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Scaling A Multifamily Portfolio With Liz Faircloth – Real Estate For Women

 

Investing in real estate is a learning process. From buying your first property to scaling a multifamily portfolio, investors learn many lessons in between. In this episode, Moneeka Sawyer sits down for a discussion with Liz Faircloth, a social worker, entrepreneur, co-founder of The DeRosa Group, and co-founder of The Real Estate Investher community. Liz shares how she got into real estate investing and talks about what she learned about investing in many types of real estate. She shares why they settled on multifamily and what you need to do to become successful in the real estate game. Tune in to learn more on what it takes for real estate investing success.

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Scaling A Multifamily Portfolio With Liz Faircloth – Real Estate For Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am so excited to welcome to the show, Liz Faircloth. Liz Faircloth co-founded the DeRosa Group in 2005 with her husband, Matt. The DeRosa Group based in Trenton, New Jersey is an owner of commercial and residential property with a mission to transform lives through real estate. DeRosa has vast experience in bringing properties to their highest and best value, which includes repositioning single-family homes, multifamily apartment buildings, mixed-use retail and office space. The company controls close to 1,000 units of residential and commercial assets throughout the East Coast.

Liz is the Co-founder of The Real Estate InvestHER Community, a platform to empower women to live a financially free and balanced life through over 25 Meetups across the US and Canada, and an online community and membership that offers accountability and mentorship for women to take their businesses to the next level. She is the co-host of The Real Estate Investher Show, which I will be on too. They published their first book, The Only Woman in the Room: Knowledge and Inspiration from 20 Successful Real Estate Women Investors.

Liz has been interviewed for many articles and top-rated podcasts, including mine. Including being a two-time guest on the top-rated BiggerPockets Podcast and the Best Ever Show. On the personal side, Liz is an avid runner, has completed several triathlons and marathons, has two adorable children and is a New York Mets fan. Hello there, Liz.

Thank you so much for having me.

You and Andresa do so much cool stuff with the InvestHER Community. I love what you’re doing together but I haven’t really gotten to chat with you about what you’re doing. Liz, why don’t you give us a high-level version of your story of how you got interested in real estate and what your path has been?

It wasn’t a linear path. At the time, my now husband and I had started dating. Before we started dating, I was in graduate school for Social Work. I got my Master’s in Social Work. I want to open my own practice and help people. That’s been always my passion. During that time, my brother-in-law who was the only entrepreneur I ever met, grew up in a great family but middle-class family. My dad was a teacher. I was never introduced to entrepreneurs or investors, that just wasn’t in my sphere of any context growing up. Hard work ethic was there, but certainly the business piece of it, I was not familiar with or didn’t have a lot of exposure to.

Until I met my brother-in-law, who was an entrepreneur, started a business and handed me Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I’m 23 at the time and he’s like, “You have to read this.” I’m like, “All right.” I like personal growth books. I started in college reading different books and I always enjoyed them. I like learning and growing. Long story short, I read that it. My eyes were opened to this idea of passive income. I honestly never heard of that before. It’s like, “I can have money working for me, not me working for money.” It was a whole new, open-my-eye concept, which I know a lot of people have said.

What got us involved was

I then started dating my now husband. We lived about two hours from each other. Every weekend, we go to all the REIA meetings and start learning. We’re in our twenties, didn’t know anything. We didn’t have any money to invest, but we said, “Let’s give this a go.” We started taking courses. This is before Facebook Marketplace. This is literally open the newspaper, go to ads and call tired landlords. That was the million-dollar tip we got at one of the events. That’s what we did every weekend, literally knocking on doors, right outside of Philadelphia, where my husband lived and when I visited him.

One day, we got someone to say, “That’s interesting. Let me think about that.” Then we called them back and struck up a deal. A year into us taking courses and door knocking and cold calling and bootstrap whatever we could do, we struck up a deal and bought our first property. It was a duplex about $150,000. We learned everything on that property. We’d go with the people. When you buy a property, the tenants that are there may not be your tenants ongoing because there’re a new sheriff in town. The whole multifamily opened our eyes. There are only multis in this neighborhood. It wasn’t like we chose a duplex. It just so happened because it was like older homes right outside of Philadelphia. There were only duplexes and small multis. We got our start there and then we moved to New Jersey and then started our business focused on New Jersey and buying properties there. We sold that property and did 1031 into a four-unit, then that started our trajectory in New Jersey.

Over the fifteen years I’ve been doing this, we had lots of twists and turns. I wish we just focused on multi but we didn’t. We got involved a lot of different things early on. People would get distracted as we usually do. We were probably a little naïve and young. We flipped houses, we got into tax liens, we bought a commercial building, we bought raw land. Every random thing you could possibly think of, we probably have done it, until we doubled down on multifamily. Our business now is focused on multifamily. We went from a 2 duplex to a 10-unit. We grew very steadily. We didn’t go from a 2 to a 200-unit. We did, but over time.

Now, we focus on larger multis and we’re starting a fund where we’re actually investing with other operators. We’re diversifying a little bit outside of multi but more like from a funding perspective. I’m involved in that, not day-to-day, but more from like a strategic level and helping build our team out. It’s exciting to be able to invest in different sectors of real estate, not just multifamily. We do love multifamily. We have a letter of intent on a property in the Southeast, which is where we are focused on now.

Tell me a little bit more about this fund. Let’s dive a little deeper in that.

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It’s something that we’ve talked about over the year and then COVID obviously happened. COVID happened, the pandemic and everything. You’re in California, I’m in Pennsylvania. We’re in the thick of shut downs. I know things are opening up, which is wonderful and people are getting along. All the conversations we had were like, “How’s this going to affect our buildings?” I have to say with our multifamily, any loan that came out, we took advantage of. We didn’t know how it was going to affect. We didn’t know who’s going to be able to pay. We didn’t know what’s going to happen with tenants and everything like that. Our buildings, knock on wood, the ones that were doing well are stable and have thrived during COVID.

We had a building in North Carolina that was 40% occupied. It was literally a turnaround building. It was 200 units. We got it up to 90% during COVID. Some of these buildings thrived. Other buildings that were having some issues prior to COVID continued to have some issues. While that was a stable sector for us, we’re all in on that sector. My husband and I talked a lot about as we grow our businesses, what do we want to do? We want to diversify and the importance of that, and what does that look like? The fund is an opportunity. We’ve always focused on raising money and then putting it specifically into a building, into a project.

With regards to the fund, we talk to people all the time. People are like, “This sounds like a great opportunity to pass an investor.” Then you’re like, “I don’t have a building. I don’t have anything under contract right now.” We refer them. We know a lot of people we like and respect in the business. We have no problem with that. There are a lot of good syndicators out there. We wanted to have another flavor of ice cream, if you will.

The fund will obviously be an ongoing rolling fund, and it will give investors what we’re going to actually invest in are all things that we know, and that we’ve vetted it. We’re not going to start investing in a business that we have no idea because that’s a whole other level. It’s like mitigating risk. We want to mitigate your risks. You want to make sure you’re mitigating risk for yourself, but most importantly, your investors. Hard money loans, that will be one. We’re going to start to work with maybe the hard money operators that we like and respect that we know do good business. We’re not the hard money loan lenders. They are, and we’re going to do that. Multifamily will be a piece of it. If we have a project that comes up, we’re going to almost invest in our own projects and that will be a piece of it.

Those are the two main pieces. I want to say even like self-storage and those operators, that might be another sector. They’re related to investing in real estate on some level, but it will be in a way that we are not the sole operators of everything. As we evolve, you don’t want to do everything yourself. You want to be able to do what do you do well. Once you figure that out, you have to focus on that. That’s what that looks like. We’re building out a team and that’s been in the making for some time, but that’s the goal.

I’m fascinated by that idea because I feel like, for me too, there’s something that I do really well. I do executive homes in the Silicon Valley. I’ve got my entire systems. It’s all built out. It runs itself. I don’t worry too much about it. I was telling you before that I’m taking all of my May off for my birth month because that’s where my birthday is. We’re traveling to Hawaii and I’m going to a spa in Palm Springs with my sister. We had our vaccinations, we’re all taken care of, we’re doing our tests, everything’s good. We’ve decided that it’s time to celebrate. That lifestyle is fantastic. I’m not particularly interested in working significantly more. I do get boards, we have construction projects, we have some other stuff going on so that my entrepreneurial mind doesn’t slow down or get bored.

 

What is happening is I found several different syndicators doing different things. I’ve invested in storage, multifamily and a variety of different things. I often wondered because each time that I invest, and I don’t know how this is going to work for you guys, but every single time I invest, it’s a minimum of $100,000. That’s great for us because we have that money, we’re looking to retire, we’re moving that way, but not everybody who’s reading this has access to $100,000 for this and $100,000 for that. They want to be able to diversify without spending that much money. What does that fund look like for you? Is there going to be a minimum investment? Have you worked that out?

I think we’re still working that out. One of the key team members that we knew that we needed, it’s not how but who. You can start to build out different businesses, you can’t know everything. I don’t want to know everything quite honestly, that just hurts my brain a little bit to know everything. We’re women, we want to know everything. Anyway, one of the people that is a key principle in this endeavor is a fund manager from Wall Street who has run funds. As we’ve talked to him, I think the minimums are going to, I’m not sure exactly. I will say though, one organization we’ve started working with is called Republic. Basically, what they do is they in essence have a similar type of approach, in that people can invest $10,000, even down to $1,000. Don’t quote me on that, but I’m not familiar.

What’s fascinating though for our last indication was a 336-unit apartment building. Our minimum was $50,000 on that project. Not everyone has that but they want to invest in real estate. We found this company and what they’re doing is they’re the investor in that project, but they’re the ones going out to the accredited investors to then say okay to all pooling all this money together. Then they are the investor in that project with us. They’re all pooled in this together in this company called Republic, then Republic is ultimately the investor, if that makes sense.

It was cool because that was the first time we had ever done that. If you think about it, we have a 336-unit apartment complex. We had close to 80 investors. It’s a lot of people, even with a minimum of $50,000. We had some people who put $500,000 and some people put $100,000, any amount. There’s a lot of money. I’m the cheapest person, I’d be putting $1,000 at anything. That’s me. I know, I get it. We were really pleased to see that. It’s a neat approach. I think that’s the future to be honest because I love that concept and I was really intrigued by it. As we do other deals, we’re going to be working with them. I’m not sure the relationship exactly how that’s going to play out in the fund, but that was just a neat example for our last indication that gave everyone the opportunity.

Are they more of crowdfunders or are they syndicators? Do you have any idea on their structure?

I’m not too sure which level they are. I just heard about it conceptually and was intrigued. I know that they’ve been around and they’re not just at the start of their company. There are a lot of different pieces around it to ensure how you do it. Some funds are accredited, not accredited, and all that plays as well. There’s a lot of legal stuff, a lot of money to see attorneys and all that stuff. Because it’s a project, you can’t solicit. It’s illegal to do that. There are other projects from friends and family. I know that with this particular project it’s because we only accepted accredited. It’s a neat approach and I’m happy to get more info.

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Let’s put our heads together. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that. I’m always looking for ways when I get phone calls from my ladies, when they say, “I’ve only got this much.” What can we do with that to benefit them in the biggest way? That would be amazing. Another topic that I’m getting a lot from my ladies is this idea of out-of-state investing. Especially here in California, there are a lot of markets where people feel like, “I can’t really invest in my backyard,” and they’re scared to go out-of-state. I know that you do a lot of multifamily out-of-state, so let’s talk a little bit about that, your perspective and how to look for projects and stuff like that.

For our first seven years, we invested locally. We had a rule where we don’t invest more than 30 minutes away. We did a team. We did a leasing agent. We had our bookkeeper who did all the accounting. We have a tenant relations person. We had a maintenance person. We had four people on our staff besides me and my husband, helping us manage our local properties. We bought a property in Philadelphia which was an eighteen-unit and that was 35 minutes, so we went, “We could still do it.” Then the market shifted. I’m in the Northeast, and New Jersey is not the most favorable state on taxes in this country. Even in Philadelphia, the projects that we were looking at were getting outbid, it was getting more expensive. We raise money, we work with investors. The returns are important to ensure that we’re going to get into the right projects. We’re not just parking millions of dollars from a relative.

We’re constantly looking at how we’re going to get into the right area for our investing goals and our investors. A broker had brought the same broker and that’s the first thing I’d say as a good tip is start building relationships with commercial brokers. Sometimes it’s tough, especially now. Think about a hot market, everyone’s calling commercial brokers saying, “I invest in multifamily, do you have anything for me?” “Yeah, you and 90 million other people.” You’ve got to differentiate, keep that in mind too.

We had closed that eighteen-unit with the same broker who called us about a property in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is about an hour and a half from where we were living at the time. He said, “Are you interested?” We’re like, “Cool, like an hour and a half. We’re not going to send our leasing agent there. We’re not sending our maintenance person there. We need to look into property management companies.”

After vetting the deal, and that’s a great story that ended up itself. The first domino always is a good property management company. You’re going to need that. Some people successfully invest in properties and they self-manage the properties. I’ve heard of it. I know a lot of women who do it successfully. We knew at a 49-unit, that wasn’t going to be our best strategy. We knew it was going to be important to have a good and local property management company. Why I say that’s a great person to have on your team? Say you’re sourcing an area in Alabama or wherever you’re sourcing deals. Before even looking for a property, start getting to know the property management companies there because that’s going to follow. If you cannot find a property management company in a geographical area, that might be a sign for a lot of reasons that something is off.

Even with Airbnb, which is very hot, vacation rentals and luxury vacation rentals, whatever the people are interested in. If it’s a hot area, there are people managing in that hot area, and that’s a great source and a great team member to start to talk to. Number one, they know the area. What streets are good? Which streets aren’t good? What areas are up and coming? What areas are too hot and expensive? Because we know that’s the case. We’ll wait in an exuberant way now. Everywhere is like, “Hold on, what do you want?”

