If we're talking apples to apples of like you got a hundred grand, should you buy a hundred thousand dollar property in cash or put a hundred thousand dollars in the stock market? I would probably have put a hundred thousand dollars in the stock market, honestly, because like when you lose the leverage piece, you lose everything.

But if you can use the a hundred grand to buy 500,000 worth of real estate, now you're going that your $500,000 deal is appreciating at 3% per year. So you're getting whatever that is like way better leverage on that. Right. And the loan's getting paid down and you get the tax benefits and you get the the cash flow.

So you kind of combine it all together. And like, I mean, what the stock market, I mean, everyone's got a different number, right. But six to 10, somewhere in that percentage, or if you're Dave Ramsey, 12%, you say, but the stock market average is somewhere in that range. Right.

Let's call it seven, 8%. I mean, like my real estate, like I don't buy anything that doesn't average me 15% or greater. Like I don't buy anything that doesn't do 15%. And that's after factoring in all of the crazy costs that come from owning real estate. Like that's, that's the number we, what we call underwrite.

So we underwrite from a 15% per year standpoint, when we buy real estate for our investors, we're actually getting more than that. We're getting more like 25, 20 to 25%, but we take about a third. Uh, that's what my company does. So we underwrite from a 15% per year for our investors.

Hello and welcome to another episode of all the hacks show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. If you're new here, I'm Chris Hutchins. I'm a diehard optimizer. I love doing all the research to help you get the best experience in life without an expensive price tag. And today I'm talking to Brandon Turner about real estate.

And while I do own my primary residence at a fraction of a vacation home, I've never really dabbled with rentals, Airbnb's or any residential or commercial real estate projects, except owning some REITs in my investment account. But Brandon's taken a different path and it's worked out pretty well for him.

He's a real estate investor with thousands of properties, hundreds of millions under management. And he's also the author of a few real estate books and has sold over a million copies. He's also a podcaster with over a hundred million downloads, having hosted the bigger pockets, real estate podcast for almost 10 years.

If you're not familiar with bigger pockets, it's a massive real estate investing resource with millions of members, tons of content, books, courses, and more. So I want to use this conversation to do two things. First, Brandon is a fascinating person who's very intentional with his mindset on life, work, philanthropy, and more.

So I want to understand how he operates, why he works with a performance coach, whether most of us should be doing that, how he's managed to be successful and still prioritize friends, family, and the quality of life. Did I mention he lives in Hawaii, so he's doing something right.

But I want to start by brushing up my knowledge on real estate and learn who should be investing in real estate, whether I'm even on that list, how people should get started and ask some of the questions that have been on my mind for years and held me back from doing real estate in the past.

Dude, that may have been the greatest interview introduction I have ever had. So I am, I'm psyched to be here. This is going to be a lot of fun and excited to talk to you not only about real estate, but can I tell you a quick story about how terrible I am at your world?

Yeah. All right. So your world, the world of like points like that, that piece of your world of like hacking the point thing and the travel thing. So I spent half a million dollars on ads on Facebook over the past eight weeks. I mean, talking about what I was raising for going, I already know.

And I didn't, I didn't use a credit card for it. Like that's how bad this was. Like, I don't think, I think we like hooked up an ACH something or a debit card, like half a million dollars on ads. And I didn't get anything for it. Like I could have probably like flown in a nice plane or something.

So I probably have a lot to learn from you. Hopefully I can share at least some with you and your audience. Well, for anyone listening, if you're in that situation, the Amex business gold and the chase Inc business preferred are three and four X points on ad spend. So, you know, somewhere, somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million points are, are on the ground, you know, off in the ether.

So, Oh, that's funny. Yeah. Terrible. Whatever. People listening will really feel that pain, but hopefully if, if you're spending money now, you'll be spending money in the future and we can correct that down there. There it is. That's it. I'm a big believer. I shoot. Sorry. I'm already taking over this show.

This is what I do. I think I'm a big believer in like, I mean, I don't keep receipts. This is something that people are always shocked when they hear I don't keep receipts. Like, even though I could, I could deduct a lot of the stuff I do. I go to dinner.

I don't, I don't do like the whole tax thing. I don't like, I go to a business dinner. I don't keep the receipt and people think I'm crazy. And here's why though. It's like, I'm a big believer in like going all in and using all available space in my head for two things.

And that is like family and getting stupid rich through real estate. Right. So those are like the two things. And if it, if it's not those two things, like I just don't generally get into it. And I think that has been one of the things that's let me be successful in those two areas.

Cause I'm only really focusing on two areas and not 50 areas. So points and receipts and all that stuff that I should be doing, I'm just not doing. So maybe I just need like a person in my life to run that part for me, but maybe I need to start that company.

Maybe you do. That's a great idea. Do we just make a billion dollar company? Do we just become best friends? Ah, all right. Let's go back to real estate. What'd you want to know? So I'm a pretty thoughtful investor. I used to run an investment advisory firm, financial planning firm, and I own my home.

I own some wreaths in my accounts, but I feel like I see people like you who've done a lot in real estate. And I always question whether I'm doing it wrong is, is investing in real estate outside of your home, something that everyone should be doing. The short answer, I would say, yes.

The more nuanced answer is which way to invest in real estate. I think real estate belongs in everybody's portfolio. I think that real estate has so many cool things to it. It's not the only way to make wealth. I mean, stocks, they're great. I'm sure like bonds, I don't know, whatever those are, like all that stuff works, right?

The thing that's cool about real estate is has so many different ways to make money within it that it, it, it can find its way to any person's portfolio. So what I mean by that is like, I was like, you know, whatever, 21 years old, I'm working at Coldstone Creamery, right?

Like dissing ice cream and singing for tips. And I think I was actually like 19 at this point. We're going to Coldstone, like 19 singing for tips. Right. And I rent an apartment, a four bedroom apartment, and I rent out the other three rooms and I just live in the fourth room.

And all of a sudden I'm like living for free. I ended up actually renting out my bedroom and I lived on the couch for half that year. And I started making money. So, I mean, like, like you can go that extreme and that's, that's kind of, you know, real estate investing.

And then on the other side, like I own whatever, 7,000 rental units. I own a big company that buys apartments and mobile home parks. And I just run like a business over there. And so you take those two extremes and everything in between involving real estate, you can make money and you can make a lot of money.

And so, yes, everyone should invest in real estate. The question is how and how is it going to work for you? What fires you up? What gets you excited? And what's your goals are? So I imagine most of the people listening are not looking to have four roommates and sleep on a couch.

So we can, we can knock off that end. And I'm guessing that if they're listening to this, trying to learn about real estate, they're also not on the other end of trying to figure out how to buy their, their next 3,000 properties. So we find somewhere in the middle, someone who maybe they own their home.

