What happens when seasoned real estate investors face devastating property floods? Join us as we share the highs and lows of handling disaster, revealing hard-earned insights on the risks of active investing and the freedom that comes with a passive approach. Discover how you can build resilience, redefine success, and craft a blueprint for sustainable wealth. Don’t miss this episode for a raw, behind-the-scenes look at real estate's true challenges and rewards.

Key takeaways to listen for

• [05:13] Harsh realities of flood impacts on active investments and how to handle unexpected damage
• [16:13] How shifting to passive investments can offer greater time independence and lower risk exposure
• [22:14] Eye-opening trends from experienced investors and why many ultimately choose passive investments
• [27:19] Smart diversification strategies to mitigate risks for long-term stability
• [30:49] The critical need for solid insurance planning and trusted adjusters to manage risks effectively

Resources mentioned in this episode

• [30:49] AllCity Adjusting

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Neil Henderson: 00:00:42

Real estate is not rocket science. You don't have to be a genius to make money in real estate. You have to be persistent.

You got to be patient, and you got to have time, experience, and money. Welcome to Truly Passive Income. I'm Neal Henderson.

Clint Harris: 00:00:52

And I'm Clint Harris.

Neil Henderson: 00:00:53

So this is a little bit of a different episode. This is going to be Clint and I.

We don't have a guest with us today, and Clint and I thought it was a good time to give everyone a little bit of a life update on what's been going on with us and thought it was a great opportunity to talk about the seasons of being an investor and the drawbacks of being an active investor, which Clint and I have gotten a little bit of a face full over the last month or so, which we will explain.

Clint Harris: 00:01:21

Yes, we have.

I think there's a lot of parallels of overarching lessons that I've learned, especially in the last year of doing interviews with other professional operators and LPs. And I think that this is really important perspective for anybody that is looking for passive investment strategies.

One of the things we're going to talk about is some flooding that happened in Carolina beach, where we live.

It was not associated with the hurricane that happened a week later that has been absolutely devastating for much of the country, especially the Southeast, especially western North Carolina, which is the state where we live. So unbelievable sorrow and condolences go out to those markets.

The North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund is something that I would encourage anybody to get involved with if it's something that you can help with. So I don't want to make light of that. Going to be talking about some flooding. It's not associated with that flooding.

And we're well aware of the devastation that's happened. And a lot of people's lives have been turned upside down and a lot of people's lives have been lost. So I want to say that first.

But a couple weeks ago, what happened to you, Neil?

Neil Henderson: 00:02:20

Well, I got up on a Monday morning after having a great weekend with my son on a road trip to Charlotte and woke up and the house is kind of shaken just a little bit, which sometimes happens in high winds.

Could hear a little bit of rain outside, got up and walked out my front door to get my car to go to work and got a face full of stinging rain, which is usually when the wind is pretty high. And I mean, it was blowing sideways.

Clint Harris: 00:02:50

Yep. And Neil lives across the street from the beach, by the way. Yeah, it's right there. Yeah.

Neil Henderson: 00:02:56

And. And I was kind of like, oh, I knew there was maybe some bad weather forecast, but I didn't think it was going to be quite this bad.

And it was bad enough that I turned around and was like, all right, I don't think I want to be on the road in this. And so I turned back around, went back inside, and I called Clint and said, hey, I think I'm going to be working remote today.

And he said, that's a good idea because currently I'm stuck on Carolina Beach Road. Everyone's pulled over, nobody can move because the rain was so bad. And then we sat there and it just rained and rained and rained and rained.

And within about an hour, we have a major road. It's Highway 17, also called Lake Park Boulevard, right in front of our house that turned into a river. And then I got a call from our.

We have an Airbnb unit in the first floor of our house, our little house hack. And the guests reach out and they said, hey, we're supposed to be checking out, but we don't think the roads are passable.

Would you mind if we hang out for a little while until things calmed down? And we said, sure. And about 30 minutes later, we get a call from them and they said, hey, there's water coming in through the front.

Clint Harris: 00:04:06

The.

Neil Henderson: 00:04:06

From through the door. And I looked outside and sure enough, there was a foot of water out in our driveway.

