Hunter Thompson – Full-time Real Estate Investor, Managing Principal at Asym Capital, a private equity firm in Los Angeles, Host of Cash Flow Connections Real Estate Podcast, Member of Forbes Real Estate Council, and Investor in Thrive Market talks to Neil Henderson and Brittany Henderson, the hosts of The Road to Family Freedom podcast. Hunter has helped more than 250 investors to allocate capital to over 100 properties. Hunter discusses recession-resistant asset classes, low-to-value ratio, and protecting for downside risk.

Three Key Take Aways from this Episode

1. Hunter Thompson has raised over $20 million in private capital and controls over $60 million in commercial real estate. 
2. Recession-resistant asset classes include the mobile home park business and self-storage facilities.
3. The average social security check is about $1,300 a month and the average 2-bedroom apartment rents for about $1,200 a month.

What you’ll learn about in this episode

• Hunter discusses how he got involved in real estate.  
• What is Hunter’s definition of ‘financial freedom?’
• Why is the 2010 European financial crisis so critical? 
• How did Hunter educate himself in the real estate market?
• How long did it take to get to his first big real estate deal?
• Which asset classes does Hunter believe are recession-proof?
• What is a good loan-to-value ratio for Hunter Thompson?
• Hunter discusses his investor portal. 
• Who are most of his tenants? 
• Could Hunter run his business from anywhere in the world?
• How does he protect for downside risk? 
• What is the most critical skill someone would need in his real estate niche? 
• Does he get more value from networking events or his podcast? 
• Is there anything that Hunter would do differently? 
• What advice would he give to someone who has a family and looking into real estate?
• What were the take-aways that Neil and Brittany gained from Hunter Thompson?

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Resources Mentioned in the Show

• The Road to Family Freedom: roadtofamilyfreedom.com
• Cashflowconnections.com
• Cash Flow Connections Real Estate Podcast

Connect with Hunter:

• Website: Asym Capital
• LinkedIn: Hunter Thompson

*FTC Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase after clicking on the links, Road to Family Freedom will get a small commission. We are dedicated to finding the coolest products for families looking to building financial freedom through real estate and we never recommend anything that we don’t love.

So when you start looking at commercial assets, you start to bring in more complications. And those line items if you think about looking at on an underwriting model and Excel for example, each line item makes the investment more and more complicated. And therefore, there can be a larger and larger discrepancy between a mom and pop owner and a best in class owner.

I'm Neil and I'm Brittany, we are a family on a journey towards financial and location independence. Each week, we interview successful real estate entrepreneurs about their chosen investment strategy, and rate it based on how much money it took to get started, how long it took to educate themselves, how passive it is, and whether or not they could do it from anywhere in the world.

Welcome to the road to family freedom. If you like our show, the easiest way for you to give back is to leave us a rating and review on iTunes, head on over to road family freedom comm slash review for links and instructions on how to do that we would be so grateful. All right, and now thought of us Let's hit the road to family freedom.

Greetings, friends and families. I'm Neil. And I'm Brittany, you're listening to the road to family freedom podcast. Joining us today is Mr. Hunter Thompson. Hunter. How are you?

I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on.

Oh, of course great to have you. Hunter is a full time real estate investor and founder of asym capital, a private equity firm based out of Los Angeles, California. Since starting ACM hunter has helped more than 250 investors allocate capital to over 100 properties. He has personally raised more than $20 million in private capital and controls more than $60 million in commercial real estate. He is also the host of the fantastic cash flow connections real estate podcast. With all that said, Hunter, you want to give her friends and families a little bit more about your background and what you're focused on now.

Yeah, sure. So a little about my background. You know, I think that a lot of people, when they come on the show are coming in any real estate show, they talk about 2008 as kind of their last straw moment, whether it was one way or the other. And for me, that really wasn't an important defining moment, my real estate career, but it definitely started me on that path. So I wasn't heavily invested in the market in 2008, I'm still finishing college. And when 2018 happen, just by my nature of being a little bit counter cyclical, I realized that there was going to be a great opportunity in the world of finance. Now, most of the things I had learned about finance were stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc. And so that's really what I jumped in on and start to experience some success in the market, as did most people who started looking at investing seriously in 2008. And as I was kind of contemplating the reasons people invest, and trying to outline this, and trying to clarify this, try to codify this, a couple of things came to mind. It's really about predictability of outcome. And when I talk about predictability of outcome, that's, I guess, the mindset that goes around being financially well off or financially free, is knowing that you'll be able to pay off your future expenses without working. And if that's the definition of financial freedom, even though most people don't iron it out to that level of detail. That's at least my definition of financial freedom, I realized that the stock market was just not a very direct way to accomplish that goal. And so, as I was kind of pondering this 2010 happened. Now 2010 is something very few people talk about. But for me, it was the absolute most important moment in that beginning of my career was when the European debt crisis really started to happen. And for those of you who aren't familiar, this is when Europe had something very similar to happen to them that the United States experienced in 2008, there was a complete lack of liquidity in the market, banks froze up. And really, businesses started shutting down ATMs, even in some cases didn't even have cash. And this situation was causing unbelievable volatility in the US markets. And so I remember watching CNBC, and they were talking about the Greece bond yields, and they were saying, if the Greece bond yields remain below 7%, the s&p 500 was going to be fine. But if it went above 7%, the s&p 500 was going to collapse. And I remember thinking, How in the world is it the case that something as obscure as the Greece bond deals is going to play a role in my financial well being? So much so that everyone on CNBC is all of a sudden obsessed with that? How could I ever predicted that? How could I have ever done the due diligence that would be required for me to be able to understand that that was a risk, and let alone mitigate that risk? And so that was really my introduction into looking at alternative investments in real estate came up very quickly, just because the simplicity of the investments allow a small company or a small family office to actually conduct due diligence, that was kind of how I got started in this space.

Gotcha. You know, we often talk about unfair advantage is sort of how you get ahead and in any sort of investing, you know, what's your opinion advantage. And it's very, very difficult for someone who is investing in stocks to gain any sort of unfair advantage over hedge fund managers who live and breathe this stuff and swim in the data daily, and then have an army of people, and also artificial intelligence is now that are also swimming in that data. Whereas with real estate, you really have, you know, I can understand why the value of a piece of real estate is going up. Rather than I don't really understand I love Apple Computer, but I don't really understand why Apple stock goes up or down daily beyond like, you know, the financial pundits saying, hey, Apple had a really good day, and they had reported really good earnings.

Well, right. And the reason that's all they're saying is, because that's all they know, as well, no one really knows, that's the whole point, you cannot have, regardless of the infrastructure you have in place, people have to have essentially, comparatively unlimited resources cannot predict, to any degree of accuracy where the price will be in the next quarter or the following quarter. It's it's incredibly complicated. But the challenging part is not only really complicated, impossible to do, it's incredibly important at the same time. And so you get stuck in this world, where it's like, man, if I could just find a way to mitigate some of these risks, get some predictability of outcome this week, entirely and change my next 50 6070 years.

So that's how you kind of switch from what you were doing and got into real estate and you obviously have a financial background, but how did you go about educating yourself in the financial realm? Or that excuse me, then the real estate realm?