Maybe they've thought about buying a vacation home or a rental home, but they haven't pulled the trigger and they're trying to figure out what's a good way to get into this, whether it's just the learning side or the kind of experience through doing. Yeah. So one of my favorite ways to get into real estate, especially with those people who don't have a ton of capital to start with, right.

Again, going back to why I love real estate, real estate is kind of like a, any business like a, in that it doesn't necessarily require a lot of money. If you sub sub, and what was the word you use time instead, right? So there's ways to like kind of hustle your way into real estate.

So maybe it's not the living on a couch kind of idea, but there's a term we call house hacking. This has changed my life. House hacking. I've done it many, many times. It's where you buy like a small multifamily property. Let's call it like a triplex, like three separate units, right?

And they're all over the country, all over the world. Every, every, every country's got them and you live in one of the units and then you rent the other ones out. Now you don't even have to be the property manager. You can even hire management. So you don't deal with the tenants, but the benefit is, is one, you can get into these deals for very low money down like 3%, 4%, 5% down when you're willing to live in the property for at least a year.

So let's just say you're somebody you've, you've saved up 20 grand. Well, what's 20 ran grand really going to do for you, right? You throw it into the stock market and you make yourself 10% on your 20 grand. Okay, good. You're now making 200, you know, whatever that two, $2,000 a year.

Like it's, it's not life changing money, but that same 20 grand, if you were to buy that, buy that duplex or triplex, you could be living for free and saving what you'd be paying on rent somewhere else. You can be saving a thousand, 2000, $3,000 a month, and building equity at the same time.

So that's a cool strategy. And a lot of people like, well, I'm not, I'm, I don't want to live in a crappy duplex over. And so I live in Hawaii. I have an ocean view. My house is worth about $3 million. I got a pool. I got this crazy cool property here.

It's a triplex. I rent out the back unit that pays almost half my mortgage. And if I wanted to rent out the other unit that I have, I could, and I'd pay, I would pay my whole mortgage. I'd be living for free in Maui looking at the ocean because of house hacking.

So it's not just for people who are starting out. It's just a cool strategy in general, a cool hack, again, house hacking and you're the hack guy. So. Yeah. I mean, I actually ended up doing this without realizing it, uh, about a decade ago because we were trying to buy a home and we kept struggling with the fact that if you buy a two bedroom home and you're going to start a family, you're going to outgrow that home.

And like the traditional advice, you know, when you buy a home, you pay real estate agent fees or someone does. And when you sell the home, the same thing and closing costs and furnishing and staging and all this stuff. So the general rule is like, if you're not going to live there for a long time or own it for a really long time, the transaction costs are going to eat you up.

So we were like, well, we can't buy a place. That's two bedrooms. Cause we're going to move out. Uh, and so we found a place with three bedrooms with one of the bedrooms having a door to the outside. And we said, great, we'll turn that bedroom into a studio.

And for the next five years, while we don't need three bedrooms, we're going to rent it real estate in San Francisco did so well that it ended up paying the whole mortgage. And then when we finally had our first child, we said, Oh, we need the space. We were done with tenants.

And now we have a three bedroom. We didn't have to buy and sell. So that was our version of, I didn't know there was a house hacking movement. Now this guy from the investors podcast network, Robert Leonard wrote a book called about house hacking recently. So now it's become this thing at the time.

It was just a way that I could subsidize the cost of my mortgage. You know, what's funny about this. So the word house hacking, uh, I actually, so I coined that and I'm not trying to just pat myself on the back. I was the first one to coin that years and years ago, like 10 years ago.

And the reason why you can go back to the original article I wrote on it, the reason that I coined that was based on travel hacking. Cause everyone talked about travel hacking. And I was like, well, I'm kind of doing the same thing when I buy duplexes and live in house.

So I call it house hacking just based on that. And the term just took off. And so, uh, really I owe a lot to your, uh, your world and your industry, uh, for that term. So really what I'm saying is we're all here because of you, man, definitely not because of me, but you are here because of me, but, uh, but, but I love that story that you just told, right.

Cause it just illustrates one of the million ways that real estate can, can change your life or benefit your life in a lot of ways. And so you can buy nicer, like I wouldn't buy a $3 million house in Hawaii, but because I house hack, I can. And in fact, there's other cool things like my buddy actually rents for me, which is normally a terrible idea.

I usually caution against that, but, uh, my buddy rents for me because he's back there. We started this company together to buy big commercial properties. And now we bought whatever, 7,000 units because of him being there. So it was kind of a cool, like the kind of ancillary thing is you kind of get a community vibe, which is sorely missing in America today.

Right? Like we're also alone in the world. So now I kind of feel like I have my own little, like, like compound in a way, which is kind of funny, but it works really well. One of the key kind of mathematical reasons behind what you just said, you know, in house hacking is that you can get leverage and that that leverage, unlike the leverage in a brokerage account is, you know, not subject to a margin call.

So if house prices go down, you don't get evicted, uh, you know, and if you ride it out long enough, you'll be okay. So that works really well. If you are ready to buy a new place, what if you're already in a home and you're not really looking to move out of it is getting into real estate.

Is that just buying the duplex and not living in it is, is it buying a vacation rental property? Is that version of it as appealing when you can't live in it and something that the average homeowner should be thinking about as a way to invest their savings? A hundred percent.

Yes. They should look into it. That said, most deals aren't deals. Most properties are going to lose you money by, by owning them. And so as long as you're willing to learn how to like run some simple math, and it's not hard. I mean like you can just go to YouTube and search like real estate, you know, rental property math.

Like it's not super hard to do. Now, again, there's different strategies, different strokes for different folks, right? Vacation rentals are a phenomenal way to bring in a lot of profit. I mean, I got a condo here in Hawaii that one condo makes me $7,000 a month in profit, like one, one property.

Right. And I think I paid maybe 150 grand like into it, like that I've got into it. And it's a million dollar property, but like that's a phenomenal return. Like that's going to blow the stock market out of the water. However, I have to manage that. I have an assistant who takes care of it, but like that's still a business based guy I have to run.

So again, there's, there's different things for different people, but yeah, if you buy, I mean, imagine this, actually, let me tell you a story that illustrates a couple of points on why I love real estate so much. So when my daughter, whose name is Rosie, she's super cute. She's six years old.

Now, when Rosie was born, like the week, literally the week she was born, we went and signed papers on a four unit property. It was a fourplex, located in kind of a rough area. Not like, not like I, you know, I'm going to get shot there, but like definitely not like a place I'd want to live, but we got this four unit property there and it was super cheap and disgusting and there was like rats living in it and a bunch of like people had broken in and stolen stuff.

I mean, it needed a lot of work, but we buy this property and we fix it up. And then we put it on an 18 year payoff plan. It's a 30 year mortgage, which is pretty typical. But I actually went to like Dave Ramsey's like calculator online and was like, how much extra do I have to pay every month to pay it off in 18 years?

