Growing Your Success By Plugging Into A Community With Deborah Razo – Real Estate Women

We all want success, but what happens next when we get it? Grow it! And one sure way to grow your success is to plug yourself into a community. Moneeka Sawyer’s guest today is Deborah Razo, the Founder of WREN – the Women’s Real Estate Network. Deborah talks with Moneeka about the beauty of being in a community of women and why you need them as a support system to help you succeed. Are you interested in joining the community? Listen to this episode!

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Growing Your Success By Plugging Into A Community With Deborah Razo

Real Estate Investing for Women

I am excited to welcome back to the show, Deborah Razo. You have met Deborah but let me read her bio so that you can be reminded of who she is and a little bit more about how she and I have grown our relationship together. She always an independent spirit. She started her first business in 1990. After owning several businesses, she realized that her path to financial freedom is through real estate investing and her personal mission to teach others who seek to grow and want to live life fully.

In 2009, she began her journey with Tony Robbins and now as a Robbin’s trainer traveling globally to provide onsite coaching to attendees. In addition to her degree from UCLA, she expanded her investing education with a series of intensive workshops. It felt like a natural transition to her shifting gears from her design firm to a booming rehab business that led to developing multifamily fourplexes. She is currently focusing her energy on partnering with investors seeking financial freedom through the acquisition of real estate assets. She’s also passionate about helping other women find success in real estate investing through networking and education.

To this end, she founded the Women’s Real Estate Network, which we call WREN in 2016. WREN is what we’re going to be talking about. One of the things that I hear much from you is, “I want a community.” You’ve tried a few communities and I feel blessed because you keep coming back to me and say, “I want a community with you.” I have to say that this is a place where I fail. I’m sorry that I’m failing because I don’t love Facebook. I haven’t found a platform that allows me to be engaged and to be there for you. I feel bad about it.

I’ve been on a hunt for a way to fill that need that I’m not fully responsible for. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be responsible for you but I don’t want to be responsible for the tech. I don’t want to remain responsible for Facebook ads. There is so much stuff involved in this that I don’t have expertise in. I’m not interested in it.

What I’m interested in is chatting with you and helping you grow and being your best selves and having conversations. When we first met, she mentioned that she has WREN and it was of in its baby stages. I was excited to chat with her. We’ve stayed in touch. The community has grown. It’s on Facebook. There’s a lot of people managing that and I’m a part of that. As it’s grown, I thought, “This is a place where my ladies could go.”

Some of the things that I love about this is this not a Facebook group, it’s a paid membership. Not huge amount of dollars like penny, super cheap but because of that we have a group of ladies that are interested in talking real estate. There are no trolls and no advertising. We’re there to help one another. That’s why I’m bringing Deborah back is because I want to talk about what she’s doing and how this can help you.

As we move into a new year, I’d like you to consider what are your goals. You ladies asked for the community because you need it. As women, we are very good at building community in many areas of our life. However, building community and talking about money, investing in real estate somehow, we shy away from it. We shy away from asking questions, answering other people’s questions and hanging out. I’m not sure totally why that is but I do know that women have some ideas about money and what we should and shouldn’t be talking about. It’s not conscious, it’s deeply ingrained inside of us.

We’re not like them. We’re fine sitting around the dinner table, talking about money and mortgage rates. To us, it might seem a little bit boring but when you’re talking with another woman that’s passionate about it, it’s not boring. This year I’d like you to consider building your community because it will support you. It will help you get the education you need when things go wrong or you have issues, you have a place to go to ask questions. You don’t have to feel bad about it. There’s never a dumb question.

Growing Your Success: The pandemic has made us all reevaluate whether we’re living our best lives and living how we want to live.

We’re all there to support each other. You need that. All of us need that. We have that in many areas of her life, we need this in our real estate business too. As we move into this conversation, I want you to plant the seed inside of yourself that, “It’s time for me to build a community. That’s going to support my expansion.” That’s one of your goals for 2022. I’m giving it to you. Let me bring in Deborah. Welcome to the show.

I’m writing that as the top of my goal for 2022. Thank you much for having me back.

For those, that haven’t heard your story in a little while, could you give us the high-level version of how you got into real estate?

I’ve been an entrepreneur for years. I’m going to qualify that by saying I built my own job. It wasn’t that I had a system where I was building passive income. I had built my own job. I was paid money to do work for clients. Then, I was in a bad car accident. It made me think about what I wanted out of life. A lot of people are going through that now. We’ve had this pandemic and it makes you reevaluate. “Am I living my best life? Am I living what I want to live?” It’s created a space for transition for people. That’s what my accident did for me.

it created the space of transition and me asking the questions like, “What am I doing? Am I living my best me?” The answer was no. That didn’t mean I had a bad life but it wasn’t the life I wanted or dreamed of. There was a part of me that was scared to dream and to want all that. With this decision and this accident in my life, I was like, “It’s now or never. We got to grasp now.” I decided to make some changes and I wanted passive income. I started googling passive income.

There are lots of things that come up. There’s real estate, royalties and all kinds of things that come up but real estate always, pops up. That’s when I thought, “I want to get me some of that mailbox money that everybody talks about.” I transitioned and started my journey towards that. I look at some of the mentors that I follow and I haven’t been always the most focused. I tried things and love them. I’ve tried things and hated them. That’s all in the journey and all in the learning process. Along the way, I found other women who would encourage and support me, which is what we’re talking about here.

Talk to me a little bit about that. What did that look like and what happened?

I was going through a frustrating time. I didn’t have a lot of money after the accident, and then I borrowed some money to help flip a house and thinking that I’ll get the capital from flipping and then I’ll reinvest in buy and holds for the cashflow. Cashflow has always been my long-term goal. The wealth in the cashflow so that I could get out of the rat race and travel the world and all that stuff. I wanted freedom. I was flipping and a bunch of hedge funds moved into my area and they were buying up so many of the properties that I would put offers in for and try to flip.

I was super frustrated. I was like, “I can’t find anything that’s working.” Where the numbers are working, I’m being outbid all the time. I felt like, “Where are my girls?” I need my support system around me. It’s not to say that I haven’t gotten great education from men, I have. They don’t think the thing way we do. They’re not balancing the things that we’re balancing.

Having some people with whom you can bounce ideas and share resources is amazing.

I put together a brunch in downtown LA on a Sunday and I invited a bunch of women who were full-time investors. They weren’t all flippers that. There are two women that owned eighteen storage units across the US. There was a woman that was a lender. There was a woman that was into notes. They were all full-time real estate investors. It was fun. We got together and were fun but what started happening is we started talking to each other about our problems and offering help.

That is one of the things that come naturally to women. “You need a lender? I know this guy, he’s a hard money lender. Do you need a babysitter? Do you need a gardener?” We share resources. Having some people that you can bounce ideas off of and share resources with is amazing. At the end of that brunch, I said, “I was thinking about doing this quarterly.” They said, “Let’s do it every other month.”

People started opening up their homes and there was usually wine involved. What ended up happening is not only did I know, like and trust these women but we started doing business together. I would JV with one of them. Somebody would lend on my job. I would lend on somebody’s project. I would buy into something. I look at that group of women and I realized they have affected my bottom line. That’s when networking becomes productive. That is productive networking.

At some point, I realized there were all these other women out there that didn’t even know about these rockstar women because they weren’t at the front of the room. They weren’t telling their story. They weren’t sharing their business models. I thought, “Let’s start a meetup that so I can take from this group of amazing women and put them in front of the room and say, ‘There are other women that are out there doing this.’” It means something when people see somebody like them. When another woman sees a woman, that’s amazing. She goes, “She’s doing that. I can do it.” That’s what started happening and then we grew quickly then technology came into play.

I am good at face-to-face. I’ve run meet-ups. I had groups that ran for years. It’s not that I’m not technically savvy. I am but for whatever reason, there are certain pieces that I’m not awesome at. I appreciate that you took that on. It was interesting, I was talking to somebody about the show. They were like, “Why do you focus on women? What’s the difference between men and women?” I was like, “You’re not interested in talking about menopause or what it’s like to be a mom that has a brand-new baby and still wants to run a business or to be a stay-at-home mom and your husband’s the main bread breadwinner. You feel like you don’t have any right to the money to invest.

In fact, often he doesn’t trust you because he hasn’t studied it himself. Not because he doesn’t respect you or love you but because he’s managed all the money, that’s his job. You’ve managed the kid. There’s been a division of labor and you’re trying to change the paradigm. My husband is amazing. In any case, we have issues as women, that men as much as they might want to understand, it’s impossible.

He doesn’t have our hormones. He doesn’t have the way that our minds work and our feeling of responsibility to our children, fur babies or our aging parents. It’s not just that we think differently because we do but we have very real physical aspects about our life that no man can relate to. You walk into a room of a bunch of men, real estate investors, they will be very respectful and you learn a lot. I learn a lot but I’ve also been hit on a lot, which is not appropriate. We’re talking business. We deal with stuff that is different and men don’t understand.

The way we relate to each other is different. I was flipping here in Los Angeles and we opened a WREN chapter in Seattle. I was up at the WREN chapter in Seattle. There was a woman at the WREN chapter who was a developer. I walked up to her and I was like, “You’re a developer. That’s cool.” You don’t meet women developers. She goes, “You’re a flipper, right?” I said, “Yes.” She goes, “I used to be a flipper but developing is so much easier.” I was like, “What?” We had this conversation that night that opened up my paradigm. I had never seen myself as a developer because I hadn’t met women developers. The developers I had met had been men. None of them had told me, “It’s easier. You can do it.”

Growing Your Success: Men don’t think the way women do. Let’s face it; they’re not balancing the things that women are balancing.

You’re dealing with these men developers, most of the men that do development are either contractors themselves or have contractors in their pockets. They know each other, it’s like the all-boys network. They don’t perceive how we fit sometimes. I don’t feel like any of it is of malice or maybe sometimes. Mostly their hearts are big but they don’t understand and they can’t because they’re not women. The same way as we can’t understand what it’s like to walk in a man’s shoe. We’ve had a little bit of training because we’re out there in business with them in our society. We don’t know what it’s like to be a guy.

It’s important to be able to have communication that’s open and real. You don’t have to worry about, “Am I articulating this right so that he’ll understand?” You’ve been doing this for years. I’ve been doing this for many years. For me, when I started in this business, it was all men. There were no women mentors. I remember it was exhausting trying to figure out how to communicate right so they didn’t think I was dumb, emotional, hormonal or didn’t know the numbers. There was this impression about women and numbers and all of these things. Everybody knew I was smart. I came from UC Berkeley but there’s a different way of looking at each other.

It’s not even about being smart. It’s about being taken seriously. To finish up that story, I went on to develop. I’ve developed a couple of fourplexes. Sometimes even now I’ll say, “I’ve developed.” It’s so funny the expressions I get on men’s faces sometimes. Some of them are respectful and in awe of me and some of them are shocked. I was like, “What do you know? We do the same thing.”

Every once in a while, to be goofy because I’m feeling very much that I need stand for myself. I’ll say, “I’m the CEO of a multimillion-dollar development company.” They’ll be like, “What?” I’m like, “I developed in Los Altos.” They’re like, “What?” They stop with the, “I know much more than you.” Now, it’s much more of an equal conversation. I never feel like they mean it but it’s the way the paradigm has been in the past and we’re trying to shift that. In the meantime, we need each other.

What’s beautiful in that is that I can see you like that, you can see me like that, we can express that to other women who can look at us and go, “She’s doing that? I could do that?” Like that woman that opened up development to me. I’ll open it up for other women. That’s the beauty of being in a community of women is that we can open up our minds to different ways to do things.

Not only is it, a resource like if I have a problem, I have several smart women on my telephone that could help me with that problem. It’s also a source of encouragement like, “One of the women in WREN, she’s buying her third hotel.” It’s that source of like, “There are these women who are heartfelt but great all at the same time.”

To know that that’s possible and it’s okay. You get to have good conversations with those women. They’re not inaccessible.

They’re transparent. We all have bad days. I jokingly say, “Yes, there is crying in real estate. It’s okay we’ve all done it.” It’s not all cashflow and wine. It’s also great to have the girlfriend to go “Get it out. Sit on your pity pot. Are we done? Brush yourself off and we’re going to go again. We’re going to go at it.” One of the things that I find that’s interesting to me, I study a lot of statistics between women and men investors. Oddly enough, maybe to men, women tend to have a higher return on their investments. It’s fascinating. We don’t get in as quickly as men do.

There’s no way around. There’s just walking through.

Sometimes women miss opportunities in real estate because it is about making the offer and getting in on that deal. It’s not that we don’t know it’s a deal because there’s an internal sensor when a woman finds a deal whether it’s shoes, house or whatever it is. There’s something that goes off on us but there’s also a hesitation when the ticket price is a little higher.

There’s a hesitation when that happens. We have a saying in WREN, like “You can borrow my confidence. Make the offer.” That’s how it is. We have to lean on each other to go, “Should I?” Somebody has to stand behind you and go, “Go ahead, do it.” It’s interesting being surrounded by a community of women in that, in that sense.

