew.

He said, “I’ve discovered these policies that allowed me to put cash into an insurance policy. When you’re high cashflow businesses like farms have to be, you can get a high yield return in these life insurance policies. You then can flip that into actual real investments in the future. If he hadn’t done that from an early year with his high cashflow business, he would’ve had a whole bunch of assets, which would’ve meant he would’ve got a golden retirement.”

I was like, “Why wouldn’t you spend your life articulating how passionate you are about helping these people that create something out of nothing, the hustlers of the world not end up in second-class retirements?” He said, “I would love to do that but I don’t know that I’m always going to go to networking events and find somebody that was interested in that.”

We created this unified message. Now, firstly, he came up with this concept. He wanted to call himself the Financial Cowboy. I was like, “Finance firstly is a commoditized word. We know you are in finance or financial planning, insurance, or something like that. We put you in a commodity. Even if it’s not the commodity you’re selling, it’s the wrong opportunity. The word cowboy attached to it makes me feel like you’re going to grab my money, go away, and spend it on cocaine. It’s not the right fit for me.”

I said, “What if we call you the Hustle Lifeguard instead?” The reason we called him that is the people that start these businesses that have got high cashflow businesses are the hustlers of the world but they prioritize their staff. They’re always looking after their staff and making sure their staff retirement needs are under control but they don’t think about themselves.

A lot of them will say, “My business is my asset,” but most of these businesses never sell. They don’t prioritize their investment needs. I know it was part of your last questions, “What are my property investment strategies and things like that?” The reason I know is because I don’t not prioritize my later life because I’m excited about my business. No matter how excited I am, which I hope people can tell, I love doing what I do.

However, for him, what I said is he should go to networking events and when somebody asks what it is that he does. He should say, “I’m the Hustle Lifeguard,” and when they say, “What is that?” One of the things I love to see more than anything in the world is to talk with these people that start things out of nothing. What he finds more often than not and he hates seeing is they don’t prioritize their retirement even though they had high cashflow businesses and that leads them in second class retirements. He’s explaining that he’s on a mission to help these people and go on and then tell a story.

As soon as he did that, his entire business transformed. His question then was, “Matt, I’m a little bit uncomfortable with that though because when I’m going to networking events, how do I know that the person I’m speaking to is somebody that has a high cashflow business?” I said, “Here’s the thing. If you own who it is you are and who it is that you serve, even if the person you’re speaking to doesn’t do that, they likely will know somebody that does and because of that, they will introduce you.”

In my book, I talk about the benefit of having momentum partners. I say that when you go to networking events, most people in their head say, “What I’m looking for is a prospect.” Prospects are like staying in the hamster wheel. We get a deal, we make our money, and then we have to go hustle for another deal.

That’s not the way out. When you are going networking, I reluctantly will accept a deal when all there is an opportunity for getting a deal in a networking event. When I’m out networking, I’m looking to make sure I never have to go networking again. I do that by recruiting momentum partners and champions. Momentum partners are people that believe in the work that I do and are willing to share it with the world.

For instance, you invited me being on this show because I was on somebody else’s show who recommended my work. That person is a momentum partner of mine because he believes in what I do and he shared it with you and you’re like, “I want to get Matthew on my show.” That meant I got to share my message with his audience and now your audience, then likely, many more audiences because he believes in what I do and he shares it.

Now, while you don’t have an official agreement signed, a good momentum partner, you should also do the same for them because you believe in what they do. Judy Robinett wrote the foreword for my sales book. When she and I met, she called me because she was looking for advice. She read an article I wrote on Entrepreneur. She was looking for some advice on how to close higher speaking fee deals because she found that when she mentioned the price, she didn’t get them. She was charging too little.

I gave her a script to use to get a much higher price. She was so appreciative that I didn’t try and sell her anything. She introduced me to three shows. I then introduced her to three shows and we did that off the cuff for over a year. We both made hundreds of thousands of dollars off clients that came from those podcasts purely because we believed in what each other did.

That is what a momentum partner is. When you go to a networking event, look for those groups of people. When you find them, it doesn’t matter if they’re buying your stuff. They are hugely powerful. Champions are the group of people that have high credibility in your industry or people that allow you to break into other industries. For instance, Ivan Misner came through a momentum partner of mine. I was introduced through a momentum partner to his work.

Many people, when they get introduced to someone like Ivan Misner, try to sell him something. For me, I wouldn’t care if he asked me to pick up his laundry. I would’ve done it. When we got and had a dialog, he became a champion for me. He started recommending and endorsing my work and because of that, it gave my work credibility. The best way to make more money is to have high levels of credibility. You need champions for that and to expand your network. You need momentum partners for that.

For those people to champion your work, they need to be inspired by your passion and mission and that’s what the networking script does. When I go to an event and I think that the person I’m speaking to may not be the person that I need to sell to or that may not be my best customer, I still stay true to who I am. I stay authentic. I share my passion and mission in the exact same way and 1 of 2 things happens.

One is, they go, “That’s exceptional. Here’s somebody I think you need to meet.” The second thing that happens is more often than not, I’m the first person that they’ve ever met that energizes them when they’re hearing about what somebody does. They’re hearing about passion and mission and don’t feel sold to and because of that, they try and borrow my passion for what they do. Even if I articulate, they’re not my ideal customer. I use the words, “I specialize,” not, “I work exclusively with.”

Specializing is wonderful. People expect somebody that specializes to have better general knowledge than everybody else. They say, “I’m not your niche but I feel that what you said could work for me. I’m an extrovert but I could gravitate to systems and process. I have a product-based company. However, I feel that I need to be utilizing a more solid strategy that leverages my face as the brand anyway because that’s where all brands are going.”

I could choose to disagree. I could choose to say, ” I don’t want to have you as a client or I could feel that they’re the perfect fit for me.” That’s my choice. What I find is by staying true to who I am, it opens up more doors. The moment I start bending myself to every audience or being careful to not tell them what I do until I find out more about whether or not I consult to them, firstly, it’s dishonest and it’s going to make you feel uncomfortable.

Secondly, it always leads to a less successful outcome because the moment you start hedging, then all of a sudden, it’s like coming down to punish you. If I sell two different businesses, I’m going to mention this business to ideal customer for this one and vice versa. Stick to what you are born to do and you will always find you get a better outcome.

You covered so much information there. Thank you so much. I want to be respectful and we need to do EXTRA too. That was amazing, Matthew. Thank you so much for that. You are fantastic. I want more information. I’m sure my ladies do too. Could you tell us how they could reach you, please?

The easiest way to get in touch with me is to go to LinkedIn. Check me out there. There’s a ton of free content I put out there. I find a lot of people buy programs before looking at all the free content. I learned on YouTube. I put a ton of free content out on YouTube as well. Check that out. If you’re interested in creating your own version of the Rapid Growth® Guy or the Hustle Lifeguard, go to MatthewPollard.com/growth. There, you’ll get a template that you can download that shows you the five steps to do that in a more specific way and it’ll only take you about an hour.

It’s surprising that nobody does this stuff and that’s the problem. We tune in to all these shows and read all these books but we don’t take action on it and that’s a great template for you. My publisher hates me when I say this but if you are interested in checking out The Introvert’s Edge, you don’t need to buy my book. Just download the first chapter.

The Introvert’s Edge: How The Quite and Shy Can Outsell Anyone

I’ll help you get past the belief that you can sell or network as an introvert but depending on whether you go to TheIntrovertsEdge.com or TheIntrovertsEdgeToNetworking.com, which book do you want. Download the first chapter. Get over the belief that you can’t sell or network. In both books, I give you the exact steps to follow in the first chapter.

In the sales book, if you do nothing more than grab what you say, fit it into the steps that I give you. The first thing you realize some things don’t fit, throw that out. You shouldn’t be saying it to customers or prospects. You’ll then realize there are some gaping holes usually around questions. Maybe we’ll do as a special part of your segment as well for your premium clients but you’ll learn that you probably don’t tell great stories.

You don’t ask the right questions, then you’ll realize that there are some things out of order, which is why you end up finding sales so difficult. If you do nothing more than that, you’ll double your sales in the next 60 days. You can access those free chapters TheIntrovertsEdge.com and TheIntrovertsEdgeToNetworking.com.

I got shivers. Thank you for that. That was amazing. We don’t have time for our three rapid-fire questions but we do have time to do EXTRA, which we’re going to be talking about how to create that unified message. He’s got a template you can download but we’re going to do a quick run-through on exactly how to make that happen. I want some personal advice. You folks will get to see this on mine, which is I am the Blissful Millionaire. I’m excited to have that conversation and use that to break it down. Does that sound fun, Matthew?

That sounds great.

Matthew, thank you so much for all you’ve offered in this portion of the show.

It was my pleasure. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.

Ladies, thank you for joining Matthew and me for this portion of this show. We do have more, so stay tuned. We’re going to be talking about how to create that unified message. That’s going to be on EXTRA. If you’re subscribed, stay tuned. If not, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com and you can tune in to the next conversation.

For those of you that are leaving Matthew and I now, thank you so much for joining us. You know how much I appreciate you and I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon.

Important Links

• Matthew Pollard
• The Introvert’s Edge
• Ugg Boots
• The Introvert’s Edge podcast
• American Association of Inside Sales Professionals
• WP Engine
• Choose Bliss
• Judy Robinett
• Ivan Misner
• LinkedIn – Matthew Pollard
• YouTube – Matthew Pollard
• MatthewPollard.com/growth
• TheIntrovertsEdgeToNetworking.com
• RealEstateInvestingForWomen.ETXRA.com

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To listen to the EXTRA portion of this show go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

Learn how to create a consistent income stream by only working 5 hours a month the Blissful Investor Way.

Grab my FREE guide at http://www.BlissfulInvestor.com

Moneeka Sawyer

Moneeka Sawyer is often described as one of the most blissful people you will ever meet.   She has been investing in Real Estate for over 20 years, so has been through all the different cycles of the market.  Still, she has turned $10,000 into over $5,000,000, working only 5-10 hours per MONTH with very little stress.

While building her multi-million dollar business, she has traveled to over 55 countries, dances every single day, supports causes that are important to her, and spends lots of time with her husband of over 20 years.

She is the international best-selling author of the multiple award-winning books “Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment” and “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way.”

Moneeka has been featured on stages including Carnegie Hall and Nasdaq, radio, podcasts such as Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod,  and TV stations including ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW, impacting over 150 million people.

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Avoiding The Common Mistakes Newbies Make In Multifamily With Taylor Loht

Newbies in real estate tend to make mistakes in a lot of things. Although mistakes are possible, we can still correct them. What could these mistakes be? In this episode, Moneeka Sawyer welcomes Taylor Loht, host of the Passive Wealth Strategy Show, to discuss the common mistakes in multifamily you should avoid to help you build wealth. Inaction is the most common mistake newbies commit, but when you take action and commit to the process, the result of your efforts can be fruitful. Cultivate discipline in your life and move forward as you build wealth. Want to learn more? Tune up the volume and tune in to this conversation now.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Avoiding The Common Mistakes Newbies Make In Multifamily With Taylor Loht

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am so excited to welcome to the show Taylor Loht. I had the pleasure of meeting Taylor. I was on his show. He was such a pleasure to talk to so I wanted to share him with you ladies. Taylor is a multifamily and self-storage real estate investor. He has acquired, partnered on, or had a hand in over $150 million in commercial real estate. He hosts the Passive Wealth Strategy Show, which I was on, which helps listeners escape the Wall Street casino and build wealth on Main Street by investing in real estate while avoiding the common newbie pitfalls. Taylor, it is so good to see you again. Welcome to the show.

It’s great to see you as well. Thanks for having me.

Could you give us a high-level version of what brought you to real estate? Give us your story.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about this and trying to be more self-aware of what happened and occurred. In 2015, I had been investing in Wall Street’s stuff for a while and doing pretty well because I got lucky when I started making money and we were in the market. 2015 brought new things. The price of oil fell from $110 or $120 a barrel down to $40 something over the course of that year. It took with it a lot of the stock market. We had a lot of stagnation and that got me questioning. I was like, “Maybe this isn’t the right way to build wealth in the long run.”

At that same time, I so happened to read Rich Dad Poor Dad. All those things factored in together and joined together and got me thinking there’s got to be a better way to build wealth. I started learning about real estate and hit the ground running I suppose. I was going to go get MBA and decided not to do that after reading Rich Dad Poor Dad and started investing in real estate. That’s the quick version.

Your story is so similar to mine. I got my degree, thought about getting an MBA, and decided instead to take that money and invest in real estate.

It’s tough to look at the MBA and think between the salary that I’m not earning and the cost to get the MBA. It’s going to cost me $300,000 to $400,000 to do this and then I’m going to have a big pile of debt and a job I don’t think I want to make more money. That didn’t feel right. Robert Kiyosaki showed me that my misgivings about that were right and I had to go another direction.

How long have you been investing in real estate?

I started investing in 2016 as a passive investor with the goal of getting more active in the space, scaling and growing. For me, it’s a little bit of a hockey stick type of thing. I’m a very introverted type of person naturally. You mentioned getting your first degree. My first degree is in Chemical Engineering. I’m a nerd. I didn’t spend my teens and twenties getting out there and socializing. I had friends and stuff, but I wasn’t like a big man on campus.

I had to go learn how to meet people at real estate networking events. I had to learn how to do things like what we’re doing now, doing a show, and speaking to all your awesome readers because this is not the type of thing that I naturally gravitate toward, but to get to where I wanted to go in life, I had to learn how to do these things. I had to learn how to build a level of comfort and confidence doing these things. That took time, but that’s okay as long as you’re working and moving forward then there’s nothing wrong with that.

I’m with you.  What is the biggest newbie mistake real estate investors make? Where do they go wrong?

When we’re talking about people who are new, they say may start going to real estate networking events and trying to figure out what’s out there and all these kinds of things, the biggest mistake is not taking action. Parenthetically thinking that education equals action. Education is great. I’ve spent a lot of money on real estate education more than I ever thought I would, but you have to turn that education into action. This includes me at the beginning because you don’t know exactly what to do when you’re getting started, so you don’t know which direction to go. You’re getting pulled by shiny objects or can’t pick a path and stick to it.

When new real estate investors want to get started, they don’t know where to start. Maybe they go to a networking event, or they hear about a course that’s going great. Maybe they buy it or don’t, but either way, if they buy it, they might not stick to that. That might not hold them down the road. They might go buy the next program and then eventually give up because it doesn’t work. They might try for a month and then they don’t get a deal for a month. It took me years to get my first deal of continually working at it and growing. It’s taking action and committing to the process. Stumbling and falling on your face sometimes is part of the process. It’s something that most of us deal with at the beginning.

It is interesting because one of the real big tenets of this show is to take action. What I shared with one of my guests is to take mindful action. For me, action is about doing something. Education is an action, but you do have to go to the next step. Also, don’t get analysis paralysis. Go to that next step, commit to a strategy, and move forward towards actions toward that strategy. It’s all action, but it’s a matter of not getting stuck in any particular action either because there are other things.

For instance, if you want to do no money-down strategies, you’re looking for lease options and calling distressed sellers. Don’t get so caught up in the phone calls that you don’t close any deals. That’s also getting stuck. What happens is people buy a course and they’re like, “I’m going to learn all of these scripts by heart.” You have to make phone calls. When someone says, “Yes,” you have to follow up. Don’t like freak out and say, “I’m not going to call them back.” There are baby steps in that process. It starts with education, but then you got to keep moving forward.

Speaking of being on the phone with people, you have to get to the point where somebody yells at you and calls you a jerk because you’re trying to do this deal with them, and for whatever reason, it’s going to happen. I got over it. I’ve been yelled out of the phone by people a few times whose property I’m trying to buy, but it gives me pause. I’m a sensitive guy, but you got to make the next calls and move on to the next one and whatever those hurdles are that we have to get over.

I’m never going to poo-poo education. You have to apply it. Maybe you learn about wholesaling and you’re like, “I don’t want to be a real estate wholesaler.” I don’t want to be a real estate wholesaler either. There’s nothing wrong with being a wholesaler, but if that’s not your path, no problem. Find the path that is right for you, commit to it, and move forward.

How do you overcome the key limiting beliefs of new investors?

Do you mean on an individual level like my own limiting beliefs?

Yes.

My opinion is that’s a daily practice. That’s something that we, as individuals, have to work on. I’m realizing that 2015 was a very pivotable year for me. I had that shift in my way that I built wealth, but also, I started training in Brazilian jiujitsu and I still do at the end of 2022. I became a vegetarian in 2015 and I’m still a vegetarian. I’m marrying a vegan in 2023. I’m stuck on that path too. I’m perfectly happy with it.

In this realm, you have to constantly be challenging yourself in taking that next step. If you’d asked me in 2015 when I was brand new at jiujitsu and didn’t know anything, “Are you going to stick with it? Are you going to get to purple belt level?” which I am now, I would’ve said, “I’m not so sure,” because I had those limiting beliefs in my mind. Now, if you asked me if I’m going to keep progressing, absolutely. As long as I don’t get injured and can keep going and training, I’m going to keep pushing forward, but it’s only because I’ve continued to press through all of those various beliefs.

Now, I work with a lot of passive investors. The first couple of phone calls for example that I had with passive investors scared me, but you have to do it. There’s always the first one, whatever it is, like the first offer that you make, the first property you get under contract or the first investor who wires you money. “I have $100,000 of this guy’s money and I have to put that money ahead of my own. That’s scary,” but that first one is what gets you going and starts the fire.

If you’re familiar with this thing going around called 75 Hard and I don’t know if your readers have heard of that, but it’s put out by this guy named Andy Frisella. It’s about cultivating discipline in your own life. There are a few things that you’re required to do every day for 75 days. You’re required to follow a diet. He doesn’t tell you what one to follow. He says, “You got to pick it and stick to it.” You have to exercise twice a day. One of those exercises or workouts has to be outside. You have to drink a gallon of water a day.