And it was like 150 bucks extra every month. So I put it on this 18 year path plan. Now our mortgage at the beginning was 150,000 that I own in the mortgage. When my daughter is 18, we'll owe $0 on it. Now that property could make me no money for the next 10 or 18 years.

I can make nothing off of it, but at very least my tenants just paid off a mortgage over the course of 18 years. And now it's worth, it's, it's worth a lot more money, right? In fact, it's probably worth when I bought it, you know, 200,000, my mortgage was 150.

I always said it'd be worth three to $400,000 when Rosie's ready to go to college. So now, so notice these are two things at play here, right? The property values tend to go up over time. Yes, there's dips and such, but based on just 3% appreciation over the next 18 years, it should be worth between three and $400,000.

We will then owe nothing on it. So we've built now three or $400,000 of equity that Rosie gets to use for college. And this is a plan. I tell a lot of parents buy one rental house when your kids are young, put it on them on a 15 or 18 year, whatever mortgage, whatever it takes for them to go to college and their college is paid for off one property.

So that's the loan getting paid down and appreciation. Those are two of the four wealth generators of real estate. So one of them is appreciation. Real estate goes up. Number two, real estate gets paid down when you have a mortgage, which is great. That's the whole leverage piece. Number three though, is the cashflow.

This fourplex makes me over $1,500 in profit every single month. Now some months a little bit more, some a little less. If we have repairs and such, and that's after paying the property manager. It's like, I don't even deal with this property. It's maybe a minute every single month.

So now I've got the third wealth generator is cashflow. Now Rosie doesn't get that. I get to live on, you know, I get to have a nicer car because of that. Right. I can use that for my life and that's why I love cashflow. So cashflow is a third reason.

And the fourth wealth generator of real estate is the tax benefit. So when I make $1,500 a month on cashflow, I pay $0 in taxes on that $0 in it. You make $1,500 doing, you know, a W2 job, not you, but somebody does and they're going to pay 500 in taxes, 600 in taxes, whatever.

So the tax, like not only do you have the three areas where you're growing wealthier, but the fourth area is that you don't pay. There's so many tax strategies for real estate investors that you typically will pay little to no tax as long as you're investing in real estate.

So combine those four things together and it's a phenomenal return that I think can blow up any business, any investment, any way to generate wealth out of the water, completely out of the water, in terms of both how well it grows and the assuredness of which it grows. You can start a business and you'll get 10,000% return, but businesses fail all the time.

Real estate's fairly stable. And it would be hard to lose when you buy right and you manage right. You said we're going to be friends. Maybe, maybe, maybe this is the pivotal moment here when I push back on a few things. So on the tax front, let's go in reverse.

The reason I assume you're not paying taxes is because you're depreciating the property. And that's a huge piece of it. Yes. And at some point in the future, when you sell that house, having depreciated the value of it, if you were to sell that property, you would have much more taxes in the future.

Whereas my W2 income that I invested, I would only pay on the gains if I went and invested that W2 income after tax. Yes. And no, but this is why I said, as long as you keep investing in real estate, you pretty much never pay taxes. So between a thing called the 10/3 exchange, which is awesome.

And between a thing called cost segregation or depreciation, accelerated depreciation, all that stuff. And I don't, we don't need to go in the weeds on it, but essentially as long as you don't stop investing in real estate, it's kind of a treadmill. I will admit it as a treadmill you get on, but what most investors do eventually is they just get more and more passive properties.

Like they start maybe buying the duplex that they're managing or the fourplex. And eventually they sell it and then they buy a, a share, a small piece of a huge shopping mall. And they just hold onto that for life. And then when you die, the taxes basically just get wiped out.

The government says, okay, well you, you know, your children aren't going to owe any of that and they wipe it out. And so there are ways to pay nothing forever. Uh, but like you said, there is that, that said on that $1,500, first of all, I don't pay any self-employment tax or, uh, you know, any of the 15% that everyone else pays.

Uh, and it's, so it's naturally lower anyway, but then the depreciation just wipes the rest of it out. Even if you did decide, you know, I'm getting off the treadmill, I'm selling these properties. You're still paying capital gains on that. You're not paying income tax. So correct. I'll give you that, you know, even in the worst scenario, it's still a better scenario from a tax standpoint, but, and go ahead, go ahead.

No, I just say, but, uh, you know, there are future tax liabilities by taking the depreciation. Yeah. It's not as easy as like, you know, just you buy rental property and pay no taxes ever. Uh, it's, there's definitely a strategy to it and understanding how this stuff works is important, which is one of the reasons people should not invest in real estate.

Let me argue why you shouldn't invest in real estate because it is not a button you press on an app. Uh, now there are easier ways to do it, right? So like I've raised, I don't know, uh, $250 million over the past couple of years from investors like you maybe who like, I don't want to go buy a duplex and deal with the toilets and the tenants and the termites and all that crap.

Right. I don't want the trauma. So they just invest with me and then we go and buy it. So that's what my company does today is we, we do stuff like that. And this is not a sales pitch. You don't have to go with me. You can go with anybody.

There's lots of us out there who do this very thing. You can still get depreciation. You get, still get some of that stuff, but it's much more of a push button sort of investment. Now your returns are probably lower than if you were renting out all your bedrooms and your house living on the couch, but you pay for, you know, you, you, you pay and you get what you want to put into it.

Just like really any business. And one more quick point. The other cool thing about the tax depreciation stuff, not only are you not paying the like the 15% that everyone else has to pay, but I ran the numbers one time and it's one in one of my books, even if you were to just pay it anyway, at some point to settle up with the government, cause you deferred it down the road, down the road, down the road, because you are not paying it.

You are using the government's money next time to buy more. So even when you settle up, you are far ahead of where you would have been if you just pay taxes like a normal person. Does that make sense? Because you're, that's the same logic that goes into tax deferred retirement plans, right?

The reason why is that your money can compound before you owe that tax liability. And I did an episode that we will not get into all about kind of some crazy estate planning tax strategies. And part of the reason that those work is that the government kind of the rates, the government thinks things will grow are not the same rates that things actually end up growing in the markets.

And so if you can defer taxes as long as possible, you can actually get an outsized return, compound interest, et cetera. And you briefly brushed on 1031, but I'll say my version of it, which is completely unsophisticated, but maybe that's easier than going down a rabbit hole. It's just that if you have a real estate property that increases in value, you can either realize those gains or you can roll them into another property and defer and defer.

So as long as you're rolling in the gains from real estate sale to another real estate transaction, you can postpone and postpone. Exactly. So you buy a property, make a million bucks, dump it into a new property and the government's going to be like, Oh yeah. I would say it's like the government is like, is like your uncle who's partnering with you.