There was water coming in through our front door, not connected to the other unit. And on top of that, the guests who were staying with us, it was an elderly woman who was on oxygen. She couldn't climb the stairs.

We're suddenly dealing with, you know, we're worried about us losing power and we've got this woman who can't survive without oxygen. So long story, endless. We ended up having to have her evacuated by a high water. High water rescue team from the Carolina Beach Fire Department.

Yeah, and. And then that flooded our unit, luckily for us, only ended up being about an inch or two of water in our downstairs unit. And that just was a.

But it was enough to destroy our floors, destroyed all of our baseboards and about six inches of drywall. So I am literally, as of today, that was a little over two and a half weeks ago. We're up and running.

We literally yesterday, the contractor finished it's going to cost us about five grand. I did not have flood insurance. Uh, and even if I did, I'm not sure I would have tapped into that deductible to do that.

And I feel very fortunate because I'm not Clint Clint, what happened to you?

Clint Harris: 00:05:28

So this storm was crazy. We had a band of storms that came across. It hit the mouth of the Cape Fear river and it all consolidated into one little point.

And somebody was telling me that they're going to be studying this storm for a long time. It was not a name storm. It was a numbered tropical depression.

And it dumped 18 inches of rain in 12 hours on ocean Boulevard, Carolina beach, and a mile away got 8 inches of rain. It was unbelievable how it happened. 18 inches of rain, 12 hours, 3.

Neil Henderson: 00:05:55

Inches of rain at Wilmington Airport.

Clint Harris: 00:05:58

Right. Which is just not that far away at 15 miles. It was, it was wild. So I turn on, same storm rocking our house. A wife is freaking out early that morning.

I look up and turn on the news and one of my quad plexes is the COVID story for weird cars floating in front of it. And every time that a rescue truck went by on the main road, it created a wake and the floating car was banging into my building.

I got a foot of water inside six of my 14 Airbnb units. I got a $250,000 flood claim. I've got demo happening right now. It's going to take me a couple months to put it back together.

So it's been, it's been quite the journey. We're recording this podcast at 2:30 in the afternoon and I have a beer.

Neil Henderson: 00:06:48

I thought it was actually first thought it was, I thought it was a coffee. I don't blame you.

Clint Harris: 00:06:52

Nope, it's a beer from the kegerators that we have in our office just for the couple weeks that we've been having right now.

Neil Henderson: 00:06:58

Yeah.

Clint Harris: 00:06:59

So there's a lot to unpack here. Right. These are active real estate investments. But you know, we also have a portfolio of about a dozen self storage facilities that we manage. Right.

So in terms of what does that mean?

Like we, Neil, put together an update from our investor relations team that went out to all of our investors, let them know that we had some very minor things that happened at two of the properties. One of them had to power out and one of them had some rain blew in through a roof hatch that got ripped open.

But minimal stuff and nothing's no major issues. We had protocols in place of managers were there before the storms chaining the doors in case the electronic locks went out.

They were back making sure that there was no claims, you know, doing all the things. And those are protocols that you have to have in place ahead of time. And luckily we dodged a bullet, which a lot of people did not.

But I think It's a good time for us to talk about some of the seasons of. Not rainy seasons, but seasons that you go through as an investor. Right. And then one of the things that it made me think about was how you and I met.

and I met. It would have been: 2017

Neil Henderson: 00:08:04

dn't read that until probably: 2019

Clint Harris: 00:08:07

s still getting traction till: 2021

oved to Wilmington in July of: 2017

Still up for debate on that. You will see more juries out. But anyway, that post ended up having something like 17 or 18 pages of comments on it.

And I met Neil through that podcast. I got invited. Or through that post, I got invited onto his podcast because of that. Through that I met. Through Neil, I met my.

My partner Jerk and Levi Hemingway at a local real estate meetup here. Our supervisor of construction is Ryan Bono and his wife Hannah. I connected with them. They were living in California.

I connected with them through that post and then reconnected years later when they. They moved here. I met one of our project managers, Cam and his wife Chelsea. I met them through that post.