75 HARD: A Tactical Guide To Winning The War With Yourself

There are a few other things you have to do. You have to take a cold shower every day for five minutes. I don’t like cold showers. The rest of the stuff I can handle. I still hate the cold showers. You also can’t drink if you like alcohol. I like whiskey but I’m not drinking it because I’m sticking to the program. If you miss one thing, you got to start back again on day one.

You also have to take a picture of yourself shirtless every day for 75 days. Those pictures of me are never going to see the light of day. My fiancé doesn’t see them. They’re only for me. I tried this program and I made it probably 3 or 4 days. I’m not sure exactly what I missed. Maybe it was a culture shower or something else, but I had a limiting belief when I got started about whether I could accomplish it.

I’m not at the end of the program now. The jury is out. I haven’t completed it, but I’m significantly further than I got last time. I didn’t have this same level of limiting beliefs about whether I could stick to my diet or work out twice a day and one of them outside. It’s hard to fit this stuff into your schedule. That’s a lot of time. The cold showers stink, but I can get it done and just don’t enjoy it.

It comes down to putting one foot in front of the other. If and when you “fail,” or if you don’t meet your own expectations which are most of the time because you didn’t take the right actions. We knew it at the time like you have an email to respond to from somebody or a call from a potential seller and you’re putting off calling them back. You need to take that action. Even if this deal that you’re working on doesn’t go anywhere, you need to have that process in your mind that mentality or mindset of, “I’m going to take the action on whatever this thing is,” and it comes down to cultivating that in your life as much as you can.

I love your whole attitude about possible failure. I like to call it more like trial and error rather than failure because failure feels bad. A lot of people are like, “Try is such a weak word like I’m going to try.” I don’t mean it that way. What I do mean is we set a goal and if we are not able to get to the very end of that goal to reach it, examining along the way with this beginner’s mind or gamer’s mind maybe what was it that I did wrong, was not committed to, or didn’t do right? How can I get better at this? I love the fact that you brought in something so personal because that’s where we practice. In business, we feel like the stakes are so high and they’re not higher than personal development.

For personal development, the results are significantly more impactful in your life but they don’t feel as scary necessarily as in business. I love that you’re practicing this ability to create goals, pursue those goals, reexamine where the errors happened, and pursue them again. There’s no real failure. There’s just evolution and success. I love the way that you did that.

We then can take those skills and move them into our business practices. When we’re on the phone with somebody else or taking somebody else’s money, it’s scarier, but you’ve started to develop that skillset required for having that gamer’s mind. “What is this adventure going to bring? How can I become a better person? How can I do this better?” I love the approach that you explained. We’ve never had anybody talk about this deep personal goal setting journey the way you did.

I’m glad to share what I’ve learned. I’ll be honest. I don’t mean to put myself as somebody who is super disciplined all the time. I’ll give you an example. I got injured in jiujitsu. I broke a couple of ribs or maybe severely dislocated them. I had a pretty bad rib injury. If you get a rib injury, you can’t breathe, pick stuff up, and do jiujitsu. I ended up taking a few months off of not training. When you have a rib injury, you can’t do anything. You can’t lift weights.

Eventually, I started doing some jump rope outside and trying to keep my cardio going, but it was hard. I was sitting around and can’t do my favorite thing, which is exercise in any way. My diet and mindset slipped a bit. I put on a little bit of weight. It’s only 5 or 6 pounds and I got it off now. I see life as a process of learning and continuously developing, and then seeing we’ve stumbled and trying to get ourselves back on track, not all at once, but day by day. “What are the steps that I can take to get myself back on the path where I want to be with whatever our goals in life are?”

That’s how life needs to work in order to be fulfilled and consistently learn, grow, and recognize that we’re not always going to perform to our best expectations. Things are going to come up in life, but when we can recognize that and say, “I’m not performing as well as I can. How can I get myself back on track?” That’s what it takes to grow over the long term and build wealth but grow as a person as well, which is more important.

We can mitigate risk as much as we can, but there’s always risk involved in putting yourself out there. People say that public speaking is one of most people’s most feared activities. You’re more afraid of public speaking than you are of dying. Jerry Seinfeld has a good joke about this. You’d rather be the guy in the casket than the one giving the eulogy. That’s not something that I want to do.

When I was a kid growing up and I had to speak in front of the class, I hated it. I didn’t even get any joy out of that, but to get where I want to be, I have to learn how to work through that. Truthfully, I don’t enjoy it but it’s “easier.” It’s less mentally taxing when you can focus on providing value to the audience. My method when I have to do public speaking is to practice until I’m not worried about what I’m going to say and that’s focused on providing value to the audience. The process is getting over our fears progressively. However, it applies to our real estate investing. It’s just huge. Fear is a limiting belief. I’m dealing with them.

You mentioned that you’re an introvert and that you’ve had to develop skills to have that not be negative. I am an introvert too. Nobody ever believes me when I say that, but I’m not a very outgoing person. I was at a big real estate event down in Southern California and I realized there were so many missed opportunities there because I sat with my friends whom I wanted to connect with. That, to me, is what fills me up. It’s these real conversations with people that I care about and want to get to know more. I’m not the person that’s a good networker so there were so many missed opportunities.

However, it was the thing that made it even possible for me to be there because I decided I was going to meet 2 or 3 new people and the people that I was going there with I didn’t know them well so I could build those relationships deeper. I’m all about deep relationships. I am not the best networker and I do terrible in groups. If I’m in a room of a lot of people, I completely shrivel up. Those are characteristics of an introvert and it has never held me back. I’d love to hear your perspective on that because you’re the same way. We don’t hear a lot of that in this real estate world, right?

That’s true. We don’t hear people talking about it because, in many ways, people perceive it. This is maybe changing society, but people perceive introversion as being antisocial or generally less good at business or an investor because you don’t get energy out of networking with 50 people at a networking event. I don’t particularly enjoy that myself, but if you can focus on what you are good at and sometimes you have to do things that you don’t like to do. That’s true, at least for me.

Sometimes you got to get out there, network, and deal with it in your own way or whatever makes sense for you. For myself, if I am at a real estate networking event, particularly a big conference, after talking and trying to build connections with people, I have to step away for a little while and take 5, 10, 15 minutes, or however long to get myself back centered and trying to regain some energy whatever it is. I got to check out for a few minutes. Maybe I’ll take some time to digitize some business cards or be productive with that time checked away so that I can come back to the event with the energy that I need to have. I’m not going to be there forever. These events are typically 2 days or sometimes 3 days. I can deal with it for that long.

My fiancé and I have known each other for a few years before we went on our first date. We met in jiujitsu. She started not too long after I did. We knew each other at the name level. That’s how I pretty much used to know everybody at jiujitsu. I’ve changed that over time as I’ve worked this muscle of building connections with people and I’ve seen that as a valuable muscle. It’s great to get to know people. Years ago, we went on our first date. She asked me out and we connected. We learned how much we have in common and get to know each other on a deeper level.

It went from there. We’re great and very happy, but at that point, we’d probably known each other for a few years where we’d seen each other 3 or 4 times a week for years, but my natural tendency is not to strike up conversations, especially with women at the gym. That’s not who I am. Again, she asked me out. I wasn’t asking about women at the gym. That’s my natural tendency. I’m not there to meet people. I’m there to exercise and get to know this sport. Now, I see the value in the real estate world when I’m there. That’s how I’ve built a lot of connections with many of my investors.

What I’m getting at is that we can succeed in real estate too. There’s more understanding of that and growth in the culture. There are more knowledge bases and strategies out there available to learn from. There are quite a few very good guides for introverted real estate investors to build connections at real estate networking events that are out there.

I’ve had one gentleman in particular on my show in the past that trains introverts on how to succeed in networking and sales with an angle into real estate investing. His name is Matthew Pollard. I got to recommend checking out his content. I’ve got a few of his books on my phone, but suffice it to say that it can be done for those of us who are introverts. We just have to use strategies that work for us in whatever our particular real estate investing niche is. You can find a way.

One of the things about creating a blissful real estate business is to build that business based on your strengths and who you are rather than trying to fight who you are and try to be something that you’re not and build a business on that because it’s not sustainable. We do grow, but you don’t want it to be so painful that it stops you.

I say frequently on this show, there are 1 million ways to make $1 million dollars in real estate and pick one that’s aligned with your strengths, and it’s not dependent on the things that you’re weak on. If I’m weak in networking, I don’t want to build a business that’s completely dependent on networking. It doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t grow that skill, I shouldn’t network, or I shouldn’t push myself, but I don’t want my business to be completely dependent on that until I build some confidence there.

Build a different business, at least to start, and it’s possible. There are so many ways to make money in real estate being an introvert. You don’t have to be what people perceive as what real estate success looks like. I love having this conversation because many of my readers must be introverts and think, “I can’t network,” but you can. It’ll be a skill that you need to develop, but you don’t have to start your business and be completely dependent on that. Pick something else. There are many different strategies.

I totally agree. We can do it. You need to find the route that works for you, build, and learn over time.

Common Mistakes In Multifamily: You need to find the route that works for you, build, and learn over time.

Taylor, could you tell everybody how they can reach you? I know you’ve got an awesome free gift.

My show, Passive Wealth Strategy Show which you’ve been on, and thank you for coming on, is where we teach our listeners how to escape the Wall Street casino and build wealth on Main Street by investing in real estate. We have new episodes every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. We also have a free video course on red flags in Passive Real Estate Investing. I invest and do multifamily and self-storage syndications and actively raise money for these deals from passive investors.

I get a lot of questions from passive investors about good things to look for in a syndication. We made the video course of seven things that I’ve seen go wrong in many deals across the board. You spend enough time networking and getting to know people one-on-one in private non-recorded conversations, people will tell you so much. You ask them and let them run. They’ll tell you so much about what went wrong with their deals. When you spend several years in the business as I’ve had and hopefully many more, you start to see some trends and things that can go wrong. You can get that course at PassiveRealEstateCourse.com. It’s totally free. My company is NT Capital at NTCapitalGroup.com. You can look us up there as well.

I am intrigued by the idea of the red flags. You said that there are seven, could we do a deep dive for maybe 1 or 2 on what you’ve learned about them in EXTRA? Would that work for you?

That would be great.

We’ll do a deep dive into 1 or 2 red flags that you should be looking for when you’re looking at investing with a syndicator. I want to highlight that Taylor is a syndicator. He is looking for investors. If you like what he has to say, reach out to him regarding that also. Taylor, are you ready for our three rapid-fire questions?

Let’s go.

Give us one super tip for getting started in real estate investing.

Know your why. Why are you here? What are you committed to achieving? Not, “I want to go buy real estate. I want to go build cashflow.” Those are great and we’ll get there, but start with the deep reason you’re here. Is it that you want to create a retirement for yourself or fuel your own retirement? Is that you want to send your kids to college? Is that you want to be prepared as your parents get older and have the finances to make sure you can take care of them? Whatever it is for you or you want to travel more.

I’m not here to tell you what your goal should be, I’m here to tell you that you should know what it is because it’s going to help push you through tough times. When you get on the phone with somebody and they don’t want to talk to you telling you how much of a jerk you are, that why is going to help you make the next phone call.

What is one strategy for being successful as a real estate investor?

It comes down to every day. A lot of people talk about having morning practice in your life. It’s every day thinking about your goals. Honestly, one of the best tools that I got from a coach who I paid a lot of money to give me this tool, but this is a free thing you can find on YouTube. Go look up Earl Nightingale’s The Strangest Secret. It’s awesome. I listen to it all the time over and over again. It comes down to our lives and experiences. Our success is shaped by the thoughts in our heads.

Are we having positive thoughts? Are we having negative thoughts? If we always focus on the bad things, then we’re only going to notice the bad things and the negative. If we focus on the positive, the good things, the opportunity, and what we can go out and achieve, then we’re more likely going to go do it and achieve those things. I recommend looking that up and listening to it.

Common Mistakes In Multifamily: The thoughts in our heads shape our success. If we focus on the positive, the good things, the opportunity, and what we can go out and achieve, then we’re more likely to do it and achieve those.

What is one daily practice that you do that you would say contributes to your personal success?

For several years, I’ve done intermittent fasting every day. I’ll be honest, it’s come and gone in my life as life gets in the way sometimes. Here and there, I fall off the track, whenever something happens. I’ve been sticking with 16/8, so that’s 16 hours I don’t eat anything, but I drink coffee and water and I only eat meals 8 hours a day. I’m not here to say that’s right for anybody else, but there’s something to it that helps me focus on my goals.

I did a phase where I was eating one meal a day after I get home from jiujitsu. I hadn’t eaten anything for 22 to 23 hours. I go do an hour of jiujitsu, get home, and be so hungry, but the first meal was so good. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that. I’m not doing that right now, but thinking about that every day helps me eat healthily. As I said, I’m a vegetarian, but there’s a lot of crappy vegetarian food out there just because I’m a vegetarian doesn’t mean I only eat vegetables. I don’t all the time, but doing that every day helps me. Plus, I’m in my 30s. I’m getting older.

I also like listening to Tony Robbins. Somebody who’s healthy has 1 million goals. Somebody who’s unhealthy, sick, or has few months left to live, they have one goal. If we can focus on keeping ourselves healthy, we can keep going after those million goals. As I said, I’m in my 30s. My grandfather who I’m told I’m the spitting resemblance of and whom never got to meet died in his 50s. I’m thinking, “If I’m following his track, that means I’m over halfway done. I got to take care of myself.” I’m sticking with it, but that’s super important. It all starts with taking care of your body.

I love that. Thank you for all that you’ve offered on this portion of the show, Taylor.

Thank you for having me.

Ladies, stay tuned. We’re going to be talking about passive investing red flags in EXTRA. If you are subscribed to EXTRA, stay tuned. If you’re not, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com and you can sign up there. For those of you that are leaving Taylor and I, thank you so much for joining us for this portion of the show. I look forward to seeing you next time and until then, remember, goals without action are dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon.

Important Links

• Passive Wealth Strategy Show
• Rich Dad Poor Dad
• 75 Hard
• Matthew Pollard – Past Episode of Passive Wealth Strategy Show
• PassiveRealEstateCourse.com
• NTCapitalGroup.com
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com

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To listen to the EXTRA portion of this show go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

Learn how to create a consistent income stream by only working 5 hours a month the Blissful Investor Way.

Grab my FREE guide at http://www.BlissfulInvestor.com

Moneeka Sawyer

Moneeka Sawyer is often described as one of the most blissful people you will ever meet.   She has been investing in Real Estate for over 20 years, so has been through all the different cycles of the market.  Still, she has turned $10,000 into over $5,000,000, working only 5-10 hours per MONTH with very little stress.

While building her multi-million dollar business, she has traveled to over 55 countries, dances every single day, supports causes that are important to her, and spends lots of time with her husband of over 20 years.

She is the international best-selling author of the multiple award-winning books “Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment” and “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way.”

Moneeka has been featured on stages including Carnegie Hall and Nasdaq, radio, podcasts such as Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod,  and TV stations including ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW, impacting over 150 million people.

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Why The Right Syndicator Believes In Education With Pili Yarusi – Real Estate Women

A syndicator could make or break your real estate career. Many consider them the person in charge of your success. That is why before diving deep into the game, you need to arm yourself with the right syndicator. In this episode, we welcome back to the show Pili Yarusi. Pili is a syndicator herself and is the Cofounder and Operator of Yarusi Holdings LLC. She speaks for the second time on the show with Moneeka Sawyer to share great tips on finding the right syndicator for you. Pili takes us across her journey and offers insights on the importance of education and taking mindful action. At the end of the day, this is your investing journey. You need to protect it as much as you can. Begin by choosing the right people who can help you towards success. Join Pili as she guides you how.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Why The Right Syndicator Believes In Education With Pili Yarusi – Real Estate Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am so excited to welcome back to our show, Pili Yarusi. I had her on the show a couple of years ago. We had an amazing conversation. You should go back, look her up, and check out that one. I’m so excited to have the next conversation and share with you all the ways that she’s grown and all the new things that she has to bring to the conversation. I’m super excited about this conversation.

Before we head into that, let me reintroduce you to Pili. Pili is a loving mom and wife whose goal is to lead with Aloha by example. Pili is a Cofounder and Operator of Yarusi Holdings LLC with her husband Jason. Yarusi Holdings is a multifamily investment firm that repositions underperforming properties through operational efficiencies, rebranding and value add renovations.

Pili and Jason have managed the successful and profitable exit of these multifamily properties. The Yarusis have an active real estate portfolio of over $100 million. She co-hosts Multifamily Live, The Jason and Pili Project, MOM – Moms of Multifamily and MORE – Moms of Real Estate. All can be found on Facebook, YouTube and anywhere you tune in to shows.

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Pili, welcome back to the show. How are you?

I’m so good. Thank you so much for having me back on. That was so many moons ago. We were giggling about how amazing it is that we laid the foundations for the people that we become with the things that we read and the things that we do years ago.

Through COVID, you moved locations. You were active on Clubhouse. I’ve been watching all your events on social media. It has been amazing to watch you grow and then to hear in your bio all the numbers and how things are so different than they were years ago. Congratulations. You’ve done an amazing job.

Thank you so much. It was interesting to hear you read some of our old numbers when we were starting, like our triple-digit units. You said we had 100 and something units.

Ladies, we were reading over her bio first. It was the old bio from years ago. It was 426 units and 100 and something in direct management. Look at those new numbers.

We’re at $200 million in assets in direct management and over 2,000 units. We took down our first building in 2017 and here it is. It’s almost 2023. It’s been an amazing ride. It’s been so much fun.