Yeah, so something really fortunate happened, I ended up moving to California, mostly because I really liked Los Angeles. And you know, like the weather, like being in the California lifestyle. And so the reason I say It's fortunate, the market timing was completely out of my control. So it was an incredibly favorable time to get into real estate. But perhaps more importantly, moving to California, there were a lot of people that got completely wiped out. And so when I started going to networking events, and starting to learn more about real estate and trying to expand my network, the people that were meaning standing at the time, were the people that were able to weather that storm. And so I always tried to be humble in the fact that yes, if I was a little bit older and started my real estate career in 2006, I'm not so sure if this conversation would be happening right now. But perhaps more importantly, the people that I met, I quickly understood whose strategies, were going to be able to weather the next downturn, because it was people that were standing during the heart of one of the most significant downturns in the history of the United States. And so my started my career by just going to networking events. And originally I would go to somewhere between two and five every single week. And that quickly, got some notoriety, got some education, and then I started investing passively through a variety of vehicles. And the first investment we ever made, was lending hard money loans. So we identified markets that were non volatile, and markets like Memphis, Tennessee, Kansas City, and we would lend money to fix and flippers up to 60 or 70% loan to value based on those properties. So there's a property that was worth $100,000, with loan $60,000 on that property, we were able to get an interest rate, usually in the 13% range plus three points. And I remember thinking, you know, look, if this property is worth $100,000, we're only loaning $60,000. And this is a market that's never experienced a 40% correction, the risk profile, this has got to be comparable to something like a 12 month CD or something yet, we're getting 16% per year. And I was like, This is completely asymmetric. In terms of the return profile, feel like am I the only one that understands that this is going on? Well, unfortunately, it kind of was the case, because quickly, those terms changed. As the more liquidity came into the market, not 16% turned into 12%, turning the 10% turn to 7%. And now that play, in my opinion, at least is pretty much gone. But during that period, I transitioned out of the single family space and into the syndicated world of passive investments. And that's where, you know, I've really decided to build my business and really put my stamp on the commercial real estate sector, through the passive vehicles that invest in, you know, high quality 15 million to $15 million properties.

Well, let's delve into that just a little bit. Aside from the diminishing return of hard money, loans. What was it that drew you out of that single family space and into the larger commercial syndication space?

Yeah, so there's a lot of things. I mean, first of all, say this, there's a lot of money to be made in the single family sector. So anything I'm about to say doesn't dispute that at all. It's just a matter of preference. But there's a couple things that I think are objectively the case that are hard to argue with that really make commercial really advantageous. So first of all, one of the reasons that investing in single family assets is so Common is that the barrier to entry is relatively low, you can own an entire property with 30% down $100,000 property, you can only put $30,000 down or so then you can own that property with without really having to have a significant net worth, I mean, $30,000, that that's something that can be easily achievable for a lot of investors that are considering buying their first property. Also, the simplicity of the investment doesn't lend itself. So that there's a massive discrepancy between someone who owns just one property, and someone who owns 2000. So the economies of scale, the systems, the relationships, the lending, all of it is relatively straightforward, and it's simplistic in nature. And that's one of the benefits of it. Because going back to my previous comments, the more complicated the asset, the more challenging it can be to mitigate risk. But this is on the other end of that spectrum. So when you start looking at commercial assets, you start to bring in more complications. And those line items, if you think about looking at on an underwriting model on Excel, for example, each line item makes the investment more and more complicated. And therefore there can be a larger and larger discrepancy between a mom and pop owner and a best in class owner. So if we are able to identify best in class owners, in a business, like Self Storage, for example, which runs much more like a fully functioning business, and just a standard real estate investment, you're doing things like leveraging nearby relationships with truck rental companies, or military bases or colleges. And just that one line item, how can you leverage those relationships, you really start to see that discrepancy. administrative fees, late fees, selling merchandise, all these things, add 1000s and 1000s of dollars to the bottom line, those strategies just aren't available in single family houses. And so when I understood that you can identify best in class owners that say have $200 million worth of self storage, leverage their time, energy expertise and access to capital, and basically invest passively. That's what I was really, really drawn to, I think, really part of it as a personality thing. But I really like interacting with and dealing with people that are highly sophisticated in their respective classes. And if you're dealing with someone who stands to gain 10s of millions of dollars, if they're able to execute for you, their incentives are much more aligned with you. And let's say a single family property manager that may stand to gain 50 or $100 per month. That makes sense.

Definitely. Absolutely. So

well, I want to go back just a little bit to when you first started, I obviously you kind of jumped in pretty quickly, it sounds like and getting started and investing. Were there any challenges that you feel like were holding you back? Or that you had to overcome before kind of getting through your first deal?

Oh, yeah, I mean, the first deal was something that that was something that wasn't that much of a hurdle, the main thing at first was really, who am I going to invest with and what strategies are going to work. And like I said, I felt like I got very favorable in terms of the market timing, and also in terms of the network that I just found myself in because of that market timing. So I don't want to take credit for that. However, the first real hurdle I had was well into my career. So when I really started, my goal was to just help my friends and family invest. I knew that, you know, my mom, for example, she wanted to get money out of the stock market and put into real estate. So that was the first focus of my, my career. And so as we started doing this, no, we had built up a track record of being able to execute on everything from hard money loans to even mobile home parks at this point. And in 2013, we decided to create our first real fund. And so we had an agreement with the sponsor that basically said, you know, if we can bring half a million dollars to the table, we're able to get these favorable terms that will allow us to be compensated. And you know, it'll be economically viable around the point of about $500,000. Right, so we have this contract that says this. And so from my perspective, looking at the mobile home park business, at the time, you're able to generate 10% cash flow, you know, starting day one, and then upwards of let's say, a 20% return on an annual basis. Now, once the properties are taken full cycle. So I'm sure that you're probably familiar with most of the big picture thesis is around why the mobile home parks is so fascinating. But I was found this very, very compelling. And so we had a little bit of a marketing campaign drew some like not necessarily the closest friends and family but one or two tears outside of that. We had 30 people come to this lunch, where I gave them a PowerPoint presentation on the mobile home park business with an operator that we had been investing with for years at that point. And we basically had the opportunity to raise capital from these people that came to this lunch. Like I said, 30 people came which was a massive success. The presentation went really well and the total amount raised was $0.00. No. And so this was heartbreaking because at this point, I had made the decision that this is what I wanted to do professionally. And I had all the green lights were already things were working, the market timing had been really successful, I'd identified operators that that were able to execute. And why in the world? Didn't anyone want invest $1, when I could couldn't wrap my head around it, I was like, Am I not a good enough presenter? Did it not become off clearly, like what these are people that know and already, trust me. So this is like one of the scariest moments in my career. So upon reflection, I have come to understand exactly what happened. If you are going around talking to people and advertising and marketing to people that aren't already looking for these types of investments, particularly something like mobile home parks, now, it's something that's in trend, but I promise you back then, it was something that not a lot of people were talking about, especially outside of the investment world. So if you're going to get someone to invest in something they've never, ever thought about investing in before, basically, you're acquiring them to go through some pseudo religious experience in the middle of this 45 minute lunch. And that's what really, I really started to understand that and shift the focus of my business, you can't go around hunting for those types of individuals, because they're not actually looking for you, they're not interested, most people that have had success in the stock market, they're gonna get their six to 9%, every single year, over the 50 year period, they're pretty much happy with that things have been going their way for the last, you know, whatever, 200 years. So it's just one of those things where what you want to do is position yourself in such a way that leads are attracted to you build that infrastructure that will automatically nurture those leads, and then the scalability of the business is going to for x 10x 100x. Yes, you may be able to go out to your friends and family and get them to invest 25 or $50,000, by the way, most of them are going to think I'll probably just lose this, but I trust this kid, you know, he'll he'll do the right thing. However, if you're trying to get those 250 $300,000 investments, you have to go to people that are actually willing to move their entire portfolio into deals similar to this. And that was a major turning point in my career, when I realized that I needed to build that infrastructure.

Gotcha. How long would you say it took to go from that zero deal to your first what would you would call maybe your first real deal?