 

I called up my way to Target. You’re a real estate investor, you never turn it off. I saw a sign that said ‘For Sale’ and it had a handwritten phone number. I’m like, “That’s a good sign.” Great area, Bucks County, where I live and I’m like, “That’s an interesting area.” I texted the person, guy, gal, I don’t know who it is. I said, “How much is the lot and what’s the size? Is it with sewer?” all the things you ask. We’ve done a bit of new construction a lot of times but we could probably pull it off. “$250,000.” I don’t even know if you’d get $500,000 for the property. That’s just for the lot. People are nutty with their prices right now.

Going back to out-of-state, I think property management companies are helpful to have on your team as an initial team member. What commercial brokers care about is if you’ve closed deals. They do not want to work with people who are going to get to the finish line and not be able to pull the money together because they want their commission. That’s what they care about. Beyond everything else you want to talk about with them, they care about if you’ve closed with them or with anyone. If you or someone on your core team has closed deals that you’re looking for. If you’re looking at a 100-unit, you better have someone that you’re bringing to the table that’s like, “This is the kind of team we have, the kind of team we’ve done and this is what we’ve closed.” That is what they’re thinking right now when you call them.

This broker brought us this project and we started to talk to property management companies in the area and vet the area. What really helped, and I always say this, if you have somebody in your family or in your network who lives in the area is really helpful. They don’t need to have a degree in real estate. They don’t have to have ten years in investing. If you have some boots on the ground and feet on the street, people that aren’t just property management because remember, property management company is a vendor.

We always like to offer our property manager company’s potential ownership in the building. Every time we buy a building, we say, “We’re syndicating this, would you like to own part of it as well?” It’s not the best sign if they’re like, “No.” Even if they put $25,000, maybe they think that’s like chump change. Most of all the property management companies we’ve worked with have invested in our deals and that’s a good sign as skin in the game, so to speak.

I would say the second thing is to start to look at, “Is this an up-and-coming area? Do I know anyone in my network that can help me? Is there a reason to go there? Do I want to go there?” If you’re going to invest in an area, those are questions to ask, “If I have to now get on a plane, is that on the way to my aunt or my parents? Is this an area that my kid can go to college for the next four years?” Make it make sense. Versus an area that literally you know no one. That can work but if you can blend a few things in there and it is an up-and-coming area, you’re going to want somebody that’s 10, 15 minutes from the property, whether it’s a realtor, whether you have to pay them hourly. If you can’t get there, someone needs to get there because fires happen, things happen.

We have a cousin in this area, Lancaster. When we’re looking at it, we’re like, “What do you think?” He’s an investor, which was even better. He was able to be our boots on the ground. He’s part of our general partnership. We had a fire there years ago. We want to make sure everyone’s okay. We also want to see what’s going on. In an hour and a half, the fire is probably going to throw a little more damage than ten minutes.

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A couple of things that I want to highlight is that people think that you hear about an amazing market and you should go invest in there. I remember in the mid-2000s, everybody was in Henderson, Nevada, right outside of Las Vegas. I had close friends who all invested. There was also Florida, there was also Chicago. Those were some big hubs where they were really marketing to investors from out of state, especially California. Californians had a bunch of equity and it wasn’t working for us. Everybody could get loans by just stating things.

There were these pockets that were trending. People were making money hand over fist. For me, I always play the longer trend. I don’t play the short-term trends. I would admit, I would probably be a lot richer if I got that right more often, but there are many people that get that wrong. Part of it is that they didn’t do some of the things that you talked about. It wasn’t a place that I would ever want to visit. It wasn’t a place on the way to anything. Las Vegas, it is. Chicago, it is. Florida, it is. A lot of people didn’t have that mentality of, “Would I want to go there? Would I vacation there? Would I want to live there? Would I want my kids to go to college there? Is there any reason for me to go there?” Even in Henderson, it’s not like people were like, “I’d like to have something in Henderson because I like to go to Las Vegas.” No, it was, “I’m investing in Henderson because everybody else is investing in Henderson.”

I love how you talk about this, especially in your first few deals, I think this is hugely important is as you’re getting to know what this is like. The very first time you step out of state, you don’t want to be in a market that you completely don’t understand, that you just get a bunch of numbers from someone that’s a vendor. They’re interested in selling these properties. They’re not going to lie to you, but they’re definitely going to paint a pretty picture.

We had a friend that moved to Henderson and we went to visit them one time when we went on a trip to Las Vegas. He was like, “There are all these crazy investors coming in here.” All around town, people were like, “This bubble is going to blow,” because there weren’t as many people in the restaurants anymore. There were things that were closing down. We’re like, “How is it possible that all this expansion is happening but the actual economy is shrinking?” There’s no way to have known that if we hadn’t had this conversation with our friends that had just moved there. There’s all this hype about Henderson, but they just closed down the local Whole Foods or whatever market it was.

I love what you talk about is we don’t have to have boots on the ground all the time, every time. Eventually you do develop a skill in getting to know markets or you focus on certain markets. Especially in those first few deals that you’re going out, that is all such good advice, Liz. Make sure that it’s someplace you would want to go. It’s like basic, intuitive, common sense stuff that we don’t think about because we get whisked away by the excitement of what’s possible. Those basic stuff, “Would I like to go there? Is there anything there I appreciate? Do I have someone that’s relatively close by, maybe within a half hour?” Even if they’re not going to be boots on the ground, just have the conversation once in a while. See how things are going in that market.

Thank you so much for that because normally people are like, “You need to look at the colleges, the employers or the average income rate.” Yes, you do need to do all those things, but it’s not the end of the story. Especially when you’re starting, it’s not necessarily going to give you the comfort that you need to actually get out there and do it. Here’s the thing, nothing happens for you until you take action. If it’s just the numbers and that’s not inspiring you to take action, then nothing is happening for you.

 

Many people do get caught up and there are many important numbers as you’re analyzing markets and analyzing deals. Even just the idea of what COVID taught is the importance of diversity of jobs. Are there different jobs that people can actually be employed by? They’re all in on the tech, all in on the government or all in on whatever industry. The idea of diversity of jobs is to me, even more important than job growth, they’re both important. To know that people can get different jobs, there are jobs that can do positive things. There are many markets that don’t have that. Even high-priced areas don’t have that. We probably invest more in the workforce housing, more up and coming areas, not areas that are on any hot market list. Those are the too expensive areas. We’re like, “We don’t want to invest in an area that’s on any list.”

I love that, it’s much more practical advice. My ladies here have a lot of good advice from very smart people. Sometimes, we just got to ground it. This is how you make yourself comfortable with that. Ask yourself some real common-sense questions because so much of building a real estate business is common sense. There’s a lot of fancy languaging. There are a lot of people that say things that sound smart, but in the end, it’s a common-sense business. Thank you so much for grounding that for us. It was helpful. We are going to do EXTRA. We’re going to be talking more about building your team, finding partners when you’re in state or out of state. She likes to say, “Who’s on the bus?” and then team building with all those people that are on the bus. I love that picture because you’re all going out on a field trip and you’re all on this bus. Where are you going to go? How are you going to get there? Is it going to be fun? Is it going to be profitable? We’re going to talk about that with Liz in EXTRA. We have that to look forward to. Before we move to our three rapid-fire questions, Liz, could you tell everybody how they can get in touch with you?

In terms of some of the active multifamily projects which are fun to learn more about some of the day-to-day real estate projects, you can go over to my husband’s nice business called DeRosa Group, DeRosaGroup.com. My husband spent a lot of teaching as well. We both love teaching and helping, so you’ll see a lot of YouTube content and things of that sort from him. In terms of women who are interested in getting more support from women and getting connected, check us out TheRealEstateInvesther.com. From there, you can learn all about our Meetups that are across the country, and our Facebook community and membership, and things we’ve got going on with helping women. You can check us out there.

Thank you for that. Liz, tell us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate.

Don’t get distracted, focus on a niche and go all in on one thing.

What’s one strategy to be successful as a real estate investor?

Don’t give up. You’re going to lose money. I hope you don’t lose money, but you may lose money like many of us. Fifteen years, I can tell you a lot of interesting stories. You’ve had money like a Bernie Madoff situation where literally hundreds of thousands of dollars were stolen from us. We don’t give up. That makes anyone that successful in any line of business or anything in life. Don’t give up. Know that your mistakes are going to make you propel you forward, and you’re going to learn from it and you’ll grow from it. If you don’t have that attitude, then everyone gets stopped after they lose money and something bad happens. Don’t give up. That’s the key.

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

Something that I’ve always done and then go back and forth and don’t really do it consistently is I do a daily prayer. I read a little spiritual prayer. I think about it. I’ve been doing ten-minute meditations. I’d like to increase that eventually. For me, it’s been super helpful. I focus on whatever I learned in that prayer. I focus on that in my meditation. If I miss a day, it’s rare, but I have maybe missed 1 or 2 days for four months, but every day I usually get that in.

My meditation practice gently worked its way into my life to where I don’t even think about it. It started to just happen. I missed three days and my husband and I were on edge. I lost my temper at a restaurant. I didn’t yell at anybody but I didn’t have the patience to wait. Nobody saw it but I felt it like, “What is going on with me? Who is this person?” My husband was like, “Are you really stressed out?” I was like, “I think I haven’t been meditating. I haven’t been taking Moneeka time.” I have been taking Moneeka time. I got a pedicure. I still do, but that piece that starts my day has been so important. I’m glad you mentioned that.

You have to practice it. It’s like going to the gym. You can’t do it once and you’re good.

I always say in all of our Bliss practices, you can’t just brush your teeth once in your lifetime and hope your teeth are going to be good. You’ve got to brush it every day. You’ve got to keep doing those little things. Liz, as always, I’ve loved our conversation. Thank you for everything you’ve shared in the show.

Thank you so much for having me. This was amazing. I hope I was helpful and gave some content that your audience will help them.

Ladies, Liz and I have more to talk about. We’re going to be talking about building teams and who’s on the bus, all of that really good stuff. Stay tuned for the EXTRA. If you are not subscribed, go to RealEstateForWomenEXTRA.com, and you get the first seven days for free. Check it out. See if you love it. If you don’t, that’s totally fine, but do check it out. For those of you that are leaving, Liz and I now thank you so much for joining us for this portion of the show. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon. Bye.

 

Important Links

• DeRosa Group
• The Real Estate InvestHER Community
• The Real Estate Investher Show
• The Only Woman in the Room: Knowledge and Inspiration from 20 Successful Real Estate Women Investors
• BiggerPockets Podcast – Liz Faircloth episode
• Best Ever Show – Liz Faircloth episode
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad
• TheRealEstateInvesther.com
• Facebook community – The Real Estate InvestHer
• RealEstateForWomenEXTRA.com

 

About Liz Faircloth

I’m Liz. I was born and raised in a middle-class family in New Jersey where my home was filled with love but going out to dinner was a big deal. From an early age, I have always wanted to serve others and even went to a graduate school program to become a social worker.

While studying to become a social worker, my brother in law who was the only entrepreneur I had ever met, handed me Rich Dad Poor Dad. This changed the trajectory of my life forever. Over the next couple of years, I started learning as much as I could. After a year of taking courses and hundreds of attempts to get an offer accepted, my boyfriend at the time (now husband) purchased our first investment property a duplex with none of our own money since we did not even have the money. 

I started in my 20s not knowing anything about investing, business, and no money to invest. Now, 16 years later, our team owns and manages millions of dollars of real estate. What most people don’t know is that this evolution came with a lot of lows, loss, heartache, and challenges.

As someone who was not handed anything I have today, I have learned a ton of lessons from not giving up to managing the balancing act of life as a woman. I am constantly working at balancing all the priorities of my life from being a mom of young children to a wife & biz partner with my husband to taking care of myself. It has not been easy so that is why we created our InvestHER community.

 

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Fundamentals Of Investing To Achieve Financial Independence With Chris Larsen – Real Estate For Women

 

We have our own choices every day, especially in your funds. How do you handle your expenses, and what do you do to achieve financial independence? Join Moneeka Sawyer and the founder and Managing Partner of Next-Level Income, Chris Larsen, as they delve into controlling your cash flow, creating a structure that would enable you to grow as an individual and professional. Chris is passionate about helping investors attain success in their field. He enlightens people and shares a couple of his mistakes to take the fast track towards financial independence, which took him almost 20 years. In this episode, he talks about investing, infinite banking, loans, mortgage payments, tax strategies and more. Learn how to grow your portfolio, practice financial literacy and make the best choices in your professional life.

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Fundamentals Of Investing To Achieve Financial Independence With Chris Larsen – Real Estate For Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am so excited to welcome to the show, Chris Larsen. Our guest is the Founder and Managing Partner of Next-Level Income. Chris has been investing and managing real estate for many years. While still a college student, he bought his first rental property at the age of 21. I love people that get into this industry young. Ladies, if you’re young, get in. From there, Chris expanded into development, private lending, buying distressed debt, as well as commercial offices and ultimately syndicating multifamily properties. He began syndicating deals in 2016 and has been actively involved in over $225 million of real estate acquisitions. Chris is passionate about helping investors become financially independent.

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Chris, welcome to the show.

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

I’ve been looking forward to this show. You’ve been patient with me with all the rescheduling. Thank you. I’m glad we’re finally here. Chris, give us a high level of your story. I know it’s very exciting.

First off, I love that you bring up, “Get started early,” now is early, whenever you can do it. I was 21. I was in college and to rewind a little bit, my passion at the time was racing bicycles. I went to Virginia Tech for Biomechanical Engineering. I did well in school and was told, “You should be an engineer like your grandfather.” All I want to do is race bicycles. Cycling is like a real engineer sport because it’s all about numbers and power to weight ratios. That was the end of my story in a lot of ways because I didn’t want to do that.

Along the way, at that same time, when I was at this turning point, trying to decide what to do as I was looking towards a professional career, my best friend, roommate, training partner passed away. He had a massive brain hemorrhage between my freshman and sophomore years in college. I poured another year into this sport. Then realized even after I was winning more and more races, I wasn’t happy. Even though my team went professional, I stepped away from the sport and went back to school. As a junior in college, I thought, “What am I going to do with my life?” I don’t want to be an engineer. I was going to go race and then figure out what I wanted to do.