They're like, Hey, you did a really good job with that investment. You made a million bucks. You know, keep, keep our money, just put it in the next deal and then put the next deal. The government's going to let you just keep putting in the next deal. Now there's a lot of rules with that, but that's essentially what it is.

Historical property appreciation is positive, but historical stock market appreciation is more positive. At least if you comparing apples to apples, it's like the returns are higher. So, you know, how do you compare this to, I'm going to take all the money I have. I'm going to put it in a diverse index funds, including REITs or we can get to REITs after.

And instead of paying down this mortgage each month, I'm going to take that cashflow and I'm going to invest it. I've said that mortgages are great for people who wouldn't otherwise save because it forces you to, but if you're disciplined and you took all that cashflow and saved it, how do you think that compares?

You think real estate still wins every time or on average? I think on average it does. And it has, uh, when you, when you use that leverage, right? If you're, if we're talking apples to apples of like you got a hundred grand, should you buy a hundred thousand dollar property in cash or put a hundred thousand dollars in the stock market?

I would probably put a hundred thousand dollars in the stock market, honestly, because like when you lose the leverage piece, you lose everything. But if you can use the a hundred grand to buy 500,000 worth of real estate, now you're going that your $500,000 deal is appreciating at 3% per year.

So you're getting whatever that is like way better leverage on that. Right. And the loan's getting paid down and you get the tax benefits and you get the, the cashflow. So you kind of combine it all together. And like, I mean, what the stock market, I mean, everyone's got a different number, right?

What six to 10, somewhere in that percentage. Or if you're Dave Ramsey, 12%, you say, but the stock market average is somewhere in that range, right? Let's call it seven, 8%. I mean, like my real estate, like I don't buy anything that doesn't average me 15% or greater. Like I don't buy anything that doesn't do 15%.

And that's after factoring in all of the crazy costs that come from owning real estate. Like that's, that's the number we, what we call underwrite. So we underwrite from a 15% per year standpoint, when we buy real estate for our investors, we're actually getting more than that. We're getting more like 25, 20 to 25%.

But we take about a third. That's what my company does. So we underwrite from a 15% per year for our investors. Now for that, right. Higher risk, higher return. Obviously like you're trusting some random dude from the internet, like to invest your money and hoping you get your 15% per year.

So it's, it's maybe a little riskier than throw it into GE or Tesla, but I don't know. I could actually argue the opposite way. I mean, what do you think? Let's throw it back at you. Yeah. Dump it in the socks. I definitely, when you're talking, dump it into GE or Tesla.

I feel like I I'm with you, right. That the volatility of any single stock, right. I was there. I almost thought you were going to go GM or Tesla. And then I was like, well, that's an interesting perspective, right? Like one, one of those two could go very different direction.

Um, yeah, I mean, historically the challenge for me has been the push the button, right. To buy the real estate, you've got to find the deals. You've got to process the deals. You've got a deal. We had one tenant in a house, in a house we lived in. And that even felt like a lot, not because they were there, but because, Oh, the sink's not working.

It just felt like a lot. So I think for me, I've always been apprehensive of buying real estate with all of the kind of craziness that comes with managing it and dealing with it. If it's not your primary residence and you would know better than me, I feel like the loan situation is harder, uh, in terms of, you know, you just don't get as favorable terms when you're not buying a primary residence.

Uh, and, and that's kind of held me back, uh, the vacation rental, you know, if it's not a long-term tenant, then you've got a vacation rental. Now you got to put it on Airbnb or you got to put it somewhere and manage who's coming and what happens if there's a pandemic and no one wants to travel and all that stuff.

So for me, it was just so much easier to invest in the markets, but you know, that doesn't mean I'm not interested because then I go, okay, well then I could just pay someone to do all this for me. Uh, like, you know, a company you're starting or anyone else.

And then I'm like, Oh, but then the fees, maybe I should do it myself. And I kind of get stuck in this analysis paralysis of, I want to do this thing. I don't want to do the work, but I don't want to pay someone to do the work. Okay.

I'm just not going to do it. And so I ended up just doing REITs. So I'm curious where you think REITs fall on the spectrum. Is that a form of real estate investing? Or do you kind of say, no, no, no, that's like the stock market version. Let's leave that aside.

It is a stock market version. REITs typically have a very similar return as like the regular stock market, right? Depends again, which REIT, and which ones you're looking at and how you're measuring it. You know, you can manipulate data all you want, but typically it's not a whole lot better and maybe even worse than traditional, just stock market investing.

So, but REITs are great. REITs are push a button. They are the stock market for real estate. You're typically buying large A-class real nice, like apartment complexes or, or shopping malls or whatever. And you're combining your money with lots of other people. And they're just very stable. Like no one, like just very stable.

You're not doing anything fancy. You're not really having to work at all at it. Now, what we do. So at Open Door Capital, which is my company. And again, there's lots of us out there that do this. It's a similar model. You wire the money to us, you push your button and you're pretty much done.

The way that we're different is we're, we're actively investing. Like we're not buying super A-class shopping malls for $3 billion and getting, you know, 10,000 investors all chipping their money on it, or 10 million investors. We're typically a hundred investors coming together, pulling our money. And we split profits a little different.

So we just basically take the first seven or 8%. Like we always assume, like, if we're not going to get, get you at least a stock market return, then I shouldn't get paid. So there's not like the first seven or 8% goes right to our investors. Like you would get the first seven or 8% per year return.

Anything above that, we then split. So typically it's like a 70/30. So I will take 30% of anything above your average stock market return. And then you would get 70% of that. And then at some point it might shift also to what's called a 50/50 at some point, if we blow it out of the water and do exceptionally good.

That's our kind of like hope is that we get a 50% return for investors so that we make more money and that everybody wins. But yeah, so I guess the point being there are ways to invest completely passively into real estate, whether it's a REIT or a company like Fundrise which is kind of a middle ground between a REIT and what I do, or whether you're investing in a person you trust and know from the internet or from a meetup group or whatever.

That's why, and because of that, I'll even make this point. Most rich people, when I say rich, I mean, like, you have disposable income in a significant amount of way, should not invest in real estate, like actively. Because at the end of the day, you go out there, you buy a rental house, right?

You're, you're a month in, you're sitting at the dinner table with your family. You're, you know, asking your kids these questions about that. And then your phone rings, right? You pick up your phone and you're like, and they're like, oh yeah, my toilet's not working tonight. And you say those like four most dreaded words of every landlord and family, which is I'll be right over.

Like, I'll be right over. Right? So now you're leaving your family, you're driving over there, you fix the toilet, you come back home. A week later, the stove's not working. Right. And then they didn't pay rent three months later. And now you've got to evict them. And so if you were to look at the average person who buys real estate, like out there, that doesn't love it.