Yeah, so I'd say another two years of really building that infrastructure, growing the network and putting out information on the internet, writing articles writing ebooks, I've drafted a couple articles for Forbes, for example, that does help in terms of that credibility, and people start to be drawn to you. So I mean, just to put it in perspective, by the way, I'll kind of close out the story, because I think the listeners will be disappointed. We were, we ended up raising a total after, after the launch and raise $0, after a lot of communications and one on one phone calls with other people, we ended up raising $340,000 with about one week to go, a contact of my CPA ended up investing $160,000 right on the nose. So he literally made it to $500,000, within seven days of the entire thing. So we didn't damage the relationship with the operating partner. Now, just to put that in perspective, and I'll circle back to your original question. Um, it is common for us to receive wires of 200 $300,000 without even interacting on a one on one basis with investors through automations, and systems and processes and the infrastructure that we built up now. That's how much can change over that period of time because of that. And so, you know, the real change to me, I mean, I have a podcast, it's the cash flow connections real estate podcast in iTunes. That was a major moment. For me. It's something I wish I had done earlier. I love doing it. But in terms of being able to build that nurturing relationship, that's how those wires are received and sent. Because the people that listen to the show, they understand me intimately. They know so much about my perspective on investing. And if they align with that investing perspective, they trust me.

Gotcha. So they're even if they've never met you, they hear your voice in their head, almost on a daily basis, and they probably feel like they know you.

Yes. And we're obviously extremely accessible in the sense that you know, you can google our names, you can find articles we've written all over the internet. If someone were have a bad experience, it would be very clear, Lee available and that just isn't the case. Now granted, a lot of that has to do with the fact that we've been able to deliver on our promises. And a lot of the fact of that has to do with market timing. Just generally because everyone in this business has been able to succeed in the last 10 years. However, our strategy is extremely different. Have a nature in the sense that we focus on low loan to value, we focus on the recession resistant asset classes. And we've been giving up a lot of the upside of what some of our competitors may have done because of that more defensive strategy. And I think that that comes through in our communication that comes through in the podcast that comes through in the marketing documents even because, no, we're not trying to generate a 28% return over a five year period. Anyone can do that if they're patient enough, we want to be able to protect and grow our investors world wealth over the next 60 years. And I think that that's a categorical shift in the business plan and the mentality.

That's cool. Since we're kind of talking about how you collected your knowledge, I'd love to know if there are any books not written by you that you feel like are really helpful for people. And then also if you have any of those ebooks that you think would be a good place for someone to start that you wrote, man, I

mean, something that I listened to multiple times a year now it's it's it's come out is mastering the market cycle by Howard Marks when it comes to investing. That is something this is why I mentioned it several times during this talk, he tried to be humble about the significance of the market cycle. And everyone wants to take credit for a massive massive upswings and downswings if they predicted correctly. But the truth of the matter is, markets are just really, really important to the entire business. So that's a great suggestion. In terms of the the entrepreneurship side of things, a book that I wrote, excuse me book that I read recently, that I found extremely compelling. And even a little bit underrated is clockwork by Michael mccalla wits. This is really important as you're starting to get to that 12345 employee space in your career, because it talks about a big difference that most entrepreneurs, they fall into the path of deciding rather than delegating. And so when it comes to deciding that means you give someone a task, and then every time they hit a roadblock, they come to you and ask for questions. And it basically means that you're doing the task as the entrepreneur that they should be doing, because you're just constantly answering emails, he really talks about a mind shift that says, Give them the entire project, provide them with the big picture what you're trying to accomplish, and tell them to let you know when it's done. And that right there if you don't take anything else away from that interview, if you're outsourcing any of your work, which you should 100% be doing regardless of how menial tasks are giving the entire project and then being able to provide feedback once the project is completed or 80% completed depending on your strategy. That is a huge skill that I'm learning right now. And it's really helping the scalability of the business.

Michael mccalla Wits wrote profit first.

That's correct.

Yeah, gotcha. I know him. Yeah. Cool.

I love his stuff. masterly like double double by Cameron Harold. Both of those individuals have been guests on my show. I'm a huge fan of Cameron held, he seems like the coolest guy ever. He just kills it in the game. And he also has a great work life balance. And that's kind of the ultimate goal for all of us. So I definitely suggest that one as well.

And I want to circle back for just a second when you talk about recession resistant assets. Now I have my own opinion about what some of the recession resistant assets are. But can you sort of talk about the asset classes that you think are recession resistance and why?

Yeah, so the easiest one that comes to mind, from my perspective is the mobile home park business. So essentially, the big picture thesis is the worst the economy does, the more demand there is for affordable housing. This is also compounded by the fact that the mobile home parks is interesting because it is actually basically illegally illegal to build them at all. And every single year, there's less and less mobile home park because they're being either condemned or repositioned into apartments or hotels or something similar. So you have this really interesting situation. Because the baby boomers, you're seeing the data about this 10,000 of them are hitting the age of retirement every single day. Many of them have very little savings, and most of them are relying on social security as a main source of income. So the challenge, though, is that the average Social Security check is about 13 $100 a month, and the average two bedroom apartment rents for about 12 $100 a month. So just mathematically impossible, this massive demographic shift that's taking place is going to necessarily result in tremendous demand for affordable housing. And that supply is contracting on an annual basis. As an investor, that's a very unique value proposition. So there's a lot of nuances of that particular asset class. But in terms of recession resistant component, I think that kind of paints the picture clearly. Of course, that isn't the entire spectrum, right? Because the way you lose money in real estate most of the time is not that there is it's not that there's no demand for the product. Right. So the demand we think is extremely stable, but we have to be really cautious about his leverage. Most of the stories in real estate that has to do with losing money have to do with principal balance coming due to interest rate rising too quick. It's all about the debt. Right? And so we want to be really cautious about the leverage points that we have in these asset classes. And that way, if there is an economic correction or a capital market correction, meaning it's challenging to get new loans, you can weather both of those storms. And I think that paints the picture of a true recession resistant asset. Self Storage is similar, maybe not as clear. But it's similarly compelling from a historical data perspective. When people use the product of self storage, it's mostly because of the fact that they're going through some kind of transitional period. And a lot of those transitional periods can be brought on by recessions. So if you think about people, changing jobs, moving, downsizing is the most important. All of those are more common during recessions. And the data is very compelling on this. He mentioned ebooks that are written if you want to check out some data on this, you can check out cash flow connections, comm slash download, or you can just shoot me an email info at cash flow connections calm, and I'll shoot you that ebook, but but generally speaking, the predictability of the outcome is provided by that inverse correlation between the economy and the payment demand for the product.

Gotcha. So before we move on real quick, what, what's a, a loan to value ratio that you're looking for?

Thank you for asking that, by the way, cuz I really dislike when I am doing interviews and feel like people Oh, yeah, I've got a quote, good loan to value. It's like, that's a useless piece of information. So thank you for clarifying. So for us, you know, we have a fund right now, that is a sub 60% loan to value. From my perspective, that is extremely conservative. Yeah. underwrote the deal at 65%. I think that 65% given the types of value add that you can add to self storage in particular, that is still in that conservative range. But I think it just speaks to, you know, the defensive nature of where we are in the market, our particular investment thesis as a firm, and what we're trying to accomplish, you know, when you look at the structure, we're incentivized to generate outsized returns for our investors. But the truth is, if you blow it once, your careers over, essentially, right, so you just have to be really cautious about that leverage point. And the business can be very lucrative, as long as you don't result in that principal loss.

Gotcha. And then, what sort of term are you looking for? I mean, are they fully amortized? Or are they 10 year loans? Five Year loans?