While I was racing and even when I was young, the first thing I remember is I hop on my bike and I have this tremendous sense of freedom. Probably if you’re reading, you think the same thing. I wanted the freedom to live life on my own terms, not only to respect the life I was given but also the life of the friend that I lost. I turned towards investing. I was introduced to it by the same gentleman, Clint Provenza who introduced me to cycling. My father passed away when I was five and he was a real mentor to me.

I started looking into investing. I was day trading and one of those nights/mornings at 3:00 AM when I was lying there in bed, thinking about what I should do with my trades, I thought, “Do I want to be doing this twenty years from now?” The answer was no. I looked at other investments. I read over 250 books on money investing and settled on real estate because you could control it. I bought my first property at 21. I built and managed a portfolio of single-family rentals for fifteen years but ultimately transitioned into commercial real estate. That’s what we focus on now. I try to enlighten people and share my mistakes so they can take the fast track to get towards financial independence, which took me almost twenty years.

I have a very similar story that I wanted to be a dancer. That was my thing. I came to investing for a similar reason. I wanted a life of choice. I think that freedom of choice is our true wealth. That’s what I wanted and real estate allowed that. It takes me fifteen years before I could say that my husband and I could retire but I couldn’t do it with the lifestyle that I wanted in California. We would have had to move. We continue to grow our portfolio but it was at the same thing. After about fifteen years, I was like, “We are doing everything now that we’re doing because of choice and we want to do that.” There’s nothing more liberating than that.

I teach a Financial Literacy course for high school students. They’re coming out of underprivileged homes. Most of them are living below the poverty line. We had a conversation that at some point, income is important but it’s the freedom to choose. I cited in a study that shows the janitors that have freedom in their day-to-day choices are happier than the CEOs that are making 10,000 times than they are. They’re not happy because they don’t have freedom.

Don't be afraid to ask questions and understand the numbers, the strategy, and why an operator is going into the market. Share on X

My TED Talk is about this. There’s a lot of research where money does buy happiness to a certain threshold.

What’s that number?

The original number that came up within 2010 was 75, but a study that was done in January 2021 said 100,000. It’s gone up because of inflation, obviously. Basically up until then, the number of dollars that you bring into your household does relate directly to the level of happiness or satisfaction in the household. After that, we’re looking at we have freedom, excess income is taken care of and we can focus on joy or bliss. I’m glad we’re on the same wavelength around that. Talk to me about this concept of infinite banking. Tell me what you mean by that.

Next-Level Income was born of this desire to curate information around financial literacy and education. As I built it out, we have three main areas. We talk about how to make, keep and grow your money. Those are the three steps. I have coaching clients and that’s what we work through, “How can you maximize how much money you’re making? How can you keep more money?” That’s typically around entity structure, tax strategy but also this concept called Infinite Banking. If you think about what your biggest expenses are in life, most people know that taxes are one. If you are reading this, making a lot of money, you’re at those higher income levels like 20% or 30% in California, even 40% or 50% is not uncommon.

That’s a big expense but the next biggest expense that a lot of people don’t think about is financing. Think about how much money you spend on interest for your house or on cars and if you have a business, business loans, infrastructure, equipment. If I said to you, “What if you could take that financing dollars that you spent on interest, put them back in your own pocket and you could become the bank?” That’s what Nelson Nash talks about in this concept of becoming your own banker, which infinite banking was born of.

On average, when you pay a mortgage, it’s fully amortized, you pay a lot of interest in the front end, it goes down to so and so, and when you look at the very end, you were to finance out for 30 years, what amount of money relative to your principal do you end up paying? Isn’t that something crazy like three times as much?

It’s 2 to 3 times. Interest rates now are lower. It’s more like two times but historically, it’s about three times. Let’s not pretend you’re in California because you’re probably paying $3 million. Your average home in America is $300,000, so you’re probably paying somewhere between $600,000 to $1 million for that home. That doesn’t take into account when you refinance. A lot of people refinance. They reset the clock and you pay more interest. A lot of people never get out from under that.

Ladies, I want to give you a little clarity on that. What happens on a fully amortized loan is not what we call simple interest. A fully amortized loan means it’s heavy on the interest on the front end. Let’s say like 2/3 of your mortgage payment goes into interest, 1/3 might go into your principal and then it moves over your 30 years. At the end, you’re paying significantly more in principal. I don’t think it doesn’t exactly flip but you’re paying a lot more in principal and significantly less than interest. Every time you refinance, you start that clock on the heavy interest side.

In the past, ladies, I talked about I like interest-only loans. That’s because I don’t stay in homes very long. I refinance them to take money out so I can buy something else. I’m always high on the interest side. This is a way for me to control my cashflow and doing what I would normally be doing. When he’s going to talk about infinite banking, understand that you’re paying 2 to 3 times your principal. He’s talking about how you can put that to work for you rather than you paying that off.

That’s a great way. I co-hosted a radio show in college. One of the financial advisors advocated for a fifteen-year mortgage. I said, “No, you want 30-year. You want to have the money in your pocket and the ability to pay off your mortgage because, one, ask yourself, ‘What is your return on equity?’ It’s zero. The money’s sitting there. It’s not doing anything for you.” You can go out and use that money. You can finance, buy another property and leverage that. You can use the bank’s money to do that. If you have your home paid off, you have to pull that money out with the permission of the bank.

 

What’s interesting is whole life is very similar to owning a home. The term life insurance is very similar to renting. You build up equity in that policy but here’s the thing that’s great. When you have a properly structured life insurance policy and you build up that equity, you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission to take that money out. You own that policy. The collateral is your policy on your life. The insurance company has to lend you the money before it lends out to anyone else. They have to lend that money out to earn a rate of return because the other neat thing with life insurance, and this is unlike your home but similar, your home goes up in value. Life insurance does too because they pay dividends.

The insurance company invests that money. If they invest it well, what happens is they earn a return on that and give it back to the policyholders. This is important with this concept. You have to have the right insurance company that you’re working with and a properly structured policy. You can go buy the wrong mortgage for your home. There are multiple types of mortgages for your investment property. You have to make sure you buy the right policy with the right structures. Sometimes, there are multiple structures within that so it can be quite complex.

I was on the phone with one of my ladies and she was saying, “I’ve got something with State Farm.” I don’t know how State Farm is structured.

I do. I work for State Farm.

One of the other ladies that was on the same call with me said that she ended up trying the infinite banking structure. I don’t know how it all worked for her but over time, she wasn’t going to end up paying taxes on the money and was horrified. What I’m trying to say here is there are lots of different kinds of insurance companies and whole life structures depending on your goal. This is like with anything else, whether it’s investing, getting married or having a job. You have to know what your outcome is that you’re looking for. “Is it what is going to be paid to my family when I die? Can I use this money? Is it, I would rather not pay taxes or is it growth? What is it?” Once you make a decision, you have to find the policy that is structured to reach that goal in the best way possible.

You have to work. The unfortunate thing is there’s a limited number of companies that can do this. You want to optimize the company for your certain circumstance. If you are a 50-year-old woman, the company you might work with might be different than a 30-year-old man or 80-year-old woman. It depends on what your certain circumstance is. The other thing is if you work with an insurance agent that’s going to structure this policy, they’re paid less commission to structure the policies this way. When you maximize the cash value, you’re optimizing the insurance level. When you optimize that, it means you a lot of times lower it. You’re lowering the cost of insurance.

A big portion of that in the initial years is the commission. It’s paid to the agent. I’ve been in sales my whole life. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with paying somebody for the service you provide. That’s part of the thing. If you’re reading, you may have heard things like, “Life insurance is a bad investment.” I don’t call it an investment. I’ve used it for over several years now. This exact type of policy structure is like a super-charged savings account. It’s a tool that you can use along your investment journey. If you’re a small business owner and you say, “I own a small business,” what’s cool is you can also structure it for retirement. You can use it like a Roth IRA, but what’s nice is unlike a Roth or 529 plan for your kids, you have a lot more flexibility. You can use this money for whatever you want along the way.

The other thing that I love about these is that depending on how it’s structured. You were talking about different ages. If you’re 20 versus 80, you can put together a policy where you’re doing a monthly installation. You could also put together a policy where you have one installation. Your business did good and maybe you put $200,000 in, then you let that ride for a while. There are different ways to structure it. You don’t feel like in the old world where, “This was going to be a payment every single month and I don’t want another payment every single month.” Especially if you run your own business, you don’t know what next year is going to look like. These newer policies are interesting because there’s so much flexibility and new opportunity in structuring to create other ways of using them.

We have a whole page to it at NextLevelIncome.com. We have a banking page. You can check out some of the resources, videos, white papers there that talk more about this as well.

Income is important, but the freedom to choose is even more so. Share on X

Do you feel complete on that topic? Did you want to move to the next one?

I’m good. I edited my book, added a chapter and didn’t mention it but that’s the other thing we have on the website. If you want to learn more about it, you can also get a copy of my book for free. If you go to NextLevelIncome.com, you can click on the Book link. I’ll send your audience a copy if they put their address in.

Thank you so much. Talk to me about your perspective on multifamily. This is a hot topic with my ladies.

I’m trying to figure it out. When you say that, I’m like, “How can I figure something else on my podcast that I can say, ‘My ladies.’” I don’t know if I’m ever going to figure that out or not, and that’s probably a good thing. I don’t think that’s not going to be my tagline. I call multifamily real estate the Holy Grail of investing. If you look at my book, it says, “How to Make, Keep, and Grow Your Money Using the Holy Grail of Real Estate to Achieve Financial Independence.” I’ll send you a copy for free if you go to the website.

I’m high on multifamily. I was the person that managed my own portfolio for fifteen years. I was a person that got a phone call on my honeymoon in Costa Rica and paid $40-some in collect call fees to deal with the problem tenant. I was the guy that stayed in too long and didn’t get a great return on my properties. I was fortunate enough to run into somebody that introduced me to this space. Several years ago, I started to investigate multifamily real estate. I’m a demographics guy. I spent eighteen years in the medical device industry. That’s how I made money to invest. I got into a medical device and moved to Asheville, North Carolina because we have great demographic trends.

When I started to investigate multifamily being an engineer, a day-to-day guy, analytical, I found that multifamily was supported by these terrific demographics by what we now call the Millennials. They’d rented, and guess who’s supporting multifamily now? It’s their parents, the Baby Boomers. They’re selling their homes. They’re renting. Gen Z is renting as well. We’ve turned into this nation that we like to own. That’s the American Dream but we also like flexibility. I jumped into multifamily. It was because of the demographics, analytics, my MBAs and portfolio management. What I found is something that Ray Dalio calls the Holy Grail of investing, which allows you to increase the Sharpe ratio. Don’t let your eyes glaze over. I’ll simplify the Sharpe ratio. It increases the returns of your portfolio and decreases the risk. It’s like a boat that goes faster and has less bumps when you’re on it. I thought, “What is better than that?” Ray Dalio calls that the Holy Grail of investing. I call multifamily the Holy Grail of real estate because it allows you to increase the returns in your portfolio and decrease the risk.

I know that in EXTRA, we’re going to talk a lot more about multifamily and a high level of why he loves multifamily much. We’re going to go deeper into the pros and cons of multifamily and then he’s going to do some number breakdowns for us. These are things that I get asked about a lot. It’s not my strong suit. My husband and I have not been involved yet in multifamily. The commercial evaluation of the numbers is not his strong suit. He hasn’t had to do it yet. This will be fun. Why don’t you give us a high level on why you like multifamily? What’s exciting about it?

There are a few things. If you’re reading and are like, “I love real estate but I don’t want to be the person that has to go in and fix toilets, find new tenants, screen people and do showings,” I get that because I’ve done it. The big thing is if you invest in multifamily with an experienced operator, somebody that is pretty good in details, it’s 100% passive. You can invest, be a direct owner, get the income and appreciation. The depreciation has great tax benefits, especially if you’re a high-income earner but you don’t have to deal with it all yourself. That’s fantastic. It’s scalable. You could buy a 100-unit multifamily building for $10 million or a $1 billion multifamily portfolio. Whether you’re investing in your first deal or for twenty years and you’re looking to place $1 million or $10 million of capital, you can use the same strategy.

It’s very scalable but there’s something that I like even more. It is control. You might’ve read me talk about laying in bed at 3:00 AM, feeling like things were out of control with my money. I like real estate because you can control it. We’re acquiring a property in Greenville, South Carolina. We live in Asheville, which is about one hour away. We were down in South Carolina for my son’s Lacrosse games and took them to the property. We drove around. It was built in 1997. It’s a little beat up in the stairs. Some need to be replaced and new paint. We can control all of those things. If you own a business, you get this. Apartments are valued like a business. They’re valued by net operating income.

If you live in your home or have a rental home, it’s 1,000 square feet and sells for $300 a square foot. It’s worth $300,000. The bank figures that out because they say, “The home on your left is worth $295 a square foot. Yours is about $300 a square foot.” You don’t control that. The market goes up and down. If we go and buy an apartment building for $10 million and have $1 million of net operating income, that’s probably not a great metric. Call it a $20 million apartment building with $1 million in net operating income. We increase the net operating income to 50% from $1 million with a $20 million valuation to $1.5 million with that new valuation. You’re probably thinking to yourself with your calculators, $30 million. We control that when we’re able to move the rents by the renovations, operations, more efficient and bringing in better management. It’s passive and scalable but most importantly, it’s controllable.

We’ll break down more of this in EXTRA so we can take it a little bit slower. Did you feel like you already covered what are the important metrics? What exactly should we be looking at?

 

We can unpack this a lot more in the EXTRA section. If you’re thinking, “This sounds interesting,” which I look out for as an investor. I started as an investor in these deals. I was what’s called a limited partner before I syndicated these deals and became a general partner. If you’re a limited partner and you say, “I’m interested in this,” you need to look at three different things. Number one, the Geography. Are you investing in an area of the country that people want to move to? I wrote a whole blog post about this. I talked about how you can identify these. It’s very easy to see with reports from companies like United Van Lines. You can go on our blog at the beginning of 2021 and read the post I put on there.