And they're not, they're just trying to buy real estate and they're putting a bunch of their money into it. I would argue you'd get a better return investing with a company like mine or a fundraiser, or maybe even a REIT, then you're going to get on your own. Because when you average in all those costs of owning a rental property, they add up.

Now, over time, if you're fired up, if you want to be good at landlording, you want to be good at this stuff. You want to manage your own properties and you like it. Yeah. You can make it a stupid over oversized return. That's going to get you financial freedom in just a few years.

I did it. I mean, I did it from zero. I mean, from the time I was 20 ish to 27, I mean, I was in it. Like I was changing toilets and painting walls and all that. And when I was 27, I was able to quit my job and what I call retire.

It's starting with no money. I mean, starting with Coldstone Creamery. Now, you show me a stock strategy that is somebody can start with no money and in seven years be retired, like at, with that level of assuredness, like, and I'll be, I'll be shocked. I mean, it sure can happen, right?

Buy Bitcoin, do the GameStop thing. Like you get lucky, but I'm talking about like that level of like confidence. It's rare. So if you want to be active, great. If you want to be passive, there's ways for you to do that as well. When I hear the word active and I think about how you talked about Reits buying a class, it made me think that is the real unlock in real estate, the ability to buy a property and fix it up more than it is to just buy it and wait and cashflow.

It is like, is the true skill finding places that have the opportunity to put in less money than it will ultimately appreciate? Is that where the magic is? Is that what you look for with your company? I mean, there's a million ways that you can, you can pull profits up, but yes, if I'm getting your question, right.

What I like to do is I like to buy properties that you can immediately bump up the value, and then it goes up gradually from there. Right? So imagine you buy, let's go simple math, right? You buy a hundred thousand dollar property that you can just make, look a little bit nicer.

And now it's worth one 50. Maybe you got to put a little money into it or whatever. Let's say now it's worth from 100. Now it's worth one 50. Well, now it appreciates from one 50 upward. It's not starting at the hundred. So you immediately start at this high, new, this new high level.

And then it goes from there. So that's one of my favorite strategies. We call that value add investing. So you immediately add value. That is not what REITs do. And that's why REITs get a lower return is because REITs typically would just buy a property that's already there. And they're just banking on, you know, 3% per year rent raises to make all their, their wealth.

And it's a strategy. I hear lots of people kind of amateur real estate investors are, we're going to buy a place in a neighborhood that maybe we understand because we've lived here and we're going to fix it up and either ourselves or hire someone and then we're going to flip it is house flipping something that seems like such a great idea, but has a lot more cautionary tales than the average person knows.

I mean, definitely, definitely does. Uh, it's super fun, right? I mean, who doesn't like to take something ugly and make it beautiful. Uh, but maybe a lot of people, but I love it. It's super fun. Like you feel like you're on HGTV and flipping things, but yeah, flipping is very much a business in every way.

Like you go start a business doing a lot of things. Some people just happen to do it with a piece of real estate, right? And you, you fix it up, you make it better. You sell it for more money. The risk of flipping, especially today in this market is that when you're flipping in a market that is dropping, which is what we find ourselves in today.

Now I don't think we're going to see a dramatic, you know, plunge 80% of real estate values, but when you're in a market that is correcting, you're trying, you're kind of catching the falling knife, right? Like you're buying it for a hundred, you're going to put 20,000 into it and you think it'll be worth 150.

But what if it's not worth 150? Like what if it takes you longer to do the project? And now it's only worth 140, but you also went over budget. And so you had to put an extra 20 into it. Well, now you're broke even. And then you pay the real estate agent and now you're losing money.

I've been there. I've, I've had one bad flip that, that I lost money on. Uh, ironically, had I kept that property, I would have made cashflow every month, probably between five and $700 a month on that property. I would have kept for the past nine years or 10 years since I bought it.

And today I sold that property, ended up selling it. Those numbers actually were this property. I tried to sell it for 150, didn't sell, ended up selling it for 120. Today that property is worth over half a million dollars. So like real estate, one of the other things that's very, very helpful is that it is a very forgiving asset class in time, right?

It's a very forgiving asset class. You can screw up on a lot of stuff, but as long as you can hold it, you get bailed out of almost everything. That's not dissimilar from the stock market, right? If you just hold through the down times and through rough times, you can survive almost anything.

And so the deal with real estate is you just need to buy properties that you can hold. If you need to, if you're going to flip houses, great. Just make sure if something goes wrong, you can hold it to bail yourself out. So you said rough times, you know, depending on who you ask, we're either in rough times, we're on our way towards rough times or rough times are about to be in the past.

But it is true that interest rates are pretty high right now. How does the current market affect what the average person should be thinking about doing when it comes to real estate investing? Yeah. I mean, interest rates are high. If you look at a five-year time span, right? But if you look at a 50-year time span, they're actually pretty normal.

Whether or not they'll go up higher or lower, we don't know. Interest rates definitely affect the market. I mean, like that's what the government's doing, right? Like they raise interest rates as a way to slow down the economy or the inflation anyway. And so the government is actively trying to make house prices stop going up.

So by raising interest rates, they do that. Ironically, we're in a really weird time right now where they are deliberately trying to raise interest rates to keep house prices from going up. But what happens then is it makes it harder to build new property and it makes harder to, for people to buy property.

So where do all those people go? They go rent because they can't build a new property and they can't go and buy something. So they go and rent. Well, we've already got a housing deficit in America, a really bad one, which is why rents are going up so much.

So now we've got this increased problem. The government is trying to slow down real estate prices and other prices from going up by raising interest rates. But what the effect it's having is it's driving rents higher and higher and higher. So who wins in that situation? Like who wins when interest rates, when, when, when the rents are going up dramatically and people can't buy as much.

Flippers don't win, right? Because you can't sell a house when you're flipping houses as much, but when you own rental property and you have a fixed mortgage that does not change and your rents go up by 10%, 20% per year, it's the landlords, it's the rental property owners that are beginning wealthier and wealthier and wealthier.

So it, are we in rough times? I mean, if you're a tenant, yes, it's going to get rough. I think the next few years, I think tenants are going to see their rent go up across the country dramatically. If you're a landlord, I mean, these are, it's going to be really good times for us in the next few years.

I think that most investors are, and honestly that's what's propping up real estate values right now too, as investors, because we know that's what's happening. So we're willing to pay more for properties. I'm willing to buy property right now that breaks even because I know that next year rent is going to be a lot higher, not everywhere, but in a lot of places.

So that's, that's what I see in my crystal ball. I could be 100% wrong though. But does the cost of the capital, right? If leverage is the magic that helps you get the returns, the cost of capital going up, does that eat into the returns or does it get made up for by rising rent prices or how do you even think about interest rates?

Do you slow down a little bit right now or does it not affect you? Yeah, it does. It, they are, it is compensated by rent raises, right? So on one hand they're, they're compensating, you know, so it's not a big deal. But what's cool is that like interest rates can be refinanced and you could refinance your mortgage at any point.