Take us through your journey a little bit. You’re a syndicator. We have a lot of syndicators that come on this show. I’d like to hear about your journey. For me, one of the things that I want to chat about on this show is I feel like my ladies have heard a lot about syndication. We’ve highlighted some amazing syndicators like yourself. Some are amazing and some, I don’t know enough about to say.

My ladies know that the syndicator or the person in charge is the single most important indicator of success. The ladies have had a little bit of a challenge as far as making a move toward investing in these syndications. I’m not sure if you’ve dealt with that, what your experiences have been around that and what advice you can give the ladies. That’s where I wanted to head. Let’s start by reminding us of your story and telling us about the journey over the last few years.

I want to answer both questions at the same time. I’m going to start with something that you and your ladies can think about. For a syndicator, my most important job and this is per the SEC Regulations or the Securities and Exchange Commission, I need to make sure you’re educated. That’s my biggest concern. My second biggest concern is that I need to make sure that you know me and that I know you.

It doesn’t surprise me, honestly, that it’s such a big leap. Number one, you need to get educated about this new asset class. It’s something that you keep on hearing about but haven’t dove into because it takes a little bit of education to dive into correctly. We talk about passive investing all the time. A true passive investor knows what they’re getting into first and understands it.

When it comes to real estate syndication and going in with a syndicator like myself, I want you to know me. I want you to have access to me. I want you to know that I am going to take care of your investment as far and as much as I can. Those are some of the things that I want you to chew on as I’m going through my story.

I’ll save you me growing up in Hawaii and all that stuff for a later date. Maybe we can have tea one day and talk about that. My real estate journey has honestly been one of complete growth and change. We talked about this a little bit in the last episode that I had with you. I might have been pregnant with one of my children. I’ve been either pregnant without or with a small child for this entire growth period.

Jason and I got together at the end of 2012 into 2013. We decided we wanted a family. We had our first child in 2014. We also got into real estate in 2013, flipping and wholesaling homes. We started doing small rentals and had a construction company. He still had his brewery and I was a real estate agent so a lot was going on plus growing our family.

When multifamily syndication hit us, it hit Jason first. I remember him talking to me about it. I was pregnant with our second child. We still had all these businesses. We were growing. We were prospering but we had so much to juggle. I told him no. It goes back to what you were saying. You and a lot of your ladies haven’t taken the jump into real estate syndication. I said no. I was like, “We have so much going on. Why would we start another business?” We were talking about getting into the active side.

That’s key. There’s the active side and then there’s the passive side. You were looking at going into the active side.

I wasn’t educated enough to even understand that there was a passive side. I didn’t even know this at that time. I was like, “I am pregnant. We have all these things happening.” It was what I said before. It was education that got me there. We jumped in with a mentor instead of how we jumped into flipping and wholesaling, which was like, “Let’s watch HGTV. We have a construction company so we can flip a house.” That is another story for another day.

For multifamily, we got a mentor. We educated ourselves. We ended up taking down our first multifamily at the beginning of 2017. It was a 94-unit in Kentucky. Let’s flash forward a couple of years to 2013. We’re at $200 million and 2,000 units. My biggest concern is to educate. It’s not small amounts of money. It’s not $1,000 or $5,000. Most minimums start at $50,000. Some are $25,000 but most are at $50,000. That’s not something most people have in their back pockets. I want you to be comfortable. I need you to be comfortable. If you’re not comfortable jumping into the syndication, then don’t. Don’t jump into one until you feel comfortable enough.

We talked a little bit about real estate in general. I believe real estate is the best asset to jump into. I’m going to come back to what I said in the beginning. As far as much as you know the person that’s running it, do they have a background of success? Do they have other investors that you can talk to? Do you have their cell phone number? Can you get a hold of them if you need to? If you don’t understand them or understand something, can you get a hold of them?

It comes down to being comfortable in what you’re investing in because this is your hard-earned money. We like to talk about passive investing. You want to make money with your money but first, you’ve worked hard for that money. Let’s make sure that the people that you’re investing with are also going to work hard to make money with your money.

I’ll be honest. I have invested with a few of the different syndicators that, over time, I’ve gotten to know. They’ve been on the show a few times. You’ve sent me a few things. You know this because my answer to you was, “I am finishing up a construction project. I need to stay liquid.” This has been my story for the last couple of years and it’s very frustrating.

When you’re in construction, you do need to have quite a bit of liquidity. This is our first project in this company. We started the company together. This is my first project together with my partner. Liquidity was a hugely important deal for me and continues to be. I was talking to my partner. I probably shouldn’t say this here but we’re all friends. My partner and I were saying, “How much are we in cash?” Over 10 years, because it’s been a 10-year project from when we bought the property to when we got the permits to when we’re finishing the build, we are in for $1 million. That’s personal cash for each of us.

I’ve sold properties. I’ve had to make things happen. That’s in addition to the loan that we owe. In the end, we are going to do fine but we’re not going to make a killing. One year’s income is what we’re making on the back end of this. We missed the boat as far as when we’re selling. We didn’t get rich on this project but I learned a lot. One of the things that I learned was liquidity was key. If we had not finished it, we would’ve ended up with a lot of builders, especially during COVID. For me, there was a liquidity thing.

I will say that it’s a bit of a shield because I don’t feel yet that I’m educated well enough to make those decisions about what kind of syndications I want to go into. Some things came up so we did end up putting it into three. I’ve diversified. I’ve got 1 mobile home park, 1 multifamily and 1 storage thing that I’ve invested in. That was early on. That was before I met you. I then stopped.

I made good decisions. The people that I’m investing with are good and it is because I know them. I trusted them with my money. As I look, “What am I going to do when liquidity isn’t this big deal to me? I want to invest. Where am I going to go? How am I going to go do this?” We’ve had some people come on the show to educate us but for some reason, I’m feeling like it’s not deep enough. Talk to me a little bit about the kind of education that you share with your people to make them comfortable with taking that leap. You’re right. $50,000 and $100,000 is a lot of money.

We educate on a couple of different levels. 7 Figure Multifamily is our active program. I have some investors that have jumped into that program with the sole purpose of learning how to do it from an asset manager’s side or a capital raiser’s side. They’re learning how to do it from that side so they understand where they can put their capital and how it’s being put to use.

As an active investor, this is what I do day in and day out. This is my job. I’ve created a job. I also passively invest but this is my work. This is what I love to do. As a passive investor, you could go that deep. As you continue your journey, you can learn over time by talking to the syndicators that you talk with. We should be open books. There’s that level.

We also educate on the level of a passive investor. People and other syndicators have come on here to discuss basic syndication techniques but to honestly go deeper, it’s the phone call. It’s finding a syndicator that will talk you through the process and understand your needs and talk you through them. For instance, if one of you came to me and started talking to me about what you needed and I figured out that it wasn’t syndication, I’m going to tell you that.

Real Estate Syndicator: To honestly go deeper, find a syndicator that will talk you through the process and understand your needs and talk you through them.

If you tell me that you want a quick return on your money, I am not your lady. I don’t do quick returns on your money but I’m not going to force you or help you to understand that this is the way to go. I’ll probably introduce you to a house flipper or private money lending. That’s also good. It comes to being comfortable. You want to be comfortable. You don’t want to make a mistake. Unfortunately, it’s investing.

You’ve run through the gamut of your project. In this ten-year project, you’re not going to make a killing. A lot of it’s based on timing. Jason and I could slap ourselves. We wish we got in in 2013. We got in in 2017, a few years later. We’ve still done well. We’ve had ten successful exits. We’ve had dozens of investors who are happy with how we’ve performed. Can I promise that in the future? Historically, Jason and I have done well. I don’t have a crystal ball but we are educated and open.

Most of my investors, if not all, because I call them with my cell phone, have my cell phone number. They can call me if they need to. They can let me know what troubles they’re having or if they have a question about something that’s on their K-1 or if they have a question about what we’re doing or if they want to go deeper. They deserve to. Their $50,000 tells me that they deserve to have my cell phone number and to call me if needed.

I’m not sure how other syndicators run their businesses but that’s how we run ours. I’m not going to say you because I don’t want to talk to everyone but for me, being comfortable and educated was the key to my growth. When you started talking about the old episode we did together, you mentioned all these books that I had quoted and the things that I was studying. Those were the foundations of the woman that I am.

You mentioned the book, 12 Week Year and Miracle Morning. I haven’t read those books for a while. I should probably revisit them. Those are my foundation. Those are part of why I succeed. The reason I’m so good at what I do is because of the foundation and the education I laid down for myself. With investing in any real estate, you should educate yourself. That’s what may be holding some people back. It’s true education. It’s that comfortable I know what I’m getting into education, not I’m pressing a button on my Robinhood app and hoping for the best.

Hope is not a good investing strategy. There are a couple of things that come up for me as you were talking. I love that we can have a real conversation live. Thank you. You’re warming my heart. I love this.

Thank you.

Two things come up for me. The first one is I’m so afraid of calling you and saying, “Give me some information.” I get that information and then I’m sleeping on it and I’ve got another question. I’m one of those people that will ask you questions until you feel like you’ve been buried. I will keep asking questions. I will also say this. I have never in my entire life lost a dime in real estate. Every single deal has been successful but I will ask into the ground. Yay for me on one level but people that do business with me are like, “Another question?”

Even I’ll say it on this show. You have to take action. I’m fully aware of that. Business people who know me know have seen my portfolio and my life. They know that I’m an action taker but I will not take action until I feel safe and comfortable. If you got a phone call from me every day for ten days, wouldn’t that be frustrating for you? I know my ladies are thinking the same things.

I’m going to give you a quote from Tony Robbins. “Success leaves clues.” There’s a reason why you’re so successful. It is because you ask the right questions. The other thing I’m going to say is that’s why we have email. You don’t have to call me. You can email me all your questions. I’m going to go back to the price point. $50,000 is the minimum. I have people who invest upwards of $500,000. I have one investor that brought all the capital to one of my deals. That was upwards of $1 million. They will ask questions.

Whether or not I am nose deep in kiddo stuff and my kiddos deserve all my time too but if you have a question for me, you are the most important person. Your capital is your life. You worked hard for that. Who am I to get irritated because you want to know what a K-1 is, what this line means on that K-1 or why I am painting the wall gray instead of white? Who knows what your question is going to be?

This is not said any place in the SEC but once upon a time, I was a real estate agent. I am inbred with this idea of fiduciary duty. I have a fiduciary duty towards you even though it’s not set in stone and it’s not written anywhere. I can’t promise you profit. I can’t promise you that I’m going to be there for you every waking hour but if you have a question, let’s get it answered.

I’m going to go back to there’s a reason why you’re successful. It’s because you asked the right questions. You mentioned taking action. There is taking action but we should rephrase that into taking mindful action or educated action. It’s the uneducated action that gets us into trouble. That split-second moment of putting all your money into one pot sometimes works and people make millions of dollars.

Real Estate Syndicator: Take mindful action or educated action. It’s the uneducated action that gets us into trouble or that split-second moment of putting all your money into one pot.

There are those times and it happens more often than not that they don’t because they invested in the wrong thing or with the wrong person or at the wrong time. It’s taking mindful action and making sure you’re pressing the buttons for investments that make sense for you and the numbers make sense. I believe in investing in people, number one.

You said a couple of things that I want to go back to. I love this idea of mindful action. The action does not necessarily mean jumping in. Doing your education is also action. Reading this show is also action. Taking action towards your goals does not mean immediately jumping into something without feeling enough confidence around it to experience success.

You know this at the end of the show. I say, “Goals without action are just dreams.” It’s true but there are lots of different ways that you can take action. I love the way that you reframe that because that’s exactly what I mean. We do need to take action but it needs to be mindful action. That starting action can be education as long as you don’t get into analysis paralysis, which is a fine line.

There is a fine line there. You should know better that action does not necessarily mean taking that jump. Although so much of social media and everything that’s on there is like “Go. Do. Hustle.” It’s taking that time to analyze not only the deal. The deal needs to work and the numbers have to be beautiful but you need to know all the different ways that the deal might not work.

This is more important. Analyzing the person that you’re investing in and with is of the utmost importance. You can go analysis paralysis on this as much as you want or maybe not that much but enough. You should have a good relationship with the people that you are investing with. That’s why I love working with new investors. I want to make sure that if a new investor’s going to invest, they invest with me. I know that I can do it. I have that confidence.

I know I’m a good fiduciary. I will make sure that you know me and my husband. If you have questions, you’re not going to feel bad. If you’re reading this and you want to jump into syndication and ask a million questions, I am not going to make you feel bad. Ask all of the questions. That is what I’m here for.

One of the things that you said that I want to also highlight a little bit is, “You’ve had success because you asked the right questions.” I didn’t ask the right questions in the beginning. That’s the other piece. I know a lot. I’ve been very blessed with this show. This show has educated me probably more than it’s educated any of you because I’m having every single conversation. I’m studying every single guest. It has been phenomenal for me. I’ve got a lot of education that way.

Over time, there’s been an evolution of, “This question matters and this one doesn’t.” I still ask goofy questions. I understand that it’s okay because you don’t get to the right questions until you start asking. Don’t ever feel, “Since I don’t know what the right questions are, I’m going to sound stupid. I don’t know.” It’s okay because you got to start somewhere. If you never start, you’re never going to reach success. That’s the truth. You have to take the first step. The first step is to start asking questions. Would you agree with me on that?

I agree. That’s why your ladies are with you. Ladies, that’s why you trust and you are with Moneeka. It’s because you know that she’ll help guide you through some of these questions. This is why you go with indicators that you trust because they’ll help guide you through this time and the questions that you have. With our first multifamily mentor, we still ask him questions because he continues to level himself up to a level that we’re reaching for. We can ask those questions that he is dealing with at that level when we get there.

When we took down our first building, we could not figure out how to do this one thing. We went to him. It was one question to him that would’ve taken us a week to figure out on our own asking different types of questions. This is why you go to those who know those things that you need to know. That’s why you listen to podcasts.

We probably created our podcast for similar reasons. I’ve learned so much from having a podcast and from other people that I’ve brought on. It’s been phenomenal. It’s listening to podcasts, talking to other women and talking to other people in the industry. Reach out to them. The reason why people go on podcasts is to have people reach out to them. To anyone who’s reading this, reach out to me. Let me know if you have any questions. I will answer any of them to the best of my abilities.

Real Estate Syndicator: The reason why people go on podcasts is to have people reach out to them.

What a great reminder. People don’t come to my show because they like having conversations with me.

I do.

There are a lot of people with whom we become friends because of this show. We’re like, “That was a great conversation,” and we stay in touch, like us. Some people do come back because they want to talk to me and I want to talk to them. The reality is that the reason that people come on these shows is that they want you to reach out to them. You’re not imposing by emailing them, calling them or telling them you’re interested. Even if you decide at that moment that it’s not the right time to invest with them, they are happy for the opportunity to have the conversation. I had a conversation with another friend of mine, Maureen McCann. Do you know Maureen?

I know of her.

She’s a turnkey person. She’s been on this show about five times. We did a whole session because she talks about 52% returns and some cool stuff.

That’s how we got into multifamily. It was turnkey. That is a whole other story.

At one point, I was calling her and was like, “Are you seeing results? Are my ladies calling you?” I trust her so much. I was like, “I want my ladies to connect with her because she would educate them.” She’s a lot like you in that way. She’s education first. She said, “Don’t be so concerned with what I’m getting out of this show. The reality is as I build these relationships, it may be ten years down the line when someone finally thinks, “I’m ready for that.” I loved that Maureen supported me in this way. Maybe I’ll connect with her again.

You don’t have to invest right away. Don’t feel any pressure that if you’re calling somebody that it’s like, “I feel committed, obligated and all of that stuff.” They would hope that if you connect with them that you would consider them when you’re investing but it’s not an obligatory thing. You get to ask questions. They’re in the business and on this show because they want to connect with you. That means emails and phone calls. All of those things are good. They’re not just okay. They’re good. You are not imposing yourself on them by making those connections.

If this is on video, I’m bouncing on my seat. I’m so excited because what your friend Maureen said is so true. I want to have a conversation with you not just for the now. If it’s for the now, then that is great but I’m talking future. The shortest time we’ve had an investment was 18 months to 7 years. Our investments are long-term investments and so are my relationships. I want them to be long-term. Since our investments are so long-term, I want to have a relationship with you. I need to because we’re going to be in this for the long run.

You are going to be a passive investor but it doesn’t stop there. You don’t get the mailbox money or you do but I expect you as one of my passive investors to read my emails. I want you to know what’s happening. I want you to be educated on what’s happening within the market. I want you to know all the things that I know and everything that I’m sharing with you.

If you go onto my website, you’re going to get my information on how to invest. We call it Becoming Independently Wealthy With Apartment Buildings. It is a very long title. I might shorten it. That’s going to be some emails that you’re going to get and some more education coming from myself and my husband. The great thing is you’re going to be invited to go into my investor portal. You have no obligation to do so but that’s more information. You get to see what an investor portal looks like. You’ll get to schedule a 50-minute call with me.

This is usually what scares people the most and why they don’t call. It is because you think when I pick up the phone, I’m going to be like, “Give me your money.” If I even talk about money, it’s probably going to be because you mentioned it first. I don’t want to know about money. I don’t even want to know how much money you make. I want to know you because I don’t know what’s going to happen for you and with you tomorrow, 5 years from now or 10 years from now when something good happens or if you have something great financially happen to you or you get into a new job and grow.

I’m working with someone who has $10,000 in savings sitting there. He’s growing his wealth. I’m working with him and helping him to grow that financial stability. I help him create a budget and create a system or a foundation. I give him books to read to grow from. I still want to know him 10 or 20 years from now when he’s invested in syndications and invested in other investments to create legacy wealth. I want to have these legacy relationships. It’s not a one-time phone call. This is me wanting to get to know you. I will never ever talk money unless you want to.