You want to be in large cities where people are moving that are growing faster than the national average. Where are these cities? A lot of these are from the Southeast. Remember I said, “I moved to North Carolina for the demographics,” the Carolinas, Florida, Georgia, Texas, Phoenix, Colorado, Boise, Idaho seems to be a big one here. Why are people moving here? They’re moving out of California to places like Colorado, Texas, Idaho. They’re moving to the Southeast from places like California, LA, New England, New York. Places that are cold don’t have a great quality of life. Taxes are going up. I have a coaching client that is like, “We’re looking at South Carolina to move. Taxes are going up. We don’t want to live here anymore.”

Number two, the operator. Are you working with an operator? This is somebody that’s going and finding the property that’s going to buy the property, bring you in alongside them, they’re going to operate it and increase that net operating income. Have they done it before? Have they done it in the Geography that you’re invested in and what is their experience there? You want to ask them some tough questions like what’s their strategy. You look then at the metrics in the deal. That’s complex. We looked at over two dozen different metrics on the deals that we’re in. There’s a lot of different variables that come into play.

If you’ve ever invested in a business, business owner or professional, you can read a financial statement. If you call me and say, “I’m interested in this deal.” As an owner of these properties, you’re entitled to all the same information you would be entitled to if you go into a single-family home. You can go through those, call the operator and say, “Walk me through this. What am I seeing here and there?” Don’t be afraid to ask those questions and understand the numbers, the strategy and why an operator is going into the market.

Talk to me a little bit about ROI. Different operators do this differently. Tell us about how you structure your deals for your investors?

What we do is called syndication. It is very simple. It is an operator going out and bringing in investors alongside them to invest. What’s important is how that syndication is structured. We do what’s called, typically, our preferred return. If you look at deals, 6% to 8%, what does that mean? That means investors get the first 6% to 8% of the returns coming from that property. Investors are preferred in front of anybody else. They’re going to be subordinate to the lender. The other thing that’s nice about these properties is it’s called nonrecourse debt.

I work with a lot of doctors after spending eighteen years in the medical device profession. They don’t want more risk, debt and a bank to come after them for something. They have patients that are out for them if something bad happens. That’s a nice thing about these properties as well. After the lender, the investors get that preferred return and then there’s an equity split. A large part goes to investors and then the partners that organize these deals get the minority position in there but that’s the incentive. You want to work with the group, in my opinion. How we do it is we give the investors the first big portion of the returns, about a half of the returns upfront and the other half comes from that split on the backside. We, as partners, get a piece of that split.

We’re incentivized to maximize the profit of that property on the backend. You asked a question there and I’ll address this. There’s typically a couple of different ways to look at this. You can look at a total return. You’re going to get a 10% return comprised of half cash and half appreciation on a property. There’s also an equity multiple. Another way to look at it is you’re going to double your money over a certain period of time. There’s also the IRR, the Internal Rate of Return. We can dive deeper into the EXTRA portion of the show or you can go ahead and check out my book, which goes deeper into this as well. You can always read on a site like Investopedia, which dives deeper too. It depends on what type of investor you are. Maybe cash or the total return is important to you and it all depends on what type of investor you are.

Do you pay investors immediately? When they first invest money, are they guaranteed a certain return each year while the project is happening or how do you structure that for your people?

One little red flag, we never say guaranteed because these are investments that have a risk associated with them. If you ever heard me say, “Guaranteed,” you should either slap me on the face or stick a paper towel or something in my mouth. We have a couple of different types of investments. We have investments that we pay investors a fixed return based upon the performance of the property. Our group typically pays out monthly. We like it. There are groups that payout quarterly. It’s not necessarily better or worse but personally, I like to get money in my account every month.

People who have freedom in their day-to-day choices are mostly happier than the CEOs making enormous amounts of money. Share on X

You get some stuff on the backend, depending on how the project goes.

Typically, in multifamily syndication, you’re going to get regular cashflow, monthly, quarterly or annually. Think about it as a rental property. You’re getting rent. If you’re renting it out for $1,000 a month and your expenses are $900, you might get $100 a month. When you sell it, if you bought a property for $100,000 and you sell it for $150,000, you get that $50,000 profit on the backend. It’s very similar to that.

Do you guys do the whole refinance structure piece too or you go for the sale?

When we model out the returns on our property, which is called a Proforma, we don’t assume we’re going to refinance the property. If you’ve ever owned a rental property or have a property of your own, what’s nice is if you have HELOC, Home Equity Line Of Credit, and you pull money out of your home or an investment property, you don’t pay taxes on that when you pull that money out. You might pay taxes when you sell it but you don’t typically pay taxes when you pull it out. It’s nice. It’s very similar to what we do. A lot of times, we look to do that if the property is performing. We don’t tell investors that’s part of the plan because we want to be a little bit more conservative than that. That is a very optimal way to pull investor capital out in a tax-efficient manner.

We dove pretty deep into all of that stuff and I know we’re going to get even deeper. Ladies, definitely stay tuned for EXTRA. We’ll be talking more about the fundamentals of multifamily investing, the numbers around that and why or why not to do it. Before we move towards the end of this show, Chris, could you tell everybody how they can reach you?

If you want to dive deeper and learn a little bit more, check us out at NextLevelIncome.com. We have a podcast, which hopefully we’ll be sharing Moneeka on in the future. We have a blog and you can also get our book for free, which dives deeper into all the different aspects that we talked about. Go to the website, click on the Book link, put your address in and I’ll even send you a copy for free.

Thank you for that. That was so generous. Chris, we have three Rapid-fire questions. Tell us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate.

The best tip I can think of is to find somebody that has gone down the path you want to go down, and either ask them for advice or hire them to help be a mentor.

What would you say is a strategy to be successful in real estate investing?

Success in general is habits. Whether you want to be successful in real estate, in life, losing weight or whatever it may be, you need to focus on your daily habits. If you want to be successful in real estate as far as syndications or passive investments, that may be reviewing a deal every day and every week. If you are going out and buying your own properties, that may be contacting brokers, making phone calls and getting options out there that are coming in towards you on a regular basis.

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

 

I’ve learned a lot over the past few years. I bought my older son The Five-Minute Journal for Children and I use The Five-Minute Journal to meditate every morning. The Five-Minute Journal is basically a gratitude practice. I know you’re big on this. Happiness comes before success. You have to get in that right and abundance mindset, which is you share. You know that success or money will come to you and there’s always a deal out there. You don’t have to worry or fight over these things. Share, help other people, and other people will help you get in the right mindset. That’s what I try to do every day.

This has been an amazing show. Thank you so much for all you’ve already contributed, Chris. This has been great.

It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Ladies, stay tuned for EXTRA. We’re going to be talking more about the fundamentals of multifamily. If you are not subscribed but would like to be, please go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. You get the first seven days for free, so check it out. Download as much as you can and you can stay if it’s for you. For those of you that are leaving Chris and I, thank you so much for joining us for this portion of the show. We appreciate you. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams, so get out there, take action and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon. Bye.

 

Important Links

• Next-Level Income
• Book – Next-Level Income
• Blog Post – Where Should You Move? 5 Ways To Take Advantage Of “Geographic Arbitrage.”
• Investopedia
• Podcast – The Next-Level Income Show
• Blog – The Next-Level Income
• The Five-Minute Journal for Children
• The Five-Minute Journal
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

 

About Chris Larsen

Christopher Larsen is the founder and Managing Partner of Next-Level Income. After 18 years in the medical device industry, he dedicates his time to helping others become financially independent through education and investment opportunities. Chris has been investing in and managing real estate for over 20 years.

While completing his degree in Biomechanical Engineering and M.B.A. in Finance at Virginia Tech, he bought his first single-family rental at age 21. Chris expanded into development, private-lending, buying distressed debt as well as commercial office, and ultimately syndicating multifamily properties.

He began syndicating deals in 2016 and has been actively involved in over $350M of real estate acquisitions. In addition to real estate, Chris has invested in equities, oil & gas, and small business lending, as well as being active in Venture South, one of the nation’s Top 10 Angel Investing groups.

Chris lives with his wife and two boys in Asheville, NC where he loves spending time with them in the outdoors and enjoying the food and culture that the region has to offer.

 

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Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business To Over $1 Million In Profits In 12 Months With Mike Simmons – Real Estate For Women

 

We might think that growing our profits is going to take a lot of time, but that isn’t always the case. Sometimes, what you need is to do a bit of level jumping, and today’s guest is just the right person to teach you how. Moneeka Sawyer is joined in this episode by real estate investor and author Mike Simmons in a great discussion on jumping to the next level. Mike shares his story of getting into the real estate space, and the challenges he faced along the way. Mike also shares his insights on success in the business and the things he learned as an investor.  

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business To Over $1 Million In Profits In 12 Months With Mike Simmons – Real Estate For Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am so excited to welcome to the show, Mike Simmons. He is a real estate investor, podcaster and speaker who shared the stage with Gary Vaynerchuk at his Agent 2021 Conference. He is a Co-Owner of the wholesaling company, Return On Investments, Producer and Host of the popular podcast, Just Start Real Estate, which I was just on and a partner in 7 Figure Flipping, one of the nation’s largest real estate mastermind groups. He owns sixteen rental properties and has wholesaled and flipped over 80 properties in 2020. He wrote the book titled Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months, which tells the story of his success as a real estate investor.  

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Mike, welcome to the show. 

Thanks for having me. You’re awesome. I can say that because I had an hour–long conversation with you. Thank you for having me. 

You’re welcome. My pleasure. Ladies, we did this fun thing. We’re doing an episode swap. We did it in one big chunk. I don’t always do it this way. It is fun to get to have a long in–depth conversation with you. This has been amazing so far. I’m excited about what you’re going to share. 

There are a lot of people who do real estate, work full time, and love their job. They don't want to leave. Share on X

I appreciate it. I’m more excited to do this. I get the benefit of knowing you’re super cool and fun, even before we get started.  

Mike, give us a high–level, two–minute version of your story of how you got started in real estate. 

My story is relatable, which makes it normal. I worked from 9:00 to 5:00. I was in corporate. I went and got my degree much after high school. Ten years after I graduated, I went back and got my degree. The reason is right out of high school, I got a job working for UPS. It was a union. In my family, we were all Midwestern union–minded. My parents, all they wanted for me was to get into a job that had a good strong union. They thought that was it. That was the end game. Once I did that, I thought, “I didn’t love high school so why would I go to college.” I am in a union. This is what my parents said I’m supposed to do. I start working for UPS. Long story short, it wrecked my back at a young age. I couldn’t get out of bed without going to the chiropractor 3 to 4 times a week. I was on the road to being a cripple in my twenties. I was smart enough to look around and go, ” I can’t do this for the rest of my life. Something has got to change.”  

I went into the automotive industry. I’m from Michigan. Everyone goes into the automotive industry. I did that. There was good pay, good benefits. I liked it. It was fun. I was lured away from school there too. We went through this recession. This real downturn and the automotive industry took a hit. People were getting laid off like crazy. I had to be honest with myself. The one thing I learned in growing up with a dad who’s a Marine is how to be very self–critical. I am not someone who has a hard time understanding their faults. When I looked around at this time in my life, I said, “There are so many layoffs happening. I don’t have a college degree. I have some experience. Honestly, if I were a company and hiring and some HR, I wouldn’t hire me. Why would I hire me? There are more qualified people. People with degrees and more experienced. I am very expendable right now.”  

That scared me. I went back to college. I don’t use what I got in college anymore but I went back to college. What college did for me was it expanded my mind a little bit. It made me think about the possibilities. I started thinking about things that I never thought about before like retirement, investing and saving. Up to that point, I’m paycheck–to–paycheck like a lot of people. It’s stupid but that’s what I did. I started looking into the stock market and day trading. We talked about that a bit on my podcast. I did that for a while but I hated it. I didn’t like the stock market. It was boring to me. I needed something more exciting. I came across real estate. I decided this is what I want to do. I love this. I’m interested in it. It’s definitely a vehicle to get me where I want to go. I did the worst possible thing that you could ever do when you make a decision in your life that you want to do something was I got paralysis analysis. I started overthinking it.  

I started reading books, taking courses and going to seminars. I was educating myself to the point that I was overwhelmed with information and I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I don’t know enough about anything. It’s sad to say the reason I called my podcast Just Start Real Estate is because I realized the biggest problem people have with success is they don’t even get started. I decided in 2003 that I wanted to be a real estate investor. I didn’t buy my first house until 2008. I spent five years paralyzed with fear. Paralyze thinking, “What are people going to say if I screw this up? What will my parents say? What will my wife say? Will I lose money? Will I look dumb?” All these crazy thoughts that people have legitimately. I was frozen with that for five years before I got started. The first house I bought, flipped, and made money was like being stuck underwater until you almost are ready to pass out and then being thrust above water. I took this deep breath of air. For the first time, I felt like I was doing what I meant to do and that was to create my own destiny. That was how it started. 

 

That’s quite a visual. I felt that viscerally. It is interesting. We talked about this on your podcast, too, that entrepreneurial mindset. Being in corporate, for me, was being held underwater. It was suffocating, dying and miserable. I worked for great companies. I had a great job and great bosses. There was nothing wrong. It just wasn’t right for me. When I was able to get out there, it was taking that big gasp of air and feeling, “Finally, I get to be me.” 

If you’re not an entrepreneur, it can be a scary, terrifying thing. That’s how you know that you might not be cut out for that. For the people who go, “I feel like I’m alive for the first time,” that’s where you’re supposed to be. That’s how I felt. 

What’s interesting is that there’s a place for real estate investing in all of that whether you’re a corporate, executive, single mom, single dad or entrepreneur. In all of those places, that’s the beauty of real estate. There’s room for an investor strategy. Wouldn’t you agree? 