I love when you were talking about the pity party because I feel like we need our time to honor our feelings and our fears. We also need a little bit of a kick in the butt that says, “You’re done now.” a lot of times what happens is us women are such good listeners. We want to be there. We want to hold space. We want to make sure that you feel heard but we don’t go to that next step because it’s scary. It’s scary to tell another woman, “Are you done yet because now it’s time for you to move forward?”

It’s a hard thing to say and hear as a woman because we want to be loved, liked, heard and I want you to know my feelings. This is me. I know I’m generalizing, if that’s not, you please forgive me but that’s who I am. I know that that’s who a lot of the women that I am around. I used to be a day trader or trading options. I had one morning where I woke up and the brokerage had screwed up the closing out of the option trade and I owed $400,000 in one night.

David and I were making $60,000 a year in California. We had no money. I got out of it. it was a brokerage’s fault. It was all recorded and all that stuff. It was fine. I ended up making $20,000 that day but which is cool but not for that stress. I think what happened was at that point, I was like, “I can’t do this. I can’t wake up in the morning and owe $400,000. I can’t do that.” I stopped trading for two months and stopped.

A girlfriend of mine, we would go for a walk every day after my trading. She says, “Are you trading yet? I’m like, “I’m not going to do it.” It’s too dangerous. It’s too risky. One day, she said to me, “You need to get back on the horse and ride. You can’t live your life in fear.” Every single time that I’m in fear or something has gone terribly wrong and I’m like, “I can’t do this.” I hear her voice.

If my husband says something to me like that, I’d be like, “You don’t understand.” That’s not nice of me. He was also scared too so he wouldn’t say, “Get back on your horse.” He’s like, “No, don’t do any more of this,” because he was emotionally and financially invested too in that situation. Having another woman tell me someone that I knew cared about me to say, “You can’t live in fear. You’re never going to succeed if you keep going like this.” I love that you’ve created this community of successful women that understand that and that we can help each other.

What’s also helpful, which we’ve touched on is that perspective. Having a mentor or somebody who has a perspective of who you are. I’ve had them too. I was in a deal. It wasn’t going well and I got scared. When you get scared, you’re not making decisions from an empowering place. You’re making decisions from a completely disempowered place. You’re not making the best decisions. You’re making decisions out of fear instead of making decisions out of thinking something through.

Growing Your Success: It’s not about being smart. It’s about being taken seriously.

One of my mentors is also a woman who’s been in the business like your length of time and said, “There’s no way around, there’s just through.” You can just walk through. It took my fear down. I was like, “She’s right. I’m going to put my best foot forward today and then tomorrow. I’m going to do the same thing. The day after that, I’m going to do the same thing.” We’re going to walk through. She was lending me her experience.

I couldn’t see like that I was going to get through it. I ended up getting through it and making a profit. I didn’t lose any money in the long run but I needed somebody there to encourage me that way. It’s interesting how we can encourage each other to step up, step-through and continue through our fear. I love that WREN is an opportunity for a community like that. We have women who have a lot of years of experience like me and you. We need those women coming in that are new to the business because they’re excited.

I’m always like get on my calendar and talk to me because they’re the funniest conversations. I’m coaching, I get that. To hear the excitement and the ideas that they bring, there’s so much out there that it’s impossible for me to know what’s out there, what people are seeing and also what they’re needing. It juices me so much.

They need people with experience. They need people to go, “Come on. You’re going to go this way. Okay. You’re not going to get it unless you put an offer in. Put an offer in.” It works well. We also have the framework of being women. There are some definite traits that we have that come up and that is asking for what you need. Women have a tendency not to do that. In our community, we embrace the femininity of that and ask for what we need in that way.

We all can do business in a man’s world because we’ve had to, short, direct and succinct. It’s also wonderful to embrace our femininity and do business like we want to do business, which is more creative, collaborative and win-win for everybody. It’s an interesting paradigm when you shift into a feminine space for your business, operating system, that it becomes more profitable sometimes. It’s pretty cool.

I stole the conversation around us experienced women needing beginners because I got excited about that but I want to hear your perspective.

A woman that’s been in the business for a long time, we take for granted some of the things that we know or some of the little joys that you get from being new in the business. Being able to see how to make money or a certain perspective of something. It’s encouraging to me when I meet women who are getting into this business and they’re all excited. Whether it’s providing for their kids or an at-home-mom who’s wanting to provide a good vacation for them during the summer. It’s cool that all walks of life can be in the same community.

The people that are new to the business need to see the people that have been in the business for a while. They are doing it, successful and they are making things happen and vice versa. We need their energy and their enthusiasm and their go-getterness. It’s a good symbiotic relationship. I’m glad to say that we have women at all levels of education in the community.

Networking is about forming relationships, and there is a way to network that is productive to your business.

We become a little bit complacent because we’re been there, done that. You think you know. We’re surprised when we don’t know. That’s the thing about a beginner is you’re okay with not knowing. For us, it feels a little bit like I should’ve known that. If I do something that was “stupid” although nobody does anything stupid but you might think to yourself, “That was dumb. I should’ve known better.” Things are constantly changing. Having that beginner’s mind and having that around you allow you to feel better also in those moments where you’re like, “I should have known that.”

It’s acknowledging that. One of the meetings that we have is called Power Hour and we feature women who are WREN members, who’ve maybe completed a project and they are presenting their case study. We do this for a couple of different reasons, one of them is because we don’t get the opportunity to step forward as leaders in our real estate community out in the regular world.

Most of the time, a woman is not at the front of the room but maybe once a year at a regular REIA. We want it to give a platform that we could train women to step to the front of the room, to start to feel that confidence, to foster leadership in our community and give that opportunity to them. It’s one of the things that I love best because it’s like I’m being able to contribute to somebody else’s growth.

We have a little mentoring system for that process so that they’re not going on cold turkey. They get a template and coaching so that they can learn to own themselves, their voice and their presentation and feel the reward of that. Sometimes as women, we don’t celebrate our wins enough. That’s what part of that is about too, let’s celebrate our wins. Let’s look at another member and go, “You rocked it.” It’s cool that way.

I want to talk specifically about WREN, the platform and all of your offerings. Before we move into that to get onto the platform, get the membership and get all the details. You go to BlissfulInvestor.com/WREN for Women’s Real Estate Network and then you can go to the page to where you can sign up. When they go to that website, what are they going to find? Talk to us a little bit about the offerings and what women can expect.

We have an annual membership for our networking organization and it’s $249, which is not expensive at all. The benefits are amazing. At first, you become part of our network. We send you a series of network training. We call it Work It Girl Network Training. Here’s the reason why whether you’re in front of a person or whether you’re on a Zoom call, putting your contact information in the chat is not networking. Giving your card to somebody is not networking. Networking is about forming relationships. There is a way to network that is productive to your business.

This is a series of three videos that talk about how to network so that it’s productive for your business. We want you to succeed. We want you to network that it’s productive for your bottom line. We want you to go through that training so that when you’re welcomed into the community that you understand that. We have a Facebook page that is where most of our community activity is going on.

We have all kinds of resources on our Facebook page whether you’re starting as a wholesaler and you need scripts, those are up there. Whether you’re wanting to learn to run numbers for something, those are up there. There are all kinds of resources on our Facebook page. We have monthly member-only meetings. Those members-only meetings, not only do you get to connect with other members and learn about their business models and what they’re doing and see if there’s somebody you can do business with.

Growing Your Success: The beauty of being in a community of women is that we can open up our minds to different ways of doing things.

If you’re a wholesaler, you need flippers to buy your deals or whatever it is. Maybe you’re a passive investor and you’re looking for investments. Sometimes at the monthly meetings, we’ll have a speaker that might’ve spoke for us and come so you can ask questions that you can get that off-camera relationship going with some of the speakers and the experts.

Those monthly meetings are online. No matter where you are, you can go to that.

WREN has been around for a little bit and we started as an in-person networking company. We have eleven chapters across the US. When the pandemic hit, we went online and we haven’t started opening up yet. Some of the ladies aren’t ready to come out. What we did was go online and it’s been interesting. It’s cool that I’m meeting women from all over the US. don’t know about you but I have flipped in Los Angeles for a while but my buy and holds are not in LA. My buy and holds are in Memphis, Tennessee, Tucson, Arizona and Houston, Texas.

I’m real estate investing in all those areas. I’m meeting women in those areas that are investors. My network is like, “I need a contractor. That’s not in my local area. That’s in your area. Can you help me? I needed an insurance person. That’s in your area. Can you help me?” The value of the network is even expanding because it’s ten feet outside of my house. It’s in that community that I’m already investing in. It’s been interesting to meet women who are all over investing. We have a couple of women who are flipping in Alaska. It’s been great that way. Online has expanded things and in a perspective of, “Where is she investing? Is that a good market? Can you tell me about it?” It’s been interesting that way.

Those are some of the benefits of being a WREN member. We have also other monthly meetings where we bring in a speaker to educate you on a certain business model. For example, we have people come in that are flippers and they talk to you about flipping. Somebody coming in about raising capital or mobile home parks.

It’s all women always at the front of the room so that we can learn from them and we can ask them any question we want, from how they execute their business model to how they’re juggling it. We had one woman come in, who’s got five kids for goodness sakes. It’s like, “How are you doing that?” She was telling us about the systems that she’s using so that she doesn’t have to be away from her kids all the time but still can run her business. That’s helpful too. It’s an interesting community.

You also have Ignite which is your event. Is it one time a year? Tell us a little bit about that.

It’s been one time a year and an in-person event. It was a three-day event, the last time that we had it. It was amazing, great energy, with 250 women coming out. Celebrating not only real estate and our speakers that took the front of the room but also starting the day in meditation. Having that opportunity to open ourselves up for what we’re ready to bring into our lives that day. There’s a feminine touch to it all and the networking at the end with wine and stuff.

Surround yourself with people that you want to be like. Hang around with people who are doing what you want to do.

We went online for the pandemic. We had an event, last November 2021 but it was a one-day event. We’re hoping to have an in-person event in 2022. That’s on our goal list. The online events have been great and we try to do it a little differently. One of the things that we’ve done online is we have a pajama networking party day. Everybody dresses up in their pajamas and we bring a cocktail and we network together. It’s fun and it’s a different way for us to be chicks together. We have plans for 2022. Hopefully opening up and having an in-person event again.

I’m part of the network also. As I said, I love having a community but I’m not over-involved online at least through 2021. 2022, I’m looking forward to also building out my network too because I’ve got some new things coming and going in my life too. Please and come join me and Deborah. It’s at BlissfulInvestor.com/WREN. You can sign up there and then we can all start hanging out like chicks.

We have EXTRA, which is the membership portion of the show. I want to do a little bit of a deeper dive on helping people understand how to network for building their businesses and specifically going online. I feel like that’s been a little bit of a challenge for me. I know that you’ve had this experience through the pandemic of how to help people or women connect when we’re online whether it’s on Facebook or it’s at one of your community calls or one of your meetups online or at Ignite. Before we move into EXTRA, are you ready for three rapid-fire questions?

Yes, I am.

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

Surround yourself with people that you want to be like. When I started, I wanted to be a flipper so I surrounded myself with flippers. I learned their vocabulary and I saw what they were doing. I asked them to share their numbers with me. I asked them to show me some on-site projects going on. Hang around with people who are doing what you want to do.

What’s the strategy for being successful as a real estate investor?

You touched on fear and walking through your fear. Focus on what you want, focus on why you’re doing this. I had a tremendous amount of focus on the lifestyle I wanted to live. That’s what got me here and I’m living that lifestyle now. You need to continue your focus on what it is that you want because that’s what’s going to pull you through the fear.

Tell us one daily practice you do that contributes to your success.

Growing Your Success: We all can do business in a man’s world and be short, direct, and succinct. But it’s also wonderful to embrace our femininity and do business like we want to do business which is more creative, collaborative, and win-win for everybody.

Grateful list. It’s funny because I woke up in a funk. I reached out to one of my friends and she was like, “Have you done your grateful list?” I hadn’t done it in a few days. I realized, “That’s what was missing.” When I’m grateful about where I am and what I already have, it’s much easier for me to walk through that day and take on whatever’s brought to me.

I jokingly say that as an entrepreneur, “Nobody calls me unless there’s a problem,” It’s the truth. If things are going right, I don’t hear from anybody. It’s always when things are going wrong that I hear from people but being in a grateful place puts you in a very resourceful place. When that phone does ring, I’m in a place of like, “I’m here. Brainstorm, let’s do it. Let’s figure it out.” It’s the grateful list for me.

It’s such a good perspective on it. It does make us much more resourceful. This has been amazing. We’ve got these pieces or little nuggets that we can share that can completely shift a person’s paradigm. My audience loves the three rapid-fire questions because it’s those nuggets that they can take into their life that can change everything. This has been so much fun. Thank you much for sharing WREN with my audience.

Thank you, Moneeka. This has been great.

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Stay tuned for EXTRA. We’re going to do a deep dive on how to that work, not giving your number or giving your card and how to do it online so you can take advantage of all these resources that we’ve got that have been developed because of the pandemic. There are so many good things. The whole pandemic was hard and there was a lot of yuckiness and there were also some amazing things that served our lives that have come out from that too.