I have one other question and I’ve never asked a syndicator this. Let’s talk a little bit about exits. When you’re in syndications, some of the things that happen is they have this plan. They’re going to do a value add, a new build or whatever it is. They give you all the numbers of what this is going to work out and then what are they going to rent it at.

If they’re doing a value add, they’re having to cycle people out as leases come up. There’s a whole process. They’ll say, “When the project is done, we’ll refinance it. We’ll pay off your thing. You make a certain amount of money. Either you’ll make income on the rents over the long-term or if or when we sell it, then you make that capital.” There are lots of different ways that you earn money, which is how they come up with their final IRR, Internal Rate Revenue.

These are the exit strategies or the possible exit strategies that we hear a lot about. What if things go bad? Let’s talk a little bit about how that works. One of the things that I want to preface this with is one of the things that I know. If you’re with a good syndicator with a good project in a good location, as long as you can get the time to be right, the project will recover even through a bad time or a slump. You have to be okay with, “The timeline on this project is 2 to 7 years.”

Maybe they said 2 years, 3 years or 5 years. You got to understand that their biggest obligation to you is to make money for you. If that means that it’s going to take a little bit longer than the 2 years, 5 years or whatever it is, then sometimes, they need to do that to hold it long enough so that they don’t see a loss.

You’re still going to make money on the rent but it may not be the payoff as fast as you would want. That’s the one thing that I have always had in the back of my mind when I go into syndication. This is what we’re shooting for. It’s not the best case. It’s also not the worst case. It’s to allow for the time to be right. I’d like you to talk about the way that you look at exits and what happens if things go bad.

It all starts with underwriting. You already said it too. It’s best case, worst case and base case. The numbers that we put out to our investors are usually very much the base case. We normally don’t even put out the best-case scenario because we never want to overpromise. There are ways that we can make more money on the property. There are ways that we know how to advance the property further than how we put it out there. We normally don’t put it all out there because a lot of the time, when we exit a property, we still want to leave meat on the bone for the next owner. We can take it to those places.

What happens when a property goes sour? This hasn’t happened to us yet. It goes back to underwriting. You have to make sure that the numbers are solid. There are a lot of things that we can’t control but we want to control them as much as possible. You said our number one goal is to make money for our investors. That is true but there are numbers 1.2 and 1.3.

Our other goal is to make the best place possible for our tenants to live. I know that has nothing to do with your question but we are education first and tenant first. If we have happy tenants in a good community, then our investors thrive too. If our tenants are thriving, our investors are thriving. Number three is communication. A syndicator needs to communicate with you when things are going bad and good so that when things are starting to go south, it’s not a surprise. This is why multifamily is such a great investment. It’s a span of 2, 5 or 7.

I used to tell people we stop at 7 but we do underwrite for 10 years. This is why multifamily is such a great asset. It is because it’s supposed to stand the test of time. Maybe rents go down. Maybe we have a fire. Maybe something happens that is out of our control. That’s key. When something like that happens, that’s why we’re given this time to figure it out and bring it back up. We figure out how to rectify the situation and bring it back out but it’s those things that we can’t control.

It is the things that we can control that you want to make sure that the syndicator has a handle on. They can control the numbers that they enter into their property. That’s why we underwrite and keep on underwriting. That’s why we do worst case, best case and base case because we want to make sure that we are not surprised by the numbers.

If the worst-case situation should happen, we want to already know ahead of it. If we get the best case, that’s great. We already know ahead of it. We want to make sure we have a handle on all of these things. It’s your property management team. We do not actively property manage the asset. We manage the property managers. We are the asset managers. We look over everything and make sure everything works.

You want to make sure that you know who the asset manager is on the syndication. Don’t just invest or talk to the syndicator. The asset manager is your key person on the deal. You want to make sure you have his number if something goes wrong. You want to make sure that you know that he or she is doing the right thing. That is the person that is the puppeteer for the entire deal.

Once you go through acquisitions, you have people that come in. Maybe they’re part of the asset management team or acquisitions. Maybe they helped underwrite. Maybe they did due diligence on the deal. These are various ways you can get into a deal and they brought capital to a deal. Whoever is the asset manager, once the acquisition happens and the sale happens, that person or that team takes it over. That is the person or team that is making you money.

Is that you with your projects?

That’s me and my husband. My husband is the key asset manager in our team.

You are the asset manager as well as the syndicator. Is that true?

Yes. Syndication 101 is the pooling of investors’ funds. I am a syndicator because that is what I’m doing within the asset. That is how I’m funding the asset. It’s with the syndication. The asset manager is part of the syndication. He or she isn’t even part of the syndication. She’s part of the business plan. When you take over a multifamily building, you’re creating a business. It’s business within itself.

The main manager is the asset manager. That is your key person. That is the person you want to talk to. This is the person that you want to make sure you know, like and trust with your $50,000, $500,000 or whatever it is because this is the person that’s going to be managing those funds and all the other managers.

Real Estate Syndicator: The asset manager is your key person. That is the person you want to talk to. This is the person that you want to make sure you know, like, and trust with your funds.

I hadn’t heard that distinction before so thank you.

You’re welcome. There are two ways I could take this conversation. One of the reasons why you might not hear that term before is that a lot of syndicators out there don’t do the asset management part. They raise the funds. They’re part of the business plan but they don’t have the decision-making. You want to make sure that you know the prime decision-makers in the deal.

When a deal goes sour and I’ve heard of a few, all I can say is the things that go wrong are usually because they didn’t have their numbers right in the beginning and they weren’t communicating with everyone. There’s that saying, “Do and ask forgiveness later.” It’s the opposite with syndication. You want to make sure that the people that you are working with because limited partners are still partners. They know what’s happening with their money and what’s happening with the asset in good times and in bad.

I haven’t heard of anything that’s fallen apart but those that I have heard that have gone slightly more toward the sour end could be solved with communication and making sure that you have your numbers right from the beginning. That’s why each building that we’ve gone into has had its business plan. We follow that business plan and pivot when needed. That’s why we’ve had ten successful exits. It is because we have a foundation of education of people first that the numbers have to work. That’s always the caveat. We invest in people but the numbers have to work. We run the numbers religiously. We keep on running the numbers inside of the deal because markets fluctuate.

Pandemics happen.

Craziness happens. The thing is multifamily has pulled through the entire time. Will it go down? Will it go up? I don’t have a crystal ball. That’s why education is necessary so that if you are investing your $50,000 into, let’s say, syndication, you know that that money has the possibility of making money but also has the possibility of not. One of our biggest concerns is the return on capital. We want to make sure that we make money on your money but we want to also make sure we return that capital. You don’t want to lose money. That should be the number one rule in syndication school.

One of the things you said also highlights the value I have when looking at a syndicator. Do they have mentors themselves? Your syndicator has the experience and work ethic. They’ve got all their resources. One of those things that are going to ensure success is that they’ve got people that they can go to when they have a question because they’re at their level. Maybe they’ve been in it for 5 years, 10 years or 20 years. Other syndicators have been in there longer. There are always new adventures that happen in real estate. Hopefully, it’s not too many adventures. You don’t like adventures in real estate but they happen.

They do happen even though you don’t want them to.

That’s right. We don’t want adventurous investing. It’s good to have people that you can go to. You’re going to the syndicator and the syndicator should have someone to go to that has been through the cycles that can then mentor them if they hit bumps in the road.

We have our mentors. We also have a group. Within 7 Figure Multifamily, this came out of a group that I was originally with, 7 Figure Flipping. Those were my mentors in the flipping and wholesaling industry. When Jason and I broke off and did multifamily, I kept in contact with those mentors. Every so often, I would let them know about a deal that I had. I would let them know, “We should partner up.” Jason and I had already created our mentorship program at that time but I saw this way to uplift everyone.

The great thing is having this amazing relationship not only with my mentors in multifamily but I get to also watch and be a part of this family within 7 Figures and get to ask them questions. They’re other investors who either have gone through the things that I’m going through or are going through it. I can talk with them and learn from them.

It’s also learning from your peers, not only from those that have come before you but from those who are going through it. They might have answers to the questions that you don’t know even to ask. That’s what good mentorship provides for you. It provides someone to go to whom you can ask them any question and they will answer with no ifs and buts because they’re there for you. They’re there to mentor you and help guide you as you step up into your future.

As always, we could talk forever but I want to be respectful of your time. Before we end this show, could you tell everybody how they can reach you? Ladies, take notes.

The best place to get to go to is my website, www.YarusiHoldings.com. It’s easy. When you open up the email, there’s going to be a button you can click to get more educated. You can click on the button and learn more about me and my team.

She’s also got that free report there for you. You can download that to get a little bit more education. This conversation has, as always with you, been so yummy. Thank you.

This has been amazing. It was great to catch up. I cannot wait to have you on my podcast. We will extend this conversation into more of what you’re doing.

That sounds awesome. Thank you so much. Ladies, thank you so much for joining Pili and me for this show. Wasn’t it awesome? I love it when you get to overhear a couple of girls chatting. It’s so important to me that you feel comfortable and blissful in making your choices. That’s what this show is all about. I feel like Pili modeled that in so many ways. Thank you for joining the two of us. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams, so get out there, take mindful action, and create the life that your heart most deeply desires. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

Important Links

• Yarusi Holdings LLC
• Multifamily Live
• The Jason and Pili Project – Instagram
• Last Episode – Create a Strong Foundation with Pilialoha “Pili” Yarusi
• 7 Figure Multifamily
• 12 Week Year
• Miracle Morning

About Pili Yarusi

Pili Yarusi loves to help people and “Lead with Aloha”.

She is a founder and Investor Education and Relations Director for Yarusi Holdings, a multifamily investment firm that has acquired over 2000 units valued at $180 Million since 2016. The firm repositions properties through operational efficiencies, moderate to extensive renovations, and complete rebranding.

Pili is a co-founder and coach at 7 Figure Multifamily – focusing on Real Estate Syndication and Multifamily Investing and trains others on the success formula for buying apartment buildings at www.7FigureMultifamily.com.

Pili is a co-host of The Multifamily Live Podcast providing actionable content and tools to build and strengthen your multifamily business.

She is also the co-host of The Jason and Pili Guide to Real Estate Investing – a fun and interactive YouTube channel that features all the great things that she and Jason are working on.

She and her husband Jason have three awesome children, Luke, Lily, and Leo, and an English Bulldog, Jill.

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Moneeka Sawyer

Moneeka Sawyer is often described as one of the most blissful people you will ever meet.   She has been investing in Real Estate for over 20 years, so has been through all the different cycles of the market.  Still, she has turned $10,000 into over $5,000,000, working only 5-10 hours per MONTH with very little stress.

While building her multi-million dollar business, she has traveled to over 55 countries, dances every single day, supports causes that are important to her, and spends lots of time with her husband of over 20 years.

She is the international best-selling author of the multiple award-winning books “Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment” and “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way.”

Moneeka has been featured on stages including Carnegie Hall and Nasdaq, radio, podcasts such as Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod,  and TV stations including ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW, impacting over 150 million people.

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REI Tax Strategies: How To Cut Your Taxes By 50%, Keep Your Earned Money, And More With Lorraine And Jim Conaway

Taxes are inevitable, especially as an entrepreneur and investor. But it doesn’t have to be so difficult and painful to deal with; with the right strategies, you can even cut your taxes by up to 50%. Today we have Lorraine and Jim Conaway to share with us the different REI strategies for reducing your taxable income, keeping the money you earn, and more. Lorraine and Jim share their financial experience and how they have helped many clients with their tax strategies and saved them a lot of pain. They also share their journey in the industry—the ups and downs—and how, through the years, they have discovered what really matters to them. Don’t miss the opportunity to start controlling your finances smartly. Tune in now!

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Watch the episode here

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REI Tax Strategies: How To Cut Your Taxes By 50%, Keep Your Earned Money, And More With Lorraine And Jim Conaway

Real Estate Investing For Women

Using their extensive experience, knowledge, and success in the world of tech strategies, real estate investing, and other wealth vehicles, Jim and Lorraine used their straightforward, big-hearted style to guide thousands to ignite their unique wealth formula. With decades of success, in designing and implementing customized wealth solutions, they appreciate that success is truly about education support and the art of supercharging your unique style of wealth accumulation. —Jim and Lorraine, welcome to the show again. How are you?We’re doing great. How are you, Moneeka?

I’m so glad to have you guys here.

Moneeka, you were doing such a great thing for your entire community. I tuned in to a couple of your shows, and they’re so informative. They’re very educational and they’re there to help your community. That’s just really good that you’re doing that for women. I love it.

Thank you, Lorraine. Every once in a while, I’ll be like, “I don’t feel like recording now.” Recording is my favorite thing to do, just so you know. When I have those moments, I’m like, “I want to see my ladies,” so I get out there and I do it. It really is fun for me. Thank you for that. Lorraine. You and Jim are two of my favorite people in the world, but Jim, I do like Lorraine better. I want you to know that.

I’m used to people feeling me that way.

You probably feel that way, too. I think so.

When somebody likes the bad dad joke-type approach, then I become the favorite.

I think my husband prefers you, but I’m a fan of Lorraine. Lorraine is a friend of mine. I feel like we’re really close friends. I love you, guys. I recommend you frequently to my ladies. One of the things that have come back several times is, did you know they’re being sued or did you know they’re being investigated? My ladies, through my direction, have been taught you have to do your due diligence. I can only recommend so much, and then you have to do your due diligence. I have to confess, I’m proud of them for coming back to me with that. They helped me to find other people that I might have on my show who do have issues that I didn’t know about.

It’s a great community thing that we all keep our eyes on the ball for each other and people keep me informed. The issue here for me is that I know you and your integrity. I personally do business with you and I love you, guys, personally. I know that in this particular case, interesting, bad things happen to really good people. I would like you to help us to understand what happened so my ladies know the story the same way that I do.

I wanted to share the story because it is the actual of what happened. Jim and I were very excited to be faculty for a New York Bestselling Author way back in ‘08. We still have that amazing relationship now. What happened is we were financial planners at that time, and we personally have been real estate investors. In 2023, we will be 29 years that we’ve been real estate investors. Back then, we were real estate investors and we were financial planners, and we came across turnkey real estate. We went out and visited these turnkey providers, and they said, “If you allocate part of the portfolio to real estate, which we love real estate, and I’m sure your community does, too, you can also get a referral fee and expand our business model.”

We said yes. We had so many people that the vendors couldn’t keep up, so we expanded to new vendors providing turnkey real estate. One vendor couldn’t scale up, even though he said, “I can do it.” We flooded him with clients. It took one client, a niece from Germany who visited her aunt, and said, “What? Your property is not rehabbed. It’s not finished. We are going to sue the vendor.” They sued the real estate developer. What was really sad is they sued title, escrow, us, and everybody. It was like, “We got included in that, and we didn’t get paid. We weren’t the developer.”

It came out because we were securities licensed at that time. It triggered an examination from FINRA. That’s how this whole bad news came on the internet because we were securities licensed. It did get closed and the developer had to buy the properties back. It’s all public record. Jim, do you want to explain what FINRA is and that whole sanction?

FINRA stands for Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. I’m going to read this quick little paragraph from the document, the final agreement that we came to.

It’s from our attorney, FINRA, and us, where we all signed.

James and Lorraine Conaway failed to timely and completely disclose the scope of the real estate related outside business activities. In other words, outside business activity is that activity, which is not directly regulated by FINRA or any securities real estate, to their FINRA-registered firm. They also provided their firm with inaccurate information about the outside business activities in response to an investigation of them. As a result, they violated FINRA rules 3270 and 2010. Now, if that doesn’t sound a little innocuous, I don’t know what does. Basically, what they’re saying is that, not that we didn’t disclose things, but we didn’t disclose them adequately enough.

The issue boils down to, further in the letter, the Conaways at the Conways’ direction, Tycon, the company that we used to be associated with. It attempted on an ongoing basis to track the progress of rehab on the client’s properties and coordinate with GK to confirm the scheduled rehab work was being done as agreed. It monitors the client’s rental properties that were not performing or underperforming and directs GK to address client grievances. As you can tell, we were accused of having done a good thing.

When you Google our name, there are lots of attorneys who would love to be able to sue us for all kinds of strange things, so they exaggerate these things or word them in very aggressive fashions. The sanctions boiled down to a nine-month suspension of our securities licensure after we had already surrendered our license, and a $10,000 penalty or fine if we chose to reenter the securities industry. That’s it.

The bad thing that we did was try to help clients who were delayed in the rehab of their property. I have to tell you that’s very heartbreaking for us being in the financial industry for over a quarter of a century and having a sterling record. Even multiple decades of having audits and coming out spectacular on our audits and then having this one incident with this one client on this property triggered this whole thing. That’s what happened.

By the way, further into the document, they actually identified five transactions that were inadequately disclosed. One of those transactions was with a principal of our own firm. With that said, the lesson that I would like for people to take from this is when you are an entrepreneur and you have any level of success, you get a target painted on your back.

Jim, please complete the thought and I’ve got something to contribute there.

Once you’re under pressure and have an issue arise, you’ve got to be resilient and figure out how to pivot. That’s where the tax thing came from.

The one thing that I want to contribute quickly here is I love what you said there, Jim, about success breeds success. It also breeds jealousy and many other things that are not as awesome as we would like. We’ve had people on my show several times talking about protecting yourself, creating entities, and doing all of those things because these things happen. My outlook on life is bliss. I like to believe that everybody’s got the best intention in mind.