100%. I know a lot of people that do real estate, work full time and love their job. They don’t want to leave. It’s something that helps them supplement and get them to where they want to go faster. For some people, it’s what they want to do. They don’t want to be in corporate. I was like you. I was miserable. I wasn’t the best employee because I was difficult. I always had an opinion of how things should be done. I was not necessarily beloved by all of my managers and things because I was difficult for them. I constantly had a way about how I wanted to do things. It was good to understand where I belong. I always tell folks, “In growing up my world, there was this gravitational pole. The gravitational pole was toward the security of air, unions, working hard and saving your money. That was it.” To become an entrepreneur, was like escaping gravity. It took a lot of energy. It took me twenty years. I skipped over it. I was working for someone else for twenty years before I got started in real estate. It took me that long to break out of the expectational grips that my parents had. It was no fault of theirs. They loved me. They were one of the best. That’s what they knew. That’s what they thought was the best thing for me so it took a while. 

You talk a lot about creating a business that can operate without you. That’s real estate. That’s the dream. You go from a solopreneur to this business. As I say, I work 5 to 10 hours a month. I work very little on this. I call it my multimillion–dollar side hustle. That’s what we want. A business that we don’t have to trade time for money with. Talk a little bit more about that. 

The worst thing you can do is go off from working eight hours a day for someone else to work sixteen hours a day for yourself. That’s not the goal. For me, what that looked like? I won’t lie. I think I’m a slow learner because it took me about 5 or 6 years to dial in and understand what it took to run a business. Up until then, I was running what I like to lovingly call a lemonade stand. The lemonade stand was making a lot of money. It was being run the same way a five-year-old runs a lemonade stand. I ‘m taking money in one hand and handing it in another. I don’t know what’s what and it’s just crazy. Going from a solopreneur to someone who is running a business, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I bounced around. I stayed local. Everyone I talked to was friends, family and a couple of people REIAs who weren’t doing anything interesting in their business. My mind wasn’t able to grow much because, like a goldfish, I was in a very small bowl. That was the entire real estate world to me. These few folks I talked to.  

It wasn’t until I was put in a much bigger bowl that I was like, “There is room to grow here. There are people doing some cool things that I’m not doing.” Specifically, the number one thing that got me out of that little bowl and allowed me to have access to people who were doing things that I wanted to do but I didn’t know how to get, there was no bridge for me to get to where they are. They were in another location with no way of getting there. To create that bridge, I needed to surround myself with people who were where I am at that time and got there. That was a mastermind. If it isn’t a mastermind then at least a mentor who has your best interests at heart which sometimes can be tricky or a coach or somebody. You need to put yourself in an environment with a person or ideally people who are beyond where you are in business and can help you bridge the gap between what you know and what they know that got them to where they are.  

I met a guy named Andy. A very close friend of mine. I went on vacation with him. At the time when I met him, I was running about $200,000 a year gross profits. I don’t want to get CPA here because I’m not. He was doing about $2 million at the time. I was, “You have the business that I want. You have employees. You have people work for you. You have nothing but free time. You’re not doing much most of the time and you’re running this business. How did you get there?” He said, “It took me four years to get from where I am.” I sat down with him over the course of time. He laid out some of the things that move the needle for him to get them to where he was, not just the things that work but the things he tried that intuitively make sense and I would have tried. That didn’t work so well and why it didn’t work. He showed me this field, the path he took and he pointed out the landmines.  

It's virtually impossible to run a company at scale without people if you value your time. Share on X

If you’re running through a field with landmines, you have them all clearly marked and there’s a path where you go. It may take you four years to get across that field with no information. I said, “Why can’t I do what you did in four years? Organically, you figured out. Why can’t I do that in one year? Can I?” He said, “Sure. There’s no reason why you can’t.” That’s the groundwork for my book. How did I do it in one year? That’s what I lay out. I took all of his plans. I compressed everything he did slowly and methodically into a year and I executed it. Now, what’s the difference between me and somebody else? Nothing, except when I go to you, Moneeka and say, “You are successful. I want to emulate what you did because I think what you did was smart. I’m interested. Can you please tell me what you did?” You say, “Sure. Here’s exactly what I did.” What I don’t do in that situation is question you and say, “That doesn’t work in my mind. You had an advantage.” None of that. I just did it. I didn’t question it.  

That’s part of being raised by a Marine. Guess what you don’t do when a marine tells you what to do when you’re eleven? You don’t question them. You do it right. That served me well in that instance because I just said, “This guy knows what he’s talking about. I believe it. He’s telling me. Why would I question them?” I didn’t. I executed and went from being a $200,000 gross profit business to over $1 million in gross profit within twelve months. I did that within a year. All I did was follow a blueprint that was put out before me. 

There are some things I want to highlight there. First of all, when you decide to follow or take instructions for somebody, make sure a couple of things. Make sure you want to be in their shoes. There’s a couple of things to remember there. First of all, don’t take advice from someone who is not where you want to be. I used to always say don’t take investing advice from someone who’s broke. Don’t take real estate advice from someone who’s afraid of real estate. You want to be in their shoes. Also, the core mission of their business should be similar to yours.  

For instance, for me, money is great but freedom is more important so freedom of choice and time. When I go to talk to somebody, I want instructions from someone who has freedom of time and freedom of choice, as you did. You went to somebody that has this multimillion-dollar business of revenue each year. They have all this free time. You didn’t go to somebody who has a multimillion-dollar business but working sixteen hours a day. They’re out there. They’re a million. They’re a dime, a dozen. When you’re choosing that person to follow, make sure there’s someone you want to be in their shoes and their life, not jealously, none of that stuff. You’re not aspiring to be them but you’re looking at their life and you want a similar life for yourself. Then follow instructions because they know things that you don’t know. You will make mistakes along the way and they will have the answers for you. After that, you can adjust it once you get good at their system. You can make it your own system. Don’t do that initially. Yes, you’re smart but you’re following somebody for a reason. They’re smarter than you in this way. 

The crazy thing is, being smart is not necessarily a prerequisite for being successful. There’s a lot of smart people that fail. Find a successful formula and follow it. As you said, find the recipe that works. Make it the way they tell you to make it. If it tastes great, great. If you want to adjust it afterward, fine but you have the formula. You know how to do it. I totally agree with you. To your point, somebody who you admire. Someone who you look at and say, “They are in a position that I would like to be in, freedom of time, freedom, money, all that stuff” He fits that bill. He’s still a mentor of mine. He’s still somebody who I look up to and has my best interests at heart. He’s a great guy who I think a lot of. 

You do a full breakdown of what you did in your book, correct? 

Yes. Here’s the thing. One of the things that I’ve learned over the years that I’ve been in business is most people think it’s the software or specific technique that you employ. It’s not. It’s a little bit less sexy than that. It’s a little bit more of belief systems, structure and things like that. For me, going from what I was bouncing around, as a wholesaler flipper, a deal or two a month going to 10 to 15 deals a month, the difference was a couple of things. Number one, I had to learn that every time I bought a house, it should not be a brand new adventure where I change all of my systems and processes. As a flipper, I was walking through the aisles of Home Depot and Lowe’s picking out countertops. It’s, “I’ve already done 30 flips. Why am I coming up with a brand new pallet every single time?” That’s illogical and inefficient. It’s why my bandwidth was only allowing me to do so much.  

 

I learned to systemize and create processes that were easily trainable and downloadable so that people could take those processes. Go with them and I didn’t have to be the person doing all the thinking all the time. I learned to create systems and processes that were repeatable that could have efficiencies and economies of scale. That was number one. The second thing was, I learned to track numbers. I was running a lemonade stand. If you ask most five–year–olds how much money they made that day, they hand you a bunch of money. That’s how I was running my business. I learned that I have to track things. I need to track my KPIs.  

I have a couple of different sets of KPIs that I use, key performance indicators. Some of them are what I call my island numbers. My island numbers are if I were stranded on an island or vacationing on an island and somebody gave me this handful of numbers. I would reasonably know the health of my company based on this handful of numbers. It’s not all telling. I wouldn’t know if I’m succeeding or failing by looking at these numbers. That’s important. Certain departments have more granular numbers. At the end of the day, if you don’t understand what money is going out and what money is working when it comes to marketing, real estate investors may be using 2, 3, 4, 5 different marketing channels. They know they’re getting deals and making money but they don’t know which marketing channels are working. Should some of them be turned off? Should some of them be turned up because they’re very profitable and the other one is not profitable? You don’t know because they all blend together and not paying attention. Watching my numbers, knowing my numbers and when it comes to KPIs, we’ll get deeper into this during the EXTRA but as a high–level thing. I think that there are two separate categories when it comes to metrics or KPIs.  

There are performance, result–based, result–oriented numbers, and activity numbers. We’ll break that down a little bit more. Sometimes, tracking the activity can be as or more important than tracking the actual results. We’ll get into that deeper. I did that. The third thing that I learned and dialed in was the hiring part of it. It’s virtually impossible to run a company at scale without people if you value your time. You can do it on your own but even Superman can’t be in two places at once. He can get to a place and be very fast or Wonder Woman but you can’t get there at the same time. I learned that hiring people effectively and hiring the right people cannot only make me more money but also free up my time. Some people think if I hire people, I don’t make as much. No. You hire the right people, you make a lot more and you get your time back.  

I learned that. In the beginning, I hired so poorly. There are a lot of nuances to it that we can get in deeper to but some of it was I was hiring people based on their resume alone. I wasn’t giving any thought to culture fit. Do they have the same values as me and my company? We had to go through some pretty crazy amount of people in that first couple of years because I was hiring with only one thought in mind. I talked about this on my podcast. When you get into business and all you care about is money, it’s going to be tough. I would rather hire great people and train them to be good at their job than hire someone who appears to be good at the job on paper and maybe not the greatest personality fit or value fit with my company. That was huge for me. 

Our conversations are so robust and so exciting to me. They just slip away from us.  

I’m surprised it’s been this long. I love talking about this stuff. 

What I want to do is let the ladies know that in EXTRA, we’re going to talk about business partnerships. I have a business partner. I know how valuable that can be. It’s also something that we haven’t talked about in the show. He also brought up some good points on what those actions are. We talked about results versus activity results. We’re going to talk a little bit about that. We’re also going to talk about hiring and scaling a team. This is a place where I, Moneeka, fall down almost 100% of the time. I have some good people that are working for me now. It’s been years of me and I would rather my ladies don’t have to go through what I’ve been through. I’m no expert. I think it would be fun. If we got the time in EXTRA, we’ll try to cover that too. Those are my objectives for EXTRA. Ladies, stay tuned. That is going to be so juicy. I’m excited about it. Before we end this show, Mike, could you tell my ladies where they can reach you? 

Thank you for that. If you want to find out more about me and what I’m up to, you can always go to MikeSimmons.com. That always has the latest and greatest stuff that I’m working on or what I’m involved in. Also, we referenced a few times. You guys should definitely go and check out Moneeka on my show, Just Start Real Estate. We have fun conversations like this. We don’t always just ask the hardcore real estate stuff. We talk a little bit about life and things. Go, check that out. I’d love to have you. 

Are you ready for our three rapid–fire questions? 

There's nothing better than having someone who's been there and who will show you how to get there. Share on X

I’m so ready. Let’s do this. 

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

I would say find someone local, hopefully, that has blazed some of that path for you and just ask for advice. There’s nothing better than having someone who’s been there and show you how to get there. That’s what people don’t do enough to ask for help when they need it. 

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

This is not necessarily a positive look at it but I always think back to corporate and the thought of that scares me enough to make me get out of bed in the morning. It’s a little bit of motivating me a little more than pleasure sometimes but I never want to go back to that. That’s what I do. 

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

One of my superpowers is I’m very good at compartmentalizing. What I do is when I’m working, I’m working. I’m full–in and full–on. Everyone knows, don’t knock on the door. Don’t come in. Don’t bother me. When I’m not working, I am 1,000% into my family, kids and wife. I’m very good about not checking messages. I’m focused on her. I’m focused on them. I put up high and very thick walls between the things that are important between work and family. When I’m doing one, I’m not doing both. 

That’s a hard thing to do. 

When you’re talking to your spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend or someone, one of the biggest turnoff moves in the world is to look at your phone and read a message while they’re talking. It’s so rude. You’re holding your phone. You’re running a business. It could be important. It’s hard to not look but, what does it tell the person that you’re across from whether it’s your kids, your husband? What does it tell them when they’re talking, you look down, and your reading? It’s the rudest thing in the world. I try to be careful about that. 

Mike, this has been such a good conversation. I can’t wait for the next part. Thank you for what you’ve offered so far. 

Thank you for having me. It’s been fun. I cannot believe how fast times go. 

I know it’s fun. Ladies, stay tuned for EXTRA. We’re going to talk about the actions that you can take to build your business, hiring a team and building a partnership. All of those things that EXTRA. We got a lot of stuff we’re going to cover so stay tuned. If you’re already subscribed to EXTRA, you can stay tuned and if you’re not but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. You get seven days for free. You can check it out. If it’s not for you, you don’t need to stay. For those of you that are leaving us now, thank you so much for joining Mike and I for this portion of the show. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon. Bye. 

 

Important Links

• Mike Simmons
  
• Return On Investments
  
• Just Start Real Estate
  
• 7 Figure Flipping
  
• Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months
  
• Moneeka Sawyer – past episode of Just Start Real Estate Podcast
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com 

 

About Mike Simmons

As the owner of a successful real estate investing company, lending company, and also a partner in one of the country’s largest real estate mentorship/mastermind companies, I specialize in helping entrepreneurs create systems, processes, and automations that allow them to work on their business and not be a slave to it.

I am also the producer and host of my own online show, Just Start Real Estate, and have conducted over 350 interviews with entrepreneurs who run 6, 7, and 8 figure businesses. Additionally, I have a new book that is now available on Amazon: Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in 12 Months.

 

 

 

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Join the Real Estate Investing for Women Community today:

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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

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How To Up Your Social Media Game To Grow Your Business With Lyndsay Phillips – Real Estate Women

 

There’s no denying that social media is here to stay, and billions of people are now active on socials, which is why businesses are stepping up their social media game. The growing number of people using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and other social platforms is why business owners invest in content marketing. Moneeka Sawyer is joined by Lyndsay Phillips, a content marketing expert and the Founder and Owner of Smooth Sailing Business Growth, to share how a business can attract and convert customers faster through social media. Lyndsay shares how she got into content marketing and talks about the importance of having an avatar, the difference between using a post, a story, or a live, and how to utilize those. She also explains how socials can be used to build better relationships.