So it's not like, Oh, I'm paying 7% right now on my mortgage. Okay, fine. Well, in two years, they go back down, you refinance into a 5% or 4%. You're not stuck for life with that. But what doesn't typically in almost any, almost historically always go down as rents, rents typically go up because inflation tends to go up, rates go up and down.

So it's kind of like dollar cost averaging. And maybe it's use a phrase that I don't fully even understand cause I'm not a stock guy, but like, right. When things go down, you just refinance to get the lower rate and then you lock in that rate for the next few years.

If they go down again, you just refinance again. So it's, it's I don't worry about rates right now because rates are temporary. Rents are going up. Yeah. I mean, I've been seeing all the news about the highest 30 year fixed prices in a long time. And all I can think about is if I were getting a mortgage right now, I would probably not be getting a 30 year fixed right now.

Right. I, my bet, and I am not an expert and I could probably be wrong, but is that in the next 10 years, rates will likely at some point be lower than they are now. So if I were buying a home today and this is not advice for anyone, but if I were, I would probably look at the like seven, 10 year, uh, adjustable mortgages where it's only fixed for seven or 10 years.

And with the anticipation of being able to refinance in that window, um, which I think is just this amazing feature of a mortgage. Like the bank can't refinance on you, but you can on them. You can add on them. And that's why I, I, yeah, the 30 year mortgage thing.

It's for me. Yes. If I can get a dramatically lower rate off a seven year arm, they call it adjustable rate mortgage, a seven or 10 year. Yeah. I like that idea. Here's what I don't like though. What happened in Oh seven Oh eight, right. As people have these adjustable mortgages for the same reason, like the, that we're having in today.

Uh, and so they'd get the arm cause it was cheaper. And then the arm would shoot up when the market collapsed, the arm shot up to 28%. So all of a sudden people's mortgages went from a thousand to $5,000 and they lost their homes. That's, that has been changed.

Uh, there are now limits on what an arm can do. A lot of people don't realize this. They think, Oh, I would never get an adjustable rate mortgage cause I don't want Oh eight to happen again. Well, if you look at the paperwork and talk to your lenders, yeah, most arms have a max what they can get to.

And it's somewhere in the, like the 11, 12% range. So I, yeah. Could rates stay high forever? And then your adjustable rate, seven years from now goes up to 12%. That is possible. That is a risk. So if you really don't like, like risk, take a 30 year mortgage, you can refinance a 30 year mortgage too.

But if you want to lower your interest rate and take a little gamble, that's what I typically do. Yeah. The arm's not bad. Yeah. Yeah. We had that. I built that into my model when I was like, which one do we do? I was like, well, you know, and, and by the way, because of the lower rate, don't think of the breakeven as seven years, you do a seven rate arm.

You probably, because you're going to get a lower rate, you probably have maybe eight, nine, 10 years to refinance before it would have been a worse deal than the 30 year fix. You're right on it. Because for the first seven years you're saving money. So, yeah. And you can invest that in other things and all that.

Yeah. A hundred percent. I love that. So one thing I've heard you say in real estate, it can be easier to do bigger deals, right? Like some of these huge deals, you know, compared to buying one house and fixing it up can be easier and, and you know, more profitable.

So what does that mean for the average investor? Does that mean like forget starting with buying, I think for you, it was like, you know, you bought a house in Portland. Like is that, forget that as your first strategy, is there a way to kind of skip and jump into something bigger without necessarily needing to hire someone?

Or is the answer to jump into these bigger projects, you need to invest with a syndicate or something like that. So you can definitely invest with a syndicate, right? That's totally fine. You get a good return that way. Hopefully, if you have a good person, right? A good company that you're working with, you should a person jump into a larger deal.

For example, there's a investor named Grant Cardone. He's very popular on social media, millions of followers, very loud, an exciting guy, right? So Grant has this big thing. He's always like, don't buy anything under 50 units. It's stupid. You shouldn't do it. He's kind of a Dave Ramsey of the opposite side.

He'll tell you, you're stupid if you, you know, if you don't use debt. So I don't, so the over here, we've got Grant saying, don't do anything small ever only by large deals because they're easier. And I've said the same thing. Large deals are easier, but large deals have require a whole lot more capital that may not be yours.

And there's a big learning curve, right? So if I make a mistake on my that, let's go back to the flip. I said I lost money on the one flip I lost money on, right? So I lost probably $15,000 what I lost because the market wasn't as good as I thought it was.

Maybe I didn't do as good of a job rehabbing as I thought. I took a lot longer than I thought I screwed up because I was new to flipping houses and I lost $15,000. Okay. Well, you know, I can survive that. I mean, I can, I can earn that back other ways.

I bought a hundred million dollar apartment complex and I screwed up and lost 15%. Well, now I've just lost $15 million of probably investor capital or your own capital. So if you're going to going big is great. It is easier because you have smarter people at all the levels and the, the salaries for those people or whatever you want to call it.

The way those people get paid is kind of baked into it because you're buying a business. Like if you're buying an apartment complex, you are not buying a real estate. You're buying a business that happens to trade in real estate. That makes sense to you. You have people, you have staff, you have processes systems and the bigger you go, the better those systems and processes and people are, which is why you want to go bigger when you're buying a duplex.

I mean, who's changing your toilet. You're got, you got to call the plumber or you got to go do it. When you have a, when you own 1% of a billion dollar portfolio, that portfolio manager has people who take care of the problem for you. So yeah, bigger can be easier because you're allowed more people.

You got bigger teams. And frankly, there's just more cashflow, usually to be able to afford and to pay for all those problems. This might be a naive question, but is it easy, even at the small level to hire someone to handle all of that, all of the problems with a rental?

If, if I were to say, I want to buy a rental property in North Carolina, right? I'm not going to drive over and fix it. It's a multi-hour flight. Maybe even I have to change planes, but is it easy as a small time real estate investor to buy a property in another state and hire someone to manage it?

Are they easy to find those people and vet those people? And does it eat too much into your returns that it makes it not worth it? It is so easy to hire someone to manage your rental properties. It's so hard to hire someone good to manage your rental properties, right?

And so, I mean, there's a million of them out there. There's a million property managers. This is an entire industry of people who will, you can hire for 10% typically of whatever the rent is. They'll take care of your property. So you've got a property, the rent is a thousand dollars.

They'll charge you a hundred bucks a month to manage your property for you. No problem. But their only incentive is to make sure the property doesn't go empty. And they've got a thousand other units that they're also incentivized to make sure they don't go empty. So it's not impossible.

There are great property managers out there. I've worked with a lot of good ones, but I've worked with a lot of bad ones that are, they'll put in anybody and they don't care about you. They don't care about your property as much. So the key is due diligence, right?