Yeah, so again, good clarifying question, I, this is really important, I try to drive this point home that that is the most important part. So these are all like really important questions to ask. So usually, we do somewhere between five, seven and 10 year term. And I think that looking at a fund or building an entire portfolio, or getting a diversification of that term is actually critical, because you don't want them all to come due at the same year. Now, there is something to be said about both short term and long term. And when I say short term, usually the shortest will go is five years. 10 years is preferable, it really helps me sleep at night. But if you're adding value, let's say you're buying a property that's 60% occupied, and you're going to be raising occupancies up to market rates of let's say 92, or 95. If you add that value, you're going to want to be able to refinance. And so in order to refinance, you have to have those shorter terms in there with the more favorable schedules in terms of amortization schedule, usually 25 to 30 years, and we almost exclusively invest in fixed rate loans I have personally invested in in variable rates, and it's turned out extremely well. But usually, it's fixed rate just for that predictability. Gotcha.

All right. Let's move on. What does the What does the day in the life for a professional passive investor look like?

Yes, right, because I'm kind of an interesting space, because we identify passive investments based on our track record, or due diligence process and our relationships. And then we basically source those investors to our investor pool. So I'm kind of in this hybrid mode, where I am a passive investor, but it's my day job. So I mean, I wish I could say that I'm calling you right now from Greece or something like that. I mean, the reality is, I work 50 hours a week. I don't think that's too much. For me, I think that's a reasonable thing with work life balance. I also don't have kids. So it's easy to work 50 hours a week without blinking. I mean, just me personally. Now, I do have a fiance and we're really excited about having kids later down the road. So I think that work life balance question that I'm super obsessed with starts to become more interesting. At that point. I'm sure that you guys can relate to that as well. It's like, Oh, great. You got to work life balance. Let's know.

Yeah,

we're gonna send her we're gonna send her for what four year old to you and see how your work life balance works.

Exactly. And I'm glad like people, this is the thing like being able to have great conversations with you guys and being able to have conversations with some of the guests on my show. You can actually get such insight from not only the things that take place during the recording, but actually prior to and after the recording because it's, you get the sense of what their lives are actually like. So again, the pocket Casting mediums is awesome. So, you know, basically what I do, I try to spend as much of my time operating and what Dan Sullivan calls my unique ability. And that's a term that basically defines the kind of things that you like to do all day, every day that really gives you energy, that kind of thing. That is someone, people are always asking you to do more of it for their company, or to help them out in some way. They're asking questions about that. Things that you love doing. But it has to be lucrative, right? So I actually really like lifting weights. But I'm not nearly enough, good enough to make a nickel off of lifting weights, no one would pay me to be in a gym with him in any capacity whatsoever. So that's not my unique ability. It's something I just like to do on the side. But what I do like to do, I like to do great interviews, conducting due diligence is something that I really pride myself on. Building relationships with investors is something that I love to do. And there's a lot of companies out there that focus on the family office strategy, they want to have 14 clients that are all ultra high net worth. I think that maybe that would be great to do some point in my career, but I really love helping people, accredited investors, get money out of the stock market and increase the predictability of the return. So if I can spend my time interviewing great people, building relationships with investors that I want to work with for the next 50 years, and and learning from some of the industry leaders, that's you know, most of my day is built up mostly with that stuff, which is something I'm extremely grateful for.

So you talked about delegating earlier, I assume that you have people that you're delegating to what are the what does that look like? Do you have system set up?

Yeah, so first of all, I'll just say that anyone listening to this right now should be using some sort of assistant or virtual assistant for some task. If you have not started this process already, this is something that you should, as soon as this podcast is done, go open up account with upwork.com. and hire someone for a task that you and I both know that you shouldn't be doing on a regular basis. And the way to figure this out, is if you want to do an audit of your time, write down all the tasks that you do during a particular day, and do this for five days. So it's week, a work week, at the end of the week, you'll have a pretty good understanding of all the tasks that you do on a regular basis. And then order those in terms of on a scale of one to 10 How good are competent or incompetent or excellent or, quote, unique ability that you are in each of those tasks, and then get an Excel, order them from 10 down to one, and then start delegating the ones at the very bottom. And this is a 100% everyone listening to this can be doing this, even if it's something as simple as you want to upgrade your email signature, okay? Do you have a background in this is something that you're gifted at No, don't even waste the time looking on YouTube, trying to figure it out and code it yourself. just hire someone at work for $8. And you'll have a new signature. I think that's a great example, because that's something that people have to go through at some point. And it's just a menial thing that you should not be doing. I personally, I'm not very handy, I'm never gonna build another piece of furniture my entire life, because I'm going on record right now and doing that. That's because my time is better spent otherwise. Now there can be things that you're not super good at, but you enjoy doing that's fine. That's a different conversation. But I totally am a proponent of people outsourcing work. Why? Because it is the skill set that can actually help you scale. The skill set of truly outsourcing truly dead, delegating, truly giving someone a project and say, call me when it's complete. And we'll talk about it and you own the results. That is something that will help your business get to the next level. Something else that I felt really, I wish I had learned earlier is, and this is so simple, and you hear people talk about it. But until you start implementing it, it's useless, obviously, creating weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual goals. And then having transparency and accountability into whether or not you were able to achieve them driven by someone else. So get someone outside of your firm, and pick them to be your accountability partner. And just basically have them check up on you every single week, month, quarter and annually. And you'll see that if you can just accomplish three things per day, three small things per day, that your business starts to grow exponentially. Why because most people do not accomplish any of those things per day because most people are acting completely reactive every single day all day, meaning that they get to the office and there's 50 emails that they've never read. And they start answering those emails and those people start responding and they start getting phone calls and they start injured. That's not the way that any leading CEO spends their time. So I mean, another strategy is block out two hours in the morning to do things that only focus on growth. So going into the office earlier if it's allowed, not answering emails, not answering phone calls, just writing down or working on things you previously written down that you really think will take your business to the next level over the next month or quarter or a year.

You clearly don't have a four year old.

I use that I use that as a preface it's already it's an Asterix

That's all good. So just curious, aside from, you know, you mentioned up work, are there any other tasks that you have outsourced? Not including, you know, email signatures and things like that?

Yeah, I mean, well, I'll put it this way. First of all, before even getting into the whole automation thing, or systematization thing, the most important thing you can do is just to eliminate most of the stuff that doesn't help you do that stuff. And so, you know, there's a quote by Warren Buffett, the difference between a successful person and everyone else is that successful people basically say no to everything. Yeah. And so that is something that I take to heart because if you automate or systematize, a bunch of stuff that you shouldn't even be working with, that's not going to help you. Automation is obviously preferable, if it's cost effective. So we recently made a very significant investment in a investor portal, that helps the entire investment process. And then also allows investors to have an experience which is similar to E trade, for example. So they log in, they can see every investment they've ever made with us, they can see the results of those investments, every distribution, all the tax documents, etc. Like I said, this was a financial commitment on an annual basis. But it is remarkable, because it's like having an incredible assistant that works 24 seven, that never makes a mistake. And so that's when one of the best investments we've made as a company,

yeah, well, you're also increasing the value for the people who are investing with you. They, even though it's not really giving them any kind of extra monetary value, it just makes the process smoother, and probably gives them some warm, happy feelings, because they can go and look and keep track of it and not have to, you know, feel like they don't know what's happening with their money.