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

How To Up Your Social Media Game To Grow Your Business With Lyndsay Phillips – Real Estate Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am excited to welcome to the show Lyndsay Phillips, Founder and Owner of Smooth Sailing Business Growth and Real Estate Investors Marketing. Lyndsay is the go-to content marketing expert who helps clients attract and convert customers faster. Lyndsay is featured on MSN, NBC, Fox, published in Home Service MAX Magazine, and has guested on a ton of podcasts including JLD’s Entrepreneurs On Fire, which I have been on also and Joe Fairless’s Best Ever Show.

She’s a serial podcaster with shows like Smooth Business Growth Podcast and now co-hosts the REI Marketing show. Speaking at events such as Dream Business Academy, Podfest and Service Business Edge. She has shared the stage with Mike Michalowicz and Jay Abraham. She’s working with successful real estate investors. She’s increased her product audience, extended their reach and built their authority status through content marketing.

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Lyndsay, how are you?

I’m glad to see your beautiful face again.

Welcome back to the show. Could you tell us a little bit about your story and how you’ve got involved in this? I know that you help real estate investors, too. There aren’t a lot of content marketers that help investors. Tell me a little bit about how you’ve got into that.

Social Media Game: It’s great to create blogs, podcasts, videos, and information on your website, but if you’re not talking about the right topics, the right places, or their language, you’re not going to attract anybody.

I started as a VA and then niche down into content marketing. I found that it was working well for my clients. I love the creativity and the psychology behind attracting, building relationships and converting. I was working with a friend of mine, Aaron, who’s a real estate investor copywriter. He introduced me to some investors that were struggling with their marketing. I started doing work for them and helping them out. It grew. I have been on podcasts. I’m establishing a name for myself and realize that there aren’t a lot of services out there, whether it’s online marketing, digital content or whatever that are geared towards real estate investors because it is a unique industry and there are much to understand. I love it.

Talk to us about why it’s important to have an avatar? I want to give a little perspective on ladies on why we are asking this question. If you are not in marketing, one of the things that we do in marketing is pick an avatar of our ideal client, listener, tenant or home seller. There are a lot of different avatars. An avatar simply means the person that would be perfect to do business with. For me, you ladies know that when I buy a house, the very first thing that I’m thinking about is my tenant avatar. That tenant avatar is my business partner. This is the person that I want to do business with.

I picked the tenant avatar, which is executives and then I started to look for houses that the avatar would like to live in. I find the house, and then I go and advertise to that avatar. First of all, the property attracts them but also my understanding of who they are attracts them and what their needs are. An executive, for instance, does not want a landlord that’s breathing down their throat. They do not want a landlord that defers all maintenance and telling them what to do. They are executives. They are used to being the boss, not be bossed around. I understand who they are. For them to do business with me is easy. I provide a house that they will love.

Avatar is a marketing term that we use and it sounds a little bit like markety. It sounds a little bit voodooey but it’s relevant in everything that we do. Ladies, if you are single and you are looking for a guy, you should have an avatar of that man or whatever it is. VA or whoever it is that you are trying to attract, whatever the customer looks like, you want to have an avatar. Talk to me a little bit more about your perspective on that.

Customers don’t want nonsense. They want to get to the point and get things done so they can move on with their busy lives. Click To Tweet

It’s great to create blogs, podcasts, videos, lead magnets and information on your website but if you are not talking about the right topics, the right places or their language, then you are not going to attract anybody. As you said, you are attracting executives. If you were attracting elderly people, they don’t probably watch videos, listen to podcasts or wouldn’t necessarily be on Instagram, let’s say. What appeals to them, their lifestyle, pain points and what they want in life is different. When you are thinking about what content, there are many options out there. It can be overwhelming. We are talking about Clubhouse and that’s like, “Another thing.”

There are many options and it can be like, “What do I do? Where do I do it? What am I going to talk about?” The first thing that you need to do is think about who you are attracting? Ask questions. Think about the three best deals that you have put together or your three best tenants. Think about it like, “Why did they come to you? What were their concerns? What kind of questions did they ask? Where did they find you? Where do they hang out? What do they even do in a day? What are they like as an executive?” They don’t want nonsense. They want to get to the point and get it done so they can move on with their busy lives. Where like seniors, they were a little slower, they take their time and there are more thought processes. The whole way of digesting information, accessing it and making that decision is different. It will affect everything that you do.

Also, how you do business with them. With executives, they were excited to get a text from me. With an older and elderly person, she wants me to come by, say hello, hang out with her for an hour and have tea because that’s how they have always done business. We’ve got all these great new tools but that doesn’t excite them. There are a lot of different kinds of people. I have some people that are all in the construction industry, which is great right now with COVID-19. The conversation is different with them. The way that I meet with them, they want me to have a relationship with their kids so that I understand the way the family works for them and those things. The way that each of us does business is a little different but we can be included in a grouping and the way that we show up in the world.

When you think about the marketing, you can’t look at it from your perspective like, “I want to rent out my property, I want to sell this multifamily home, I want a deal and I need a partner.” They are not going to give a crap about what you want. You should think about what they want like losing sleepovers or what kind of decisions they are making. That’s what you need to base all of your decisions on. If you are worried about like, “Should I be on Clubhouse? Should I be on Instagram?” Just think, “Are they?”

I remember one of my clients was like, “We’ve got to be on Snapchat. It’s the new greatest thing.” I’m like, “Your peeps don’t even know what Snapchat is.” Why waste your time, effort and money putting marketing in that avenue when you can’t even survey people and find out. They were on YouTube and watching videos all the time. He spent more time and effort doing videos, which by the way, is good because it helps you connect with someone faster because they are looking in your eyes and they can see your personality if you are like them. You get to read for people.

You can build relationships faster by podcasting and by doing videos because you are going to cut to the chase and front of the line much faster. You need to think about where they are hanging out. Do they listen to podcasts? Do they watch videos? Do they love to read? Like my one client, his peeps don’t read. We don’t do a lot of blogs because they don’t care, they don’t have time and they couldn’t care less. For me, like entrepreneurs, I love blogs, picking out tips and stuff like that. I do a lot of blogs. You need to think about, “Where are you going to hang out? What kind of content are you going to put out?” That’s going to help you drive what topics you are going to talk about and what kind of language you are going to use. All those things will help you drive and create that content marketing that is going to attract much faster.

I had a place that came empty during COVID-19. This is an interesting thing, ladies, to think about is when you are reading this, you are out there looking at things on YouTube or you are in these communities, which I encourage you to network, find out what that avatar is going to look like. I found out that a lot of my peers are finding their new tenants through the Facebook Marketplace. I will be the first to admit that I am not doing the whole Facebook thing since the pandemic started.

Social Media Game: You can build relationships faster by podcasting and doing videos because you’re going to cut to the chase and in front of the line much faster.

There has been a lot of negativity. Part of my defense for my immune system is to make sure that there’s little negativity comes in as possible because we do have to pay attention to what’s going on and it’s scary. In my spare time, I want to feed myself yummy stuff. It was not showing up on Facebook and the news. It was not showing up in those places and also in other places. The point is, even though I was not on Facebook, I heard this thing that everybody is getting their stuff on the Facebook Marketplace. I looked at the avatar of the Facebook Marketplace and I didn’t have an idea of who was there because I hadn’t been there. What was fascinating about this thing is I go to Realtor.com, Zillow and Craigslist. Those are the places that I normally advertise and of course, I did those things and then I threw an ad up on the Facebook Marketplace. The response on the Facebook Marketplace was 10 to 1 on the other ones.

I would get one on Zillow, one on Craigslist, zero on Realtor.com and then I would get twenty on Facebook. The quality of the ones on Facebook was not necessarily good but within three days, I have three applications from the Facebook Marketplace. It’s true that as the times are changing, people are also changing. Where I may not have thought that an executive and an executive’s wife are on the Facebook Marketplace, that’s not true. What I’m trying to say is that finding out who your avatar now is great and that person is going to evolve the same way that you are evolving. You have to be aware that an avatar is a person. It is a person, it is not a stick figure, people, and technology changes and all of that stuff too.

That’s a great point. Even being connected with people like you, me or Facebook groups, ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. You don’t have to know everything like, “Where’s everyone getting the most action on this?” Feel free to test. If you were like, “I don’t know, I’m on the fence.” You can test something for a while. If it works, great, you are going to run with it. If it doesn’t, good to know. It’s okay to test. It’s not like you are spending $1 million and you are jumping in. If it fails, that’s okay, too.

That’s a little bit about the avatar. Now, what do you post?

Everyone gets stumped like, “What do I write every day?” That’s why many people are not consistent with their society because they have no idea what to write. For me, I love recycling, reusing and leveraging a piece of content. If you have a podcast episode, a blog or a video because you can just transcribe the video, you are going to share that and share more than once. Also, you can splinter little bits and pieces out of it. I call these snackable bites. Let’s say, for instance, you have a blog. It’s like the five limiting beliefs of real estate investors or whatever it may be. There are five points right there so you can take one piece and make a social media post and pretty meme, quote or graphic. Just stands alone and doesn’t link anywhere that’s shareable. You can ask questions like, “What do you think about this? Do you prefer this or this? Are you this kind of person? Do you find that this holds you back?” People love to state their opinion and people want to share more about themselves. You want engagement. You want interaction. That’s one of the easiest. Ask a wacko question.

You have taken your blog, you have splintered it and take out little snackable bites. You can also do a video on that topic. People aren’t going to remember, “Didn’t she do a blog on that topic that she’s talking about?” This is like extra content and then you can even share other people’s content. You are a wealth of information, Moneeka, and other sources, BiggerPockets or whoever. Whatever articles that you find or tidbits of information, it is okay to share. To me, you are not lowering your authority by doing so. You are serving your audience, you are showing that you are learning more, reading what’s trending, what’s going on, you are showing that you care, you want them to be informed and it’s super easy to do. You don’t even have to think about it.

Many people don’t do this but the last point I want to share is to share what’s going on in your life. You did an ad in the marketplace that you weren’t sure and you were like, “Look at the results I’ve got.” You can share that, “I have my doubts. I gave it a try. Here’s what my results were.” Share what’s going on in your daily life. It’s okay if it doesn’t work. You can be vulnerable. That’s fine. People want to know what’s working for you, how you are doing your thing, how you are rocking it, what’s going on behind the scenes and they want to know your personality. They want to know about you. If that doesn’t fill up your week with social, I don’t know what will.

You can plan it. You can say, “I don’t like doing videos so maybe I will just do that once a week. I will write a blog once a week. I will break it up.” We have little bites episodes. You can do that in one minute or you can do it in Stories or whatever. You can plan that out like, “This day, I’m going to ask a question. This day, I’m going to do this right.” You don’t have to think through it every single day, every single week. You can let that go.

It gets old fast does. For us, we do it for our clients as well but even for me and whoever. It’s like a batch task. The first week of a given month, maybe you dedicate that to creating content, your podcast, your blog and your video. The following week, you can take little bits out, splinter and make some pretty graphics. The next week, you pre-schedule it, then you’ve got a week off, and then you do it all over again. As long as you are in a routine and you have a system. If you have a system, you can farm some of it off to a team member, VA or content marketer. It just does itself.

Sometimes, it’s geographic-specific and sometimes, for me, it’s national or international. My reach is quite large for my show but when I’m renting a home, it’s more specific. How do you decide what to post for each of those to extend your reach for that if we want to be geographic specific or we want to be broader and more widespread?

You are right, some investors work in a specific geographic location or other entrepreneurs too. They were more bricks and mortar or what have you. It’s important to be an integral part of your community like liking the Better Business Bureau or the downtown core Chamber of Commerce. I don’t know what you have in the States compared to Canada but those associations and charities, finding out what is even going on in the news in your area and the current events of like, “It’s a Peach Festival next weekend.” It shows that you are a part and a leader in the community, which is huge.

Following all of those, liking, commenting and sharing those posts, DM them and ask them what’s going on, the more you communicate and network within your community and you are sharing what’s going on, people will see that and it will be reciprocal. The other great tip is if you are mentioning someone and tagging them if you are talking about commercial buildings or what’s going on, you can tag them, and then same with hashtags. Hashtag your city or your region. A lot of times people will search houses in Detroit or whatever that may be. That helps target and get you in front of that audience as well.

Why would you use a story instead of a post? What’s the difference? I’m always posting and I don’t even know what stories are. That’s true on Instagram as well as on Facebook. How do you use them?

Everyone is getting off on that kick. Stories, when you open up it’s easier to see it in your mobile app than it is on desktop. You will see right at the top almost like a slider of these long posts, normally Instagram or square posts. They will only be up for a day. They are up and they go, however, you can save them to your Highlights on Instagram to store them and people can go in there, keep them and look at them. It’s where everyone goes automatically. It’s right at the top and it’s eye-catching. You are going to grab their attention first with the Stories than you are in the News Feed.

We all know Facebook, its algorithms, the News Feed and they pick and choose for you. I don’t know too much about the algorithms when it comes to Stories and that, but I do know from my own experience that I’m more apt to see something throughout the Stories. They are cute, some of them have moving images and they are like little clips. If you do a bunch of Stories in a day, they stockpile. It almost reads like a little movie because they show a whole bunch of them together. You can see someone’s day in action if they are on there a lot and doing a bunch of Stories but you are going to grab people’s attention quicker. It’s more work.

When it comes to social, if you think about how you can help people and create a conversation, you will naturally make that next step. Click To Tweet

I wonder, “With all of this stuff, how am I going to get my work done? How do I do all this without completely consuming my life?”

That’s where systems are so key. I use Canva. Say you are creating images for social, you can just resize it to Instagram Stories and then you can add layers on top, tweak it and stuff like that. They do have a lot of fancy templates and you can go full-on all out. The app itself like Instagram on your phone, it’s quicker to do it on the fly that way. As long as you have a system or you are in a routine like, “Every morning, I’m going to take one of my pictures, do my little thing, and then fire it off on Instagram.” You can also connect Instagram to Facebook so that whatever story you put on Instagram automatically goes to Facebook Stories. There are a little few automation tricks that will at least save you a bit of time.