Some people, for whatever reason, either they’re desperate or something happens, they express their anger in this way. I know a lot of people that have really good business practices, and this happens, too. That’s why we recommend, ladies, that you protect yourself. This happened to you, guys. Thank you so much for being so transparent about exactly what happened.

It is what it is. People who do business with us should know we don’t handle and touch people’s money. We never have and never will. That’s not us. Just a fun little factoid, if anybody wants to know. One of the people who used to sit on the board of directors for FINRA was a guy by the name of Madoff. Do you remember him? Just saying. These guys are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.

Tax Strategies: People who do business with us should know we don’t handle people’s money. We don’t touch people’s money. We never have and never will.

The other thing is that in the financial industry regulated by FINRA, they are not under the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution says you are innocent until you are proven guilty. In this format, you are guilty until you are proven innocent. It’s a different world.

It is so different. Please understand that if somebody is securities licensed, every email they send is read by Big Brother. They have to get permission to do things like that. When Lorraine and I were confronted with this whole issue back in 2015 and 2016, we really sat down and took a look at it and said, “This is a set of headaches we don’t need and want.” It has been an absolute shift. We now have constitutional rights. What an amazing experience that is.

You guys know that I released all of my licenses. I had a life insurance license and a real estate license. I was regulated by everybody, too. I just let them go because it turned out to be too many more disclosures, especially in California. I was having to sign over my left arm to talk to anybody about a property. I really do get it. I’ve let go of all of mine, too. It’s released so much pressure from my life, too. Not because I want to be dishonest, none of us want to be dishonest, but I do want to have some rights and be treated with respect.

What’s interesting I want to say and share with whoever’s reading this is that Jim and I have been very blessed. We have been asked to be on several stages, continue to be faculty, and speak in many different places. With these joint venture relationships, we have disclosed what we have done here now. The response is, “I know you, guys. The person who referred you to me, I’ve known them forever. I am so grateful that you were honest in sharing with me the disclosure that in itself is all I need.” We just keep having doors open to us, and we’re grateful for that.

I am, too, because otherwise, I wouldn’t have met you.

That’s true.

Why don’t you talk about what happened that allowed us to pivot to where we are now?

Jim and I were real estate investors and business owners. We have had employees ever since the mid-’90s, and we are taxpayers as well. First of all, when we first went independent in the ‘90s, we worked like this with the CPA for ten years, and our eyes were like, “There’s so much money in the tax return.” In our own situation, we were learning, “If you have your entity structuring, you do this and that. There are all these opportunities.” We then got certified in charitable planning back in 2001.

Tax Strategies: If you have your entity structured and use the right strategies, you’ll get all these opportunities.

It just goes to show that you were right. I’m certifiable.

It’s one of your better qualities.

We started back in 2001 focusing on the tax strategy. In 2016, we purchased a tax firm coincidentally before this whole thing happened. It was the end of 2015 when we were in negotiations. We closed escrow in 2016 in the first quarter, and then in the second quarter, this FINRA thing happened. What was interesting is that whenever people have challenges, you have a lot of real estate investors and you have entrepreneurs. When you have challenges, it really tests you. You find out a lot about yourself. Our income was, at that time, seven figures, and it got cut off in one day.

The broker-dealer said, “No, because you’re suspended.” When you have that kind of income and you have a whole staff of over a dozen people working for you, and there’s zero income coming in, you learn so much. At that time, we had bought a tax firm, and it was a small little one. Our clients were so faithful to us. They said, “Are you okay?”

That was very touching the way the clients reacted to us. The vast majority of our clients were more concerned about our welfare than their own business because they knew their business was in good shape.

We started rebuilding. We have always helped people but it was more targeted in tax strategy because that’s where we had a lot of pain personally. A lot of our clients had a lot of pain because they were way overpaying taxes. Nothing bad about accountants and CPAs and enrolled agents, they’re taught, “Let’s prepare taxes.” They get very busy with, “Give me the documents in February and March. Let me prepare the return and here is what you owe.”

Tax Strategies: A lot of clients are in pain with tax strategies because they often overpay since they didn’t know better.

For us, we have a team of tax preparers, and it’s a great marriage between the tax preparer and us who focus on the tax strategy. In addition to that, the implementation is heavy. You see those dollars and it’s exciting for us to see people save. Jim was working with somebody, and the actual savings is $148,000. Guess what he is doing with the money?

Investing.

Buying real estate.

Here’s the fun part, not only is he buying real estate, but he’s getting additional tax reductions for the real estate he’s buying from with the tax savings he’s got. He’s getting additional tax savings.

It compounds. We talked about compounding and making interest. We also talk about compounding this way. One of our favorite words.

One of the analogies I like to give people is I don’t want people to think that their tax guy is doing a bad job just because they don’t have a strategy. We have to understand that most tax people are defense players. Think soccer analogy. Your tax preparer is the goalie. Think about their language. “I need to be able to defend this. Can we justify that tax deduction?” They think very defensively. Our job is to come up with those strategies to score goals on the other end of the field and work together as Loraine suggested. That’s where the magic happens.

None of these strategies are illegal. It’s all written in the IRS code. I think people get scared, too. Why doesn’t my CPA know about this? It’s because they’re not spending their time studying all those things. The IRS code is huge. It’s enough to keep up with what’s changed each year. There’s trust code, corporate code, and real estate code. There’s so much code. Most of them will specialize, which is why usually I’ll recommend go to somebody that understands real estate. A strategist can be a little broader and look at all of those things because they’re not actually preparing the taxes.

The one thing that you should know is that back in the day, we used to do things longhand. Now, we have software systems because one of the things that you said is brilliant. Everything we do is ultimately put into a written document. In that written document, we have the description of what the tax deduction is. We have the rules of what you have to do to justify it and we have the code sections so that the people who do business with us get a very robust document showing them exactly how it all works.

Mine was 97 pages long.

Sorry about that.

No. It’s true. It’s so deep, which is why you got buy-in from my husband because he wants to know all of it.

It does give people peace of mind that included in the strategy is the IRS code. All of that is wonderful, and it all looks great on paper but it is the implementation. One strategy may be putting your kids on payroll if you have a business or you have a real estate business. You have to know what is the job description, how much are they getting paid, how many hours, and what’s realistic. Having all of those details is so important. Those are the things that we work with people on, updating their minutes, making sure the resolution is completed in their corporate documents, those type of things.

That’s pretty comprehensive. Who else does that? That’s amazing.

One of the things that’s exciting for us is being able to say the phrase tax-free. It truly is. One of the things that we’ve learned is there are several different techniques for people to get profits tax-free, and we mean without tax.

Is this the piece that you were talking about, Jim, getting tax-free money in your business?

Yes.

Thank you for the tease. We’re going to talk about that in EXTRA.

That’s good.

It’s part of the conversation for sure. The thing that’s really amazing to me, and one of my deep motivations in life is the enlightenment that people have once they understand what can be done. It’s like being set free. It’s like, “I can earn the money and keep it legally?” Yes. You don’t have to feel like you’re paying for that next destroyer all by yourself. It’s true.

Is that your outside voice?

That’s why a lot of taxpayers feel this. A lot of taxpayers feel like, “If I could just tell the government what to do with the money, I’d be happy to send it to them.” You can’t do that.

That’s right. One of the things that have been a theme of conversation that I’ve been having on this show is this idea. We just had Chris Larsen. I just did a webinar with him.

I saw it.

It was so nice to have you there, Lorraine. Thank you. He does this whole concept of make, keep, and grow. A lot of people focus on the make and the grow. The thing that they don’t really get their heads around or understand the importance of is that keep piece allows the grow piece to happen so much faster. There are a few reasons for that. First of all, compounding. The more that you keep earlier in life, the faster it’ll compound and become more later in life or in a couple of years. There’s also the compounding factor of what you guys were talking about where you’ve got $128,000 savings in your taxes. Instead of spending that on a boat, car, fun, or vacation, they bought another piece of investment property. That compounds it.

Keeping piece, which is what we’re talking about here, is critical to fast growth. You’re going to grow if you’re doing the right things, but fast growth happens when you focus on that middle piece. We all love it. It’s sexy to talk about making. It’s sexier to talk about growing. We love money. Keeping piece is not as sexy, but I would say it’s even more vital than the growth piece.

As a matter of fact, in part of the report that we produce, we do the projection of what the tax savings is worth, we use a really low number. We only use 6% compounding. The gentleman that she was referring to had a goal of being independent in ten years.

One of the things that I noticed from his chart, which I thought was great, is he showed the sale after 6 years of the syndication on the properties putting in $100,000. Chris Larsen, right?

In my webinar, that’s right.

What happened is that doing the investing and then having the growth and net positive cashflow being reinvested. One of the components that were missing on that spreadsheet was the tax savings. I understand that’s not his line of work.

I also think that he doesn’t want to keep it so complicated that people’s eyes glaze over. There were already some concepts in there that people were like, “Huh?” There’s definitely a learning curve on some of this stuff, but you’re right. I know that Chris knows about it. He talks about tax savings all the time.

He mentioned it. It can get too complicated. If you’re not used to looking at spreadsheets like that, it’s overwhelming. I get it.

Did you read what he said, though? He said, “What if you’re making $500,000 a year and pay $100,000 in tax?” How many people that make $500,000 a year only pay 20%?

Most entrepreneurs should. Our rule of thumb is 15% state and federal tax combined if they’re self-employed.

That is the huge tax benefit of working with a strategist because most people who make $500,000 a year, especially in W-2, which is what he was talking about, he does recommend starting a real estate investing business or something so that we can take more benefits. If you make $500,000 a year in California, I don’t know the rest of the country, you’re paying close to 50%.

Thirteen percent income tax rate in the state of California. We are now number one highest to income tax state in the union.

Congratulations to us. David and I are in there, but we never want to get there. I’m just saying. It was so interesting as Chris was talking. I was like, “What? $100,000 in taxes? I know what you mean.” I don’t know if people catch this. He’s talking about a 20% rate. You’re talking about a 15% rate state and federal. What a savings that is. People don’t know how to get there, and they don’t think it’s legal.

Here’s what they say. They say, “Isn’t that a red flag or an audit?” If you’ve got the documentation and homework, and everything is ready to go, and the IRS comes knocking, you show it to them. That’s like, “Next.”

You have a lot of real estate investors. I don’t care if they’re W-2 or if they’re not. Real estate is such a beautiful investment because the income from real estate isn’t subject to FUTA and FICA. No self-employment tax. It’s federal and state. There’s this beautiful thing called depreciation on investment real estate. If your cashflow is $50,000 a year and your depreciation is $30,000 a year, then you’re only paying tax on $20,000. Thirty thousand dollars of it is tax-free. You have the opportunity of having tax-free income on real estate regardless of your status. That’s a good thing. That’s just the IRS that came up with the rules.

There are a couple of different types of tax that people should be aware of. There’s income tax, like W-2 type income tax. There’s investment income tax. There’s capital gains tax. There’s also estate tax. Our practice is primarily on income tax related, so your tax returns stuff. That comes into those three categories. Knowing how to move the investments around so that taxable income falls into various categories is very important. That’s part of the skillset. In other words, it’s not just some tax thing investment. It’s how you report your income. How you play the game can have a huge impact.

You were going to say something, Moneeka?

I was going to give you guys a recommendation, but I don’t want to cut off this conversation. I will do it at the end. People are thinking about their 2022 taxes. It’s tax season. Is there anything you want to share about what’s coming up for us?

Here’s what I would tell people to do. Sit down with a pad of paper. If you spent money and you could remember it now, it was a significant enough amount of money that you should be able to write it out. When you go to do your taxes, you should be asking not, “Is it tax deductible,” but, “How can I make it tax deductible?” It’s a different mindset. If your mindset is to spend money tax deductible before you do your tax calculations, that in and of itself could be a huge boon.

I love that mindset piece, Jim. I have to tell you a funny joke. My organizer was sitting and doing my filing. She’s looking at all my real estate stuff and says, “I’m learning so much just from doing your paperwork.” My organizer in San Jose did the same thing. She started investing in real estate because she was doing my filing. It was interesting. I love that. She’s like, “I’m learning so much. I heard this joke and I didn’t know anything about what it meant until I met you. There was a teacher and she’s doing tutoring. She bought sticky pads, and she used the sticky pad. She only used 50% of the sticky pad for her students. Can I write this off? I used 50% for personal. I don’t know. Should I write this off? Is that legal? There’s a rich billionaire who’s got his yacht and he tells his tax consultant, ‘Write off the ocean. It’s part of my business.’” I don’t think the billionaire should be writing off the ocean just for clarity, but it’s such a different mindset. How can I write this off? How can I make it write-offable as opposed to, “Should I do that?” 

I do have something to share with you. This is a fun conversation I get to have. Now, please understand, I have had 100% agreement on this factoid. I’ve talked with absolute liberals, conservatives, and teachers. You name the political spectrum, I talked to them about our favorite ex-president with the comeover. Donald Trump reportedly spends $60,000 a year for that hairstyle. Let me ask you a question. Do you think there’s any way in God’s creation he’s not taking tax deductions for that $60,000 to a person? Everybody absolutely trusts Donald Trump to know the tax code and know how to get that tax deductively. If he takes a tax deduction for a bad hairstyle, what can you take a tax deduction for? Just saying.

That’s really something to think about. I’m thinking, “I’m on TV. Should I write off my hairstylist?” I don’t know. I won’t do it. There are a lot of these things that come up that we don’t know we can take unless you are one of those privileged people that lives and goes socializes in a community where these things are talked about like it doesn’t matter. It’s a regular conversation like the rest of us might talk about the weather. There are people that live with that kind of privilege. Donald Trump is one of them. The rest of us, not so much. We’ve got to be in on these kinds of conversations and seek them out.

One of the things I wanted to let everybody know is that we do have a process where we can help people do an assessment. What we do is we get a secure Dropbox. We send people a secure Dropbox, a simple questionnaire, and we take the last year tax return, put it into our software, and then we look and analyze on what are the things that they’re doing and what are they missing, and then we create that report. We did that for you, Moneeka.

There’s not a charge to go through that process. We create the report, and then we look at, “Here are some opportunities that you may be missing, and here’s an estimate of what tax could be saved.” At that point, if people want to move forward, then we’ll discuss how we can implement and help them. If not, that’s okay. At least they got an idea of where they are.

Tax Strategies: The goal is to make reports that give clients an idea of where they are. Then, they can decide if they’ll move forward and discuss with you how to implement it or start their own more informed decision-making by themselves.

Lorraine and Jim did that whole breakdown for me, too. I sent my stuff in. It was really informative and saved us quite a lot of money on our own tax returns. We still have lots of questions, but they’re always so patient with us on that stuff. Thank you guys for that. I want my ladies to be able to take advantage of this, too. Ladies, all you need to do is go to BlissfulInvestor.com/TaxStrategy. There, you’ll get to sign up for this strategy session. Jim and Lorraine normally charge $497 for this because it takes their time and all of that stuff, but because you ladies are all blissful investors, you can get it for $297. Go to that link to get the discount. Does that make sense?

Yeah. I love it.

We are going to be talking about how to get free money on your taxes or free income from your business. That’s going to be in EXTRA. I’m super excited about that. Did you guys want to say anything else before we close?

We are so much looking forward to dealing with some of your lucky ladies and getting them to their lowest possible tax. I love the financial freedom that paying the right amount of tax provides for people.

I want to say thank you, Moneeka, for having us on your show, taking the time, and having us explain what’s on the internet because our heart is really in helping people. When I heard your last speaker speak, Chris, he made a comment about asking, “Are the people that you work with, what is their net worth? Are they seven-figure? Are they eight-figure? Are they successful? Where are they?” I thought, “Thank goodness he asked that.” I was so happy he did because that’s an important question, and that’s where Jim and I are. We do practice what we preach. This is our ministry. We’re financially independent, and we choose to do our calling to help and educate people.

I know that about you guys, and I’m so glad. The other thing is my people will find it on the internet and they don’t want to talk about it. They’re skittish about it. They’re embarrassed about it. I just love that you guys are so willing to share the real story. To me, part of integrity is being transparent. I really appreciate that about you guys. Before we sign off, I want to say one of the big reasons why I first got connected with these amazing people years ago was I was at a seminar, and someone said that she retired.

She had some assets and didn’t know what she was going to do. She put together a plan with her strategist and retired in five years. I was like, “Who was your strategist?” She did not have the equity that I did. She hadn’t been spending that much time. She’s like, “You’ve got to meet Lorraine and Jim.” I was like, “I love them.” I know I hear it over and over again. Part of what I love about you guys is you look at the strategy, but you are not like most financial strategists that only look at stocks, bonds, life insurance, or whatever it is that people are talking about. You include in the strategy, real estate and tax.

I said this to Lorraine, “Where have you been all of my life? I needed you.” That’s why I’ve been referring and referring. I hope that people feel much more comfortable now with that referral, and will start moving towards working with you guys because I know you guys have done magic for so many people. I’m so very grateful that you’re out there doing this even though you don’t have to.

Thank you and thank you for educating all of your people and all the work that you do. It really is such a great community and education, and you do it from your heart. I can see that.

Thanks, guys. Ladies, stay tuned. This has been amazing, hasn’t it? I need that more. We’re going to be talking about it in EXTRA. If you’re subscribed to EXTRA, please stay tuned, there’s more. If you’re not, but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com, and you can sign up there. For those of you that are leaving Jim, Lorraine, and I now, thank you so much for joining us for this portion of the show. We appreciate you, and I can’t wait to see you next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon. Bye.