This is one of those amazing things that we can learn about and utilize to build our lives and ourselves and our wealth. I’m super excited to talk about that in EXTRA. If you are subscribed to EXTRA stay tuned, if you’re not go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com and you get the first seven days for free of the subscription so check it out and see if you love it. Hopefully, you’ll stay with us.

For those of you that are leaving Deborah and me, thank you for joining us for this conversation. I hope to see you at WREN, networking, asking questions and all of that good stuff. I also look forward to seeing you next time. Always remember goals without action are dreams. Get out there. Take action and create the life your heart deeply desires.

Important Links

• Deborah Razo
• Women’s Real Estate Network
• BlissfulInvestor.com/WREN
• Facebook – WREN – Women’s Real Estate Network
• Ignite
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

About Deborah Razo

Always an independent spirit, she started her first business in 1990. After owning and partnering in several successful small businesses, she realized that her path to financial freedom was through real estate investing.

In addition to her business degree and graduate work at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, she expanded her investing education in 2011 with a series of intensive workshops with Robert Kiyosaki, The Rich Dad Advisors and The Real Estate Radio Guys.

It was a natural transition to shift gears from my 20-year design firm to my booming rehabbing business in Southern California. With her first house flip netting near $100,000 in profits her business took off. Her strategy of flipping houses in California for capital and buying and holding for cash flow in other markets for long term wealth has proven to be a success. And just 2 years ago moved from rehab to development.

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

To see this program in video:

Search on Roku for Real Estate Investing 4 Women or go to this link: https://blissfulinvestor.com/biroku

On YouTube go to Real Estate Investing for Women

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

Syndication Series #6: Investing In Climate-Resilient Markets With Dina Buchanan

There are more reasons to invest in climate-resilient markets than just the climate piece. Here to tell you all about them is Dina Buchanan. Dina is the Director of Investor Relations and Business Development at PCRP Group. In this episode, she joins Moneeka Sawyer to share the value in investing in climate-resilient markets not only for the environment but also for your wallet. Dina highlights the strategies to incorporate energy efficiency in your multifamily investments to create value and do good for the community. Stay tuned!

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Syndication Series #6: Investing In Climate-Resilient Markets With Dina Buchanan

Real Estate Investing For Women

Welcome to the Syndication Series, where you’re going to learn all about what syndication is and how you can utilize it to build cashflow and grow your wealth. It’s an exciting strategy and I’m looking forward to sharing all of our guests with you. Let’s get to the show.

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I am so excited to welcome to the show Dina Buchanan. She is the Director of Investor Relations at PCRP Group, a firm that provides direct access to tax advantage and passive income commercial real estate opportunities. Dina has been investing in residential and commercial properties in the United States and internationally for years and has been responsible for overseeing approximately $200 million of assets under management. Dina, how are you? Welcome to the show.

It’s so great to be here. Thanks for having me.

I’m so looking forward to this conversation. It’s something we’ve never talked about on this show. I’m super excited. Dina, why don’t you give us first a high-level version of your story? How did you get into real estate?

I’m probably like a lot of other people out there. My husband and I wanted to start a family. We had these high-level corporate jobs. We went to school, got our education like we were told to do. We realized we didn’t own our time. We wanted to have more time. We love to travel. We want to start a family. We searched out opportunities for businesses and it all kept coming back to real estate. I don’t know why. Everything we looked at, from franchises to even in real estate, we were like, “This is what we’re resonating with.” We took a class and we got some education. Everyone should do it.

It’s a great idea. It’s like we went, “Poof.” Originally, we were thinking it’ll be me that stays home with the kids and my husband would keep his job but he ended up leaving his job first. I went on maternity leave with our first child and never went back. That was awesome. We did fourteen residential transactions in our first year. That was enough to replace his income.

We started to get involved with passive and did our first apartment community three years later. That’s when it started making like, “This is intoxicating. This is getting good with passive income.” That led to a series of other deals in syndication opportunities. I’m so excited to always talk about real estate and get everyone excited and knowledgeable about it because it’s changed our family’s financial DNA rather than having to go work for money, having money work for us.

Your first fourteen deals in the first year, what were they?

They were residential single-family homes. It was interesting, I thought that you had to start with residential. It’s what everybody did. We’re like, “We got to do it.” We did that first apartment building. I was like, “I wish we did fourteen of those in the first year.” Not that we were doing poorly, we did well. It was such a game-changer when you look at cashflow diversification over 27 units, which was our first one versus 27 single-family homes. When you look at the cash-on-cash return per door, it’s not that much of a difference. It’s a lot less to get in than 27 single-family homes if that makes sense.

Did you flip those homes? Did you buy and hold? What were you doing with those fourteen homes?

The power of syndication allows an investor to have their money duplicate itself faster and not have to do any of the work.

We did a strategy called flip, flip, hold. Our coach was very helpful in helping us reallocate those funds into passive income properties because he said it’s great to have all this capital at some point. He said something to me that was interesting. I didn’t get it then but I do now. You always want your money working and working harder for you.

Holding on to a whole bunch of capital, which probably would have been more of what we thought we were supposed to do back then would have been the thing. Having that opportunity to learn how we can take this money and buy three more properties, spread it out, leverage, use private money and use bank funding. Get a cashflow on these properties and then buy some more, flip those, move that money in and increase our passive income so that we could retire from a job.

You were actively involved in a couple of flips and then you would hold a couple of flips. Talk to me a little bit about climate-resilient markets, the thing that you talked about that nobody else has. Could you first describe what that is? Define it for us.

One of the things my business partner and I are very passionate about is reducing the carbon footprint in our world. People can agree or disagree that it’s necessary and it’s not what we’re here talking about. The big piece that is very interesting to everyone is how it impacts the bottom line for us as investors on all of our projects across the board. Regardless of where we are on the great debate of our generation, the numbers don’t lie when you do the math.

The opportunity in climate-resilient markets tends to be better because we don’t have issues with funding or refinancing. Insurance can play a part and things like that. If we’re going into a market and renovating that building and putting in some energy-efficient appliances or products and using those types of things, it can be great tax advantage for the project. A climate-resilient market would simply be one that doesn’t experience the extreme weather patterns that other markets may face, coastal markets, hurricanes, extreme heat, tornadoes or deep freezes.

They don’t experience those things?

Not to the same level. For example, I live in Florida. A lot of people associate Florida with hurricanes. It’s true. They happen. I live in Central Florida so there could be a hurricane East Coast or West Coast and maybe we’ll get rain and wind. I’m in the middle of Florida and Florida is not that wide so I could be at a beach on either side within an hour. Being 60 to 80 miles inland is a huge difference in what the damage will be or won’t be. It’s fascinating when you think about it. Same product, same state, it could be completely different.

What is the pricing like? You’re in Central Florida, I thought it would be a different product. It’s not a beach product. It’s a different product and location. It’s got to have different pricing, appreciation and demand. Does it have all of those things? What are you finding?

It’s interesting when we talk about Florida because it feels like the entire state is in demand. The beach, waterfront property, people love living on the beach. We had some Airbnb units on one of the beaches. They could be powerful generators of cash and good investments. However because I live in Central Florida, we live where there is a lot of international tourism. We’ve got Disney, Universal, Legoland and Sea World.

The short-term rental business in Central Florida has exploded because there is equally a demand because there are many people who want to come in. Hotels are booked up as well. It’s interesting people want to buy second homes here. A lot of them want to buy them and maybe live in them for four months out of the year and then rent the rest of the time. That used to be reserved for the beach properties but we’re seeing it inland too. It’s interesting.

Climate Resilient Markets: A climate-resilient market would simply be one that doesn’t experience the extreme weather patterns that other markets may face.

You’re investing in Central Florida. Are there other areas that have similar types of demographics and demand?

Every market is different. The market is in demand. We’re doing multifamily properties. Those are always, in my opinion, and what I’ve experienced over the last couple of decades, always in demand. They keep getting more in demand as we see housing shrinking as far as availability. There is less. We will see that demand. We do have properties in San Antonio and Dallas. I’m talking apartment communities. We have seen a huge demand there.

Our occupancy in one of our properties in San Antonio, for example, hasn’t been below 97% in 1.5 years and it keeps getting higher. I see it in other markets as well. Whether you’ll see the same price point in other markets, that might be different as far as beachfront being inland. The dynamic with Florida’s a little different because of the tourism that we have in the center of the state. If you went to any of the beaches in Florida, you’d see the same.

In one of the questions you sent me, you said that climate-resilient markets tend to give you higher returns. Can you break that down for us a little bit?

Let’s break it down into pieces. Multifamily, we do multifamily mainly. Anytime we can have cash flowing door under the same roof, there is an opportunity there. Whether it’s a climate-resilient market or not, that’s number one. It’s the same principle as if we were going into a market that wasn’t climate-resilient and we’re going to go in and buy a Class B property. We’re going to buy that property below market value so it would be a property that was 10 to 20 years old that needed some upgrades. Where this gets powerful is the ability to do the upgrades because we already are going to pick a property that’s going to be in a high-demand market even though it’s an older property.

We’ve got the opportunity there like any other market to add value. Where the environmental and social governance piece comes in is we will put in our sponsors that we align with. If we do energy-efficient appliances, materials, paints and flooring that are more environmentally friendly, tenants love that because it reduces their overall monthly cost. Your demand and occupancy are going to be higher. We’re looking at the big picture and setting ourselves up for success that way.

How does it reduce their cost monthly? I’m a contractor. I run a construction company also. My experience is that if we do all the green types of things, it’s significantly more expensive to do the improvements that way.

The tax benefits for some operators that are doing that depending on how they set up can significantly offset the cost of those items. How it affects the tenants is their energy bills will be lower. The other thing to add to that is that you’re building your cost segregation where you can depreciate 39.5 years on a commercial and 27.5 years on a residential. If we’ve got a tenant that stays longer, overall, that’s going to reduce the expense for the owners of that building in that syndication as well.

In general, another area that makes sense is when we’re putting a multifamily building in an environment and we’ve got maybe some mass transportation, situations where it’s helpful for them, we can promote more green areas, we’re doing good for the community as well. It can help on a number of levels, not just dollars and cents wise. The bigger piece is getting these properties, especially how the investors will get out from a syndication standpoint. If we are in a climate-resilient market, we don’t risk having insurance issues and lenders don’t want to finance or refinance because there are some climate risks.

Ladies, we’re going to be talking about that deeper and EXTRA about some of the risks of being in a climate-resilient market avoids. Some of the big benefits of being in a climate-resistant area and also how to find those kinds of properties and those areas. That’s what we’re going to do our deep dive in EXTRA. Thank you for giving us a little bit of that and I’m excited to talk more about that. Could you talk to us more about ESG? What does that mean and how does it provide a benefit for investors?

People that are not factoring in climate risk into their evaluations could be setting themselves and their investors up in a syndication that could be very risky.

Environmental Social Governance is what ESG stands for. It’s something that we’re seeing larger companies pay attention to. People who are not factoring in climate risk into their evaluations could be setting themselves and their investors up in a very risky syndication. As things change and progress with the climate and it is happening, we have a huge problem with it. The worst the climate gets, the more risk effects of flooding. Anytime there is an insurance claim on a property due to weather, that’s going to affect that insurance business.

That’s a little bit more of our deeper dive but to give a bigger picture of why we’ve chosen this, we see larger companies paying attention to this and we know if they’re paying attention to it, there’s something there. There’s got to be a reason why they’re looking at underwriting and, “What’s going on?” The other reason is we as business owners and investors, not only does it help us do a better job for our investors but it’s also doing better for the environment and the planet.

Multifamily housing does reduce the carbon footprint. It’s socially responsible as well. Having a diverse team like our business is a woman-owned business. We’ve got a lot of diversity on our team as male to female. Having a diverse group that understands the dynamics of affordable housing and what we want to provide for the people that are going to be living there and how that’s all governed and plays out. Our motto is, doing good while doing well.

I love that because being socially conscious is such an important thing to my heart.

Mine too. That’s why we connect.

Dina, many people have come on my show and talked quickly about what an accredited investor is. Most of the time they don’t define what that is. I’m so delighted that you can finally define that for my ladies. I want to talk about that a little bit deeper. We’re talking about syndications. They have investments for accredited and non-accredited investors. The SEC has certain rules for the operator based on what investor they will take. The SEC understand that this is not the syndicators doing this.

The SEC decides if you’re going to take accredited or non-accredited investors, what you need to do and provide. For instance, if you’re saying that you’re an accredited investor, you need to show tax returns or assets. You need to be willing to show that information, not because the syndicator is being nosy. If they don’t have that paperwork, they can get shut down and sent to jail by the SEC. It’s a big deal.

We’ll take a letter from their CPA confirming it. There is also a tool that we have in our portal that does help them provide the proof of accreditation and we’ll look at that for them.

We invested in another syndication and they wanted us to use that portal. There was a cost involved. It’s a small little cost, ladies but my husband was like, “I don’t want to do that.” There are lots of different ways that we can do. You can provide this. This is one of those pieces that hits people. They get a little blindsided by, “Why am I having to send this information?” I’m so glad that we had this conversation. We had this series about syndication and I’ve gotten questions like, “The syndicators are asking for my personal information.”