There are Stories and then there are Lives. Talk to me a little bit about the difference between those and how to utilize those.

Lives are like a video but it’s not prerecorded. You pick up the phone, hit the little Go Live button and you are instantly talking or you are showing up on video. The great thing about lives, especially on Facebook, is it notifies anyone that you are following to say, “Lyndsay is Live.” You can grab their attention versus if you upload a video directly to Facebook, they are not going to get that notification. The beauty of a live is that you can communicate with people in live time. If they are commenting, they like heart and a little heart goes up and you are like, “Joanna, how’s it going?” You can respond, and then it will stay up after that. If people aren’t on Facebook right then in there, they are still going to consume it. It’s still evergreen. You can also use an app called Repurpose.io, any live that you do, it can automatically strip the audio for a podcast, format it for IGTV, and flip it over to YouTube so you can feed your YouTube channel. There are automation tools so that you can take a Live Facebook, use it and leverage it in different ways. That way, you can save a ton of time.

With live, it still pops up like, “Moneeka is Live right now,” but the Story stays up for a whole day. Is that true?

It’s 24 hours.

How do you use social to build better relationships? I know that we are going to talk a lot more deeply about this in EXTRA but give us a high level of what we should be considering around that.

To me, I’m like, “You want to showcase your expertise in social media through the content that you are sharing. You want to show that you are professional, that you are branded, that you’ve got that credibility and you want to talk about stuff that’s going to attract the right prospects.” It’s great to attract but then if nothing happens after that, it’s all a moot point. If you think of it as a way to connect with people, have conversations, show your personality and care, then you are good.

That’s why I like some of those posts that you do. They are like engagement questions. You are asking them. Think of it like how can I make it a two-way thing versus me pushing info on pushing promo out. When someone comments, comment back. You can even DM them and take the conversation off there and like, “How is it going?” You can ask them more questions. It even strengthens that relationship even further. “I’ve got a great resource that maybe was helpful, I know someone that knows how to do that. Let me connect you with that person.” Think about how you can help them and create a conversation. If those two things are always in the back of your mind when it comes to social, then you will naturally make that next step. Does that help?

It does help. I know this is a much larger topic than what you can say in one little paragraph. That’s why ladies, I asked Lyndsay to go into more depth about what that will look like and how to structure that. We are going to be talking about that on EXTRA. That’s going to be an EXTRA. Before we close this part of the show, Lyndsay, could you tell people how they can get in touch with you?

They can go to SmoothBusinessGrowth.com and if they go to SmoothBusinessGrowth.com/moneeka, they can get free content.

We’ve got a couple of cool gifts. We’ve got free content for two weeks if you go to SmoothBusinessGrowth.com/moneeka. The second gift is at SmoothBusinessGrowth.com/bliss. Could you tell us about that one?

It’s our done for your services. We have monthly where we have content that you can take, go and post it. We have more high-end services where we will brand it, customize it and schedule it for you so that you don’t have to worry about it at all.

When you go to that link, do you get one month for free or do you get a discount? How does that work?

The prices are right there but with the Moneeka, you do get two weeks of free content like blogs, emails, video scripts and images.

Are you ready for our three rapid-fire questions?

Go for it.

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

To me, even if you are scared, do it anyway. I built my business on that premise. It’s like I was petrified by doing podcasts, videos and speaking on stage, and I’m like, “I’m just going to do it anyway.” It may not be perfect at first but you take that next step by taking action, it automatically propels your business forward.

What would you say is one strategy to be successful as a real estate investor?

I would say being consistent. If you are a podcaster, keep doing your podcast every week. If you are blogging, do your blog every week, if you are doing live videos, be consistent with those. You have to be in front of people’s faces and be in contact with them constantly. People are like, “You are everywhere and you are doing all these things.” It naturally builds your authority and reaches you as well. You can’t take six months off. You have to be consistent.

You can take six months off, you just have to plan for it.

You have your team do all this stuff.

That’s right. As for me, I’m often recorded four months out so at least I can take two months off anytime that I wanted. As we were talking about, when you are setting up your systems, you can plan this stuff out.

Social Media Game: The beauty of a live is that you can communicate with people in live time and respond to them, and it will stay up after that.

Absolutely.

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

I would love to say it’s meditation or yoga but it’s not.

A lot of people say that on this show.

It’s not gratitude. I’m a no-nonsense kind of girl. It is my calendar and my project management tool. If I don’t go to that every morning, figure out what my priorities are and what my to-do list is, I would be lost and I would be chaotic, not efficient, not productive and I would never get anything done.

What is the software you use?

I use Teamwork but Basecamp is great and there’s Podio. There are so many. Some of them are a little bit over the top but as long as it keeps you organized, especially if you’ve got team members in there, and then recurring tasks that you don’t have to think about it, your tasks will pop up and say, “I’ve got to work on that this week.” No one wants to drop a ball.

Thank you so much for everything you have offered on this portion of the show. I’m excited about what we are talking about on EXTRA. Ladies, if you are subscribed to EXTRA, stay tuned. We are going to be doing a deep dive on building strong relationships using social media and content marketing. If you are not subscribed to EXTRA but would like to be, just go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com and you can sign up there.

The first seven days are for free so check it out. If you love it, you love it and if you don’t, you don’t. You don’t have to stay. It is totally up to you. For those of you that are joining or leaving us, thank you. If you are leaving us now, it has been great hanging out with you. Thank you for being here and you know how much I appreciate you. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams, so get out there, take action and create the life your heart deeply desires. I will see you soon, bye.

Important Links

• Smooth Sailing Business Growth
• Entrepreneurs On Fire – Past Episode with Lyndsay Phillips
• Best Ever Show –  Past Episode with Lyndsay Phillips
• Smooth Business Growth Podcast
• REI Marketing
• Realtor.com
• Canva
• Repurpose.io
• SmoothBusinessGrowth.com/moneeka
• SmoothBusinessGrowth.com/bliss
• Teamwork
• Basecamp
• Podio
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

About Lyndsay Phillips

I’m Lyndsay Phillips, CEO and Captain of Smooth Sailing Business Growth, your content marketing strategic partner, is a serial entrepreneur and also proud owner of Smooth Business Podcasting & also Real Estate Investors Marketing.

I’ve been featured on MSN, NBC, Fox and published in Home Service Max Magazine and has guested on a TON of podcasts including John Lee Dumas’s Entrepreneurs On Fire and Joe Fairless’ Best Podcast Ever. I’ve been a podcast host for years on Smooth Business Growth Podcast and have spoken at events such as Dream Business Academy, Podfest, and Service Business Edge (sharing the stage with Mike Michalowicz and Jay Abraham).

Through Smooth Business Podcasting we are a full service agency that launches podcasts, produces, promotes and leverages to help businesses like you gain more leads, increase visibility, boost authority and grow.

But yes, we are also a full service Content Marketing Agency so having us as a strategic partner gives you a FULL team at your fingertips. We plan, publish, optimize and promote your content through the web, social media and email so that you can have more leads, more clients with less stress and more freedom. Through my amazing team, we partner with entrepreneurs, coaches, authors, and speakers, who are seeking fast-paced business growth but have finally come to the realization that they can’t do it alone, do it all and do it well.

And for Real Estate Investors looking to build relationships, build their authority and grow, we offer FREE resources like our Real Estate Investor’s Marketing Group on Facebook, the REI Marketing Show and our done for you services for content and podcasting.

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

• Here’s How »

Join the Real Estate Investing for Women Community today:

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

______________________________________

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

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How To Invest In Real Estate Across Borders With Lauren Cohen – Real Estate Women

 

If you want to invest in real estate across borders, you need to be actively involved in running the business. Moneeka Sawyer’s guest today is Lauren Cohen, an international lawyer, realtor, and foreign investor expert. In this episode, Lauren explains that you need to make a substantial investment in a non-marginal business. Join in the conversation to discover more of Lauren’s top tips for investing across borders. If you want to use real estate as a tool for immigration, you can’t miss out on this episode. Tune in! 

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

How To Invest In Real Estate Across Borders With Lauren Cohen – Real Estate Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am excited to welcome Lauren Cohen to the show. She is a Serial Entrepreneur, an International Lawyer, Realtor and Foreign Investor Expert. She is originally from Toronto and now in South Florida. Lauren is also a bestselling author and sought-after speaker. She launched her podcast, Investing Across Borders, in late 2020. Lauren and her turnkey team believe in overcoming obstacles and navigating global expansion for business owners and real estate investors while providing access to unique passive income solutions. Lauren’s overriding goal is to help clients navigate the path to invest, live, work and play across borders. Lauren’s superpower rests in paving a path to immigration visas through real estate investments. Ladies, I’m sure you can tell why Lauren is on the show. Lauren, welcome to the show. 

Thank you, Moneeka. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for making the time for me. 

It’s my pleasure. Ladies, I want to let you know that Lauren was booked for this show. We booked earlier in 2021. Since then, several of you ladies have heard her on other shows and gave me good reviews. I’m going into this interview with, “We’ve got somebody amazing on the show.” I’m super excited about that. I also want to tell you one other thing about Lauren. You guys know I’m all about systems. Systems equal bliss. I had all this system set up for my intake and scheduling. Lauren and I did it a little backward. We got the system. 

I went online to put together the whole, “I want to be able to introduce her.” I put together a little script and I noticed that nothing was in the intake form. It was 8:00 or 9:00 PM here at California time so it was late in Lauren’s time. I don’t start work until 10:00, so I’m like, “We have nothing.” There was a lot. I emailed her and I sent her something on LinkedIn. She happened to be online. Lauren did this thing. Anybody else that I would have talked to would have been like, “Can we reschedule?” I’m scheduling four months out. You ladies know that I pre-record. Lauren’s like, “Okay.” She got it all to me in ten minutes. 

It’s a problem that I have. I’m over-responsive. I need to go to the twelve-step program for responsiveness. 

The thing that I want to point out and one of the reasons that I’m excited to tell you a story, I know that it’s not sounding relevant. The way that we do anything is the way that we do everything. My focus is on bliss, pleasure, joy and relaxation. As a lawyer, it’s important that you are responsive. How many of us are freaked out about something? The things that we are dealing with lawyers are usually things we don’t know anything about. You want somebody who’s responsive, kind and generous. Lauren is all of those things. Thank you for making my process more blissful even though tech failed us. 

When I received it, I’m like, “How did that possibly happen? That can’t happen. There’s no way I’m going to miss this because I know how long it took us to get here. I’m going to get this done quick.” Believe it or not, I’m studying for the mortgage exam because I don’t have enough licenses. I decided I need something else. The reason is that I have so many clients in need of mortgage opportunities. We are in the middle of studying and I get this, “I have to go and deal with this right now.” My boyfriend is like, “What’s going on?” I’m like, “Let me be.” My son’s like, “Mommy.” I’m like, “I’m going.” I got it done. Thank you. 

If there is one thing that I do pride myself on, it’s exactly that. It’s not that I don’t get into panic mode because I was in a little bit of panic mode, but it’s not the end of the world. It’s not like somebody’s sick, but I get it done. That’s what 2021 is all about. I joined a mastermind called Get It Done in ‘21. The truth is it’s about that. In 2020, we had many challenges, obstacles and interferences in our lives. What is going on? Not that there’s no uncertainty now, but you have to focus on what you are grateful for every day and come out of each day thinking, “How can I impact people in a better way?” 

One of the things that 2020 taught us is to be able to roll with the flow. It taught us about flexibility, resilience, caring about the things that are important to us, and focusing on those things because there are so little we felt we had control over. Those are the things we do have control over. How are we responding? Who are we caring about? How are we showing up? 

I was thinking of the same words as you were saying them. It’s true. How you show up for one thing is how you show up for everything. 

I honor you for your kindness to me. 

Thank you for acknowledging that. I had spoken with a gentleman before from Canada. He said to me, “I am impressed with you. You’re this and this. We Canadians love you.” I said, “I am Canadian.” He’s like, “I love you even more now.” 

Lauren, could you tell us the high-level, two-minute version of your story? Let everybody get to know you a little bit and where you came from. 

My story is a little unique. I don’t share it all the time, but I started sharing it more because your story is what dictates or drives you. I am originally from Canada. I moved here a long time ago. I have not been home in several months, but I’m not bitter, maybe a little bit bitter. I have not seen my mom, brother, nephews, niece, sister-in-law or anybody in several months. I came here with a dream. I was married at the time. I moved back to Canada and I came here again. It’s been an interesting ride. 

In 2006, I got married. My then-husband was deported on the way back from our honeymoon. We went to Thailand on our honeymoon. I wasn’t in the immigration space to the extent I am now, that’s for sure. I didn’t realize that he was inadmissible. I didn’t realize that these things he had in his background and his history would stop him from being admissible. I was in the process of getting my green card. I had a lawyer who now is my partner. I had a lawyer that was doing everything. I never contemplated this problem. He was in the process of getting his visa. 

We get married and we go on our honeymoon. We should not have left the country or maybe we should have because everything happens for a reason. We came back. They took him from me at Chicago O’Hare Airport. They expeditiously removed him. They put him in immigration jail and they deported him. Here I am with all this stuff from our honeymoon in Thailand. I’m like, “What am I going to do now?” 

It goes to show you that you have to turn adversity into prosperity and you have to find the silver lining, which is the name of my nonprofit and the name of my book, Finding Your Silver Lining in the Business Immigration Process. There is always a silver lining. The silver lining of that was it was never meant to be that marriage. It pushed me into the immigration space. I knew that I had a calling to do something greater for people from all over the world migrating to the US and Canada because I’m licensed in both countries. I need more licenses. 

You are an education junkie. I can relate to that. 

I don’t like going to school, but I like learning, reading and getting licenses. Having a mortgage license and being a realtor is complimentary. That’s what happened. He was barred from entry to the US and I said, “I have to find a different path.” That’s what started me on my journey. My number one goal is to help people to invest, live, work and play across borders so that they can be anywhere in the world. 

