Category: <![CDATA[Podcast]]>

David Greene is back and we’re “Seeing Greene” as he answers some of the most common real estate investing questions from BiggerPockets listeners! David goes over a multitude of different questions, ranging from financing, to acquisition, to mindset, and strategy.

Not only does David have the experience of being a real estate investor, he’s also a licensed real estate agent and owns a mortgage company as well. This allows him to have insider insight that many real estate investors simply don’t have.

If you’ve wanted a question answered by an industry expert, stick around because your question might just be answered on this episode of “Seeing Greene”!

It’s understandable why so many real estate investors don’t want to partner up. I mean, who wants to split half of a rent check with someone else? This can seem especially true when you’re just starting and every cent of profit counts. But, what if the path to financial freedom was through partnerships? What if you could grow your wealth, spend less time working, and scale far faster simply by leveraging your relationships.

With us are the hosts of the new InvestHER podcast, Liz Faircloth and Andresa Guidelli, two real estate veterans who partnered up to teach women about financial freedom, cash flow, and everything related to real estate. Liz and Andresa are both partners in real estate and partners in leading the InvestHER community, so they know a thing or two about what makes partnerships work and what doesn’t.

We talk about questions to ask potential partners, how to test out a partnership by doing a project together, formalizing a partnership with binding contracts, how to stop resentment in partnerships, and how to end partnerships that go bad.

If you’re looking to scale your real estate portfolio to new heights, you’ll definitely be using partnerships to do so. Tune in to make sure you and your partner stay protected!

Three years ago, Atomic Habits was released. In this groundbreaking book, author James Clear asks a complex question “why do we continue our bad habits while neglecting good habits?” While it’s not as easy as simply saying, “I want to be better, hence I’ll stop doing this”, there are some ways that you can convince (and often trick) yourself into developing the habits that will help you create a better life.

The first thing to know about habits is that they aren’t a minimal part of your life. Your habits are what your life is built upon. Do you habitually clean your room every week? You’re most likely a clean and well-organized person. Are you constantly looking for ways to save money? You probably have a decent-sized bank account. If you want to become the “money person” or the “helpful person” or the “intelligent person” you need to start adopting the habits that someone in those positions would have.

So how do you develop a good habit? More importantly, how do you halt your bad habits from derailing your entire life? James walks through a few key ways to do this, from making habit cues less obvious, to changing your environment, to removing yourself from the choice entirely. One thing is for certain, if you want to change your life for the better, you need to start changing your habits.

Brandon Turner is a man of many talents. Whether it be building a real estate empire, growing a team, or surfing out in Maui, he seems to make it all look so simple. Yet, that is his key to success. Simplicity.

Brandon’s keynote speech from BPCon 2019 touches on many things, including how to simplify your business so it’s working for you, how to grow a team you trust, working with your strengths, and becoming the superhero in your own story. It also includes glimpses into Brandon’s everyday life. From hair styles, to how to ask out your crush, and even saving naked swimmers on Maui beaches.

Regardless of where you’re at in the journey, every successful business owner (whether real estate or not) has to make a big business into something simple and seamless, and that’s what you’ll learn from Brandon’s keynote speech.

Want tickets to BPCon 2021? Click here!

Last week, Brandon and David sat down to talk about the “Core 4” of any successful real estate team. Now they’re here to talk about the “Divided 5-ed”, a term they coined to describe the five team members you’ll need to scale your portfolio to new heights. Both Brandon and David agree that a sizable, growing real estate portfolio needs to be thought of more as a business than just a group of rental properties.

Maybe you’re looking to scale into large multifamily properties, commercial properties, self-storage units, or mobile home parks. Or maybe you’re just going to buy 1,000 single-family homes. Whatever your strategy, you will need a lead generator, underwriter, money raiser, asset manager, and financer/bookkeeper on your team. You may start out doing many of these roles when you buy your first few properties, but as you scale, you’ll need to fill these roles with more fitting individuals.

Maybe you want to get more experience before you start buying properties. Great! Join someone else’s team and think about how you can be the BEST in the role that you’ve been appointed to.

Everybody is busy. We have jobs, kids, businesses, and responsibilities to take care of. Why go out of your way and risk your money and time to invest in real estate? Mike Webb, firefighter, investor, flipper, and wholesaler argues the opposite. Mike says that it’s far riskier to simply rely on your job for the entirety of your income.