We had lunch with them years ago and then we were looking for. Somebody called him and we hired him on board as well. So that's the post that is kind of kept giving for me.

And one of the things is that I was at a season of change as an investor. I had nine single family homes and I just figured it out. I'd burn a couple of them, but I figured out that is a really slow way to get ahead.

And I had to make a shift.

The shift that I made was into small multifamily converting those from long term tenants into Airbnb properties, which has been extremely successful for me. We still own 14 Airbnb units, six of which are underwater. Um, but it's frustrating.

I was in the process of selling that quadplex, had it listed for 1:35, had multiple offers, hadn't worked anything out, but it was getting very close and then it went underwater. So very frustrating. There another quadplex, two of the units flooded that was supposed to hit the market in October.

But I'm in another season of change and here's why. I invested like most people do, thinking about cash flow and financial independence. And I replaced my income as a surgical sales rep through Airbnb.

The problem was I was just focused on the money and I didn't focus on the time or location independence. And once I had those properties, even when I wasn't working, I was still technically on call.

I had my phone on me all the time managing these properties.

And part of the problem was I couldn't find another property management company that could get the same numbers that we were getting because nobody manages your business like you manage your business, right? So that turned into a two year project of building out a property management company with some partners. They operate that company.

We still own the company with them. It manages my 14 listings and another 75. And it looks easy now, but it was a lot of work.

I am now in another season of change because I have seen the light of what it looks like to be a limited partner investor. And I have one of my quadplexes is it's on a 30 year note, but it's set to pay off when my oldest son turned 16. He's five now.

Right now it's worth about 800, so maybe by then it's worth 900amillion, I don't know. But my idea is I can do a cash out refinance at that point in time that multifamily will still cash flow if I don't overleverage it.

And that would be tax free income to pay for their college or business or whatever they want to do. So I'm going to keep that property because it's, it's tied to their education.

But the rest of it, it is time for me to stop being part of the Airbnb supply and listen to the demand, liquidate those properties. Because when natural disasters and things like this hit, it looks very differently for the LPs than it does for the general partners involved.

And over time, my job is to transition to being a full time limited partner investor.

Why don't you tell me, Neil, One of the things that I've really learned is over the last year of doing 70 podcast interviews with very intelligent operators and LP investors in terms of the trajectory and what they have done as an investor throughout their life cycle. What are some of the commonalities that you see?

Neil Henderson: 00:12:06

Well, so many of them, our most common investor, the most common LP I see is someone who's got some sort of understanding of Real estate, if you don't really get real estate, you know, and you're maybe more on the index fund side, mutual funds, things like that, a lot of those people don't cross over. It just doesn't. Real estate just doesn't resonate with them as well. But you get a lot of people, the trajectory is very similar.

They maybe bought some rental properties, they maybe started to scale that on some, you know, they, some of them got as far along as I did. Like I only have two long term rentals and then I've got our house hack that we do.

I sort of got into that and very quickly went, oh, this is like not going to take me where I want to go. Some people will get much further along like Clint did. Some people will get even further along.

We have a good friend of here locally, Mark Burge, who's a self storage owner. Years ago he was kind of in the same boat.

He was buying little cash flowing properties in the midwest, residential long term rentals and then somehow just got it in his head that he was going to try and bought a self storage facility. And his eyes were open.

Clint Harris: 00:13:15

Yeah.

Neil Henderson: 00:13:15

To just how much easier it was to manage a self storage facility that had 200 units than it was to manage a 10 unit single family rental property portfolio.

Clint Harris: 00:13:28

I would say he, he got farther along than most of the people that we talked to.

Neil Henderson: 00:13:33

Yeah.

Clint Harris: 00:13:33

isodes and also we have about: 1500

And what I see is a lot of that whatever asset they start with, single family homes, maybe they're flipping or whatever, but they realize they're only getting paid once and the day they stop working is the day they stop getting paid. So then they move to single family rentals. It's very slow. Sometimes they start moving to multifamily, sometimes midsize multifamily.

A lot of times that's their first introduction to commercial real estate. And some of those people are good enough like Marcus to make the jump to doing larger midsize commercial deals, self storage and stuff like that.