100% because when they don't know, I mean, not only is that experience great, and that's going to increase the likelihood that they'll invest again and build that long term relationship. But what happens when investors can't find the documents? That means someone's getting an email, right? And that email takes time. And even if it's not me, even if it's my assistant doing that email, it's still not fun. And it's not it's that's not now trust me, that's not the goal I wrote down for this quarter is to help people find their documents. Yeah,

yeah, you get 50 of those. And then you're, you know, you're, you're in the hole, like 25 hours worth of, here's how you find it, or let's get it over to you or whatever. Definitely do. Do

you mind me asking how much that costs? You guys? Was that a prepackaged system? You guys were able to buy? Or did you have to hire developers to do that for you?

Yeah, so we looked at every vailable option, and the business is going to be in the process of being disrupted right now. But the thing that we use is about $100 per investment. And we have about 300 investments. So it's about $30,000 a year. And, you know, I don't want to tell the provider this. But even if it wasn't investor facing, even if they didn't get those documents and see those distributions, we have a rolling fund that accepts capital on a rolling basis. And so just the back end problems that we don't have to have make it worth it, because I would have to have someone full time deal with the admin of allowing new investors and all the time. Because it's not like we send the deal at once. And we get all these investors and problem solved. Which is how, by the way, we're able to get those investments and receive wires, without people interacting with us, which is, you know, really life changing.

Yeah. And then so does that investor portal also basically handle all the investor communication with regard with regards to you know, hey, here's how this particular deals going and things like that.

That's correct. And then I'll actually just give a pitch for the company real quick. So one of the things that we recently went through is the tax season. And any operator knows this is can be really challenging, even if you have a great admin staff. One of the benefits of this particular portal is that we can get a K ones from 200 investors. And the portal knows based on the name of the document, which one is which. So we have a 200 documents we upload in the portal, and the investor automatically gets an email with their specific k one. pretty remarkable. That's great. And I would say I'm sorry, this isn't supposed to be a pitch for this particular company. But

I know it's talked about this stuff. So

okay. So one of the things that I'd say that is so important in this day and age is going to be more and more important. And I don't even want to go into some of the horror stories I've seen, but the security of investor information. And that was really the real reason we felt obligated to move forward with this investment. Because the documents are issued through an encrypted portal that requires a password as opposed to us emailing them the actual document. And so things like that, when you're starting to scale. The downside of what can go wrong if a bunch of information is leaked to the wrong company or the wrong individual. It starts to be consequential and so we issue our wire instructions are also issued to a secure portal so investor know if they receive wire instructions from me the Email, it's much more likely that someone hacked my email and sent them incorrect wire instructions than it coming from our portal. That makes sense.

Yep. I've heard probably the exact same horror stories you've heard. So, Yep, definitely a definite plus.

So did you want to mention the name of the company?

Yeah, sure. So Well, I'd say this, there's a bunch of competitors out there. And they're all do incredible things. And to be honest with you, if you have if you're economically scalable, to make this type of investment, regardless of who you go with, I think it's going to be one of the best investments you can make as a firm, we ended up going with crowd Street, if you mentioned that I sent you the probably give you a $500 discount or something like that. And, yeah, so we have a great relationship with them. We consider them a partner. And you know, the portal is awesome, but it's very competitive out there. So do your due diligence, things change quickly and want to make sure that whatever you're trying to accomplish is the portal for you.

Fantastic. So where are the properties that you guys are investing in? Where are these typically located?

So we think that the majority opportunity the mobile home park businesses in the Midwest, that is kind of because a combination of factors, the economics makes sense, the regulation in terms of housing, residential housing makes sense. You see a huge delta between mobile home park lot rent and nearby two bedroom apartments, there's properties in Austin, that we rent for $500 a month, and a nearby two bedroom apartment is 18 $100 a month. So you can see that's the most close competitors, this C class apartment, or excuse me, B class apartment. And it's just remarkable the amount that you can raise rents before you start to see any pushback from those B class apartments or a class apartments is obviously significant. Now you have to drive pretty significantly to get to a comparable a C class, but our perspective is our tenants, the tenants that we want to rent to, they would prefer to not live in an apartment complex. I recently did an on site visit for apartments. And it's remarkable the the quality of our tenants. There's such a misconception about the mobile home park business, most of our tenants are all retirees that are relying on Social Security. Our tenants own their own homes, would they just rent the lot from us. So that quality of tenant that has a huge pride of ownership comparatively to a C class apartment, by the way, which I have nothing against. In terms of investments, I think, C class apartments are great, it's just categorically different terms of the tenant base. In terms of self storage, I'm a big believer that the southeast is really poised for continued growth, particularly Florida. Also, Florida is surrounded by water. And it makes for unique cell storage investment, because you have the combination of all these baby boomers that are there retiring, many of them downsizing, but you also have waterfront properties, and little municipalities that have high incomes that are water facing. So that means you have jet skis, you have boats, and those things need to be stored. So just some nuances of the state, the fact that there's a lot of retirees there, lends itself to great Self Storage investment.

Is that, like, weatherproof? I'm just curious, because you know, Florida has experienced quite a few hurricane, you know, devastation, devastating hurricanes that and I'm sure that's like different parts of Florida. But I wonder how that's affecting the real estate market? And if that makes a difference for self storage? I mean, those are big blocks of garages, essentially. So maybe not.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's a really important question. I think that something that any real estate investor should be aware of is that hurricanes are in a completely categorical different area in terms of risk than let's say anything else. Pretty much. I mean, tornadoes, yes, you can see pictures of completely destroyed mobile home parks. But the issue is extremely isolated, in the sense that insurance companies, government agencies, they can be quick to act and resolve those matters. Plus, if you destroy a mobile home park, it looks like trashes everywhere. So people want to get that cleaned up as quickly as they can. Yeah, with the hurricane problem, cities can be destroyed. And then it's not even about the asset itself. It's about Kansas City recover. So we want to be extremely cautious about that. So we're willing to invest in once every 100 year floods, sometimes usually once every 500 year floods, it's a metric that the insurance companies use to kind of determine the likelihood of a flood in that area. Um, usually once every 500 is probably the standard that we use. Having said that, the physical structure themselves kind of what you alluded to, because of the lack of complications from an infrastructure standpoint, historically, the asset class holds up very well. Right, because you're just it's just concrete. And this isn't a major part of this conversation, but it's important part. You will notice that if you do have hurricanes and you're driving binary, that's experienced a storm Our hurricane Self Storage is just completely slammed the occupancies shoot through the roof and, and prices do as well as the most efficient way to allocate that space. So I mean, it's not something we bank on, obviously. But I mean, that's the reality of the situation.

Yeah, it's if it's the only storage place that survives that survived if their houses not not survived, and they still have things that need to go somewhere it makes sense. Exactly. Or if they're rebuilding their house, and they need to have their their things moved. So

it's all about people in transition, people losing jobs, people moving to New communities, people's houses have been damaged, and in hurricanes or fires or whatever. So

that sounds like Florida is a good thing unless it falls off the state.

Yep, exactly.

So is your fund invest in anything besides mobile, home parks and self storage.

So we have historically invested in virtually every asset class and just a huge proponent of diversification, mostly, because that predictability of outcome and the likelihood that something will be changed from an economic standpoint or regulatory standpoint, I don't want that to significantly impact my portfolio in my investors portfolios. I have been very bullish on the mobile home park and self storage business because of the stuff that we've talked about the lack of competition, the recession, resistance, etc. And so this particular fund only invests in that. But I do have my eye on the assisted living space demographics are extremely competitive, and our excuse me compelling, the debt, I think debt is really a great play right now, because you're not taking the equity risk of where prices currently are. And I also like, for us housing, I mentioned, see, if you're running two bedroom apartments for $750 or So pretty much anywhere in the world, or anywhere in the country, that can be a compelling case as well. In fact, for cities, where it's similar to the mobile home parks, where you're actually seeing so much transition, so much value out and so much development, taking C class apartments, turning them into a class apartments, you actually have a contraction of supply in major markets in the United States. But there's a tremendous amount of demand for the product. And so when you're painting multifamily with the broad brush and saying, Wow, there's so much development going on in Austin right now, I'm not going to consider investing in that market. If you look through the weeds, you can find out there may be great opportunities in Austin in a C class sector, because all that developments taking place in a class.