The syndicators are not asking for their personal use. They’re asking for it because it’s required of them from the SEC. Don’t be offended because they don’t want to go to jail and help you make money. They would rather you going to end up with any legal problems. It’s a requirement by the SEC. I’m glad that we had that conversation. Let’s again define what accredited is.

Climate Resilient Markets: Multifamily properties keep getting more and more in demand as we see housing shrinking as far as availability.

An accredited investor is someone who has $1 million of income-producing assets minus their personal residence and/or $200,000 a year income with two years tax returns as proof if they’re single and $300,000 if they’re married, again, tax returns that are proof or Series 7 license as well.

I didn’t know about that. That’s interesting. There has to be the expectation of continued income. It can’t be that I’ve got two last tax returns that show this income and I retired this year, which is great if you retired this year. It has to show the expectation of future income. Those are some of the things. Ladies, don’t get offended when someone starts asking you about your situation. They’re not being nosy.

It’s the way we can all do business and continue to do business for sure. One of the things that my husband and I discovered is we had money and we said, “What do we want to do with this money?” One of the things we’ve learned, and this is a cool way to look at it is the rule of 72. The rule of 72 is a barometer of what we use to figure out how long it will take that capital we have to double based on the current interest rate it’s making or the projected interest rate in the investment we’re looking at. A good way to look at this is if you take a traditional 401(k) and somebody had $100,000 in that 401(k) and it was earning 6% a year.

How long would it take for that $100,000 to double? We would divide 6% by 72 and that would be 12 years. Depending on the time in your life you’re looking at that. We’re talking about age. If I was sitting on the side of 35 or 40, all of a sudden it looks different than it did at 20. Retirement looks a lot different. If the money isn’t working fast enough, that means the person, individual, myself or any of you, we have to continue to work. We’re looking to get the money to duplicate itself quicker. The big reason for that is we want our buying power and the money is inflation. We could have a longer conversation with this but the rate of inflation and it keeps going up.

It’s not about prices necessarily going up. Even though it seems like it is, it’s the value of money going down. It’s losing buying power and it’s everybody’s money. There are smart people and very smart people who want to duplicate their money as fast as they can to keep their buying power in check so they can continue and live the lifestyle they want or better their lifestyle if they want. Whatever they want to do if they want to travel more. When we’re looking at an investment of syndication, for example, one of the opportunities that PCRP is considering has an internal rate of return projected of 18% or 20%.

If you divide that by six, now you’re looking at like 3.5 years for that money to double. Significantly different. That means the investor that invested in an opportunity like that can keep their buying power and increase it, which is the real goal to increase the buying power. They can either retire sooner or retire in a lifestyle by design, whatever they choose. This is the power of syndication because it allows investors to duplicate their money faster and not have to do any of the work.

When you invest in syndication, you get the cashflow, benefit of the appreciation and depreciation on your tax returns every year that you’re invested and you are doing no of the legwork. None of it. Someone else is doing all the legwork. You get your K-1. That’s what you get a year. You get to write all that stuff off. I’ve been an investor for a couple of years. At the end of the year, I’ve been making 10% interest on my money invested every year like clockwork. I get my K-1, we’ve got our depreciation. I pay no taxes on that 10%. We will pay at the end when you sell then you have all of that other stuff that has to be wrapped up.

When we’re doing the 10% each year or whatever that particular syndicator will give you sometimes it’s 7% or 10%. There’s different risks, ladies. I know I’m quoting 10%, they’re high-risk projects. If you want to go with safer projects, you’re going to be getting paid probably closer to 7% or 8% usually. I hope that I’m not making too many quotes for you. That’s the way that it works. A syndicator will give you a quote.

IRR is the Internal Rate of Return. What’s interesting about that is you don’t know what that is until the project closes.

Define that. What does that mean?

Multi-family housing reduces the carbon footprint, so it’s socially responsible as well.

Internal rate of return, that’s how the project is projected to perform. It’s a projection and it should be right in line with that. When you add in the tax, depreciation, cost segregation, all of those things that can get written in there, the Internal rate of return should be very close to, if not above, what’s projected for sponsors and syndicators that understand this process.

What I love about the projects that we look at is we have a line with sponsors that can produce that return. We have the climate-resilient piece, which is a little extra layer of protection. They’re not as necessarily high risk as maybe somebody else’s project could be if it’s not one of those markets. It offers a little bit extra security there too and a better rate so we love that.

I know that people have thrown away around that term IRR and it’s not something that we’re used to hearing. What it does is it takes the interest rate that you’re earning each year on your money. Sometimes they’ll refinance a project and then they’ll give you a portion of the cash out piece. That’s included in the IRR. When they sell the amount that you get paid, all of that is also so that’s your profit, that’s all added in. That’s what your IRR is. It’s all of those pieces together. The other thing that you mentioned that I want to highlight for ladies is on this show we talked a lot about retiring early and blissful. We want to help people to have a blissful retirement.

The journey to get there should also be blissful. I’m all about bliss, all through your entire life. For me, I’m on that edge where I’m looking at retiring. There is a lot of stuff going on in my mind that a lot of people don’t think about. Since you brought it up, I’d like to mention, we do have inflation. Whether it’s talked about or not, the prices of goods seem to keep going up. It’s not that prices are going up, although sometimes they are but the buying power is what’s going down. Our money does not have the same value than it had 20 or 10 years ago. I call this a grocery store inflation.

You go to the grocery store and see how much you could buy now with $20 as opposed to what you could buy 10 years with $20. I know this is a little off, ladies. I’m not accurate in all of the things that I’m saying. I’m giving you a high level of how to look at this. When you’re thinking about retirement, a lot of people say, “If I have $2 million and I’m getting 10% that will give me $200,000 a year, that’s what I’m living on right now. That will be able to maintain my lifestyle.” If you don’t continue to grow that $2 million, you’re not going to be able to keep up with inflation and the loss of value of the dollar.

When you’re calculating that retirement number, you need to calculate that you’re going to continue to save 10% a year. Ten percent goes to you. You always pay yourself first before you pay anybody else. Even when you’re calculating that number, let’s say now it’s $200,000 a day, make sure that you can calculate that you’re going to save at least, maybe even more, $20,000 a year and it’s going to go up. Would you say that’s true or would you give me even more numbers or would you say even more?

I would say more. It’s not about what you’re saving, it’s about what your money’s making. If you take that 10%, that could be good. The problem with saving it is we still have this depreciation going on of the dollar. We did a big number of stimulus package and that money is important to everybody to realize that it’s not money that was set aside for these things, it’s money that was printed. They continued printing where they’re at a place where they’re going to continue to print, that’s a whole other subject but the reality is they’re still printing.

The more they print, the same amount of money it would take to retire. If your retirement date was in ten years from now, I believe what you’re saying is, would this be enough? If it’s saved, my answer is no. The money is not going to go as far. However, if it’s invested and it starts to duplicate itself, it could be. It’s probably going to be individual, depending on what type of lifestyle that you’re planning for. Is it the same? Is it better? Does it not need to be as much as you’re making right now. Everything, cost-wise, it’s going to take more dollars to do the same things tomorrow as it does today.

Thank you for that clarity. I always say save because for me, it’s synonymous and I realize that it’s not for others. For me, save means invest. It’s synonymous for me. Ladies, when you hear me say that, save 10%. What I’m saying is invest 10%. I’m always like that. I understand that I misspeak because it’s not precise. You do want to be investing and continuing to have your money grow. There’s a couple of reasons why I love what Dina was saying. The first reason is the value of the money goes down. We have to have that increase to make up for inflation. The whole thing of inflation is a completely different story.

The other thing is, understand that you don’t have a lot of free time when you’re working. When you’re retired, you might want to travel more to see your grandkids and eat out more. You’re tired of cooking. You might want to get someone to clean the house. There are a lot of expenses that we don’t have as working people that we will possibly have when we’re retired. I’ve seen this with all three sets of our parents that they spend a lot more now that they’re retired than they did because travel is expensive. They’re still paying their mortgage and all these other things. Understand that that increase not only should account for inflation but you want to know that your lifestyle can go up.

Climate Resilient Markets: There are smart people and there are very smart people. Very smart people want to duplicate their money as fast as they can to keep their buying power in check so they can continue to live the lifestyle they want or better their lifestyle.

You’ve worked all these years that you can live the lifestyle that you want in retirement and that you’re not restricted by, “I only calculated as much. It was not the right calculation.” As we talk about syndication as a possibility for helping you retire, keep it in mind that it is also after retirement as a strategy to continue to grow your income, portfolio and assets so that you don’t get stuck with this ceiling of what you can afford after you retire. I feel like syndication projects are a big part of my plan as I’m looking at retiring. I wanted to interject that.

Looking at 2020 with COVID, I’ve taught many real estate investing classes and one of the things I was talking to my class about once was everybody was in the same storm but not everybody was in the same vessel in that storm. If you think about it from that perspective, if your worst problem during that time when you were sequestered, which was our family, we’re bored, that’s a good problem. There are people that were not in that same boat. They were in a situation where they couldn’t leave to go make money. They didn’t have any passive income but ours looked a lot different from maybe somebody else’s because we did have passive income.

I’m certainly not saying that to impress anybody but to impress upon you with passive investing and syndications. Those types of opportunities that we can have allow us to have that freedom. Who could have predicted a pandemic? There are going to be things that happen in life that none of us can predict. 2008 wasn’t exactly predicted per se. During those times, not just retirement but important to say, even now, starting to build that passive income, think about how much less you have to trade time for money. It’s almost like an insurance policy of cashflow because it’s going to come in. You don’t have to do anything for it.

I always say, if cash is king, cashflow is queen and the queen is always right.

I used to say cash isn’t king, cashflow is king. That’s so funny but I like queen better.

I can’t believe that this conversation was so good. Ladies, the conversation is going to continue and we’re going to go into EXTRA and we’re going to be talking more about the questions to ask when you’re looking for a climate-resilient project? How to evaluate those projects? How to find those projects? What are the trends and how to find those trends? We’re going to be talking all about that in EXTRA. Before we move into our three rapid-fire questions, Dina, could you tell us how people can reach you? I know you’ve got some gifts for us.

For anyone who wants to learn more about syndication, passive investing, climate resilient markets, how we pick them and why we picked them, go to our website, PCRPGroup.com. Sign up and you can download our free eBook. We are going to have an educational webinar series that I’m going to be leading with my business partner.

We’re going to do shorter snippets of 20 to 30 minutes because we know everybody’s busy and we want to get the facts out. When you’re spending your valuable, precious time learning, you want it to be quick and to the point so that you can get the good information in and go apply it. That’s the goal. Anyone that’s on this episode, please go ahead and sign up. It’s complimentary for you and learn.

Where do they go for the website?

PCRPGroup.com. If you want to reach out to me, it’s [email protected]. You can email me and set up a time to schedule a phone call about your investment goals and passive investing. I’m happy to help out any way I can.

It’s not about what you’re saving, it’s about what your money’s making. The problem with just saving it is we still have this depreciation going on of the dollar.

Dina, are you ready for our three Rapid-fire questions?

I’m ready.

Give us one super tip on how to get started in real estate investing.

The first thing I would do is educate myself. It could be a book or a course. I’m a big fan of classes, seminars, 1, 2 hours, 3 days even. There is a lot of opportunity and knowledge that gets dropped in an environment of people of like-mind. I’m a big proponent of educating yourself. You got to know what you’re going to get into.

What is a strategy on being successful as a real estate investor?

It sounds so simple but it’s have a system. If you’re looking at properties, have a system or checklist. A checklist is a great, simple but very powerful tool to make sure you dot your Is and cross your Ts and have somebody that’s already doing the business maybe look at that checklist. Maybe they’ll add some items that you didn’t have on there. It’s not a how-to renovate a house or a building but it gives you key things that get forgotten or could be harmful in a deal but it also gives you key things to remember to do.

I believe that systems are the key to bliss, simply because they allow you to unload all those things in your brain. Honestly, I have invested in syndications but I might do one a year. Each year when I go back to evaluate syndication, there is a whole process. I don’t want to have to reinvent the wheel every single year. That’s stressful. There is a way that we deal with that. I take notes and then I can go back and look at my notes and read my notes, “Those are the things that I thought about. This is what was important. This is what I’ve learned I add to my notes.”

Each year, it’s a little bit easier. Doctor Sam talked to us about a tool on how to evaluate syndication projects. We could add that in there. We get new tools. We learn more stuff. We find out what’s more important to us, what worked and didn’t work. Creating those systems helps us to feel less stressed and more capable.

SYSTEMS. Save Your Self Time Energy Money Stress.

I’m going to use that one, Dina. Thank you. Tell us one daily practice that you do that contributes to your success.

It’s going to take more dollars to do the same things tomorrow as it does today.

Every morning when I wake up, I’m a big proponent of gratitude. I have a quick moment of gratitude for everything that I have and I’m about to create. In my day, after I have that little meditation moment or a mindful moment, I pick out one thing that I want to focus on for that day and feel what it feels like when I’ve accomplished it. I take that energy and use it and ride that momentum so that at any point in the day if things happen, I got to pick up the kids, this practice was canceled.