There's another step that I see.

When that investor comes and talks to us, they're usually like 53 to 58 years old and they've gotten to the point where their time is worth more than anything else and they can be an active investor, they know how to do it and they can go make better margins than you can get from being an LP investor. They're going to make 30, 35%, but they're doing it. They're grinding, right?

Eventually that investor gets to the point where their time is worth more than the headache and the work that's going into it, and they would rather make a little bit less and only have to read quarterly updates or reviews or monthly newsletters or whatever it may be. And those people get to the point where the time has gotten worth more than anything else.

And one of the mistakes is that some of those people waited too long because they want cash flow right now. And a lot of times with syndication deals, sometimes it takes a few years to get started.

So one of the things that I learned is I'm surrounded by this same story over and over and over with intelligent people that honestly, that's who I'm going to be 15, 20 years from now. So if I see all of their motivation changing in the same direction, all of them want to be passive, limited partner investors.

If I know that now, it allows me to create more Runway to make that ship.

I bought Those properties in: 2017

Neil Henderson: 00:15:46

I'm still return on time for sure.

Clint Harris: 00:15:48

Right? And so my return on equity is trash now compared to how much the properties have appreciated. It's time for me to reallocate some equity.

And I'm not reallocating that equity based upon what I want right now, because what I want right now is a reposition of more value added, more cash flow. I'm going to reposition that equity based upon what I know I'm going to want 20 years from now. And that's a passive portfolio.

And I would rather make a little bit less now and get more experience in that realm. Investing into storage, investing into Nomad. I've already converted my retirement accounts, 401k and 2 IRAs to self directed.

And I've got those invested into debt funds and a few other different syndication offerings. Not with Nomad. It's illegal for me to invest my retirement funds with Nomad. It's called co mingling.

So I have those placed other places, which is good because it forces me to have some diversification. But I'm taking a little bit of a gamble and I'm not going to reinvest the money based upon what I want right now.

I'm going to invest it based upon what I think that I'm going to want 20 years from now, which is time, financial location, independence with my kids. Right. So I'm kind of. It's not a gamble, it's an educated guess based upon this is what I see. All the people that are.

I'm hoping to have some of the similar levels of success that they've had in their life. They all do this in the same pathway. They know just enough to be dangerous. And then they keep getting better and learn more and more and more.

Eventually they make that switch. So I'm betting that if I can make that switch sooner, I can kind of time warp and save myself five or 10 years. That's my thinking.

So I don't know if I'm right.

Neil Henderson: 00:17:22

Well, you know, success leaves clues.

And I think what we're both seeing is the successful investors that we know have left clues along the way and we can see the journey that they've been on.

That's one of the things I've always loved about real estate, you know, and before I got into real estate, I was throwing stuff against the wall, trying to start businesses and coming up with ideas for businesses, things like that. And it's a much more challenging path to take because there's not as concrete a path. Real estate is not rocket science. It really isn't.

I mean, you don't have to be a genius to make money in real estate. You have to be persistent. You gotta be patient and you gotta have time, experience and money, like we say, all the time.

And you know, I look at my investments, you know, you have to, if you don't have a lot of money, but you have some time you can pursue.

And it is an effective way to leverage, use the leverage and your leverage, your own debt and your own time in order to build equity, like Clint and I have done, especially Clint and a lot of these other investors who've started with single family homes move into small multis, you know, maybe medium sized multis, but everyone, every single one of them eventually gets to the point, some sooner than others, where, like we said, their time becomes worth more than the money they're making and the scale. And you just. Some people are better at scaling things than others.

Clint, you've obviously, you did a great job of scaling your business, but even then when this finally came through, like, I mean, this has consumed your life for the last two weeks and it's not even close to Being over.

Clint Harris: 00:19:07

Yeah. And so that brings up the idea of risk exposure. Right. The more involved you are with a project, the higher your risk exposure.

So what's the risk exposure for a general operator? Well, we just had a horrible storm. We have to have prepared ahead of time and have a protocol that people follow.

We have to make sure that we have insurance on the properties. We have to make sure that we have loss of income insurance on the properties if it's a total loss, plus the rental income.