It's the exact same logic. Have you ever hired an employee before? I mean, you owned a company. So I mean, it's really easy to hire an employee, right? It's really easy. Just put a job description, guy walks through the door. They have a pulse, hire them. It's really hard to hire a good employee.

And the way you hire a good employee is by testing out a few of them, knowing what you want, getting recommendations, looking at referrals, interviewing them, talking to them. And then if they suck, letting them go right away and firing fast and hiring slow, right? That whole thing, it's no different.

When you hire a property manager to look up to your properties, you're just hiring a team member to take over your property. So don't treat it any like just because they say their property manager, it doesn't mean they're good. That's the bottom line. A funny analog to that is we have an au pair and we were asked this question after we interviewed our last au pair, you know, we probably did four or five video calls.

We had her meet the kids. We talked about everything. We wrote up a guide to how we would want everything in our house to function and how we take care of our kids and the responsibilities. And then we got this email that was like, we have a few questions for you now that you've matched with your au pair one, have you and your partner both talked to the au pair?

And we're like, yeah, of course. And then it was like, have you guys talked about childcare expectations? I was like, this person's going to live in our house to take care of our child. Of course, we've talked about childcare expectations. And then this whole thing clicked when we started hearing from our au pair, how so many of the other au pairs she was friends with had these terrible situations where the expectations were totally wrong.

And she was like, Oh, some of them had a one 20 minute call. And that was it. And I just couldn't believe that people who I would imagine in their professional lives treated hiring with a really rigorous process. And then in their non-professional work lives, their job life, just hire people with a totally different thing.

So it sounds like that same principle applies, whether you're hiring someone to manage your property, or you're hiring someone to watch your kids, interview them. Like you would, if you were running a business and trying to hire an employee, you want to work for you for many years. Dude, that is so good.

Right. And this goes to one of my favorite questions. Like I think my performance coach once asked me, but I use it all the time in people. I'm going to, I'm going to get asked, ask it to you right now. It's exactly related to this. What is something that you do in your, in, in your strong area of life that you don't do in your weak area of life, right?

Like maybe your strong area of life is business. So one thing you do really well is you hire people really well. You put them through the whole system and then you don't understand why your au pair is terrible. Not you, but people, right. Because they're not doing the things in one area of their life that they do in the other one.

So if you want to improve the weak area of your life, just do the same stuff you do in the strong area of your life. Right. And so like, this is that idea of like, yeah, if you're the au pair, whether it's an au pair, whether it's whatever, like do the stuff that you know you need to do and don't be lazy about it.

Cause that's why you're good at that one thing in your life. So I'll throw it at you. Yeah. What's something you do in a strong of your life that you're currently not doing in a weaker area of your life? It's funny because the creation of this podcast in some way was me trying to identify all the areas of my life for improvement and applying kind of the, the, the principles of them.

So I think when I got started, there were a lot more, right? I was like, gosh, when it comes to health and eating, I was like, I know this is important and I'm not optimizing it at all. So we ended up just like eating quickly, making unhealthy food. And then we were like, Hmm, well, if I was at a company and I was trying to run this like a business, I would try to figure out if maybe there was someone else could do it.

And so then we ended up outsourcing to someone local that cooks meals and drops them off. Like we didn't outsource to a chef in our house. That's right. We outsourced, you know, put an ad on Craigslist and look for someone, Hey, do you like to cook? Can you cook?

Uh, and so I've, I don't know if I have a perfect example now because every time I find one of those things, I'm like, I attack it like this crazy thing. And then I usually end up talking about it on the show or making a whole episode about it or interviewing someone to try to figure out how to do it.

So I guess maybe if I went through the list, I was like, what's on my list of things I want to talk to people about. I definitely don't feel like I've nailed, uh, you know, best practices for sleep. Like I, you know, I track my sleep. I do a pretty good job, but I don't feel like I've gone deep there.

So an episode on sleep is one that's kind of imminently sitting on the back burner. Uh, there's probably a few other topics. So I would say whatever, whatever topics come up on the show in the next six to 12 months are things that I probably in hindsight, I'm doing terribly right now.

Well, I love that you brought that example up, right? Like it's the example of like the fitness, like people are like, Oh, I'm struggling with my fitness. And I'm like, okay, well like, like, what do you do in business when you struggle? Like, Oh, you know, I read business books.

I go to conferences. I, you know, go to meetups. I interview people. Okay. Why aren't you applying that to your fitness? Then go to maybe read a fitness book, right? Maybe go to a conference on fitness. I don't know. Like use the stuff that works that you know works and apply it to the areas where you're struggling with.

So I love that you brought that example. Food and fitness is a huge one. Okay. We've talked about improving lives. You've mentioned mindset, performance coach. I have a lot of things I want to touch on outside of real estate, but I do have one question I want to get your take on.

How do you, you know, I assume you're pro, you know, owning your own primary residence. So we didn't even talk about it, but I'm pro ish owning your own primary residence. I love it. There are reasons not to, but mathematically. Yes. I love it. Yeah. I mean, look, if you're not going to be in it for awhile, if you want the flexibility of being able to move all kinds of reasons, I am, I am not one to say everyone should own.

In fact, I think there are a lot of people who think they should own that should probably be renting. Um, but, but, but let's say you're not opposed to it. You're not like, don't buy a home. So we've talked about a lot of different types of real estate. The one I'm curious to get your take on.

I hear from a lot of people saying, gosh, you know, maybe I live in the Bay area. Maybe I live in New York or real estate's too expensive. And so I'm going to buy a vacation home. And I see so many people say, I can't afford this. So I'm going to buy a house in Tahoe.

We have a lot of friends who said I'm going to buy a house in Tahoe. And to me, I've always been like, gosh, I don't, I don't want it. I don't want to manage a house in Tahoe as a rental. I'm not going to be there all the time.

We ended up buying a fractional home with this company Picasso and that we now own one eighth. And we only go six or six weeks a year. It's been absolutely fantastic. It's exactly what we need. But I'm curious what you think about vacation rentals, time shares that whole side of real estate that we haven't really touched on at all.

So there is, it's a great question. So generally speaking, I think that vacation homes are a tremendous waste of money when it's like, I'm going to buy a house that I can go visit as a vacation, because you're starting from the wrong angle. You're not starting with, I want to buy an investment.

You're starting from an emotional standpoint of, I really like Cabo. I'm going to go buy a vacation house in Cabo. And then from, you're just screwed from the first minute you do it. And then, yeah, you got all the headaches of owning property. Oh, forget to, you got the threat to renew the insurance.

So they sent the bill to the wrong place or, you know, the, the something broke while you were gone. And now the water leaked all over the floor. So when you approach it from, I want a vacation house because I like Cabo, I'm like a hundred, generally a hundred percent against that.