This throws off this timing, go back to that mindfulness and click into that feeling because we all have these things no matter who we are. This is life. Anything that can take away from our bliss, we want to remove that because it takes us off track. It takes us down a tangent that we don’t want to be on. I’m very focused on mindfulness every day about what we want to accomplish and what it feels like. I can tap into that feeling and shift it and go about my day. That’s something I do every day.

This show has been amazing. We’ve talked about so much good stuff. Thank you, Dina. Ladies, thank you for joining Dina and I for this portion of the show.

It’s my honor to be with all of you.

We have more, ladies. We’re going to be talking about finding and evaluating climate-resilient properties and one of the big benefits of that. We’re going to do a deeper dive on that. If you’re in EXTRA, if you’re subscribed already, please stay tuned. It’s coming next. If you’re not subscribed but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com. You get the first seven days for free so check it out.

If you’re leaving Dina and me now, thank you so much for joining us for this great conversation. I loved having you here with us and I look forward to seeing you next time. We will see you then. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there. Take action and create the life your heart deeply desires.

Important Links

• PCRP Group
• [email protected]
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com

About Dina Buchanan

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

To see this program in video:

Search on Roku for Real Estate Investing 4 Women or go to this link: https://blissfulinvestor.com/biroku

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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.

blissfulinvestor.com

Investing In Self-Storage To Generate Passive Income With Stacy Rowles-Rossetti – Real Estate For Women

Nothing smells of passive income better than investing in self-storage units. This isn’t your everyday job where you’ll wake up at 6:00 in the morning and manage your facilities. This can be done remotely, anywhere in the world. Get into self-storage with your host, Moneeka Sawyer and her guest Stacy Rowles-Rossetti. Stacy is the founder of StorageNerds and REI USA. She teaches people to invest in self-storage so that they can earn passive income. Her mission is affordable financial literacy. Join in the conversation so that you can start investing in self-storage. Do you want more time for yourself or your family? Listen in and learn how to change your lifestyle with self-storage.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Investing In Self-Storage To Generate Passive Income With Stacy Rowles-Rossetti – Real Estate For Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am so excited to welcome to the show, Stacy Rossetti. She invested in self-storage, teaches people to invest in self-storage and owns StorageNerds and REI USA. Her mission is affordable financial literacy. Stacy, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for letting me come on. I’m honored.

We’re so excited to have you. We’ve had nobody come on and talk about self-storage so far. I know that this is a hot topic and my ladies are going to love this. Thank you so much.

Anybody that wants to hear about self-storage is a friend of mine. That’s why I call myself a storage nerd.

Stacy, tell us your story. How did you get into self-storage and why?

I’ve been investing in real estate since 2010. When I first got started investing in real estate, I was wholesaling and rehabbing, if anybody knows what that is. What happened is in 2015, I got pregnant. What had happened for the first five years, all I wanted to do was rehabs. I was one of those crazy people that did like fifteen rehabs at a time. I was really crazy. I was like running around like a crazy person, stressed out. I got pregnant and then, of course, as a woman and as a mother-to-be, I started thinking to myself, “How am I going to take care of fifteen rehabs at the same time, take care of this little tiny baby? There’s no way at all.”

I was already working 100 hours a week. I basically told my husband I was like, “That’s it. We’re done with rehabbing.” He was like, “Okay. What are we doing?” I said, “I don’t know. We’re doing something that has to do with passive income.” I wanted to focus on passive income and up to that very point, I had not focused on passive income at all.

Essentially, I was always about like, “Let’s just get this rehab done and get to the next rehab.” When I got pregnant, I talked to my realtor and I have a realtor that I’ve had for years, the same one. I was like, “Can you get out there and start looking for passive income for me?” He was like, “What do you want to look for?” I was like, “I don’t know, whatever.”

We looked at portfolios of houses. I was like, “Maybe we could roll this money over into a portfolio of 10 or 20 houses.” We looked at multifamily. This is back in the day. Remember when nobody multifamily wanted to buy multifamily? Everybody was focusing on rehabbing and that’s it. All the multifamily deals that I looked at, they needed huge rehabs. At that point, I was like, “I’m done with rehabbing. I can’t do it, because there’s no way because I have to take care of this baby.”

What happened is my realtor was like, “What about storage?” I said, “What about storage?” He said, “There’s a facility at 15, 20 minutes from your house. Would you be interested in that?” I was like, “Yeah, possibly.” As I drove up to this facility, I already knew I was going to buy it. The reason why is when I drove up to this facility on the left side, it’s like an industrial area.

It was very run down. For me, anything run down doesn’t scare me because I’m a rehabber. I drove up to this facility and on the left side near where the keypad was to get into the gate, there was a huge pile of tires that had been sitting there for years and years. I had already known. I was like, “This is going to be a good one.”

Anything that’s ugly and scary looks like money to me. That’s what happened. I called my realtor and I was like, “Let’s meet the owner. I want to figure out what’s going on with this thing.” It had been sitting on the market for five years and nobody wanted to buy it. We can get into why, if you want to do that.

I knew when I drove up to that thing that it was just so dumpy and ugly looking, but I could tell that it was going to be a good deal if I could get that at the right price. I instantly fell in love with storage and been focused on storage ever since. That’s basically my story is that I got pregnant and then all I cared about was figuring out how to make passive income so I could stay home with my daughter. That was it.

I got two questions for you. First of all, why was it sitting on there for five years?

This is back in the day when property used to sit on the market for five years and nobody would buy it. 2015 was still coming in the upswing. You would have a property that was sitting on there forever. One of the main reasons why, so the name of the storage facility was Big John’s Storage. I told my realtor, I was like, “I want to meet Big John.” He was like, “All right, let’s go meet Big John.” I went over there. I already knew it was going to be a good deal, so guess what I did? I invited my lender. I invited my husband and then my realtor and then me. We all went over and met Big John. John was his name.

John was a little tiny old man, like 88 years old. I was like, “Why are you called Big John?” He’s like, “Back in the day, I used to be called Big John.” He was ready to retire. His wife wanted to move to Florida and been complaining about it for years, but nobody would buy this facility. He had to sell it first so that he could take that money and go to Florida.

We started walking around the facility and as we were walking around, essentially the way this facility looks, it’s a long skinny facility made out of metal, like a metal storage facility. It had 64 10×10 units. It was on three acres of land. It was a huge piece of property. What he did is parking around it. Remember that there wasn’t an industrial area. He was parking like big rigs and like tow trucks and stuff like this, but he had no rhyme or reason to how he was parking. He was just like, “Go find a parking spot, wherever you can find one.” Parking was all over the place. The place was super dumpy. The tires that you saw in the front of the building also were everywhere else.

Self-Storage Investing: Once you figure out how to automate and systematize your property, it truly becomes passive income. Then you will be able to manage it from anywhere in the world.

In fact, in the end, there were thousands of tires that we found once we bought the place. We walked to around and what my husband and I did is we tried to figure out how much money we could make on that thing. What we did is we talked to John and he gave us the story that he built it in 1980. For the first twenty years, it was awesome, and then the last ten years or so, he didn’t want anything to do with it. He ran it into the ground. This is very typical. This is what we call a mismanaged facility, so it’s very typical, and I only buy mismanaged facilities. The reason why is because I’m a rehabber at heart and I want to buy ugly properties and fix them up.

We walked around and we both counted. We figured out that we could probably have about 60 parking spaces in that area, and then we would have the 64 10×10 units. We asked John, I said, “How much money are you making?” He said, “I’m probably making around maybe $2,200, $2,300 a month.” If you calculate up 64, 10×10 units at like, let’s say $70 a month, and then another 60 units of parking at $70 a month, you come up to almost $8,000, $9,000, $10,000 a month. He was only making $2,000, $2,300 or whatever he said. Anytime they ever tell you a number, it’s always the wrong number.

I was like, “John, why are you only making $2,000 a month when you could be making like $10,000 a month?” He’s like, “I’m just tired of this thing.” He’s like, “It’s paid off. I’m making $2,000, whatever.” We basically got into, I said, “I want to buy this place.” I said, “I’m not buying it for $500,000.” He had it listed for $500,000.

If it was full 100%. It could have been worth $500,000 plus if he was actually having customers paying and stuff because the thing with commercial real estate, it’s all income-based. Essentially, if you say, “It makes $5,000 a month,” it’s valued at this much money. He was making $2,000, so he was making like $2,400 or whatever. He made $25,000 a year. It’s only valued at like $200,000, $250,000. That’s it.

That’s when I told him, I was like, “Nobody’s going to buy thing, John, because first of all, it’s a dump. Second of all, you’re not making enough money to value it at $500,000. It’s valued at $200,000,” so my offer is $200,000. He was like, “No. I’m never going to sell it at $200,000.” I said, “Okay. Just think about it. Actually, my lender is right here. He’s going to lend the money to me.” I said, “Rick, is it okay? Do you want to buy this?” He said, “Yeah, let’s buy this.” I said, “I offer $200,000.” He was like, “No. I’m not doing it.” “That’s okay. Just think about it. Let me know.” The next day he called back and he said he would do $250,000.

We picked that thing up for $250,000 and it took us a good couple of years to figure out what we’re doing with that. It was our very first facility, but we fell in love with storage. It’s really given us the life that we want now. We’re buying our 10th facility right now. That thing is making almost $100,000 a year. We got an offer of $950,000 on that facility.

How long have you owned it?

Five years in July 2021. Isn’t that crazy? That’s why I love mismanaged facilities and it took us a good year and a half to figure out what we are doing to get into how to automate and systematize everything. We bought four this year already, and we’re on track to buy ten for the year. Once you figure it out automated and systematize it, it’s like doing wholesale deals or rehab deals. You get into making it truly passive income. When you can make it truly passive income, then you should be able to manage it from anywhere in the world and that’s what we are focused on now.

How much time do you spend to manage those properties?

We’re buying our 10th one now. We’re completely vertically integrated. We have 1,000 doors, essentially. We have my husband who manages the facilities and then we have our office manager, who’s the operations manager and does all the phone calls and things like this. We have like a boots-on-the-ground person to go around and overlock people and clean up the trash and all that stuff.

That’s it. There are three people to manage all that, and the two of them, the office manager and the boots on the ground person, can really do most of the work. Eighty percent of the work is done by both of them. My husband does the high-level stuff. He does the QuickBooks and the numbers and that stuff is what he does.

That’s the one thing I love about self-storage as well too. Everything that you hear about self-storage, it doesn’t take a lot of time. It doesn’t take a lot of effort. It really truly is like that, unless you become a mismanaged facility. All of the facilities that I’ve bought, essentially, the owners get up every day and go to their office and sit in their office and run their facilities.

For me, that’s a waste of time and money. I was like, “Why not automate that?” We’re completely electronic, completely virtual. Essentially, they just go online, book themselves, get their code, go in and do their thing. In fact, we haven’t even met any tenants in years. The first one that we bought, the very first one from Big John, that one, we were out trying to figure out what to do and meeting tenants and try to figure out how to automate and systematize everything.

By the second one, we were like, “We’re not going out to meet anybody. We’ve got to figure out how to make this electronic.” When COVID happened, we were already virtual electronic contact list. We didn’t have any issues at all. All the ones that get up every day and go and have the tenant sign a contract and stuff like this, those are the ones that were hurting. We didn’t have any issues at all.

Do you have any issues with people stopping paying and abandoning their unit or any of that stuff and what do you do?

The way it works is like, just think of the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent are going to pay on time, 20% are not going to pay on time. You put in rules. If you don’t pay by this day, you get a charge. If you don’t pay by this day, you get overlock. If you don’t pay by this day, you go to the auction process. You implement all these rules.

Most of the time, by the time the auction process comes up, we have very few. In fact, we haven’t even had any auctions because everybody’s paying, but there are those people that they get to the auction and then you’re like, “Come on, you better pay now. Otherwise, we’re going to do it.” There is that, and our office manager handles all of that.

How did you find your office manager and your boots on the ground person?

Just on Craigslist.

All of your units are in one location. You’ve got one boots on the ground person that manages all your units.

We’re only in Georgia, but we’re all over. We’re Southern Georgia. We’re all over Southern Georgia, but maybe within 30 minutes to 1 hour from each other, so he rides around and manages all of that is what he does.

Define mismanaged facility. Why don’t you define that and the definition between the two, mismanaged and income-producing?

Those are the two most popular types of facilities. Mismanaged is exactly what I said. They’re like 50% full or less. The owners are maybe only taking cash. They don’t have their books. Big John, when I asked him for his books, he opened up his drawer and pulled out his ledger. I have a student right now that’s buying a facility that has almost 300 units in it. Just imagine this, that’s 300 units and the owner does not own a computer.

Self-Storage Investing: Self-storage doesn’t take a lot of time. It doesn’t take a lot of effort either unless it becomes a mismanaged facility. Those are 50% full or less.

You find this all the time. Those are considered mismanaged facilities. The thing with mismanaged facilities is that you cannot go to a bank and get a loan for that. In the commercial real estate world, you have to prove income. If you can’t prove income, then the bank’s not going to give you a loan. That’s why you have income-producing properties. Those are really easy to fund and banks love storage facilities because you have very few defaults ever.