Okay, so we've got mobile home parks, self storage, assisted living facilities, and workforce housing with multifamily is those sort of the the four the four major ones?

Yes, I will say I recently did a podcast on biases. And it's really important to identify your biases, so you can kind of mitigate the challenges that they can bring up, especially if you're an investor. And I have found myself, especially late in the cycle extremely biased towards high quality sponsors and my previous existing relationship with them. And so what I mean is, if there is a sponsor out there that I really, really trust, and they have a significant market advantage. I am more susceptible to whatever they're doing, because I just believe in them as a firm. And so I never invest in hotels, but just to use extreme example, if one of my sponsors that we've been working with successfully for years came to me and say, we think that there's a great opportunity in hotels in Montana, I'm going to give it a second look just because of who they are. Now that that's an extreme example, and probably not even reality, but just paint the picture clearly, when it's really just about relationships and that track record. So if I'm going to put invest your capital upfront, it's not because someone had a great idea. It's because we think that they're can execute based on our track record with them. Gotcha.

How do you, you, obviously, you have two jobs, then you have to identify accredited investors and network with accredited investors. But you also have to network with quality sponsors. How do you go about finding those quality sponsors?

Yeah. So again, just to be transparent, I'd say this, and this is what I say to people that are sponsors that are interested in working with us. I say, you know, we're always looking for new sponsors. But it's in the same way that you too, are looking for a new best friend, right? Like you probably have a best friend. And you're just kind of like you got those couple of people that you can rely on is true, though. I mean, we really are constantly looking for new deals. But when push comes to shove, am I going to be able to put a bet on this person, they're going to deliver for at least the next 10 years, because that's usually what the hold period is somewhere between 10, seven and 10 years. And so we're constantly evaluating and constantly starting those new roles. trips. But it does truly take years of being able to show that you're dependable, show us deals get to know us personally before we are interested in moving forward. So a lot of my time isn't spent actually creating those relationships. It's those relationships are sourced through word of mouth, and it's not scalable at all, which is fine, given where we are in the cycle. And we're willing to be more aggressive in 2010, when we were in participating that virtually asset prices were going to increase him as a matter of them were wary willing to take risks on, you know, the sponsors that we didn't know, as well, in terms of getting new investors. we alluded to that earlier. Most of my time is spent, you know, doing that marketing for that, and then having those conversations.

Yeah, gotcha. Is this the kind of thing that you could do? You know, we mentioned briefly that you're not on a beach in Greece. But is this the kind of thing that you could do, potentially from anywhere in the world.

So I considered it more seriously A few years ago, I think that being in the United States, timezone is critical. It's really challenging to or structurally different to have investors come from all over the world, they have to invest in LLC and do all this stuff. So I really strongly prefer to be in the US timezone. I actually really like being in Los Angeles as well, there's just a lot of capital here, there's a lot of people that motivate me and inspire me. So I do think I'm going to stick around despite the tax situation, which is a conversation for another time, in terms of my actual flexibility, I can and plan on taking a week off this year, I'm going on a honeymoon later, at the end of the year in June. And that will be a true week off or I'm not going to be answering emails or phone calls. Having said that, it's a little unfair to say that the business would be quote, running without me, a lot of those calls will be postponed until after I get back from the honeymoon. So I wouldn't say that the business is running itself. On the operating side of the business, though, just because of how we're positioned, the investments will continue to perform, whether I'm awake or asleep, or anything has should to happen to me, because we partner with those operating partners that have a significant in infrastructure, and the performance of the assets is not subject to me doing something. And we have a continuous plan, you know, in terms of getting investors, their capital and stuff like that. So there's two components of the business, right? No, the podcast can't be hosted without me. But that's maybe a conversation for it. Let's have that conversation near and see if I've been able to outsource that that time.

Do you? Are you guys going and visiting a lot of these properties? Are you kind of since you've worked with these sponsors pretty closely? Are you just kind of taking it at face value?

Am I so question? Okay,

that's exactly. And that's a very reasonable question. And so much so that we have done a spectrum. And I know that some investors may get skittish hearing that, but I'll put it this way. So in some of the funds we operate, I personally have oversight in terms of which assets are included in the fund. So I will fly on site, I will underwrite every single deal, I will do the entire due diligence process. There are other deals that we have joint venture with the sponsor that has managerial control. And we will then of course, go on site see multiple properties, but they have more flexibility in terms of which assets they can purchase. And we all have our due diligence in that case is focused on the upfront value as opposed to a property specific value. So just to clarify, we'll go on site across multiple states and spend hours and hours with the sponsor on site. But then once we fund since we don't have true oversight into deciding, we will spend our time doing due diligence on let's say the financials as opposed to the actual property.

Investing.

Alright, so you have talked about market cycles a lot. Where do you think we are in the market cycle right now.

So I've been fortunate enough to have some conversations with authors, investors, economists that have a lot of respect for. And it's interesting, because from my perspective, guys like Bruce Norris, probably, in my opinion, the most important market timer when it comes to real estate in the world, in the United States, at least, he has made the case that we're in a very interesting part of the cycle. So for the listeners that aren't as focused on California market timing in general, affordability is Bruce's most important metric. And I think it does paint the clearest picture in terms of where we are in the cycle, especially in California. So in California, affordability or generally, affordability is inversely correlated with price, right? So it's the percentage of people that can pay a mortgage, if they put 20% down. So the higher the price goes, the lower the affordability goes. So in California over the last three cycles, the affordability has quote peaked out at 17%. So as prices go up and up and up less and less and less people are able to afford it and at 17%. That's when things start to turn around, you have a little bit of a correction, and then that 17% affordability shoots up to let's say 30% or 40% as the market comes down. For the last several years, we have been in close to 30%. affordability. And so we're kind of in No Man's Land 40% would be one of the most favorable times to invest in commercial real estate as a whole in California 17% would be a terrible time to invest in real estate in California. So we've been in this 30% 27% range for several years now. Which means that if you're doing something like fixing flipping, now we're going into my opinion, versus opinion, if you're going something like fixing, flipping, it's like the greatest time ever to do fix and flipping, because you just aren't really if there's a 10% correction, it's going to be an amazing time to buy. But if there's a 20% correction to be completely a historic could be like, where did this 20% correction come from? Like, usually have to have a peak to have a significant correction, we're certainly not in the peak, again, my opinion, not versus words at all. Now, Bruce's sentiment is somewhat similar in the sense that he doesn't anticipate there being a wicked correction, because there has not been this peak. And there's been a huge mentality shift as a country in terms of owning real estate, the liquidity of the market, the lending side, which really drives valuations has not gone crazy, it's really hard to make the argument that they have gone completely loony. In fact, it's really hard to make the argument that lending standards are not relatively tight. And that drives the entire ship of every type of real estate. And so I think it's an interesting time. We're not me, personally, I'm not predicting a 20% 30% correction, it's just hard to make those numbers make sense on a historical basis. But we're very well prepared for that. And we've been prepared for that. So much so that we've given up a lot of upside. But again, when it comes to protecting capital, what's our main goal? So I'm trying to kind of, in my answer, I'm trying to give you two different hats that I wear. One is an operating a business, which is focused on production of principle, the other is just looking at the math is hard to make the argument that we're due for a 18% plus correction, but we'll see least in the next 12 months, I'd say,

gotcha. So, you know, you talk about capital protection, how, how are you protecting that downside risk,