Important Links

• Jim and Lorraine Conaway – LinkedIn
• Chris Larsen – Previous Episode
• BlissfulInvestor.com/TaxStrategy
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

About Lorraine & Jim Conaway

C&C Wealth Strategies is an income and wealth preservation firm that uses a systematic approach teamed with tax and legal advisors* to work toward customized results. Jim and Lorraine Conaway established Conaway & Conaway in 1996 to plan for better futures. C&C focuses on offering ROTH conversions, rollovers, pension maximization, income and portfolio analysis. Jim and Lorraine guide C&C by their moral obligations which suite to always put their clients’ financial lives in as the forefront of the business. Jim, Lorraine, the advisors, and the staff are continuously educating themselves on different ways to help clients work toward their financial goals. It is through a cognizant design of support and education where we establish lifelong relationships with clients and their families.

Moneeka Sawyer

Moneeka Sawyer is often described as one of the most blissful people you will ever meet.   She has been investing in Real Estate for over 20 years, so has been through all the different cycles of the market.  Still, she has turned $10,000 into over $5,000,000, working only 5-10 hours per MONTH with very little stress.

While building her multi-million dollar business, she has traveled to over 55 countries, dances every single day, supports causes that are important to her, and spends lots of time with her husband of over 20 years.

She is the international best-selling author of the multiple award-winning books “Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment” and “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way.”

Moneeka has been featured on stages including Carnegie Hall and Nasdaq, radio, podcasts such as Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod,  and TV stations including ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW, impacting over 150 million people.

blissfulinvestor.com

Taking Your Syndication Deals To The Next Level With Chris Larsen

You need to take into account a lot of different things when doing syndication deals. As an investor, you must understand every single detail of the property before closing a deal. At the end of the day, real estate and syndication are team games. You won’t go far in your deals if you aren’t transparent enough or communicating clearly.

Join Moneeka Sawyer as she chats with Chris Larsen, the Founder and Principal of Next-Level Income, all about evaluating syndication deals. Chris breaks down a deal in real time to highlight the most crucial parts of the process and the essential lessons to remember. Be sure to take notes because you wouldn’t want to miss this episode! And if you love to learn more about this topic, check out Chris’ book, Next-Level Income.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Taking Your Syndication Deals To The Next Level With Chris Larsen

We have a webinar with Chris Larsen. We’ll be talking live about the biggest topic you ladies have questions about regarding syndications and how to evaluate syndication. It’s going to be a great conversation, so come and ask all of your questions. We’ll stay live as long as you need us to. To sign up, go to BlissfulInvestor.com/SyndicationWebinar. Also, what you might not remember is we held a webinar in 2022 with Chris where he did a complete detailed breakdown of a deal, he was real-time raising funds for.

It was one of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever had about syndications, which is why I wanted to bring Chris back for another webinar. He is so good at explaining how things work and is patient and thorough in answering questions. Join us for our upcoming webinar. Go to BlissfulInvestor.com/SyndicationWebinar. In the meantime, since many of you didn’t get to hear the webinar in 2022, here is a replay of it. Read it. You will learn a lot.

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Chris, I know you have a new deal that just went live. I want to hear all about that. One of the best ways to get to learn about these deals is to walk through one. This is super exciting. Do you want to share that with us?

Absolutely. I’ll share my screen here and I got a ton of stuff. If you were new to the syndication space and if you’re reading, first off, I’d recommend going to the website NextLevelIncome.com. I wrote a book about why I feel multifamily real estate is the Holy Grail of investing. To be clear, I was an investor before I started syndicating deals. I was buying properties. You and I talked about this when we were together on the show.

I managed my own portfolio of real estate for 15 years, and then I was working 60, 80, and 100-hour weeks. I was on call twelve years out of my career and it didn’t interest me in doing that. Also, I’m an engineer by training, so I want to figure out the best way to do things. I’m always looking for a better way to do things and I was introduced to multifamily. After having this conversation many times, I decided to write a book about it. You can go to the website NextLevelIncome.com/book, and get a free copy of the book here.

Next-Level Income: How to Make, Keep, and Grow Your Money Using the ‘Holy Grail of Real Estate to Achieve Financial Independence By Chris Larsen

Go to NextLevelIncome.com/bliss. We’ve got our page for my ladies. There’s a bunch of other things that are on there, ladies. Go to that website.

This is what we’re going to be talking about. We have even more stuff that we’ve added. You can always email me. We added five ways you can set your kids up for a lifetime of financial success. These are some tools you can use for five different things. Start a bank account, pay your children, teach them about investing, start a business, and teach them about the value and cost of college. I’m big on the why. As we get into tonight, it’s like, “Why do we do this? Why do you invest?” You invest for time, you invest for freedom, and you invest for the ability to do different things.

I’d like to talk a little bit more about the deal. Before I get into this, Moneeka, I want to talk about the process. If you’re new to syndication like, “How would I look at a deal?” If you sent me a deal and said, “Chris, what do you think about this?” By the way, this happens to me at least once a week. I had one of my fellow mastermind members set it up. He sends me this deal, and it was in this little town in Alabama, and he’s like, “What do you think about this deal?”

As investors, we look at the numbers. We’re like, “What are the returns going to be on this deal?” I looked at the deal and my first question to him was, “Why do you like this town?” His response was, “I don’t know if I like this town.” I searched for this town. It was 18,000 people. 11,000 of those 18,000 people in the population were students. If you look, you’d be like, “This town’s growing like crazy.” If you’re in a decent-sized city or town, 18,000 people is a small concert in some towns. That can blow that out.

One of the things you need to be conscious of is, “Why are you investing in a specific area? Why multifamily?” That’s what I talk about in my book. I’ll talk about that here in a minute but, “Why a certain geography of a country are you going to invest in?” I’m going to walk through a lot of that as I unfold this deal here. The first thing I’m going to talk about is why multifamily real estate. Why do I call it the Holy Grail of real estate? The reason is multifamily is very stable. People always need a place to live, and it waxes and wanes. It’s hot. It’s lukewarm at times but multifamily real estate apartments never seem to be cold because people always need a place to live.

Syndication Deals: Multi-family is very stable because people always need a place to live. It waxes and wanes, sometimes too hot or lukewarm, but it is never cold.

We have a few trends as well, and I talk about these in my book. One of the big trends and problems we have this decade, 2020 onward, is that we have not built enough housing. If you’re anywhere in the country that’s even remotely desirable, you can’t get a house. It’s hard to find a place to rent and we haven’t built enough apartments. We haven’t built enough homes. The question is, “Why would we not do that? Isn’t this a capitalistic society? Wouldn’t money flow into that area?”

The problem is we didn’t build at all coming out of the Great Recession and the banks tightened up lending. My wife and I started building spec homes in 2012 and 2013. We called over 30 banks and there was one in the town of Asheville, North Carolina, which isn’t huge. Out of almost three dozen banks, there was only one bank that would lend to us to build a house and this was in 2012.

In 2013, 5 years after the Great Recession started, you almost couldn’t get money to buy or build a house. If you think about that, we have to make up for that law, and then you have the Millennials. You have 20 million potential households or more living with their parents still. They’re all moving out and looking for houses. They’re looking for places to live. Guess who else is looking for places to live? Their parents because they’re downsizing. They’re moving to better areas of the country.

If you find an area of the country that is desirable, there’s a housing shortage already. We don’t have enough homes. Millennials, Baby Boomers, and Gen Z, 36% were the article I read that about a third of Gen Z say they want to own a home. It’s only a third. 75% of immigrants rent. You have all these trends that are pushing the multifamily market. That’s number one, the multifamily market.

Number two, what areas of the country do you want to invest in? I’m going to show you this deal in Florida. It’s probably no surprise. Moneeka, I know you’re in California. I’m sure you don’t love the state tax rate as my guess. I have friends in other areas of California, and they don’t like the local policies. There have been stories in San Francisco about stores getting looted and these problems. There are people that say, “I don’t want to pay the tax and I don’t want to deal with this. By the way, I’m remote now. I can live wherever I want.”

They move to places like Idaho, Colorado, Oregon, Texas, Florida, and the Carolinas. All these states are in the top ten of the country. I can dive deep. I don’t want to get too into this. I’m an engineer. I can get nerdy about all this stuff but I can go through all the statistics of how you look at this. If you listen to those states and most people nod their heads and say, “I’d rather live in an area with a lower cost of living in a better quality of life,” although I do love California.

I love California, too. You’re right. In every place that you live, build or grow a business, there are advantages and disadvantages. I still love being in California but I know there are things that are not working here. We’ve never had someone do a deep dive on those numbers. Would you mind maybe going a little bit more high level? I would love to hear some of that.

I can do this probably in a pretty succinct way without getting too crazy here. The easiest thing to do is look at census data. You don’t have to go and look through all the US census data, although that’s where this comes from. I was doing a presentation, as I mentioned, and showed this slide. These are the fastest-growing states in 2021.

I searched and looked for the fastest-growing states in the United States. Again, I’m not saying I like or don’t like states. This is just data from where people are moving. The darker the states, the more people are moving to these states. On the West Coast people are moving typically out of California to states like Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Colorado.

Texas, I joke around and call Austin the least expensive city in California, and then also the Southeast. The Southeast is so dark here and that’s because people are moving out of the Northeast. This goes down here, talking about the fastest-growing states in the United States. This is with a little bit of a grain of salt. Idaho has a population of less than two million. If you’re going to be buying properties like big apartments or multifamily, you want to be buying in areas where there are a lot of transactions. We like cities that are typically 250,000 or above.

Even a million are nice-sized cities because a lot of transactions occur there. A state like Idaho, maybe that’s not a good fit for us. Arizona, for instance, has over 7 million. Nevada, Utah, Texas, and South and North Carolina, I’ll show you down in there. Montana and Delaware are other one that is fairly small states. If you look down here, you see those states I mentioned, North and South Carolina, Florida, Colorado, and Washington. Washington State is growing but there are some issues with some of the cities in Washington that make me shy away from it. Also, Texas, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and Idaho all are great states to look into.

What is it that about Washington, for instance?

You know this because you’re a landlord. When you’re looking at states to invest in, you want to be in states that have landlord-friendly laws and also are business-friendly. I ran into a neighbor down the road and his business. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina. They’re based in Seattle. He was like, “I got back. I was in Seattle for three months.” I said, “What were you doing there?” “I’m shutting down our office.”

Syndication Deals: When a landlord is looking for states to invest in, they must choose landlord-friendly areas that enforce business-friendly laws.

I said, “Why are you shutting down your office in Seattle?” He goes, “They drove us out of the city. They don’t want businesses there. They didn’t force us to leave but it doesn’t make sense for us to do business in Seattle anymore.” Amazon is divesting from cities like Seattle as well. You also have to be considerate of that, and you have to look at what the businesses and the trends are doing. When we look at crime, when it comes to neighborhoods, it’s okay if the crime is within a certain range but you don’t want crime to be rising.

You don’t want state taxes to be rising. You don’t want businesses to be leaving. A state that has less businesses but has more businesses moving in, is better than a state that has more businesses but businesses moving out and taxes rising because what you want is growth in an area. What we’re looking for is growth in an area and a state like Washington State may be growing but it’s very rural in some different areas. You have to be conscious of that as well.

You want to know that there are more businesses coming in. You want to know that crime isn’t going up, that it’s maybe stable or going down. Is that the stuff you can find out online also?

Absolutely. Again, this is a whole hour and an hour half.

It’s its own thing.

Given it a level but if you’re an investor, I don’t think you have to go and pull all this data. I would be conscious of you can go and search like, “Chris has shown me this deal in Fort Myers. Let’s look up our businesses growing there.” You can search and see that, and I can show you some stats on Fort Myers. Even more importantly, when we get into the analysis of a deal at a high level, you ask the operator, the syndicator or the general partner and say, “Chris, tell me about the situation in Florida with businesses or what this city is doing to draw in businesses.” You don’t have to have the answers as an investor but certainly, whoever you’re investing with, if we’re talking about syndication, that person should have the answers for you.

My husband is an engineer like you. We had a deal come across our desk and the numbers that were put in the deck were wrong. He was saying things like, “These numbers are a little bit misleading. I still like this deal because of this. They have a lot of business but businesses are going down that’s not stated.” For him, he was able to go do that deep dive and the syndicator was not forthright, forthcoming on that stuff. Maybe they found their numbers a different way but we lost our trust in that dealer or syndicator.

Details are important in this business because the math and the multipliers are big in the multifamily space. This is another article I pulled up talking about the two generations that are clashing. They’re both battling over gaining housing in these different markets. I’ll talk a little bit more about that. I’m going to show you this deal in Fort Myers. You’re an investor and you search and you’re like, “Why should I be interested in Fort Myers?” It’s the number one, fastest-growing city in the US. This is one of the reasons that we were interested in this market.

Now, it’s a smaller market. In a market that’s less than 1 million people, I’m wanting to see a lot larger growth rates than a market like Orlando, where we bought two properties. I don’t expect for Orlando to grow as fast because it’s a much larger market. It’s going to take a lot more to move the needle. I’m going to want to see faster growth rates there. I was talking about that deal in an 18,000-person pound. You might see some impressive growth numbers but 1,000 people one way or the other are going to move that fast and that’s almost too small.

I’m going to get into all those different subjects as we get in here and stop me and we can discuss this. First things first, when you’re an investor and you look at a deal, don’t get distracted by the pretty pictures. We like pretty pictures. Investors like pretty pictures. It’s appealing. The property should look nice but you want to look at the meat of the presentation. You want to look at what’s inside the presentation. That being said, I mentioned details matter. I’m not going to say we’ve never had a typo in our presentation.

We’ve transposed some numbers and done different things but you want to make sure that your operator or your syndicator in a deal like this is buttoned up. I said a big word, syndication. If that intimidates you, if you’re reading this, syndication is simply finding a deal. My partners and I go out and find a deal and we partner with investors and bring those investors together.

To purchase a deal together as a team is syndication. It’s buying a property as a team. Like on a baseball team, you have management, the pitcher, the catcher, and people in the bullpen. Although I heard, we can’t say bullpen anymore. Somebody got upset about that during the World Series. I’m not even kidding. You have people that don’t even play. You have the staff, the assistant coaches, and those things.

Syndication is a team sport. I talk about how real estate’s a team sport in my book. That’s a great way to think about syndication. It’s a team coming together to buy a deal and everybody has their place. Investors like the players on the field are important, even though they may not be the management staff. This picture driving into the property here in Fort Myers. Let’s talk about some of the high-level points here. We are buying this property in Fort Myers, Florida, and a lot of these numbers, if you haven’t seen these before, can be intimidating like, “What’s a cap rate?” We can talk about that.

Expense ratios, occupancy, and this occupancy number are not even correct because when we put this together, it’s 67% almost a few weeks ago. Now it’s about 75%. We’re leasing up very rapidly. It’s 100% leased and it’s 75% occupied the day we’re having this interview here and the day we take ownership of it. This is a $109 million deal that we’re raising $38 million. I can talk about the structure. One of the things that are unique about our group is that some other groups have been doing it as well.

We have a two-tiered structure. We have what’s called a Class A structure, which is a fixed return. Those Class A investors get a fixed return. They get paid first. It’s a very secure position. It’s not guaranteed but very secure. The Class B investors, get the actual cashflow from the property, which is typically less than the Class A investors get from a cashflow perspective. The Class A investors don’t get any upside. The Class B investors get all the upside on the deal. If you see this here, that’s why we have the two-tiered structure there.

I want to comment on that. That’s the way Chris does it, which is very interesting. It’s also different than the way many other syndicators do it. A lot of other syndicators that I’ve looked at are Class A. The first people who come in, they’ve only got a few units or this many units at Class A because they commit sooner. That’s often for the purchase of the property. They’re trying to get into the deal. They’ll offer a sweeter deal. They still get some of the upside and stuff like that but in a situation like what Chris is talking about, he’s giving everybody the same opportunity so you can choose Class A or Class B. It’s not a limited time only. There are benefits to both of those.

There are, and it depends. A lot of people are like, “If you’re retired, you’re on a fixed income.” I’m in my early 40s. I have a good friend, a former business partner. We’re the same age. We’re two months apart, and he called me a few months back. He sold the business and said, “I have $1 million. My goal is to generate $100,000 a year in passive income. Do you have anything that can help me achieve that?” I said, “You’re looking for a 10% return. We have a 9% fixed return.”

I’ve flipped the page here to show this. If you look down here, the Class A partnership structure varies. Sometimes we raise 10%, sometimes we raise 30%. The Class A structure varies based upon the structure of the deal. It does two things. It provides that opportunity for investors because we had investors that wanted a higher cashflow like my friend, and then it also lowers the leverage on the property, so we’re not having to borrow as much because it almost acts like a second loan in effect.

Our loan-to-value ratio goes down, which makes it more secure for all investors, and then also if you’re a Class B investor, it raises your overall return because the Class A investors, while they’re getting higher cashflow, they’re not taking the equity on the backend. In this deal, maybe you’re starting at a 5% or 6% return in the first year or so. If you’re a Class B investor and it goes up in year two. These are all performative projections but on the back end, your returns are higher.

We’re able to provide something for investors that want to hire cashflow upfront that maybe isn’t as concerned with growth. We’re also able to provide higher growth for those investors, even though we’re in an asset class that has had returns that are shrinking to a degree. It’s been a way that we’ve been able to provide something to investors on both ends of the spectrum when it comes to that.

Again, these are projections. This is what we like to gravitate towards as investors. I would say flip through all this, and the first thing you want to look at are the details of the property itself. You want to say, “How many units does the property have? What’s the current occupancy? What’s the rent per square footage? When was it built?” You can then start to get an idea of what the general partners and operators are going to do. I’m going to go out of order here.

Syndication Deals: The first thing investors must do is look at the property’s details. You want to see how many units it has, the current occupancy, the rent per square footage, and more.