An income-producing property, then you could go to a bank and get a loan and you put 20% down and you can just go buy a property. Whereas a mismanaged property, they don’t have proof of income. They don’t have a P&L. They don’t have balance sheets, tax returns, rent rolls or anything like this. You have to find money from some place. Either you have to pay cash for it. You have to partner with somebody, you have to get a private lender to lend you the money, or you can get them to owner finance it to you.

Mismanaged facilities are a little bit harder to fund than income-producing properties. The question that you should be asking yourself is, if you want to get them to self-storage, it’s like, “Where can I come up with the money? Can I come up with a couple of $100,000 or not?” If I can’t come up with myself, if I have to borrow the money to get it, then I should be focusing on income-producing properties.

If somebody, or if I have a couple of $100,000, you could go and find a mismanaged property. What I love about mismanage is that you can double or triple that value within the first two years that you own that thing. That property that we have that we’re selling it now, we got an offer for $950,000. We’ve been full in the first 18 months to 2 years. It only takes a little while to get those up and running.

You did say that with Big John, your lender said that he would lend against it, but basically, he chose the value based on what the income was. Is that true?

Yes.

If you pay cash for it, can you refinance it once you’ve gotten it up to snuff?

Absolutely. That’s exactly what you want to do. Once you get it to where it’s 100% or 90% plus full, then you could just go refinance it out and just get a bank loan on it.

For the bank loans, these are commercial loans, so they’re based completely on the value of the property. They don’t worry too much about personal income. All of your personal information that you would normally give for a single-family home. They do pull credit. Is that true?

They do look at credit, but it’s asset-based lending. That’s why I love commercial real estate. It’s really asset-based lending. That’s what you tell your sellers when you talk to them, it’s like, “You think it’s worth $500,000,” but the truth is, is that there’s no bank that’s going to fund this for $500,000, if you can only prove that you’ve made $2,000.

That’s how you get the sellers to say, “You’re right. I need to either prove that it’s worth $500,000 or I’m going to have to drop the price.” A lot of sellers don’t understand that concept because it’s like on the residential side. They’re like, “It’s worth $350,000,” but it’s really only worth $250,000. You have to be able to prove it and that’s what I love about commercial lending.

Through COVID, we’ve seen that there’s a big outflux from the cities. More people are moving a little bit more to the burbs. Not a little bit more, but quite a lot. I’ve always thought of self-storage as being really good in the city space where there’s not a lot of space. People are in condos or apartments, and so they need this self-storage because they don’t have a garage or they don’t have their own little storage in their backyard. Now, as people are moving out more into the burbs or have done that, have you noticed any changes in how your self-storage units are doing?

Every storage facility that we own is either in a secondary or tertiary market. There are three different markets, primary, secondary and tertiary. Primary would be in the city. Those cap rates of those facilities are super low, and then you have tertiary markets where it’s a mid-range cap rate. Those are burbs. Then you have tertiary, which is like country.

Storage is based off of migratory patterns and everybody is moving out. Especially huge, big storage facilities, companies like U-Haul and Public Storage, they’re looking at the migration of people and trying to figure out where are the trends. Where is everybody moving to? What cities are they moving to? What plays a key role in learning to invest in self-storage is number one, the population of cities.

Is it declining or is it growing? Is there a growth market or declining? You want to pay attention to that. If it’s declining, then it may not be a good area. Also, what you want to look at is you want to look at total square footage of a radius of maybe 3 to 5 miles, depending on if it’s a primary, secondary or tertiary market.

If you wanted to go and buy a facility in a tertiary market, out in a city that has 15,000 people or 10,000 people, essentially, what you would do is like, “Within this five-mile radius, how many storage facilities are there?” You would take the total square footage of that and you would divide it by the population of that area as well too, and your number should be between 6 and 8 or something like this.

If the number is 6 and 8, then it’s a thumbs up, but if it’s on the outskirts of that, and it’s probably not a good deal. When you’re looking at investing in self-storage, you want to look at the population of a town, population of the area, total storage square footage, competitors, and look at the market and see if it’s a good deal or not.

We pretty much own most of our facilities in tertiary markets. Some of them are in secondary but most are tertiary. We’re 100% full in every single one. We bought one in January that was a mismanaged property in a small town in Georgia. It was like 50,000. It’s not super big, like 50,000 people. That one, he said it was full, but it was really just full of people’s crap and nobody was paying.

That one, we’re still trying to lease-up, but other than that, all the other ones that we have, they’re all 100% full. I have one that’s in a town of 300 people. It has 60 units and it’s 100% full. The need for storage is so great right now that even if you wanted to build, which is another way to get into self-storage investing, I highly recommend it. The material prices are a little bit higher, but that’s not going to last forever. We’re thinking about building as well too. We’re definitely going to be building.

Obviously, it’s within your space. Can people do this virtually?

What I tell all my students is, “If you are going to get into self-storage investing, you need to be making this truly passive income.” There’s no reason for you to be getting up every day and going and managing your facility. That would be considered a job, not an investment, so you want to make it passive income and you want to build passive wealth, and self-storage investing is exactly the way you can do that.

We travel 6 to 8 months out of the year and we’ll be traveling the entire year. We just bought an RV and we’re going to be traveling. We’re gearing up to be able to do that and try to figure out how we can do that. I want to prove to my students that you should be able to manage your facilities from anywhere in the world.

During COVID, when everybody was freaking out and staying home and hiding, essentially, what we did is just hit the road. We went to almost every state. We visited every state. We did sixteen national parks in sixteen weeks. We went to Florida and hung out there for a month. We went up to Maine and hung out there for two months.

You can manage and all of our facilities are in Georgia. We weren’t even in Georgia for eight months out of the year. We weren’t even there. I tell my students, too, it’s like, “It’s probably better for you to buy something that’s further away because then what it does is it makes you automate and systematize that business.” Whereas if we have one facility that’s probably twenty minutes from our house, my husband’s like getting up every day and just going out there and hanging out and doing whatever. All the other ones that we have are way in South Georgia, 4 to 6 hours away. He can’t do anything with those, so he has to let our boots on the ground person manage those. He has to let the operations manager manage those. Whereas the one that we have right around the corner, he always getting up and going over there because it’s just a habit.

Buy stuff that’s a long way away and learn how to automate and systematize it because that truly is passive income when you can do that. I think the best-kept secret in the real estate investing world is self-storage. I honestly really don’t understand why more people don’t invest in self-storage. It’s a lifestyle investment. You can truly make your life the way that you want to with self-storage investing.

I invested in a syndication for a self-storage where they were building a 500-unit facility in Pennsylvania. I invested but I haven’t done it myself. I wanted to get into it. I’ve also done a syndication into a mobile home park. I’m investing into some of these things I’m hearing so much about, but I just don’t know enough about them to look at it as a possible primary investment where I focus my time on it. Ladies, in EXTRA, we’re going to be talking about how to buy your first storage facility in the next 90 days. If you want to do that, at least get more information.

Definitely, we’re going to be talking about that in EXTRA. The other thing is I wanted to say that Stacy, I don’t normally do this, but I’m so delighted by Stacy’s knowledge that we’re talking about this topic, which many of you ladies have asked about. Also, I’m a little bit surprised. Stacy has a self-storage course.

When I’m out there looking at coursework for real estate, it’s huge. $997 is nothing in my book and it sounds like you can do this truly passive. This isn’t something I’ve tried, but you can do this truly passive lifestyle. I feel good about saying you really take a deep look at that because I’m watching Stacy. She’s walking the talk. In other words, when we first got online and we were in the green room and we were talking, she’s like, “I’m on the road,” but she’s got this great backdrop. She’s got this big great backdrop. She’s got this lighting. She’s got her mic, she’s got this whole set up.

Most people who are traveling when they come on the show, they’re crackly. Their backdrop looks terrible, but she’s got the whole setup. This means she’s actually on the road and she’s setting herself up to travel for a year, running this business. If that’s true, then it is really passive income and she’s proving it. To me, that says quite a lot on so many levels. I’d encourage you to connect with her. Her course is $997, but she does also have some freebies for us. Why don’t you talk to us a little bit about that?

Self-Storage Investing: When you’re looking at investing in self-storage, you want to look at the population of the town. You need to look at every detail to really understand the market and see if it’s a good deal or not.

If you’re interested, we’ll give you a link to go and get what’s called Stacy’s Six Step System to Storage. It’s a template. It’s like an eBook. It will take you step by step on the way that I teach, and which is I teach in departments. If you think of your self-storage investing world, and it’s like you have six different departments.

That is your office admin, setting up your office. Doing your marketing, getting your acquisition stuff done, getting the financing, managing the facilities and then possibly liquidating them. I go through each of those departments in the Six-Step System. It’ll take you step by step and it’s a process. You can get that for free with the link that we give you.

We’re still figuring out that. If you don’t know where to go, go to BlissfulInvestor.com/stacy. The reason it’s really important is I know a lot of you connect with my guests and then you just go directly through their link, which is fine. What happens is then I don’t know that you were interested in that topic or that person.

If you use the links that I post, then I know you’re interested in this topic, you want to hear more. You’re interested in that person, so maybe I bring her on more or we do some partnership, which then gets you better deals, but it’s great for tracking to figure out what you ladies want. You know I’m all about serving you.

I’ve talked to so many of you like, “I signed up with that person,” and I was like, “Did you use my link?” They’re like, “I’m so sorry.” It’s about taking care of you ladies. Whenever you go to any of my guests, go take a look at the blog post on BlissfulInvestor.com. If you sign up for their program or you get a free gift, use the link that I put in there so that we’ve got some tracking. It’s not like I’m going to come back to you with any, I know some people are like, “I don’t want to be tracked.”

This is simply marketing numbers so that I understand what it is you’re wanting from me. I’m not just covering topics that you’re not interested in. Sorry for that big thing, but I’ve been hearing a lot of ladies lately where they’re like, “I didn’t use your link,” but then I just don’t know what you’re wanting. Please go to BlissfulInvestor.com/Stacy. Look up Stacy’s blog with the title where we’re talking about self-storage and use that link so we can track it. Did you have anything else you wanted to add, Stacy, before we move into our three rapid-fire questions?

I know we covered it all, but you did talk a little bit about lending and I wanted to just reiterate that as well too. You really want to get into self-storage. The truth of the matter is, is that if you’re super busy and you got other things that you’re working on, there’s nothing wrong with lending out just like you did.

The truth of the matter is, is you’re making money and you’re not doing anything right now just by lending that out. I always tell my students like, “Even if you can’t get in there, you don’t think that you can own a facility and manage it, because it’s just too much time of work.” Land. Get into a syndication or get into a fund or find somebody and partner, and you’d be the lender, and then that way you can still do it as well too.

It is a good way to test the waters and different asset classes to see what it is that you like, how does it work out? Someone else has the knowledge and is taking all the risks. Thank you for that. I have three rapid-fire questions for you. Are you ready?

I’m ready.

Stacy, give us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate.

Getting started in investing in real estate, I would say honestly, is like, “Just don’t be afraid to just take action and focus on marketing.” People do not market enough, especially in real estate, to find deals. If you’re not finding any deals, guess what? It’s because you’re not marketing enough. Take action by marketing and having a whole bunch of strategies for marketing.

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

It’s the same thing. Take action. A lot of people don’t. You have to keep moving forward because guess what? In the real estate investing world, everything is 11th hour. It’s so annoying. I wish I had a deal that closed and it was just like easy peasy, lemon squeezy, but it’s not. We’re closing on a storage facility now that we are supposed to close. There are title issues and it’s so frustrating. You’ve got to keep moving forward because it’s just how it is in this industry.

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

I’m a walker, so I’m exercising. My personal success is that I’m a busy person. I need a lot of energy because of all the stuff I do. I do the 12-3-30. It’s like when you get on a treadmill. It’s a twelve incline of twelve and like a pace of three miles per hour for 30 minutes. I do that 5 or 6 days a week, at least, and it gets me pumped up. I feel so much better mentally after I do my walk. Sometimes when I’m having a hard day, I’ll take a walk and it’s only 30 minutes of walking. I’m sweating to death. If anybody’s interested, check out the 12-3-30. It’s a great exercise.

This has been amazing, Stacy. You have me so intrigued. Thank you for everything you shared on this portion of the show.

I appreciate it. Thank you so much for me to hang out with you.

We had fun and I am so excited about the EXTRA, where we’re going to talk about how to get your first facility in 90 days. Ladies, if you are subscribed to EXTRA, please stay tuned. If you’re not, this may be the time to get subscribed. Go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com, and you get the first seven days for free. You can get this one for free.

Take a look at the membership, and if you love it, that’s great, and if you don’t, you’ve just got some great content. Go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. For those of you that are leaving Stacy and I now, 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 just dreams. Get out there, take action and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you next time.

Important Links

• Blissfulinvestor.com/Stacy
• StorageNerds
• REI USA
• Stacy’s Six Step System to Storage
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

About Stacy Rowles-Rossetti

As a real estate investing expert and coach, I have built my name on the results I have created – for myself and for my students.