I'm like, don't, like just go, go rent a place in Cabo. There's great houses and they'll clean up after you're done. Like, it's like, it's, it's way better just to rent a place. Now, if you want a, if you have a place you like going to all the time, a thing like what you did, a fractional ownership, I love that idea.

Cause you still have part ownership, but you're not wasting the other 90% of your year that you're just not going to use it. So I like that strategy a lot when the numbers work out. But again, I would just caution people to look at like, are you really better off owning something or is it better just to go on Airbnb or rent a stupid house?

That's different each time. So you get to have more fun. That's up to you. And then timeshare stuff. I avoid all of that. I don't like really much of any of the timeshare stuff. Maybe I'm sure some of it's good. I'm just not good at it. And I don't like, I don't like the shadiness of the industry that has been for the last 50 years.

Now, the last thing though, is owning vacation rentals, like owning an investment that you buy as a Airbnb property or as a VRBO property, that can be a tremendous cash cow. Like I said earlier, seven grand a month, my condo, I got another one coming online next month between the two of them.

That's 15, 14 to $15,000 a month in profit. I'll be making. That's like retire from your job, sit on the beach for the rest of your life kind of money from two properties. But it is a business. It is fully a business that requires systems, people, processes, the whole works.

And it's also very heavily dependent upon service, hospitality. So if your tenant says jump, you got to say how high, or they'll give you a bad review. And then that reflects like poorly on you and you get less bookings and all that. So if you're willing to put into work to own an investment property that does vacation rentals, it is a phenomenal strategy, even better if you can manage it yourself.

Like one vacation rental can give somebody complete financial independence. If you're willing to manage it yourself, one vacation rental, two vacation rentals will change your life. And you don't mean a vacation rental that you're like, I like to go to Cabo. So I'm going to buy it in Cabo and rent it out when I'm not there.

You mean I'm going to treat this like a business. I'm going to buy a vacation rental wherever I think the best vacation rental market is. And maybe that's Cabo. I don't know. And you know, broadly speaking, whether it's, you know, real estate to invest in or vacation rentals, where do you even go to start to learn?

Where is the most desirable place to buy right now? Where do you kind of collect that data? Or is there an obvious answer that I, as a, as a novice here, don't know. There's not, it's, it's very nuanced, which is why real estate is so powerful because it's, it's not an efficient market, right?

When we talk about like efficient markets, like like stocks or whatever are very efficient. You can buy and sell real easily. Insider trading is not allowed, right? Insider trading is allowed all day long in real estate. It's great. I use insider trading all the time in real estate investing.

Now someone's going to take that clip right there, cut out the last half of that and throw me in jail for it. But no, insider trading is totally out. So in other words, where do you have inside knowledge? Like what area do you know? I would argue that like your knowledge of an area is more important than the metrics of an area.

Your knowledge of an area is more important than the metrics of an area. I know Maui Hawaii really well. I've lived here for four years. I moved here because I'm, I prioritize lifestyle over profit, but I still like once I got here, I learned Maui really, really well. So I can do really, really well here.

You could not, like you would lose money almost for sure in Maui because you don't know the market. It's the market metrics are almost irrelevant in a large way. Now, there are, there are ways to learn more, right? There's a million blogs out there. I mean, bigger pockets, the podcast is on forever.

They do a lot of occasional stuff. Uh, but just in general market research, I'm a big believer and find what other people are doing that are like, that's like what you want to do and just do it where they're doing it. Like you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

If you're like, Oh, there's a lot of people doing vacation rentals in the smoky mountains right now. I can name at least 10 friends of mine that have smoky mountain vacation rentals. So do you think you could be number 11? Probably, right? Are you willing to learn the market to get good enough to make money in it?

If yes, then do it. Oh yeah. There, there, there is no like one definitive source. It's like, this is where the best thing is because then everyone would go there and then it wouldn't be the best thing anymore. So what are you willing to research, look into, and then, uh, jump in.

Okay. You mentioned bigger pockets, any other resources, books, things that people should go to if they want to go deeper than just this episode? Yeah. And you know, I, yeah, bigger pockets is amazing, right? So bigger pockets, I didn't start it. I was just on a podcast for a decade.

Uh, but I was a young, like young real estate investor who found bigger pockets when I bought my first property and they have a massive forum. Uh, like again, they're not, they're not paying me to plug this. I'm just saying like this changed my life. Cause I, there was a place you could go and just be like, I'm looking into these smoky mountains.

Does anyone know a good vacation rental spot in the Smokies? You'll get 50 people who invest in the Smokies to be like, yeah, don't do it or do it here. Watch out for this place. It's the, the forum is phenomenal for Q and a almost every question that could ever be asked is probably already asked in there.

So you don't even have to ask it if you're an introvert, like you just want to go and read. Uh, but yeah, bigger pockets, amazing. The forum blog podcast, whatever. Uh, meetups are great. I love local meetups, real estate's an interesting community, just like the tech community, you know, like in a lot of cities like Denver, Austin, uh, San Francisco, you get really good meetups of like founders and entrepreneurs that get together because it's a lonely business to run a business by yourself.

Real estate the same way. Every major city in America has meetups happening almost every night of the week somewhere. Uh, you can find a lot of them on bigger pockets. I think it's biggerpockets.com/events. Uh, you can find them on like meetup.com. You can start your own, but real estate investors getting together.

You're going to learn so much more than if you were to just pick up my book from Amazon or somebody else's book, because it's real people in the area doing the thing that you want to do. I love it. Yeah. I mean, part of my foray into the tech sector in the Bay area was just, I arrived here.

I didn't know a single person. Uh, and I was like, I just need to meet people. So I went to, there's this like SF new tech meetup. I would go to that and you know, there were just millions of them. And I would, and then I ended up hosting my own event, uh, which was another big part of it.

And so I'm a big fan of, of meeting people in the, in the, in the flesh, which we are now, you know, much more getting, getting at least much more comfortable doing. okay. If that ending seemed abrupt, it was probably because it wasn't actually the end of our conversation.

If you remember when I originally introed Brandon at the beginning of this episode, there was so much more than real estate I wanted to talk about, but I didn't want to release a two hour podcast on two separate topics. So instead in a few weeks, I'll put out another episode of all the hacks where I dig into the mindset Brandon used to build his massive real estate portfolio while also living his ideal life.

We'll talk about setting goals, hacking, self-discipline, using performance coaches, finding the balance between audacious business goals and quality family time. And finally, all of his amazing Maui recommendations, which by the time that airs, I'll probably have gone and used myself. So definitely check that out in a few weeks because I already know it was fantastic.

And next week we have an incredible conversation with Annie Duke, author of thinking in bets and quit. But until then, have a wonderful week. Please send me questions for the next mailbag episode where I'll cover life, work, non points, travel, and anything else you send my way. Chris@allthehacks.com. See you then.