Why Fort Myers? As I mentioned earlier, we want to be invested in areas of the country that are growing. Fort Myers and the county, it’s in 300,000 workers, 17% job growth since 2014. I like to see a small city and I say a small city with 250,000 roundabouts like that. I like to see 2% per year job growth. If you look at 2014, ‘15, ‘16, ‘17, ‘18, ‘19, ‘20, and ‘21, we’re looking in seven years, I’d like to see about a 14% job growth.

That’s way higher than the national average, by the way. Seeing 17%, which is even higher, that’s 20% higher than 14%. That’s a significant difference. I had a friend, who looked, and he’s like, “There’s not a lot of businesses in Fort Meyers are there. It’s 33,589 total businesses. Now, are they all huge businesses? No, you probably have a lot of small businesses there. 55% population growth in the past decade, and it’s projected to grow almost another 50% as well in the coming years. I got the title Fastest Growing City in America. We know Florida’s growing by about 15%.

If you look at the population growth since 2010, look at Fort Myers. It’s incredible. We bought two properties in Orlando. Orlando is 1 of the top 5 markets in the country, and Fort Myers is totally different. Again, this is what you’re going to see between a smaller market and a larger market. The next question an investor would be asking is, “Chris, why are you guys buying in a smaller market?” There’s been a lot of money flooding into core markets over the years. There are big markets like Austin, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Miami around the country a lot of these big markets.

What we’ve seen over the years, a lot of money’s been flowing into the secondary markets. That’s what we focused on in the past years, markets like Atlanta, Georgia. Raleigh, Charlotte, Greenville, Charleston, South Carolina, and then Orlando. Now, as these secondary markets have gotten more and more investors and money flooding into them, again, a lot of international money is coming overseas as well.

We’ve started to look at opportunities in the tertiary markets. If you think about it, we’re not doing this because we’re running around and seeing what’s going on. This is where the population is flowing. People are moving out of the city centers, moving to the suburbs, and now they’re saying, “I don’t even have to live in suburbs. I can live somewhere that’s even nicer, smaller, a better quality of life, less traffic, and less taxes.” We’re following the population where they’re moving. That’s what we’re doing.

You mentioned something on the last slide where you said you’re in an asset class that’s shrinking a little bit. Could you explain that?

I touched on that. The more money that flows into an asset class, it does a couple of things. It provides a great opportunity for operators like us that are selling deals. We’ve had some tremendous exits here this 2022 in terms of returns but there’s more money chasing these deals. That means, as the demand goes up, the returns go down. If you wanted 20% returns a few years ago, maybe you were okay with 18% returns, and then a couple of years ago, 15% returns. Now, I’ve seen deals with 10% returns.

You have a lot of people that don’t have anywhere else to put all this cash that they have, all this liquidity and you have a lot of big players overseas that are coming. We look for deals that need a little bit more work because we’re okay. We have a team built to put in the work, and I’m going to walk through our strategy on this deal while we’re doing that. We also look for markets that aren’t as exploited yet. We’re looking at the next top market. It’s important to point out our group.

We are a private group but we’re buying institutional quality assets. Group like ours, there are not a lot of groups our size that can go and acquire a $100 million deal like this within two months. We’ve put together a team and a process. We can vet deals, we can have our team on the ground very quickly, and we have the capital to close on a deal like this in a fairly rapid fashion. We’re prepared to get in there and improve the asset. Some might say like, “Chris, this deal was built in the last year. How are you going to improve it?” I’m going to get into some of the ways we do that here in a minute.

It does look gorgeous, by the way. It’s beautiful right up front.

I’ll talk about what that leads to in terms of the quality of residents that we have but real quick, employment drivers. This is the next thing. After you’ve said, “This is the geography. This is the state. This is the city that I’m interested in investing as an investor,” you say, “What is driving this?” You have a diversity of employers. Let me give you an example. Back several years ago, Houston was dominated by oil. Now Houston has a lot more of an employment base. If we look at the Fort Meyers market, what we’re going to see is these employers here, we have healthcare systems with 10,000 plus employees.

We have local as well as state governments here. We have county and local governments that are employed and very stable employers. We also have private. We have a public supermarket, Walmart, and Arthrex, which is a medical company that I’m familiar with. I have a lot of friends that work for them. We have McDonald’s, another city here, US Sugar, Home Depot, Winn-Dixie, and Ritz-Carlton. I look at this list as an investor and I like this because not only do I have a lot of employers on this list but I have a lot of different types of employers on this list that is going to draw in different types of individuals from around there.

You can see the proximity. I have a better picture here of the map. If you look at where these employers are, you can see this property has easy access up to 75 to all these employers here that you can get around. I’ve worked for a six-month period down in this area. It’s very easy to get up and down. Number two here is Southwest Florida International Airport. It’s the fastest-growing airport in the country in terms of seats added. When an airport’s growing that fast, it means that there’s demand, and there’s a lot of travel in and out of the airport. People are traveling to and from that area.

Another thing you want to look at is the proximity to the employers that you have here. Forgive me for flipping back and forth through all this stuff but I told you I’d go out of order. I mentioned you have employers. Look at the average income. Now you’re in California, you’re a little spoiled out there, Moneeka, I got to tell you. Around the country, if you’re looking at $50,000 or $60,000 of average income in a property, that’s pretty good. We’re at $172,000 per unit. That’s literally off the charts. This area is very affluent area, $2.5 million net worth. 88% of the residents in this area have white-collar jobs. 79%, almost 80% are college graduates.

Those that are living in the homes, in the area locally are making almost $200,000 a year. These are strong numbers. It begs the question, “Why rent? Why not buy a home?” Homes in this area are $800,000 or $900,000 starting. 20% some of the residents that are here have relocated, and they might not have the savings built up yet.

They might not know if, “This is where they want to live.” They might have started working for a company. They may be retirees and don’t necessarily have the ability to buy a house in terms of financial means or there might not be a house available for them to buy. They want to live in this area. A portion of this property is townhouses. They’re very nice. It gives you a much more residential feel out there. I mentioned a few minutes ago, how do you improve a brand new property? We have acquired three properties already that are lease-up deals. They’re new properties.

The pandemic has driven a couple of trends that have benefited some of the choices we’ve made in the past couple of years that have also allowed us to utilize different strategies. If you listen to some of my interviews at the end of 2019, I said, “We need to be careful going into 2020 based on some of the research that we’re facing a mid-cycle slowdown.” When you come to this point in the real estate cycle, which typically is 18 or 19 years that’s a whole another episode that we can talk about. It goes back to the 1850s.

Again, I’m a data guy. I’m a nerd. I love this stuff and I can tell you all about it. The thing is when you get to this point, you want to have higher quality renters, higher quality residents that’s going to buffer your downside. My former partner and I were buying in Atlanta. Those properties had about a 90% collections rate of the properties that we bought over the years in these higher B plus. B plus was built in 1990 and after A quality assets were built in the last several years, 98% collections we had in 2021.

Collections, you mean they paid their rent. They’re collecting rent.

They pay the rent. You can be 100% occupied and when there’s an eviction moratorium and people don’t pay your rent, you can still only have 90% collections. We’ve seen a lot of that. That’s a good indicator of the stability and how robust this asset class is. Now the challenge is how do you create value if you have this nice asset?

First off, the new rent. We almost bought another property up the road from this property. I was looking through my notes here. You might have noticed here in one of the prior slides the average rents in this property are about $2,000 a month. That’s market rent. They’re lower than this in this property because they gave away some concessions but for the ones that are renting now, about $2,000 a month, renewals right up the road in a similar property are increased by $300.

People are coming out and they’re increasing rents by $300 a month. We’re going to be able to buy this property and as these leases come up for renewal, over the course of the next year, we’re going to have this organic rent growth that’s coming from the market. We normally underwrite 4% rent growth. In a property like this, it’s 4%.

Being able to get 15% rent growth from the market forces that are coming in because of the scarcity and the demand for this area is incredible. The nice thing for us is that if you’re selling a property, you can’t sell a property based on what it’s going to rent for. You can only sell a property for what it’s renting for, and then somebody might say, “Chris, why would the seller sell this property?” The seller is 1 of the nation’s top 5 builders. Their business is to build, lease-up, and sell the property as fast as possible. That’s their job.

I paid $4,000 to have my condo unit painted. I needed it painted in 48 hours. I could have probably had it painted for $3,000 this weekend but I needed it painted in 48 hours. I was willing to pay that extra money for it because I was going to make a lot more money by getting that renter a month sooner. That’s what’s important to me.

What’s important to the builder is they get out of the property, collect their capital, and can invest and start their next project. That’s how they make money. Sitting in this project for another year and maximizing the rent is going to cost them money because they’re not able to necessarily build another project that they may have.

That’s not their business model.

It’s not their business model. That’s our business model.

You said that you had 100% pre-leased, and 75% already full but you’re counting on this growth of the new rents. As you have renters in, you can’t increase someone who’s already in. You can’t increase their rent to the same level. Usually, with these, it takes some circulation. Some attrition and people moving around to make that happen. How are you addressing that?

We’ve underwritten that. We have the actual rent roll, so we know when all those leases are going to turn over. We’ve baked that in and we don’t assume that we’re going to get that full $300. We underwrite that and have a buffer in. I’ll talk about how our estimates are lower than what we typically actually see. That’s a great question. The new leases will start coming due, and I believe it’s March. That’s when we’ll start seeing these increases. It’s going to take us about eighteen months. If you look at the pro forma, you’ll see it starts to happen in year two.

We’re starting to see the full realization of these increased leases. We assume it’s going to take longer than it probably is in reality. That’s step one. Step two, running the technology package. In a property like this, people like to have Nest or Ecobee. I have a picture of the Ecobee thermostat here. It’s the same one I have right back there. If you’re renting a place of this caliber, we underwrote $1,250 per unit for all 300 units. We have a quote for $800 to do this. We try to be a lot more conservative when it comes to this.

DISH fiber is something that we’ve done over the years in these properties. Everyone is accustomed to having the internet these days. Most people, I don’t know about you, Moneeka, but we haven’t had cable TV in five years. It was the 2016 election. I was like, “I’m done watching the news. Things are crazy. I can’t listen to it anymore,” and I canceled cable but we still pay more for internet and subscription services. Instead of letting Charter, Spectrum, AT&T or one of these other companies come in and sell the internet, we bring in a company.

We’ve been working with a company called GigaFi. Now we work with Dish Network, which people are familiar with. They have a product called DISH Fiber. They come in and install it. We do a profit split on the backend, and the residents get a lower cost for their internet. We charge a technology fee for that. They get the base amount. They can also choose the mid-tier or the higher tier to do that. They get better economies when it comes to that for them.

This is showing increased clashflow of $136,800 per year. If you do the estimate of what we’re collecting per month, it’s going to be significantly higher than that but we don’t expect a full adoption rate. We usually estimate about a 50% adoption rate when it comes to that but we’re seeing 60%, 70% plus adoption, and for a property like this, it’s probably going to be even higher than that.

In private yards, a lot of times, you get less money for first-floor rent. You get more money for the top floor rent. We get more money for first-floor rent because we build little private yards. If you have a kid, you can let your kids play outback without them running away. If you have a dog, you can put your dog out back. Most of the time we use turf instead of grass, and then the dog’s not peeing back there like my dog did in our condo several years ago and killing all the grass in the front yard. We’re getting a significant premium.

This is showing $100 per month. We’re seeing more than $150 per month. These are all “value ads.” If you read my book, you’re going to say, “Chris, how on Earth do you do a value add strategy in a property finished in 2021?” Those are some of the strategies that we use to add value to a property that looks brand new. Most people would assume you can’t do anything to that property. These are some areas in which we’ve been able to find value.

What’s so interesting about this is over the last couple of years, anybody who has been trying to do value add has had all the problems that COVID brought us. Supply chain, lumber, and all sorts of materials are going way up. We’ve seen a lot of projects still be profitable but not have the margins that they have originally planned. This is an interesting way to do the value add without having to deal with a lot of those issues specifically.

There are a couple of things. When you have an older value add property, there are a few factors that you have to take into consideration. One, if you’re investing, say $5,000 to $10,000 per door, which is typical for a medium-value add property, you have to raise that much more capital. You’re raising significantly more capital. You’re not going to get the same quality of loan typically because the banks are going to require you to hold more in reserves. They know that the property and the residents are of less quality. They also know that your turnover is going to be higher. We can install DISH fiber and not kick anybody out.

Syndication Deals: If you’re investing $5 to $10 per door, which is typical for a medium-value add property, you have to raise that much more capital.

We can install a technology package in a day while somebody’s at work. We can install a private yard outside their home and they’re still living there and paying rent. They don’t have to spend 1 month, 2 months, or 3 months with that unit vacant. We also know just asking the person, “Do they want it? Will they pay for it ahead of time?” and doing it that way. The other thing is with these value add properties, the cap rates are higher. If you invest $1 to get $2 out, if you have a 6% cap, so $1 divided by 6% that’s 16%. I’m trying to remember exactly what that is.

I’ll do the math quick. The multiplier is about 16. A cap rate is simply if you pay $100 for something, the cap rate would be how much you would get in cashflow. A 6% cap on the $100 purchase price would be $6. A 6% cap rate would be $6 of cashflow per $100. It’s a 16.7% multiplier. If you increase the cashflow by $1, you get $16 of value, $16.7. That’s pretty impressive. At a 4.5% cap, we’re buying this property and we’re assuming we could sell it at a 4.5% cap rate, which is a little bit higher than what we’re seeing in the market.

That’s a 22.2% multiplier. It takes us less money, and less time to produce. If you’re looking at this, we’re assuming, say $100, $190, that’s $200 per resident at a 22.22% multiplier. That’s times 200 times 12 months by the way. In this case, we don’t have to invest anything in Dish. They pay for that $2,000, $3,250. and the first year we’re creating $444 in value in doing that. That value persists in perpetuity. That’s blending all those things together. It’s an easy way to create a significant return on your money very quickly in these properties.

That’s some of the high-level stuff. We spent a fair amount of time on this. If you’re an investor and you’re looking at the unit mix, you don’t need to spend a tremendous amount of time on this. You don’t want anything that’s too crazy. If there’s a property, it’s all three bedrooms, is it all townhouses? Why is it all three bedrooms? It’s because three bedrooms, they rent for more but you’re not going to have as much demand for those.

If it’s all one bedroom, why one bedroom? What about people that work from home? What about people that can’t have two roommates in there and do that? If it’s all two-bedroom, maybe that’s okay. We like to see a nice mix of those. You want to see less 3 bedrooms, more 2 bedrooms, you know, more 1 bedrooms. This is a little skewed because this is high for one bedrooms.

A lot of these one bedrooms also have a den. There’s a difference here with that. We have 1 bedrooms, and 1 1/2 baths. Some of these 1 bedrooms, 946 square feet, that’s pretty big for a one-bedroom apartment when it comes to that. Several of these three bedrooms that are down here are townhomes, as you can see. There are 24 townhomes that are associated with this. We have this nice mix in this property of townhomes all the way down to 1 bedrooms, including 1 bedrooms with a den.

You could have a couple where they work out of the house. When my wife and I rented our first apartment, it was a one-bedroom but it had a loft. We were very comfortable in that space. This is a very flexible property that has a lot of diversity when it comes to the different unit mixes. This is a lot of the details of the property here. I mentioned it earlier, the property is one of the top five builders in the country with a terrific reputation. If you’re talking to an operator of the deal when you’re buying a property, you want to say, “Are there any structural issues? Does the roof need to be replaced? Is it slapped together?”

In a new property like this by a builder of this caliber, these properties or apartments are built like condos. They’re phenomenal. When you see the amenities in this property and you see some of the finishes, they’re well done, stainless, you have nice quartz countertops, and nice layouts in here. You see these two-car garages in some of these units. We also have one-car garages and some storage units here that also add additional rental revenue that comes in. These are some of the numbers. When you get into the finances, you want to know, “Does the financing line up with the hold period?”

You can hold a property that takes less work for less time than a property that’s going to take a two-year project to complete. If you’re investing in a property and your operator says, “We’re going to spend two years executing our value add strategy,” and they only have debt on there that lasts for three years, what if something goes wrong at the end of that couple year period?

It’s going to take two years. You mentioned this earlier, you can’t just move people out right away. It’s going to take a little while before you can start to implement that two-year value add plan. You’re about three years out before you finish it and even start to see that revenue. If you’re done and have to refinance the property at that point, you may be bumping up against the problem.

In those types of projects, we’re putting ten-year debt on those properties. A project like this is different. We have a 1-year loan with two 1-year extensions, and it’s variable but we have an interest rate cap to cap our risk when it comes to interest rate fluctuations. We typically model our hold periods for five years. All of our exits have been significantly less than three years. We’re comfortable with a five-year loan on this type of property.

Our interest rate is 0.35% in the underwrite but we are looking at potentially getting that down to 3%. It’s a very nice property. We also get a nice quality loan when it comes to that. The other reason we’re choosing this is the exit fees on a loan like this are a lot lower. What happens is on some of these agency loans that you get from Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, you end up having to pay a significant exit fee that eats away at your profits on the back end. As an operator, we have to balance the loan terms, and the loan duration, along with the fees that we have to pay on the backend.

The other thing is, I wanted to mention it to the ladies because they read all of this. When you’re doing financing, a lot of times what happens is you either have to refinance it, turn it into a regular loan, or they do these rollovers. Every project that I’ve ever looked at, the rollover seems key to me because there’s a rule in real estate and it looks like you do a great job of keeping to your timelines, and doing expense lines. A lot of times they will say, “If you have a project and you have a budget and a timeframe, double the budget and double the up timeframe.”

That’s why our 5-year projects, we have 10-year debt. This project, when we were like, “This project is going to be stabilized in a couple of years, and if we exit it in 3 years, a 5-year loan is ample for that.