Investing in real estate has changed my life, opening doors for me and my family and affording me an outlet for all my creative and entrepreneurial energy. Through scaling up a renovation company in Atlanta with hundreds of transactions to learning to invest passively through creative financing deals and storage facilities, I have not only overcome many trials and tribulations, but systematized and organized my days so that I can run several successful businesses.

Day after day, I work hard at what I do, striving to stay ahead of the curve by building on my knowledge and making shrewd decisions. This did not happen overnight, of course. My early days in real estate were slow, exhausting and hard, but little by little, I earned a sense of what worked and what I needed to do to achieve consistent results. Because I taught myself all this learning through experience and mentors, the process was gradual and required the utmost diligence on my part.

Today, I own and operate REI USA and StorageNerds. REI USA is an online education and networking platform that is exactly the tool that I would have wanted when I was getting my start, something that aspiring and established investors can turn to, a means to cutting your learning curve dramatically.

• Here’s How »

• https://blissfulinvestor.com/
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram

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

To see this program in video:

Search on Roku for Real Estate Investing 4 Women or go to this link: https://blissfulinvestor.com/biroku

On YouTube go to Real Estate Investing for Women

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

Creating Passive Income Through Turnkey Real Estate With Leah Collich 

Real estate has been proven to be one of the best long-term investments and best ways to increase passive income to live your dream life. Moneeka Sawyer interviews real estate investor and investment counselor Leah Collich to ask about her journey of becoming a real estate investor and eventually being Real Wealth Network‘s investment counselor. She explains how turnkey property investment works and how she and her husband ended up doing it. So if you want to venture into this type of real estate investing, listen to the conversation and be more familiar with it.

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Listen to the podcast here

Creating Passive Income Through Turnkey Real Estate With Leah Collich

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am excited to welcome to the show Leah Collich. She is a native Texan and is a spouse of an active-duty Army officer. The army has afforded them the opportunity to see the world and live in Asia, Europe, South America and all across the United States. Their life abroad led them to realize a passion for travel and adventure. They quickly discovered that real estate investing was one of the best ways to boost their passive income so they could continue this lifestyle after the military. Her professional background is in communications and after working as a government consultant for many years, she now works full-time in real estate, passively managing her portfolio of rentals and as an Investment Counselor for Real Wealth Network with Kathy Fettke. Every week, she speaks with dozens of investors about how they can make their real estate investment goals a reality through the purchase of turnkey investments. Leah, welcome to the show.

Moneeka, thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

I’m excited too. We’ve loved hearing from Kathy in the past. I wanted to introduce my ladies to the team. Ladies, Leah is one of the counselors for Real Wealth Network, which many of you have already checked out. Some of you have already talked to Leah and because of the synergy with the two companies, Leah’s now our designated blissful coach. I wanted to introduce you ladies to her and we’ll talk a little bit more about that later but in the meantime, Leah, could you tell us about your real estate story?

I’m pleased with this collaboration and being able to connect with you and your readers. I think a lot of understanding my background and where I come from feeds into the mission of real wealth. I’d love to share that with you. I’m a regular person. I know filling in some of the information and preparation for this show, we call it expert session. I found myself going, “I get that a lot even on calls. When I talk to investors, people assume that I’m some expert or that I know everything there is to know about real estate.” I always tell them, “I’m a regular person. The only difference between me and you is time and action at this point.” My story starts off as a lot of beginner investors.

I happened into real estate on accident. In 2010 during the middle of the last housing recession, I had just gotten married. My husband was starting his career in the military. We were stationed in a small tiny town in Southern Alabama. We were smart enough to do some basic math when we were house hunting. We found this brand new construction townhome and we looked at the numbers and said, “We can rent this townhome for $950 a month or we can buy it for $750 a month.” My dad had had a rental property growing up. There was nobody in my corner telling me like, “Don’t do that. Bad idea.” The math made sense. We bought this brand new construction townhome knowing we would be there short-term, knowing that we would keep it after we left, turned it into a rental and it would make us some money.

That’s what we did. This was in 2010 when there was a home buyer credit. You got a check, we got a $15,000 or $10,000 home buyers credit to buy this cashflowing investment. Fast forward, maybe seven years or so, we were subscribing to the traditional way of preparing for retirement. We were doing everything right. We were saving, not maxing out credit cards, opening up 401(k) accounts, IRAs and maxing them out every year, trying to be as diligent as possible to be sure that we were prepared for retirement. It was when my husband got close to his halfway point in his military career that we were like, “In another 10 to 12 years, we could maybe retire, you’d get a pension.” We looked at these retirement accounts and we went, “We can’t touch that money until we’re 59.5. That doesn’t help us retire early.”

We started looking for opportunities in our life of, “Where can we create income that we can live on?” That rental had been cashflowing all along and rented nonstop. We got inspired to replicate that but be a little bit more intentional with it with the purchases ongoing. We flipped a house that we lived in, freed up a bunch of cash as we moved to Europe and said, “We’re going to get this cash reinvested and we’re going to focus on cashflowing markets.” We had a comfort level with that first market that we bought in. We went back to that same market. We bought a foreclosure from Europe, we’re overseeing a renovation. We’re on the phone with general contractors late at night. We’re trying to hustle and get this great deal going.

It was a lot of work but it was a success story. We were so pleased with ourselves but we did at the end in our reflection on how it went go, “What could we have done better in that scenario?” One, it wasn’t super passive. We were both working full-time. It was a lot to take on as an investment strategy. Two, we didn’t improve the value of that home enough to justify a cash-out refinance. We were a little bit under leveraged in this property. We started seeing that if we want to scale that extra cash that’s stuck in that asset, if we did that over and over again, we’re limiting our ability to scale and expand.

Sometimes, the only difference between a successful person and those who are not is time and action. Click To Tweet

We thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a company or someone who could do the rehab for us, we could come in with the capital, put our money to work passively, have maximum leverage and move on to the next one.” That’s how we found Real Wealth Network. Living from Europe, we’re looking for opportunities to connect in new markets with opportunities that we could put that income to work passively. We scaled quickly in that year. Now we’re diversified in about five different markets and that’s how I got to this idea of passive income but turnkey because it allows me to continue to pursue passion, interest and use my time in those ways instead of on the asset itself.

I have ads running for you, this is the true blissful path. That’s the way that I’ve done things too is I always want things to be like little time and energy commitment. For me, I’m more of an appreciation person. I’m moving from an appreciation market to more of cashflowing markets and that happens. We evolve in life to what it is that we’re needing as did you, you went through an evolution. Ladies, that’s one of the things to keep in mind is whatever strategy you are trying or doing. I don’t like to say try because real estate is not a try-thing. You got to commit and give it some time. Whatever you’re doing in this stage of your life could be different than what you’re doing in the next stage of your life. You’re not married to this strategy but you could get married if you fall in love. I’m trying to use definitively one of those places where we can fall in love because the benefits are great.

I find that it does embolden you when you experienced mastery that might be too strong of a term even but when you’ve experienced success in one avenue, I feel like it can embolden you to take risks in new areas and try out some different strategies. It doesn’t have to be an exclusive strategy. We’re always looking for deals elsewhere. I certainly have an appetite for flipping and doing some of that more active approach but it’s been such a journey for me and something that I’m grateful now to get to share and encourage other people on how they can do the same and how this is a viable strategy for creating retirement, creating freedom, or even diversifying. It doesn’t have even to be that grand of a plan. It can be a simple diversification measure as well.

Do you feel like you’ve replaced your income? Could you go have that lifestyle with what’s coming in with cashflow?

We’re getting close to having choices.

I love that you say that. It’s not retirement, it’s having choices.

We started realizing our whole career we’ve spent away from family and we’ve had a wonderful adventure. It’s been so rich but at the end of this career, we were inspired. Our why was the ability to have the choice to go where we want to go. We don’t have to go and follow a job in a specific city. We can choose to go back with family or abroad but having those options, to me is worth so much and you discover that you enjoy it. These ideas that you had of paying down loans, it evolves and suddenly, you’re moving in a different direction. We’re continuing to have a lot of fun with it. Retirement keeps getting kicked further down the road by choice.

I know what you mean because we could retire too. David loves what he’s doing and I love what I’m doing. Why would you retire when you love what you’re doing? Ladies, read me talk about retirement all the time and it’s not the right word. I love your choice of where it’s better, where we have a choice. We can now make decisions based on what we want to be doing with our time, life, energy and money as opposed to what we need to be doing to pay the bills. I love the way that you put that.

Passive Income Through Turnkey: When you’ve experienced success in one avenue, it can embolden you to take risks in new areas and try out different strategies.

Finding people like Kathy has been instrumental to that for me. That’s what Real Wealth is passionate about is about. It’s not chasing this idea of that society puts on us of what is successful but what is real wealth to you? It is freedom, a choice and being able to live life on your own terms. That resonated with us so much and little did I know that one day I would join the Real Wealth team and get to share in that mission of spreading that dream with others.

Why did you choose to do that?

My background is in communications. I did a lot of adult curriculum development. That instructional and teaching background is my speed and then the opportunity to marry that with this personal passion that we developed of investments, I find it super exciting. What we do at Real Wealth is providing a lot of emphasis on education and teaching people the fundamentals because the fact of the matter is the reason more aren’t investing in real estate is there’s a significant learning curve and it’s intimidating. In our minds, we’re thinking of these mega moguls that have invested in real estate.

We think that’s where we have to be and that we self eliminate. We choose to pursue other options that are maybe easier. In Real Wealth, we break that barrier of like, “Ask questions. Let’s be curious and learn together. We don’t have to be an expert about it.” The second part of that is offering a tactical means by which you can take action and turnkey offers you the ability to connect with people in markets that are experts there in that market boots on the ground who understand the market dynamics and who can help you find a product there and that long-term buy and hold investment.

How does this work for people once they’re in the system, they joined and everything, what happens?

We aggregate a lot of data on what makes a good market for real estate investors. We’re looking for job growth, population growth, strong diversified economies but yet we want them to be affordable markets where we can come in as levered buyers and have good solid cashflow. We want landlord-friendly laws. We let all of this data point us to those markets. We’re interested in about fifteen different markets and that’s not an all-inclusive list. There can be great things about many different markets but once we found those fifteen markets, we go out and look for a team there locally that specializes in finding those deals and in rehabbing those properties or in some cases, building new construction homes. In addition to that, they have professional property management again so that you get connected to that deal.

If that were it, that would be too easy because it’s overwhelming. Fifteen markets is a lot to choose from. It still doesn’t make it tangible. That’s where an investment counselor helps. We’re experienced in these markets, myself and there are three others. We know these markets, these teams and general investing strategy. We get on the phone with an investor who’s ready to pursue that. Through a conversation, we talk, what is their search criteria? What are your goals? What is it that you’re looking to do? That can guide us to a market that’s maybe the best fit for an investor. I’m sure you’ve heard before some people want to drill it down and go, “What’s the best market?”

The answer to that is always, “It depends. What are you looking for? How much capital are we working with? Are you looking to create maximum cashflow or the greatest return over a longer period of time?” What is the priority? Through a conversation, we help you refine what it is that you’re looking for and refine what your buy box is. What can help you get to those goals that you have sooner? We can make those referrals and connections to these companies and those markets that can help you identify the property.

Turnkey allows investors to continue to pursue passion and interest. Click To Tweet

You introduce to a company in the market. Are you hands-off after that or what happens?

What makes us different is that we maintain a relationship with our investors. It truly is a network. The strength of the network is in our investors. It’s providing that full circle or full feedback loop if for a lot of people, this is their first time going through a transaction like this. We, Real Wealth Network, remain involved and offering you that strategic guidance. We’ve put together some great checklists that help you with due diligence and how things you should be looking for when you’re screening property and getting home inspections, appraisals and offering you some of those good tips to guide you along the process. We love getting feedback from our investors on how it’s going.

We touch base and maintain that relationship beyond acquisition but into the management phase where the proof is in the sauce, that long-term hold of the property. How’s it doing? Did it do what we hoped it would? At the end of the day, you can’t make guarantees about how someone’s experience can be? How past performance can’t guarantee that, but it can be a good indicator to be able to point to 100 or 300 sales in a specific market and the track record of the property management team that has managed those homes for this period of time. That can give a lot of people the confidence that they need beyond taking a shot in the dark, in a market that they’re unfamiliar with where they don’t know anybody. It’s a lot of the benefit that you get when you’re a part of Real Wealth.

What happens if something does go wrong with the management company? This has been my biggest fear of going outside of the California market. I’ve kept all of my assets close within 50 miles so I can get there. If you’re out of state then you can’t do that. What happens if there’s something that goes wrong for instance with a management company or the house or something like that?

Think of it as a risk. That is a risk tolerance that is beyond some people, that idea of not being able to go there. Due diligence is extremely important and not just taking what we say and going with it regardless. We always say, “Trust what we say,” but verify it. Make sure that this is something you’re comfortable with. I tell everybody, we have a property manager here that is proven that we have some leverage with because we’ve worked with for many years but at the end of the day, you need to make sure that they meet your criteria because even within something like property management, there’s a personal preference. You can talk to five different people about the same property manager and you’ll get five different takes on some of the nuances of how they do business and whether they love them or whether they’re okay.