And then one of the things that we do is we force all the tenants to have tenant insurance. Right. So we have that multiple layers of protection there.

And I think that you should look at any operator and whether it's the last couple of years of really trying times, that's when you want to pick an operator. Five years ago, everything was easy. Everybody was winning. When the chips are down, whose social media did not go dark. Right. Who's still operating.

I think that's a good time to look. And then has there ever been a natural disaster or what's the worst thing that's ever happened to one of your projects? Right.

The ice storm in Texas years ago that shattered ice pipes everywhere. Plus there's supply chain issues and all kinds of during that time. What did the operator do? Those are things you can't prepare for just like now.

And the more involved you are in the deal in the asset class, the higher the risk exposure. What is the risk exposure for a limited partner investor on one of our self storage facilities that just got hit by the storm?

The risk exposure is their capital. It's their capital, but it's covered by insurance. It's there. It may change the timeline, we don't know. We got port strikes happening right now. Right.

That could change supply chain. If one of the buildings did get wiped out, it may lengthen out the amount of time that we could build it back. Right.

It's never what you see coming to get you. It's what you don't see coming.

So the risk exposure for that investor is extremely limited compared to what it is for the general partners and the operators. And you're right, this has completely consumed my life for the last two weeks. I've got people over there.

I had to get dumpster swapped out today from doing demo and they're ripping everything out down to the studs and it's going to take me 60 days to put it all back together again. That risk exposure comes with being an active investor and driving it.

And so I want to limit that risk exposure because the Biggest victim of that exposure is the amount of time that it's going to take me. There can be insurance. There's nothing that replaces the two to three months of my life that it's going to take to put it all back together together.

So if that time is worth more to me in the future than it is now, then I need to reduce my risk exposure on things that have potential to take up exorbitant amounts of my time and my mental energy. That's part of that shift. And then that risk exposure always exists. And so it brings up the idea of how do you mitigate that?

And the best way to do that from a limited partner's position investing into passive syndication offerings is through diversification across.

Neil Henderson: 00:21:54

Time, across asset class, geography and operator.

Clint Harris: 00:21:57

Yeah, time and debt and probably region. They could get hit by a hurricane.

Neil Henderson: 00:22:03

I know, yeah.

And this is, you know, you think of the operators who are, and we're primarily, you know, we're in the Southeast, we're in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and we're looking in Tennessee. And that storm just came up through, you know, the eastern part of the panhandle.

Florida went straight up through an area that luckily was just west of where most of our properties were.

Clint Harris: 00:22:30

Four out of the five states that we operate in were affected. You can't plan for that. Right. But it still stands. You should diversify across different assets, different geography, different operator.

I know we've talked about this before, but different time structures.

I think having different deals that pay out over ones, you know, monthly distributions, one's quarterly, one's having a five year event, one's having a seven year event, one's having a ten year event.

I think diversifying over time where you can look and see what the projected pro forma payout should be, it can help you put together a long term plan in place.

And then obviously the big one that nobody was talking about two years ago is debt structure that, you know, I spoke with an investor, I know I've mentioned this on this podcast before, of spoke with an investor who had six different investments, car washes and vineyards and multifamily and RV parks. Different operators, different geography, different asset classes.

All six of them paused distributions, two of them went on to have capital calls and one of those two ended up being a total loss. So his whole portfolio ground to a halt because even though he thought he was diversified, they all had the same variable rate debt structure.

And when interest rates shot up higher and faster than they ever have in history, his entire portfolio was exposed in My opinion, the earlier you start with LP investments, it starts to snowball and you should take that capital as it comes back out and break it up into different chunks and deploy it in different areas.

And you should be thinking about this like building your own mutual fund operators that you trust, assets that you like, geography that you can be in stretched out over different time cycles with different debt structures, fixed rate. Hopefully that's what we're trying to do, right?

If you can create that, the more time you give yourself to build that, the better you're going to be in the long run. Because otherwise you're going to do what I did. I built up a portfolio once and realized I did it all wrong and I had to tear it down.