This all started with an idea in Israel that I had that people should not be stuck to where they live but should be able to be completely mobile. My home is in Florida. My heart is in Israel, but my family is in Canada. I usually can go anywhere and do business. That is what I created for myself and what I wanted to create for others and give them the path to come and immigrate to the US especially through real estate investing. Many people want to invest in real estate in the US and here is the whole other benefit of doing that. 

When you help people with real estate stuff, you help them whether they are American citizens looking to invest internationally or if they are international citizens from somewhere else wanting to invest in the United States. Is that true?  

Yes. 

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The other thing that you help people with is if they are international, they are somewhere else, and they want to come to the United States, they can do that through investing. Can you tell me a little bit about that piece, helping them get citizenship, to emigrate or whatever that looks like? 

It’s extraordinarily complex and I’ll tell you why. Real estate investing, as a rule, is passive. Real estate investing to immigrate has to be active because to qualify for a visa, you need to be actively involved in running a business. The terminology is you have to make a substantial investment in a non-marginal business. I have created the ten steps to immigrate through real estate. It’s a step-by-step guide to take people from, “I want to invest in real estate in the US. How do I do it?” The first eight steps are for anybody that’s investing and the last two are for people that want to immigrate through that path. 

I’ve been working with real estate investors for a decade and working with them to get their visas, but only over COVID, I connected all of these dots together to say, “There is a path. It’s not going to be your single-family home, a couple of units, of condos or flipping. That’s not going to work.” If you add flipping to the BRRRR method, holding properties, Airbnb, commercial, self-storage, mobile homes, you create a strategy that can potentially pave the path to immigrate. 

I have a lot of international readers, but I don’t have a lot of people that talk about that stuff. I wonder if maybe we consider doing another show specifically about that for my international readers. I’m in 45 different countries. I want to tell you a cute story. Ladies, you haven’t heard this. Lauren, I hope you don’t mind that I tell you this, but this is funny. I went on a cruise to speak. I was talking about Choose Bliss on a cruise and we went to the Greek Islands, but we stopped in Spain. The first stop was in Barcelona. 

My husband and I are sitting at a cafe. We are talking, laughing. All of a sudden, I hear my voice walk by. David and I both look over and some guy is walking around with their iPhone listening to my podcast. I was like, “Oh my god.” We got off the cruise at Mykonos or something. We are sitting in a little cafe having some lunch and someone’s walking by with a phone. They are looking at the phone. They look up and they look over towards me in passing. All of a sudden, their eyes get wide. They look at their phone. They looked at me. They’re like, “Are you Moneeka Sawyer?” It’s in Greece. It was so much fun. It was twice in that one trip. We haven’t done a trip since then because of COVID. It’s exciting to see the impact that I’m making internationally. There is an audience on this show for you, Lauren. Maybe we can talk about that another time. 

That’s what my webinar series is. You should come to my webinars. It’s how to immigrate through real estate. We walk through the whole process and I’d love to have you there. The thing is not everybody wants to immigrate. Who can blame them right now? There is a lot of upheaval in this country. COVID has not been managed so well. That doesn’t mean that they don’t want to invest. 

We have had other people. Francois Braine-Bonnaire came on. He also came on talking about how to get people into turnkey properties here so they can take advantage of the American real estate market even if they don’t want to live here. There are all different levels of people that want to immigrate, people that don’t, people that want something hands-off, and people that want a good write-off reason to come to the United States. There are all different kinds of reasons that international people would want to invest here. 

The other thing that I want to focus on is about us Americans because this is a question that I haven’t covered at all. I have covered it once because I invested in Belize myself so that show aired about my process on that. We haven’t had anybody talk about Americans investing internationally. Let’s focus on that. Talk about some of the top tips for investing across borders. 

The top tips are going to be the same no matter if you are coming into America or going out of America. At the end of the day, you need proper cross-border tax guidance. I don’t care who you are, where you live, how small your portfolio is, how little you have to invest, you need somebody to guide you on cross-border tax. If you do not have an expert that understands both countries and has some knowledge or understanding, is there a tax treaty with the US or is there not? How is your investment going to get treated in the US? For US taxpayers, we have to be cognizant and concerned about our investments overseas. 

Let’s talk about Canada. It’s the easiest one. Lots of American investors have invested in Canada or do invest in Canada or now want to invest in Canada because suddenly it’s become that much more appealing. Maybe not Toronto because Toronto is a completely out-of-control market but other places. My business partner is in Calgary. We have lots of investors that are investing there because many of the properties are upside down. There is an opportunity to go in and find what is the equivalent of subject–tos in Canada or opportunities to wholesale properties. 

If you don’t get that cross-border guidance and you end up making $100,000, do you want to give 50% or 70% of that to the IRS or whoever the revenue agency is or the tax authority? I don’t think so. I have a prospect. He has been talking to me since we started talking. He came to a summit that I did with my Calgary partner. I call them Empowered Women in Real Estate. You need to speak at that. We do allow men. He came to this and he set up a call with me after. He said, “I paid $100,000 to the Canada Revenue Agency.” I said, “Why? How did that happen?” He’s like, “Because I didn’t talk to a lawyer first.” 

The number one thing that I’m going to tell anybody who is reading is don’t be afraid to talk to the lawyer and the accountant because fear is going to end up costing you so much more than you would pay to get the proper guidance in place. It so happens that I’m working with one of your members that I met through another podcast who’s investing in Spain. I have a client who’s developing properties in Honduras. I have clients that are investing in the UK, Canada, which’s an easy one for me and in Italy. 

My real estate license is with a company that is in ten countries and soon to be over twenty. It’s an international exposure and approach. Not everybody can even contemplate what that looks like. That’s super important. When you are looking at investing across borders, use and abuse your professional team. Don’t try to do it haphazardly and say, “I’m going to buy a property in the Dominican or something.” I hope that answers your question. 

 

There is a good point here that you made and I want to emphasize it. Don’t trip over dollars to save dimes. You want to make sure that you are paying a little bit upfront to save you a lot on the back end. It feels sometimes that there is all this upfront stuff. If you buy and sell something and you save yourself $100,000 or 50% in taxes, you only pay 20% or whatever. I don’t know what the numbers are like. I know that those deltas can be significant and you want to make sure that you minimize those taxes as much as you possibly can. The only person that is going to know how to help you is going to be a pro like Lauren. Is it easier to invest in the US or consider investing outside of the US? 

It depends on what your goals are. Investing in the US in real estate is not a super heavily regulated industry. There are rules and opportunities. Each state has a different approach, opportunities and markets. For most, the US market is the biggest opportunity that presents the most volume, potential listings, properties and upside. Coming into the US is easier than going outside of the US. 

We invested in Belize because we are prepping for retirement. What are some good reasons to invest outside of the US if you are an American citizen? 

There could be tax advantages. It can be a tax haven. It can be an opportunity to move your money outside of the US legally and be able to have that nest egg built in a foreign country. You never know what’s going to happen here as we have seen in the past. That gives you an opportunity to have somewhere else to go. It’s all about a strategy and a lot of people forget that important part. If you don’t have a strategy, whether you are investing in the US or outside the US, you are going to fail. It’s like with everything we do. If you don’t have systems, you are going to fail. If you don’t have a strategy, you are going to fail. You have to create a strategy and work with a professional team to implement that strategy. 

Talk to me about building that strategy. What are some of the first steps to building that international strategy? 

We are going to first look at what you are doing in real estate, see where you want to invest, and how you want to invest? Do you want to have joint venture partners? Are you using your own money? Are you using other people’s money? What corporate structure do you have in the US? Do you have contacts and connections in that subject country, that new country? How does that all look? How was your professional team going to stack up? What types of properties do you want? What are your goals with those properties? 

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Do you want a property that you can go to a part of the time and Airbnb the rest of the time? How does that look? Bringing in those tax advisers, figuring out how you’re doing asset protection as well, looking at asset protection solutions and opportunities. You have to protect your assets as you’re expanding your business no matter if it’s in real estate or anything. Those are some of the steps that we would go through in analyzing how to make this all happen and execute it. 

What is the number one risk in not setting up that structure before you start? 

It’s twofold. The first is that you could be shut down legally. You could be precluded from visiting your properties or investments because you didn’t put the structure in place and you could be stopped at the border, whichever border that might be. The other thing is this huge potential tax consequence of not setting up your structure properly from the get-go, which could shut you down anyway because of numbers. 

In extra, we are going to talk about 1031 exchanges and doing that over borders. I’m excited about that. Could you tell us a little bit about what we’re going to talk about? 

I’m assuming that your audience knows what 1031 is. 

Yes, they have heard about it. 

I don’t have to explain what 1031 is. 1031 is awesome because it allows investors and property owners to transfer property no matter where they are from. What we forget is, this is especially true for Canadians, the exchange will be disregarded for tax purposes oftentimes when they go back to their home country. They may be legally allowed to do it here in the US, no matter where they are from. The impact could be negative when they go back to their home country if they take the money out of the US. 

We are going to be talking a little bit more about the intricacies around that. I’m excited about that extra because we have never talked about this stuff. Before we move into our three rapid-fire questions, could you tell everybody how they can reach you?  

I am easy to reach. Please find me on LinkedIn. I will tell you that you need to find me with my Canadian presence because that’s super important. There’s a little confusion about that. On Facebook, it’s LaurenESQ. Everything is LaurenESQ. I’m launching my podcast website, it’s LaurenESQ.com. That’s my brand. I’ve been using that email address forever and a day. That’s the best way to find me on Facebook. On Instagram it’s @Lauren_Cohen_ESQ. On Twitter, it’s @eCouncilInc, which is the name of my company. I’m on Clubhouse. You can find me on that new crazy thing. I hear that Elon Musk shut the platform down because you’re only allowed 5,000 people and he had 5,000 people in the first room he set up. I can understand that. I would be interested too but I was asleep. 

You can always email me directly. On top of the free gift, I also am offering a free consultation to anybody that would like to talk about US investment, cross-border investing, expanding out of the US, and bringing your business into the US. It’s bit.ly/lacexplore. Moneeka makes easy URLs. I would be happy to set up a call, please reference that you met me here. I will be happy to set up that time with you. 

You have a free gift for the ladies. Tell us a little bit about that. The link for this one is BlissfulInvestor.com/laurenesq. 

When you said that, I was like, “LaurenESQ, that works for me.” 

I love that because I know that most of our links to reach our guests start with BlissfulInvestor.com. 

You are good at branding. It’s excellent. I am taking a few lessons from you. I already adopted one of your lessons on signing up for the podcast, so I hope it’s okay. 

Tell us about your free gift. 

I’m probably going to have to renew this free gift because many people have downloaded it. It’s popular. It’s called Eight Steps to Successful Real Estate Investment Across Borders. It’s the guide that will help you and it’s free for all of your readers. It’s a $47 value. It’s going to help you to think about the different elements that we have talked about here and a little bit more. 

When you go on there, BlissfulInvestor.com/laurenesq, you will see that it’s $47. You get a special code for my ladies so you get it for free. It is our REI4FREE. Thank you so much for that. I know that there are going to be a lot of people interested in that. 

It’s a pleasure to serve you, guys. I love working with real estate investors. It took me a while to find my calling. One thing I will tell any of you that haven’t figured all of it out yet, don’t worry. You will figure it out. 

Thank you so much for that. Are you ready for three rapid-fire questions? 

I’m ready. 

Lauren, tell us a super tip on getting started investing in real estate. 

Get a coach, that’s a super tip. Don’t do it alone. Whatever you do, work with a coach or somebody that has done that or somebody that can guide you. You don’t want to invest haphazardly and you need a strategy. 

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

Staying focused and staying in your lane. My four favorite words are, “Stay in your lane.” Don’t try to play realtor, lawyer or accountant. Get people on your team that can do those things because that’s how you’re going to make money in real estate. They are going to guide you, help you do due diligence, analyze the price perspective investments, deal analysis, for example. 

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

 

I work out. I have the COVID–20. There is no question. I cannot survive without some type of workout every single day, whether it’s a power walk, a workout, watching kickboxing or working out on my ski machine upstairs or something. You have to get your endorphins going because we are all stuck at home. I’m lucky that I’m in Florida. We are not all that lucky. 

Lauren, thank you so much for everything you have shared. 

It’s my pleasure. 

Ladies, we have more coming in extra. We’re going to be talking about 1031 exchanges across borders, so stay tuned for that if you’re already subscribed. If you’re not subscribed but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com and you get the first seven days for free. You can check this out as much as you like for the first seven days, and you can decide one way or the other if you love it or not. For those of you who are leaving us now, thank you so much for joining Lauren and me in this portion of the show. 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 will see you soon. 

 

Important links

• Lauren Cohen 
• Francois Braine-Bonnaire – Past Episode 
• LaurenESQ – Facebook 
• LaurenESQ.com 
• @Lauren_Cohen_ESQ – Instagram 
• @eCouncilInc – Twitter 
• Bit.ly/lacexplore 
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com 
• Choose Bliss 

 

About Lauren Cohen

Lauren A. Cohen, international speaker, #1 bestselling author and immigration and business strategist, is an attorney licensed in both the U.S. (TN) and Canada (ON). As an active AILA (American Immigration Lawyers Association) member, Lauren boasts a stellar track record of success. She was also recently recognized as one of 2017’s “Super Lawyers” by Attorney-at-Law Magazine.

Although her role at e-Council does not involve practicing law, Lauren has first-hand knowledge of the visa process, having herself immigrated from Canada, and later becoming an American citizen in 2012. The overriding goal in all of her business endeavors is to help her clients achieve their version of the American Dream. Developing sound strategies designed to sustain long-term growth is a cornerstone of the e-Council Inc. brand.

After spending several years working as corporate counsel in various industries while delving into the field of immigration law, Lauren decided to combine her legal knowledge and business acumen. The result is e-Council Inc., a company offering concierge turnkey business immigration services ranging from professional Business Plans to comprehensive project coordination for all types of business visas, with a special focus on EB-5 solutions for direct investment and regional center cases. Lauren and her team help businesses raise capital, assist franchises seeking additional franchisees particularly in the form of foreign investors, and work with foreign investors seeking access to the U.S. markets.

 

• Here’s How »

• https://blissfulinvestor.com/

• LinkedIn

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram

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

 

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