I like the rollover opportunity.

As an investor, you want to say, “Does it match up, and is there a buffer?” I’ve seen some projects with two-year bridge loans, and I’m not saying those don’t work but if you have two-year debt on a value add project, it’s worked out well in the past several years for investors certainly but there’s an additional level of risk when it comes there. This slide can take a ton of time. I’m going to point out a couple of things and then we can go into a couple of sections. As an investor, you want to look at the comparable rents that are out there. This doesn’t have the walk on here.

I mentioned that property that’s seeing those $300 rent premiums. We can only fit so many rent caps on this slide but I have a full accomplice on here. If you look at this, there’s something you want to look at as an investor. This property finished in 2021. It came online, average rent per square foot, $1.95. Now our actual rent per square foot is more like $1.75. This is not taking into account some concessions but I would note as an investor if you look at this, where are we in terms of the market? In some markets like California, you might say, “This is low.”

In some markets like the Carolinas, you might say, “This is high.” What you want to know as an investor is, “Where does the property fall on the market, and where there’s definitely room to move in terms of rent per square foot in this market?” Both are in terms of rent per square foot. Also, in terms of rents per unit, there’s only one property here. If you look at average rents per unit, are lower than this but if you look at the average square feet, they’re smaller. You want to know that you have room to move into the market. We also talked earlier in the presentation about the tremendous income levels in this property.

The rent per income was 27%. I believe it’s correct. There are plenty of rooms for residents in this property. Also, there are not a lot of other options to get a lower rent in the market. Now, Moneeka, you were talking about like, “When are you going to see these realized rents?” We are basing this year one rent over in-place leases that are there. People might be like, “63% increase, that’s insane.” That is coming because if you note here, over the past year, this property has been leased up, so there’s been a huge loss that gross potential rent.

This is a lease-up deal. It’s a little different than a stabilized property. That vacancy loss, it’s a fake number because that number’s like, “What if all these units were rented?” It takes a while to rent those up. Also, there are a lot of concessions that were given away. If you notice, we’re going to have to burn through some of those concessions going into our first year but they’re going to come off, and that’s why these concessions are going to drop pretty substantially here as we go into year two.

Year one, it’s not an anomaly but it’s hard to judge anything. This 17% rent growth in year two, that’s where we’re looking at, “What are the comps in the area?” That’s revenue growth. That’s not total growth. That 17% is coming from rent growth. We talked about all the other income that we were bringing in in terms of the technology package and the dog guards. You can see that the other income is going to be growing to $966,000 almost $967,000. That’s not a 17% rent increase that we’re looking at. It’s a combination of burning off the concessions, other income, and rent increases as well. We’re only baking in an organic 4% rent increase into those numbers is what we’re looking at. You can see that in years 3, 4, and 5.

Some people may look at that and say, “17%, that’s insane. You can’t get a 17% rent growth number.” We think that number is quite realistic based upon the fact that that’s coming from three different buckets of income in here. The other thing I would point out, operating expenses. These are our total OpEx budgets for our properties that are older than this which are usually about 36% with our property management company. Seeing OpEx budgets of 39% and 40% for Operating Expenses, that’s pretty high for us. We have two other properties with the same management company in Orlando that are of similar quality.

As you can imagine, the higher the quality of the property, the lower the operating expenses. You’re going to have a lower turnover. You’re going to have less issues going back and forth, and less maintenance. Also, we use a big regional operator. FCA is the management company that we use, and they know this market well.

We are basing our payroll and our numbers on all this. You’ll notice the payroll here. We’re stabilizing this at $398,000. This is a lease-up payroll, so it’s going to be a little bit different. We’re stabilizing this based upon the Florida market numbers that we’ve seen in our markets as well as that FCA is providing us that operates in that market. The other thing of note, if you’re buying a property, if you look at it, there’s a huge jump here in our operating expenses and property taxes. This builder bought a piece of land. They’re paying significantly less taxes. We’re going to be paying more in taxes on a monthly basis than they’re paying on an annual basis.

That’s something you want to know as an investor. Look at the taxes and make sure that they’re adjusted, and ask your operator, “What’s the tax situation and how’d you figure that out?” We know what the tax rate is. We’re assuming it’s going to be 85%, which is the discount rate. 85% of the purchase value going into this market is how we’re calculating that.

We also have some soft insurance quotes that we’re using to get these insurance numbers. That’s also another great question. If you’re looking at a coastal market or Florida, people are like, “Why aren’t you worried about hurricanes?” We’re always worried about natural disasters but we’re not worried to the point where we’re not going to invest. We’re worried to the point of how are we going to ensure ourselves and our investors against those risks.

Like in any market, you’ll be out there. Again, that’s a high-level overview of the pro forma and the numbers there. The questions to recap as investors as you want to ask are, “What are the assumptions you’re using to get your income growth?” If you say, “Chris, it’s not realistic to see rents grow 10% in year one,” I would say, “How did you get that? What are you seeing? If we’re seeing 15% rent growth in the market, then 10% is not unreasonable.” I talked to my partner. He’s down in Atlanta at a conference and he said they did a panel and the rent growth that they all shared on stage was 10% to 20% in the southeast year-over-year.

These are not just very specific markets. These are the actual rent growths we’re seeing in this market. Again, we’re not projecting that out for five years or worse. We’re assuming that they’re going to slow down significantly. These are sales comps, and then we get into the pretty pictures again like we were talking about with Fort Meyers. We covered a lot of this. This is why is it such a great place to live. This goes through a lot of the properties that we’ve had, some of the closings that we’ve had.

That’s the final question, which is should be your first question, which is, “Who are you investing with? Do your operator, your GP, and the partner that you’ve chosen to place your money with have a track record?” I should know this exactly. This is my fifteenth department syndication that I’ve been a GP on. We’re limited partners or owners in twenty different properties currently. We invest in every deal that we present to investors. That’s another great question, “Do you invest in your own deals? Why? Why not? How much?” When we profit from a deal, we roll that into the next deal. We believe in this strategy and like to buy properties that we want to own ourselves, and we see this as a way to share these opportunities with other people.

There was one other thing you said at the very beginning. You are able to do projects that are institutional size rather than the smaller ones. Could you talk a little bit about how that works out for you? Why it’s different for you than for other syndicators? Give me some perspective on that.

There are a few different pieces of the puzzle that you need on the front end. I mentioned I was on the mastermind call and we had two other syndicators. One had a deal that was falling apart. One had a deal that he is putting together. We had a deal that came through and we joked because it’s like a dance, the middle school or the high school dance.

On one wall you have investor capital. On the other wall, you have deal flow and it depends on who is on the floor at the right time. You have to have the right deal at the right time with the right capital coming through. If you have 2 people come off 1 wall and 1 person off the other wall, only 2 of those people can dance together. You could have three people dance together.

That’s where the analogy falls apart.

It depends on which wall they’re coming off of if you ask me but it’s overly simplistic. I crushed my own analogy. You have to have the right deal and the capital comes together at the right time for a long-term partnership. How about that? Maybe we can agree on that. You have to have the right mix on the dance floor at the right time. We have created a deal flow. We have five people on our acquisitions team. We’re constantly looking at deals. My team told me they’re going to underwrite 450 deals this 2022.

This young team is out there my main partner, and then we have the team underneath him. They’re out there. That’s two deals a day on average that they’re underwriting. It’s like looking at the matrix if you look at our spreadsheets. It’s deal after deal but the good thing is because of the number of deals that they’re looking at and I mentioned this deal, they knew. They’re like, “This property up the road that we almost bought is getting rent premiums of $300.” By the way, the reason that the seller didn’t sell was that he decided to hold onto the property and get those rent premiums.

They’re good that seller decided to hold onto that. That broker that was selling us that deal, because that deal fell apart, brought us this deal. We get deals because of our knowledge of the markets, our relationships with brokers, and the frequency with that we’re in there. The big pieces are reputation. We have a 100% track record of closing. We typically close deals the size of a very short timeline of 2 to 3 months because we know so much coming in. We don’t have to spend a month after we get the deal under contract or run through all this process.

This deal was under contract, and we were able to put the package together. Our team’s ready to go, putting everything together. I started reaching out to investors saying, “Heads up, I had some investors on a waitlist. We have a deal coming through. Are you still interested so I know how much capital and what we can move to get a deal done?” We’re always tracking those numbers. It comes down to communication.

It’s sharing information with investors, being transparent, and then also explaining the process so investors know that, “Our deal, our agreement on our end is we’re going to find you this deal. We’re going to share the details of this deal. Your part of the bargain as an investor and as part of the team is that you’re going to get 2 to 4 weeks to look at the deal and fund the deal.” We’re going to close about a month after that. Our last deal was oversubscribed. There are investors that didn’t fund on time and didn’t get into the deal. That’s why we had a waitlist.

Syndication Deals: Deals all come down to communication. It’s about sharing information with investors and being transparent.

The big part on our end is I’m sending out investor updates every month. Our investors get distributions every month. They get quarterly updates as far as financials that come in there. We try to be as transparent as possible when it comes to that. We have the deal flow. We have the investor relations and the capital side of things. On the backend, we’ve had four exits with the team this year. They’ve all exceeded our pro forma expectations by a significant margin. Our average returns are well into the twenties or are higher than that.

You can see our projected returns here. I certainly don’t promise those returns on every deal we do. I would look at every deal on a deal-by-deal basis but the bottom line is the 3rd piece of the puzzle or the 3rd leg of the stool, if you will, is the operations side. Our Head Asset Manager, Brian ran a portfolio of $1.5 billion significantly more units than we have now. It’s a factor of three. This is cute for him to run the number of doors that we have at this point.

You need somebody that’s comfortable. That’s the other thing you need to ask the operators that you work with, “What’s your track record? What’s your plan? Can you handle this?” We’re only going to buy 1.6% or 7% of the deals we underwrite this year. It seems like people are like, “You bought 7 or 8 deals. It seems like a lot.” When you have a team built to handle a portfolio three times your size, we’re very comfortable with that. We’re built to scale and grow. We’ve built a team to grow into.

Have you ever had a deal that went south?

It’s yes and no. Personally, I’ve not had a deal in that I’ve been a general partner that has not performed to expectations. That being said, if you asked me in the middle of COVID, “Are your deals performing to pro forma it?” the answer was no. If you look at them overall, I didn’t have any investors. I increased my investor updates to every week because we wanted to tell investors, “Here’s what’s going on.” That’s our pledge. We want to be as transparent as possible.

A lot of deals were gone south in 2021 but they were bobbing. They were bobbing up and down and all of our all-over deals stayed afloat. This is a great question to ask, “What’s the worst-case scenario?” It was one of the first deals I invested in, and it was the group that my original partner and I originally partnered with on our first deal. They bought a deal on Houston. I mentioned that Houston was one of those markets that had a lot of oil industry and they didn’t have a lot of diversity. This was several years ago. The oil was $120 some a barrel and it crashed to $50 a barrel if I recall correctly.

The oil market tanked, and the group I invested with had a third partner. Two of them, a third partner. They split. That third partner went a separate way. They were distracted. They switched the management company. Things were not great, in general. With the group, they weren’t great in general. With the economic market, the management team got switched out. At a local level, it wasn’t great and then the hurricane comes through Houston and blows the roof off about 20 units, out of 200 units. It was this perfect storm of events.

That deal still made money. I averaged about 5% returns on that deal. I didn’t lose capital but we had a capital call because they had made a big distribution early in the whole period, so I had to send a check-in. I’m like, “This isn’t fun. I’m supposed to be making money from this deal.” This is an important thing to ask the operators that you work with and also it’s a good example of one of these stable, high-quality, multifamily deals. They shouldn’t lose money. They might not perform expectations but if you don’t sell in a fire sale, they shouldn’t lose money. That should be your first question, “Am I going to get my capital back and how am I going to get my capital back?”

If you read everything I said, you shook your head and said, “I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think the interest rates are going to be that. I don’t think the rents are going to be that. I don’t think your numbers are correct.” The next question is, “Do you still want to invest?” If you said, “Yes, I don’t agree with you but I still want to invest in this space.”

That’s why we have Class A because you can decrease your risk and say, “I don’t think I’m going to get this return, so I’m going to take a slightly lower return that’s more secure and get more of a bond-like return that’s 9% on a monthly basis was at 0.75% and take that.” I’m not going to argue with an investor that says, “I don’t like where the multifamily market’s going but I want to be invested.” We have an option for that type of investor as well.

Wasn’t one of your personal syndications that did this going south thing that the Houston story?

Not technically, but they’re friends of mine and they were partners in a deal in ours. Again, I have to temper all this with, if you look at the past years, it’s been a fairly easy time to be in multifamily. You’ve had cap rates compressing and if I sit here and I flashed up all of our deals and how great they did, that’s not worth anything. The track record is important comparatively.

Anybody reading this, I can show you all of our distributions to date as well as all of our dispositions so you can see our track record in real-time. We update that on a quarterly basis. That’s important. The past isn’t necessarily predictive of the future when it comes to the actual number. If someone tells you, “You’re going to get a 20% return on this,” run away.

If somebody says, “This is our best guess. This is what we’re striving to do. We strive to get 7% cash and mid-teens return. These are the things that could change that. It might be a little bit worse. it might be a little bit better but this is our plan to do it.” You need to be confident in the plan. If you’re confident in the plan and their numbers make sense, then to me, that’s an operator you can rely on if they have a consistent plan that they’ve executed. Everything that I walk through, we’ve done those yards, the first floor, the private yards.

Syndication Deals: If someone says that you will get a 20% return, run away. But if an operator is confident in their plan and its numbers make sense, you can rely on them.

We’ve done the internet service provider. We’ve done the technology package. We’ve hired the property management staff in the area. We know what that’s going to be. We know what the numbers are going to be. We know we can execute that plan. We can’t control the economic environment. We can’t control the cap rates. We can’t control interest rates and all that stuff but we can control the plan that we have and we’re very confident of that.

What is the minimum investment into winning projects?

Our minimum, it’s $50,000, which is on this page, we typically have a $100,000 minimum for the Class A investors because it’s a lot smaller equity slice, so it’s in higher demand but $50,000 is our minimum.

That was a lot of information.

I ran out of water. I should leave with my contact information, of course.

I don’t know if anybody who’s online with us has any questions. If you do, please let us know.

I’ll pop on here. We have a terrific team. This is my contact information here. These are my three main partners that live here right down the road. This is our terrific staff. They do a tremendous job here. If you have any questions, Tracy, I know you’re joining us here, feel free to throw any questions in the chat box or if you want to come on here live and talk. That’s great too.

Tracy came off of something that she was hosting. I’m sure her brain’s a little bit fried but she says, “No questions.” Tracy and anybody else who’s reading this, I will be sending this out. Remember that a lot of talking about a deal, why I wanted Chris to go deep into a deal is, part of the learning curve is to do something real and live. To talk about syndication theoretically, it’s not easy but that’s a lot of what we hear.

Chris, thank you so much for giving us an hour and a half time. When you go deep into the evaluation of the particular property and you get to see what’s going on in the mind of someone who’s good at this, who’s done a lot of this, then you can ask questions and you also learn through that process. This is 1 deal and 1 perspective. Chris has done other deals and we’ll do other deals. Thank you so much for going deep on that.

That was fun. Terrific questions. I’m glad we could go through that because we certainly couldn’t have done all the other presentations as well as that in addition. If you’re reading this either later on, you can reach out. My information’s [email protected]. We can set up a time. On the website, NextLevelIncome.com, you can get ahold of me. I can go through any of this and if you want to see our deals that come through, you can click on the investment link and put your information in there.

There’s a bunch of free gifts at NextLevelIncome.com/bliss, so you can get his book and get to know Chris even deeper and the way that he thinks about this. We got a ton.

I got plenty more. We got all kinds of free books up there. We got our awesome podcasts with you, Moneeka, that was on there. We keep trying to put more and more resources up there to help people out. Our goal, the first two tenets of Next Level Income are making money, keeping money, and then growing your money. We talked about how to grow your money in investment but it’s a great time of the year to figure out how to keep more of your money through tax strategies and those things. We have a ton of stuff as well that can help out with that.

Ladies, you can go to NextLevelIncome.com/bliss to get that book and get more of those freebies that Chris is so generously shared with us. Thank you.

Absolutely. Thank you, Moneeka.

Tracy, so I’m going to assume you don’t have any other questions. Thank you for joining us. Everybody who’s reading later or was here, always remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. We’ll see you soon.

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Wasn’t that an amazing webinar? Chris does a great job, doesn’t he? Don’t forget to join Chris and me this Thursday for our live webinar on how to evaluate syndication. I’m so excited to share this with you. Bring all of your questions and don’t miss it. To sign up. Go to BlissfulInvestor.com/SyndicationWebinar. See you then.

Important Links

• BlissfulInvestor.com/SyndicationWebinar
• NextLevelIncome.com
• Show – Past Episode
• NextLevelIncome.com/book
• GigaFi
• Dish Network
• [email protected]
• Moneeka Sawyer – Next Level Income Past Episode

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To listen to the EXTRA portion of this show go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

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Moneeka Sawyer

Moneeka Sawyer is often described as one of the most blissful people you will ever meet.   She has been investing in Real Estate for over 20 years, so has been through all the different cycles of the market.  Still, she has turned $10,000 into over $5,000,000, working only 5-10 hours per MONTH with very little stress.

While building her multi-million dollar business, she has traveled to over 55 countries, dances every single day, supports causes that are important to her, and spends lots of time with her husband of over 20 years.

She is the international best-selling author of the multiple award-winning books “Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment” and “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way.”

Moneeka has been featured on stages including Carnegie Hall and Nasdaq, radio, podcasts such as Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod,  and TV stations including ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW, impacting over 150 million people.

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