I built up another one, realized I did it all wrong because I was only focusing on the financial, not the time and location independence. And so I'm in the process of tearing most of that down and repositioning. I could be doing this wrong a third time, right? I don't know.

uture success. Because of the: 1500

So I'm trying to use that as the goal and work backwards from there and give myself enough Runway that the more time I have, the more stable of a quote unquote mutual fund of limited partner investments I should be able to create, is my thinking.

Neil Henderson: 00:25:00

Well, I'll add one last thing to that, which is my experience as an LP investor. I'm not. I don't have a lot of positions, but I have a few. And you mentioned it earlier.

I was an LP on a multifamily deal in Dallas, Texas, far from the coast, no hurricanes, hey, no natural disasters in Dallas, Texas. Well, then an ice storm comes through and kills all the power in most of the state of Texas. Pipes froze and it was a.

It was a 250 unit apartment building that I think lost something like 100 units, got damaged because pipes burst and water flooded in that caused damage. Now, as an lp, the only thing I got was an email that said, hey, something bad has happened. Here's what's happened. Communication.

They paused distributions, unfortunately, which was not fun.

But I didn't have to deal with insurance, I didn't have to deal with contractors, I didn't have to do anything other than worry a little bit about my capital that was at stake. And at the end of the day, it still came Out. Okay. It's still sold. I think we made maybe 2% less IRR than they projected.

Clint Harris: 00:26:13

Wow.

Neil Henderson: 00:26:14

Over the life of the deal.

Clint Harris: 00:26:15

That's great.

Neil Henderson: 00:26:15

Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't have to worry about anything.

Clint Harris: 00:26:19

That's beautiful.

Neil Henderson: 00:26:20

Yeah.

Clint Harris: 00:26:21

One thing I'll add to that is that comes down to are you going to read the emails or not? It's how involved do you want to be versus how involved are you forced to be?

One other thing I will add is that we interviewed someone on this podcast about eight weeks ago that came through for me in a big way.

Andy Gurcheck with All City Adjusting is an insurance adjuster that we had come on the podcast to talk about the defensive strategy of protecting your assets because I was really curious to learn more for City Storage, which is the brand that we operate under. And six weeks later, I got hit with a quarter million dollar flood insurance policy. And I called Andy and he helped me navigate that magically.

I never, I think I e signed one piece of paper. I never filled out a form or anything like that. He flew an adjuster in, met with the other adjuster.

I had an advocate fighting for us to make sure that we got what we needed. And that's. That's a who, not how situation. Right. I don't have to know how to navigate that process.

I have to know who I have that does know how to navigate that process. And, you know, I used to say, if you really want to learn about something, you should read books and listen to podcasts.

And now I've changed my thought on that.

If you really want to know learn about something, you should start a podcast, because really smart people will get on there and give you 30 minutes to an hour of their full life experience and pour it out, because you're giving them a platform and then you've got it documented. Right. And those are, we have conversations before we record an episode.

After we record an episode, I've got cell phone numbers like, I know who to call. My. The relationship equity that I've been able to build through this has been huge. So I would say that I would end it with this.

Real estate can be very, very challenging. Whatever you're facing, there's a really good chance that somebody has already faced it before.

And the relationship side of things and knowing how to leverage that to not only help yourself, but help other people as well is really where. That's where the magic happens. Yeah. I'll leave it at that.

That's one of those things that's the same reason you partner with a general partner or an operator that knows what they're doing. You get to shave years off your timeline by using their life experience instead of having to make your own mistakes.

That's exactly what I'm trying to do with this reposition. So talk to me in 10 years. We'll find out if it was the right decision or not.

Neil Henderson: 00:28:39

All right, well, listen, I think we're going to wrap it up there. I hope you've enjoyed listening to Clinton. I cavetch a little bit. Listen to our sob story.

It's also, given all the devastation in western North Carolina and the rest of that region, it's it's also a reminder that also what we're dealing with is just things and it's just money.

Clint Harris: 00:28:58

That's right. And it's not more important than time and certainly not more important than relationships and people. So remember what we're all doing this for.

All right.

Neil Henderson: 00:29:07

Thanks for listening. Thank you so much for listening and watching the Truly Passive Income podcast.

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