The important part and what we put a lot of emphasis on is you own this process. I do interview a couple of property managers who have a backup plan. When I’ve had situations like that personally, where something has not gone well and a property management experience wasn’t the best, it’s something that you can focus a little bit of energy into. I was quickly able to identify another property manager that could meet my expectations a little bit better. We at Real Wealth are here to help guide you through that process and lead you through that process of evaluating. Sometimes, it’s hard to know what is a typical experience or what is something that is a normal risk of owning real estate. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater yet and dump your property manager. This might be a problematic tenant and you need to ally with the property management company and get beside them in the real issue.

Do you give references for property management companies? How do people find who to interview?

We provide the reference for the specific property manager there in that market. That’s the reference that we offer but then you can go online and find other property managers on your own. We do encourage you to do that to make sure that they’re who you want to work with.

Passive Income Through Turnkey: Make decisions based on what we want to be doing with our life, energy, and money, as opposed to what we need to be doing to pay the bills.

Do you offer the opportunity to talk with other network members that have used that property manager as a reference? How might that work?

COVID has put a little bit of a damper on our normal processes for that. We had live events every month before March 2020. That was an opportunity for investors to all get in the same room, share their experiences, talk about the pros and cons of different areas and that was hugely beneficial when we did that so regularly. Now that we’ve gone virtual, that looks a little bit different. We do though have the ability to connect you with some people there locally in the market who have bought there over a period of time and who can give you some insight into their experiences with property management.

That would be my big thing is to get the references and get some validation around that decision. Tell us a little bit about, how you fit into my Blissful community? I’m excited about this collaboration. Let’s talk about how it happened and what my ladies can expect?

Kathy and you share a lot of synergies in your approach to this. You’ve got a similar abundant mindset that Kathy and Rich Fettke both have. This was an opportunity for us to provide a woman to woman connection in real estate where we can help your investors who are curious about the turnkey model, curious about a more passive approach to real estate investing so we can have that warm handover. We’ve set up a website for our blissful friends who are interested in turnkey where you create a profile on Real Wealth Network and then you’ll automatically be linked to me as your investment counselor. Once you’re logged in and created that account, you’ll have access to all of the free educational resources. You can start educating and you can look at all the market data that we’ve aggregated. You’ll have the ability to look at the teams that we work with. You’ve got access to me as your investment counselor to help you navigate the process, streamline it and hopefully get you going.

Nothing happens until we take action. We can think about it all day long.

I had a blissful investor come and we had a great strategy session. She was contemplating lots of different investment strategies, some more active some more passive but recognizing that there was a place in her investment strategy for a passive approach. We got her connected with the team that works in the market that she was most interested in. It’s that power of networking. It’s working for her already.

It has been interesting because my ladies email me and I love that. Several of them had connected with Real Wealth and a couple got to talk with you and a couple of the guys. Ladies, every single person on their team is unbelievable. I know that all of your coaches are awesome but I did feel that like, “We’re a ladies’ group and we want to talk to a lady.” It was cute when you called me and said, “Would you like your ladies to talk to Leah?” I was bouncing around excited about that. As women stay in the community, we think a little bit differently than men do and our priorities feel a little bit different. It is nice to talk to another woman about this stuff. I’m honored that you’re going to be working with my ladies.

It’s a topic that I know you’re passionate about but I feel financial literacy, engagement hasn’t been instilled in women like it has in men. Because of that, subconsciously, we’re more prone to take the back seat and to let somebody else lead that. I love and am inspired by women who recognize that that doesn’t have to be true and that there is a place for you to engage. If it’s easier to come to that place by engaging with another woman who’s already done it then let’s do that so that we can empower more people to do the same.

Nothing happens till we take action. Click To Tweet

Women are better suited to real estate. We love to nest, love our homes and love creating beautiful spaces. It’s intuitively and naturally one of our powerhouses is this ability to create a home and that’s what real estate is all about. Being able to do that, we can look at the numbers, creating space, to do your research but we get good gut feelings or inspirations about where to where to invest. It can be confusing. Once you look at the numbers, you then can use your intuitive sense, “Three different markets work. Where do we want to start?” Also, neighborhoods and all of that stuff. We are inherently better suited for this business. It seems sad that we’re not as involved as we could be and not benefiting from the amazing cashflow, appreciation and wealth that can be built through this industry.

There’s a lot of pressure too in this space to marry this idea of being a real estate investor and entrepreneur. I’ve had to tell people before and had to slow people down sometimes, I’m like, “You don’t have to make this a business. You don’t have to go and employ people.” I get some people who right out of the gate want to talk about entity formation and the tax structure for their entity formation. I’m like, “You don’t even have a house yet. Let’s slow down. Let’s learn some correlations of cashflow and appreciation. Let’s study some proformas and look at the basic math before we start blowing this up to be some gigantic entrepreneurial idea.” Real estate can be a diversification strategy. It can be passive. It can be a little side hustle hobby that you enjoy doing and it gives you that feeling of power or validation if that’s what you’re searching for. It can be that and it can be small. It doesn’t have to be huge.

It’s interesting because real estate was always my side hustle. I was in corporate, I ran my own businesses and real estate was that thing that I didn’t pay attention to. As a matter of fact, if I had paid attention to it, I can’t even imagine where I would be now. I pay no attention to it and suddenly, I’m worth millions of dollars. There were hard times. 2001 and 2008 was a hard time but through most of it, I haven’t had to think about it and I love that. It’s the side hustle without the hustle. Much of that is what turnkey is all about. It’s about the side creating the side hustle without the hustle.

The opposite of the hustle like people in the blissful business. I do agree with you, people get caught up in what everybody is out there talking about like the entity structuring, taxes and the, “You should be flipping as they do want to HGTV. You can make all of this money. You should have 1,000 doors.” No. You do what’s right for you. I only have 6 or 7 doors because I don’t like lots of doors. I’m in an appreciation market because that’s what I know for now and I’m making a transition cause I want to make a difference. That’s working in my life. You don’t have to do all of those things and all the gurus are telling you to do. You do what’s right for you.

It is prevalent in this space and I’ve always tried to resist against it and own my experience for it being my experience. We all have our scales of risk and reward of what’s right and wrong. It’s up to us to zero our scales and determine, “For me, where’s the risk and the reward here? Where’s that balance?” What we don’t want to do is allow somebody else who’s in a completely different phase, space balance our own scales. Being okay with your process looking a little bit different. If it’s not turnkey, that’s great. Do whatever it is. That’s probably the one thing that I would say is the rule you got to take action somewhere. I’ve heard you say this before, “Goals remain undefined. It’s a dream. It’s not ever going to happen. We’ve got to give ourselves some concrete tactical steps and create a timeline for ourselves so that we step into that.”

The other piece about this and I know that this is true with a lot of us women because we do feel intimidated. We haven’t necessarily had the network or educational support and all of this stuff. You want to know your stuff. You want to get educated. You want to make sure that you’re doing the right thing. You don’t want to look stupid. You don’t want to have lost money. This is what I say to that, everybody in business loses money. Don’t be afraid of it but it also isn’t something that you have to do either. You can make good decisions consistently. I’ve never lost money ever on a real estate project. That’s been many years.

Not everybody has that same track record and it’s okay. When I say that I haven’t lost money, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t had a lot of fear. In 2008, I lost 50% of the value of all my properties, I was underwater on every single one but I didn’t sell, so I didn’t lose money. Let’s all keep that in perspective. That’s what I’m trying to say is that keeping it all in perspective and understanding that you’re going to have to learn along the way. You can do as much research as you want. You can look at as many videos. You can talk to as many people. You can listen to as many podcasts but nothing happens with your wealth or your education until you start doing something because you’ll learn a lot being in there.

I see it all the time. The analysis paralysis. It’s putting a lot of pressure on yourself to know everything. I was talking about this with my husband. I’m like, “Everybody wants to step up to the plate and they want to first swing knock it out of the park.” That would be epic. That would be awesome. I’d rather be the person who is confident who understands it but I’m okay with a base hit. Like I’m going to load up those bases. The better I get at loading the bases, the more my confidence builds. At some point, I’m going to knock it out of the park. When I do, the bases are loaded. That takes the pressure off me to make sure that everything is nailed and that there wasn’t a single thing. Part of what I always try to do is reflect on a situation and look at it, even when I thought it went great, like, “Let’s look at it. What could we have done better next time?” That’s how we wound up in the turnkey space. Evaluating going, “That was good. Nice job,” but how could we refine this? The next time it’d be even better? That’s a sweet spot to stay in.

Passive Income Through Turnkey: There’s a lot of pressure in this space to marry this idea of being a real estate investor and being a real estate entrepreneur.

We are going to move towards the end of this show but before we do that, I want to talk a little bit about Extra because you’ve got some yummy, exciting stuff to offer my ladies. Tell us a little bit about what you’re going to cover in Extra?

The seven steps for new investors is what we’re going to cover. It’s going to be tactical, if I’m getting started, what are the next seven steps for me to do? Starting from let’s think about goal setting down to, “Let’s refine my buy box so that I can take informed action.” We’ll talk a little bit about what those next seven steps are.

I love that. I can’t wait. I love it when we get a breakdown like that, specific steps that we can take. I’m excited about that. Tell us where we can reach you.

We have create a website on RealWealth.com for the Blissful Investor. You can go to RealWealth.com/Blissful. If you create a login there, we’ve already set it up on the backend so that you’re immediately linked to me as your investment counselor. You can click around once you’re on there. You’ll see It’s very easy to connect with me once you’re logged into your account. We can set up an initial strategy session and get you going.

I know lots of ladies are already in the network and enjoying the benefits. Go check it out and join. It’s free to join. Leah, are you ready for three rapid-fire questions?

I’m ready.

Tell us one super tip on getting started in real estate investing.

Aside from watching our Seven Steps for New Investors, I tell everybody financing is the gas in the tank. We can know where we want to go. We can know that it’s a great place but until we know that we have gas in our tank to take us there, we’re not going anywhere. I always tell beginners, “The first thing you should do is understand your borrowing potential and talk to a qualified lender who specializes in investment loans.”

Women are better suited to real estate. They have the power to create a home. Click To Tweet

What would you say is one strategy for being successful in real estate investing?

We already talked about this a little bit but I think for me, it’s staying curious. This is something that Kathy Fettke does so well. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. I think that could be maybe the flaw of the other genders that there’s sometimes a pride that we have of not wanting to admit when we don’t know something when the reality is, it’s a very good question and there are lots of other people in the room who don’t know it either. Staying curious and not being intimidated to ask for additional information. I see this a lot in our space, people assume that if someone is trying to sell them something that they’re trying to deceive them or trick them into something. I say, “They are humans too and they’re a real estate investor, be curious about their experience, leverage their experience in that market, ask questions.” That has been instrumental to my success.

I was having a conversation with another investor and I ask a lot of questions. He’s doing something that I’ve never done and will never do. It’s a type of construction because I’m doing construction. I am constantly asking questions. At one point, I said to him, “I get that I ask a lot of questions. You can shut me down.” He’s like, “You can send me an email and see when it gets stopped.” It’s so much fun to be involved with someone who’s interested rather than someone that thinks I’m smart and they’re going to follow my instructions. “You’re going to go places because you care enough to figure it out.” I wanted to share that with ladies so that you know people love you asking questions and if it is too much, they’ll say, “I don’t have any answer. Talk to somebody else. That’s too many questions.” You get to there, that’s a good place because that means that you’ve dug deep. Questions are a good thing. They’re good for your business, self-esteem, success and relationships. Leah, tell us one daily practice that you would say contributes to your personal success.

It’s important to reinforce what you want to be replicated. This is true in many different aspects of life, relationships, finances, with children. Focus your energy on what went right and what you want to see happen again. The example that comes to my mind related to real estate is we have a friend who’s wanting to get into real estate for a long time and has talked about it for a very long time and got a property. It’s not going perfect but it’s typical real estate investment problems, the maintenance and phone call. That kind of stuff. He’s chosen to focus on the negatives of that and focus on, “It’s another call. It’s another problem.”

We always try to say, “Let’s make sure that we’re reinforcing all the good things that happened that month.” You got a tenant with no vacancy, you got top market rent for that property. You’re cashflowing well every month. It’s not ideal to have to go and fix this item but let’s reinforce all of the things that went right and that is going right because that’s what we want to replicate in our life. If we focus on all the negatives and on all the things that didn’t go excellent, those can sometimes be an inhibitor to our future progress.

This has been so good. Leah, thank you for all you’ve shared so far.

I’m happy to be here and looking forward to connecting with you ladies.

Ladies, stay tuned for Extra. We’re going to be talking about the seven steps for new investors. If you are already subscribed to Extra, you’re going to get that on whatever device you’re reading to this show. If you are not subscribed to Extra but would like to be go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. You get the first seven days for free, so you can check it out. If you love it, you stay. If you don’t, at least you got a lot of good content. For those of you that are leaving us now, thank you so much for joining Leah and I for this portion of the show. I appreciate you and I look forward to seeing you next time. 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 next time. Bye.

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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.

blissfulinvestor.com