I mean, without even getting into financials about those relationships, right? It's really about those relationships. Because when you're when you're working with someone who is an ethical actor that knows that losing investor capital is the worst thing that they can do, that can actually make up for a lot of problems. I mean, we have worked with the sponsor. And this is not to set expectations. Just an interesting story in the reality of what happened. I know a sponsor personally, that we've worked with that cut a check personally of a million dollars to make investors whole. Again, that's not to say that they'll do that again, or that that's common in the industry, it's certainly not, but the fact that they did that, it speaks to the type of person like they thought that that was in their best interest to do so right over the long term. And so we like to work with people, number one that have the financial ability to do something like that, number two, that have the integrity and the sense of what's right and wrong to actually implement something like that. So before even getting into market timing, that's the first thing. And then comes to investing in those very stable asset classes that have room for value out potential with a without taking on development risk, and taking appropriate leverage some of the things we've already covered in podcast, but cumulatively, I think, starts with the relationships and ends with, you know, the debt and the desirability of the asset class. Well, this has been awesome. And you've provided a lot of really fantastic information. And I want to keep diving deeper into that and sort of pull a few more things out of you before we let you go. So what do you feel like is the most critical skill that a new investor who might be looking to get into your niche would would need to master to really succeed? Man, there's so many. I'll put it this way. I said that I started my business really starting with networking events. And it's kind of a love hate relationship. I don't do a lot of them. Now most of my networking is done over the internet. But when I started my business, I was driving around la like crazy trying to meet anyone that would just meet me to learn as much as I could write, just start the funnel with the largest group possible and work my way down to the small group of who I actually wanted to work with. I think that a skill that investors are going to be wise to learn, especially when you're just starting out if you're going to networking event way before, if you're going to spend three hours in a networking event and 30 minutes going there and back, take 10 minutes to write out specifically, what it would take for you to get $2,000 of value out of this networking event. Now, it may be a $20 networking event or a $200 networking event if you really spent a lot of money, but write out what it would take to get $2,000 and if it's not going to potentially give you $2,000 you shouldn't go because your time is more valuable than that. So what this looks like is is it a lender Is it an investor? Is it a broker? Is it a wholesaler, literally write that out. And then when you go to the event, you will ears will perk up, when you start to hear those relationships out of the corner of your ear. Dan Sullivan talks about your eyes can only see and your ears can only hear what your brain is looking for. And so that is critical, I mean, wasted so much time going to networking events, using business cards as a praying spray mechanism, try to build one relationship, that's going to give you that $2,000 worth of value. And the other side of that is try to facilitate one relationship for someone else, that's going to give them that $2,000 worth of value. So if you know someone that invest in self storage, and you hear out a corner of the ear, oh, yeah, I'm interested in investing in self storage, make sure to make that connection, because then that person will be more susceptible to make that $2,000 connection to you the next time that they have the ability to do so. And then the snowball starts to really function. That's a really big thing. So that $2,000 worth of value is really critical. I also say crating morning, your team is really happy is really, really good idea. I mentioned it earlier in terms of spinning somewhere between Look, if some people start to get turned off, and you say take an entire day to do nothing but design your business. Sounds like wow, I cannot not insert my phone, I cannot not answer my email for that long. So if that seems like too much, do it for two hours. If that seems like too much, start with 30 minutes. And if you can just design your business for 30 minutes each week, when start increasing the spin the amount of time that you're doing designing, as opposed to doing, you start to see that scalability start to really happen. Because you're putting systems in place, it's impossible to do it just in the corner of your mind developing systems. So it has to be ironed out with no reactive time. And it can be as little as 30 minutes a week. Because once you get started, you'll quickly see results.

What would you say that you get more value out of going to an in person networking event or more value out of, let's say your podcast? Well,

it's it's transitioned. So it goes in stages, right? So when you start out, you get a ton of value out of going to networking events. But no one really cares that you're there. Because you're a newbie, right? And so that was fine, no. And we went to that stage, and everyone's kind of gone to that stage. Now when I go to networking events, it's it's a great environment for me to be in because I really love helping people. And so now I'm in a position to do that, not because of my own ideas. But many times it's because of my podcast, I've been able to have great interviews with some really influential people. And so that's really what I spend my time doing, or I'm speaking at the networking event, for example. I personally just prefer the online model, because it's so much more scalable. And I know that you guys are fans of the podcast model, obviously, anyone that's considering doing something like that the risk reward is incredibly favorable. I don't think I'm giving away any trade secrets. If I say that if i three days from now found out that none of my podcasts had ever aired, it would still be an overwhelming positive for me. Like it was just my mom that had been listening to the show and no one else. It's just from a networking component, and from a learning component still creating value out.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. That makes sense. Um, so if you could hit the magic reset button and go back and start your investing career all over again, knowing what you what you know, now, is there anything you would do differently any systems he put in place sooner?

Oh, man, you know, I, here's the thing. I want to give you a technical answer, because it's the truth. There was a massive change in the business that took place in 2012, which was the JOBS Act, it allowed for people to publicly solicit for real estate investments online. I was in the business when this started to happen. And everyone that I knew everyone that I looked up to was confident that this was not going to have any impact in the business, including one of the leading crowdfunding portals in the United States. Let me just say that, again, there was a company, which essentially was founded because of this law, who they themselves thought, even though this law has changed, this is not the route that we're going with the business, we're not going to publicly solicit, we're going to still do something that has been legal this whole time. Because of those conversations, I decided to go around with my business that required a 30 day waiting period. So we could quote, establish a pre existing relationship prior to marketing specific deals. And this is based on relationships and conversations I have with both attorneys and some industry leaders. The companies that ended up going a different route, they wanted to get VC funding, now they raise 10 million 50 million 100 million dollars worth of funding in order to facilitate that some of those relationships in those that public solicitation, etc. And that turned out to be an incredible win and the industry ended up changing. And now in my opinion, the final succeed, the public solicitation route is the best way to go. So I wish I had done that. I know that's not something that a lot of people that aren't in real estate can take away but But I guess the key takeaway there is, don't be afraid to do something that's counter to the industry. If you think that the legislation or the change of the economics or anything, you from a gut perspective, think that that's going to make a significant impact in the business, look at things on a risk adjusted basis and make the best call. And, you know, not something that devastated me or anything like that was just something come up recently. Gotcha.

All right. So you know, we, we have full time we have a family, that's kind of who our demographic is, we're hoping are listening to this podcast? What piece of advice would you give to someone who wants to get into this niche and has a full time job and a family?