Mike began his investing career by investing in a side-by-side duplex, rehabbing it, and failing to complete a successful BRRRR. After seeing the cash flow and learning from his mistakes, Mike saw an investment strategy that could carry him to financial freedom. He is still working as a full-time firefighter, but is building his portfolio and completing 20-30 flips per year while he does so. This gives Mike the ultimate freedom to do whatever is best for him and his family, even though he loves his job.

In a world where it seems cool for everyone to quit their job, Mike reassures those who like their work that it’s worth staying, especially to keep that investment money flowing. He also walks through his partnerships, how he hires his team members, and what you can do to systematize your business so you can outsource your work as you take on more strategic roles! 

David Greene is great at coining new terms, just like his co-host Brandon Turner. Today we talk about the “Core 4” of any successful real estate investor’s team. This includes the agent/deal finder, the property manager, the lender, and the contractor. Without these Core 4, you’ll have trouble building a real estate empire, especially if you’re doing so long distance. The good news? Even if you’re a brand new investor, you can start building out these relationships today!

With the help of BiggerPockets, you can find agents, lenders, property managers, and contractors. You can also head over to the forums and chat with other investors in your area, get their take on who’s the best in the business, and use their referrals to grow your team.

Are you an agent, lender, contractor, or property manager? Great! Brandon and David drop some tips on how you can attract the best clientele that will help you grow your businesses as well. The most important part of any of this is having open, honest, consistent communication with your team members and making sure nothing is falling through the cracks so everyone knows exactly what they should be doing.

At one point, Dan Brault had a construction company working on custom builds in upstate New York. He had left behind a successful sales career to do it and although he was highly stressed, he felt all of his hard work was going to be rewarded sometime soon. That is, until, he had a huge project that went over budget, over the timeline, and forced him into $400,000 worth of debt.

Dan closed his company, went back to sales and started to think about what he did wrong. Was it the leadership? Was it the system? Was it just bad luck? Dan went to work, doing whatever he could to level up his business skills so he could get back into real estate full-time and do so in a way that allowed him to scale.

Now, after going through many of life’s lessons, Dan is doing phenomenally, with him and his team closing on 12+ wholesale deals a month, getting him close to $200k in monthly revenue. He credits his success to his systems, his team, and the way he pivoted his leadership that allowed the entire company to work as one well-oiled machine.

We all reach a point of complacency. We tell ourselves that we’ve done enough, it’s too hard to go further, or we don’t have enough experience, money, or time to accomplish the goals that seem impossible. Brandon Turner, host of the BiggerPockets podcast, was feeling this way too, sitting on a decade worth of real estate, with enough passive income to live his life how he saw fit. It wasn’t until Brandon started surrounding himself with people who did much more than him that he realized he wasn’t hitting his true potential.

Now, leading the real estate syndication Open Door Capital, Brandon has more than 10x-ed his rental portfolio, built a life he loves in Maui, and worked with some of his heroes. This wasn’t by accident, it also wasn’t dropped into his lap. Brandon spent serious time thinking about his “vivid vision” of the future, what he wanted out of life, and who would help him get there.

He’s had ups and downs, with some of his favorite employees leaving, partnerships falling through, and deals being lost. All of these proved to be valuable lessons in his ongoing work to create a mobile home empire and become the best of the best at what he, and his team, does.

The path of a wealthy real estate investor is never a straight line. Often we’ll set up goals we deem worth chasing, then somewhere along the way, we’ll pivot to a more refined goal. Without knowing where we want to go, we can’t get the proper footing to start the journey. This is exactly what snowboarder, skater, real estate investor, and lender, Chris Naugle, talks about with us today.

Chris grew up in chilly Buffalo, New York and knew he wasn’t the employment type of guy. So, after quitting his first job, he decided to start a clothing company in his basement. Then, with some of the profits from his clothing venture, paired with a loan from his mom’s equity line, he opened up a skateboard shop. Everything was going well, until the dot com crash, prompting him to become an advisor on Wall Street.

As an advisor, Chris found that more and more of his wealthy clients were investing in real estate. This prompted him to take the leap and start flipping, buying commercial real estate, and investing in rentals. But, Chris wasn’t borrowing the right way, leading him to have to get rid of his 37 unit portfolio or go bankrupt.

After losing years’ worth of work and a massive amount of equity, Chris started to draw up systems and procedures that could work as a safety net for his investments. Now with a smaller portfolio of around 23 units, he works mostly as the bank that lends other investors their money. All of this was made possible when Chris stopped and thought about what his “perfect day” was and what he needed to do to make it a reality.