Yeah, 100%, who not how, identify the people that you want to build a relationship with over the next 50 years and implement their behavior. That's something that you know, I don't have a lot of strengths. But one of my strengths is looking at someone's business plan and implementing my version of that, whether it's their lifestyle, business plan, their family only, or business plan, anything like that, just being a man, I really want to be like this person, and continuing that until you hit a road bump. And you say, Well, this is actually one of the differences between me and them. So I'm going to take this right turn here. That is the ultimate way. And that's why you know, books are so helpful. That's why building relationships, there's should always be someone that you're in a meeting with, that you feel intimidated by constantly being in those situations, if you can put yourself in positions where you frequently find yourself thinking, how is it able to get into this meeting very quickly. This someone's gonna be thinking about that about you. Right. And so I think that that's, that's really critical. And by the way, it's an incredible time to be an entrepreneur, and to have the opportunity to have a side hustle. For example, you mentioned a lot of your listeners, you'd have a day job. In the year 1800 83% of the workforce was in agriculture. Right? Now. It's less than 2%. By the way, if I was alive in 1800, and I was working as a farmer, everyone would just think I was a bad worker, everyone would just think I was useless. This guy's not that good at working. Right? Well, it turns out, I'm actually really hard worker, I just don't, I wouldn't succeed in that type of environment. So there's never has it been easier to get some sort of high side hustle. If there's something that you're passionate about, write an E book on the topic 10 reasons that you need to do this 10 examples of why you shouldn't do that. Whatever it is, drive attention to that ebook, exchange the ebook for an email address, and then start blasting them with emails on a weekly basis, and you start to build your niche. That is a class that needs to be taught in high school. That's very simple. But now, the free market has provided this incredible stuff on the internet, you to me is a great way to go get information about what I just outlined. Just do it. The risk adjusted returns incredibly favorably you can write an ebook, it's a PDF, you don't even have to get something physically. So everybody out there is an expert in something, I suggest getting started on that immediately.

Awesome. Great.

Well, Hunter, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing if any of our guests want to reach out to you what's the best way that they could contact you?

Yeah, so again, I really appreciate you guys having me on I'm really happy to see this continue to grow. The website is cash flow connections calm. We recently rebranded as asym capital, that's a s y m capital Comm. And you can shoot me an email at info at cash flow connections calm, and I'll shoot you a free ebook or anything like that.

Well, great. Thanks again for joining us.

Thanks again, guys.

It was a wonderful interview with Mr. Hunter Thompson. We appreciate his time. Yes,

it was fantastic. Tons of knowledge. Yes.

Drink through a firehose there, Hunter.

We appreciate it.

So were there any key lessons that you took away from this interview?

Um, I mean, there were a lot, I think, you know, a lot of his tips on really kind of figuring out how to make things work well for you. systemization, as well, as you know, even just the thoughts on should you go to this network meeting, networking meeting or not? And how can you make that the most value for your time? I think all those tips are really, I think those kind of are the most interesting when we do these interviews personally because a lot of the basic real estate information is the same it doesn't change you know, the the next passive real estate investor that does this sort of similar kind of thing has a Capital Group. The wide view is very similar, but when you get down into their philosophies and you know, those kinds of things, that's where I find it more interesting because it's not just the same cut and paste answer that you're going to get with what they're doing or how they do it.

I'm sure I definitely took away that the outsource as quickly as possible. It's Something I've been struggling with. lately. It's very timely for me, I'm, I'm having to outsource more and more stuff, I highly recommend it. We had a conversation offline with hunter after we spoke that, you know, there are so many things that you can do that you can probably do well, and the thinking is that well, nobody can do it better than I can. But your time is probably better spent doing other

things. Yeah, yeah, even if no one can do it better. Well, if no one can do it better than you can, then maybe you need to be in a different field, what you're trying, you should be doing that what you're trying to do, but a lot of times we think we are the only ones that can do something. And actually, it can be done just as well, or sometimes even better by another person, because they're not so invested in it in a certain way, or that kind of thing. But, you know, for us, it's definitely outsourcing a lot of the back end of this podcast, and some of those things that are that you feel like it's money that you shouldn't spend, I think can be hard. And I'm sure on a on a bigger, you know, business scale, that becomes even more money, but even something as small as like, well, maybe we should have someone come clean our house, because, you know, we both work and and it's hard to keep up, we've got a four year old and I cook a lot because I eat a very specific way. And you know, we do all these things, and we get kind of bogged down. So you know, do we want to spend two hours every week, you know, we're more cleaning our house? Or can we outsource that and pay someone for it get back that time and use it to make more money than what we're paying them? Yes,

exactly. That's that's the that's the math.

Awesome. Alright, so let's get down to our four main sort of principles, why we're here, what we're what we're looking for, how did hunter acquire his knowledge for getting into the real estate game?

It was mostly through, I believe, when he started out, it was mostly through networking, he went to Ria meetings. So if you're looking at any kind of real estate, I think really the first place to start is probably those local real estate investment associations re as they're called, you know, seek them out. If there isn't one, start one and start networking with other other investors. And I think you'll learn incredibly fast that way. Yeah.

How long do you think he spent doing that for I didn't get a huge indication of really what that timeline looked like. But it sounded like he was in Los Angeles for at least a couple of years before he really got a bully going into what he's doing now. Yeah, I've been doing some other things fairly quickly.

I sort of got at least it was at least a year, I think. He mentioned 2008 2010. So I think it was he said it was two years, two years of growing his network before we really got investing. So

Alright, so how much money did it take for him to get started?

That was a more complicated one. Because, you know, Hunter primarily focuses on raising capital for other deals. And he mentioned that really, for him to get started, he needed to raise at least $500,000, at least half a million dollars, which I know is a very common number for operators to require before they're going to allow you to become a part of their deal. So I guess we could use that number. I mean, he got started doing hard money loans early on. And that and that can be much lower. I mean, you can do $5,000 hard money loan, and he was saying like $60,000 loans was Yeah, things he was doing. So yeah, so you can start a lot lower. But if you want to get started and what he is doing now, which is really what we were concentrating on.

I guess you don't really even need your own money necessarily. But you do need enough to network with people who have money.

And it's more about the amount of capital that you're able to bring with those investors. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. And how much time does he spends working on real estate?

He said at least 50 hours a week. Now, this is his full time job. And he said that he does not have kids, correct? Correct. We curse him for that.

Yes. We don't hire kids. Amazing. Yes. He only interrupts us What? He, yeah, he said 50 hours a week and obviously that is his full time job. So and again, I think we've said this before, and we should keep saying it again and again. And again. If you don't have the time to do this full time, then you need to find someone who will allow you to do part of the job for them so that you can learn, you know, get a mentor, you know, do the underwriting or do some tasks for them so that you're getting to learn and spending that time so you can start to move up. And then if you choose to, you're able to move to this as a full time position, or part time or whatever works for you and your situation.

And if you if you have, you know, the basic premises, if you have more money than time, then spend the money to gain the time if you have more time than money, then offer up the time. So you know, you can invest you can as hunter started off, he started off investing passively in deals. Now, if you're not accredited investor that then that presents a bit of a challenge that you'll have to overcome, you'll have to find smaller deals that are or maybe you're much more of a joint venture and not those those big syndications and things like that. But then if you have if you don't have money, but you have time, then find a way to offer up your time to a successful real estate investor.

Alright, and our last one, can they do this from anywhere in the world? Can hunter do this from anywhere in the world? Well, Hunter,

I would say probably yes. But in hunters case, he said no, he really prefers to be in the US timezone where his investors are, where his assets are. He said, they're going to take a honeymoon, I can't really spend

a week. So he said, you know, we talked about how long? How long he could step away from his business. And it sounds like for a lot of the pieces he could walk away if it's just the ongoing investments, you know, those portfolios or those properties or just keep on trucking, but for him part of his business is the podcast and you know, probably taking meetings with investors and doing some of those types of things. And that part cannot run, keep running without him. So you know, that's that's the piece that he either has to take break from breaks from to be able to go farther away or, you know, find someone that can help take over for him.

Alright, well, that was Mr. Hunter Thompson from cash flow connections and a sem capital. If you want to reach out to him again. You can go to cash flow connections calm. We sincerely appreciate it. It's time.

Yeah, it was awesome talking to him. All right, we'll see you next week. Set the

road. And if you like this podcast, we would really appreciate it if you take just a few minutes and leave a review for us on iTunes. It's really simple to do. Just go to road to family freedom.com slash review for links and instructions. Thanks for listening. We're doing this all again next week. Until then,

safe travels.