156 - Unveiling the Power of Listening and Collaboration in Real Estate Success with HBG Capital's Brandon Cobb

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Brandon Cobb, welcome to Listening with Leaders, and you are the owner partner of H, HBG found at hbgcapital.com, located in Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks for taking some time out to talk with us today.

Hey, it's great to be on the show. I appreciate you having me.

So you have an interesting background, medical device sales to general contracting to real estate investing. Give us a little taste of the flavor of your— of what's happened to you over the years.

Yeah, I know it's a wild journey. Had you told me 7, 8 years ago that we would be inventing these communities today, I would have looked that you like you had 7 heads. You know, today we primarily invest in affordable entry-level housing, not to be confused with like Section 8 or government housing. We don't do that. But I'm talking about like first-time homebuyer housing, probably the most undersupplied, highest-demand real estate niche right now. So we do everything from, you know, build-to-sell homes, build-to-rent communities, uh, you know, we'll even contract to develop and sell the finished pads to builders who are going to put entry-level housing on. But it starts with working with the communities, right? And so that's who we really align I'm working with are the communities that have a need for this type of product. But once upon a time I was in medical device sales and unlike a lot of people who may have a story where they had a last just crawl moment with their boss and worked in corporate America for 20 years, I actually love what I did. I was very, very passionate about medicine and sales. You know, I wanted to be a physical therapist in college until I shadowed one and I was sitting in an office 50% of the time doing paperwork. I said, uh-uh, but I love the other half, getting to help patients. And I spent a summer doing door-to-door sales, and that's where I kind of got my teeth kicked in with sales. And I came home from that summer able to pay a full year's worth of rent and have some party money. I was like, man, well, this is kind of cool. I can go out and earn what I'm worth. How do I combine that with healthcare and my interest in physical therapy? Just so happened that my uncle was in medical device sales and spinal sales down in the Pensacola, Florida area. And voilà, this whole idea of choosing a medical device sales rep as a career path was born. And so I worked for a number of years to get into that, finally broke into it. 5 years to finally break into the industry, getting out of, out of college, and worked, worked in the industry for 2 years. I loved what I did. I got to work with orthopedic surgeons every single day in the OR room. I got to train hospital staff on how to use my product. And most importantly for me, I got to make a difference in the patient's life. See, I was very intrinsically motivated. And I remember one Friday afternoon around 5 o'clock, quitting time on Friday. It's one of those days where the sun was out and spring was moving in. The day where you wanted to sit out on the patio and like have a cup of coffee and just hang out and enjoy the weather. I was meeting my boss because I had some great news to give him. We had a fantastic trial with our power equipment at Meharry Hospital in downtown Nashville. And before I could get the great news out and the smile off my face, he fired me. And I was completely shocked. I did not see it coming. I mean, stock was just an understatement. I had spent— I'd got the Rookie of the Year sales award, you know, not like 5 months ago. And I was like, what in the world just happened? And so after a lot of phone calls to friends and family and the shock factor wearing off, the lesson finally hit me. And that was that nobody is going to look out for your financial well-being but you. And so that's what started me on this journey into real estate investing. And, you know, now I'm on a mission, which is to help 1,000 business owners, other people, help them reach financial freedom through real estate investing.

So you see your company today is you'll go out and find individual accredited investors. They'll invest in projects, which allows you to then do the design-build and sell or rent or whatever it is. And then the investors get a return on investment. Depending upon the kind of investment they make with you.

Yeah, it's a truly passive investment. I think that the biggest mistake a lot of people make when they get into real estate and they get this idea of like mailbox money and passive income and these buzzwords, you know, like making money while I sleep, right? Because we see all these famous quotes from Warren Buffett, you know, you'll, you'll always be poor unless you figure out how to, you know, make money while you sleep, whatever. And then they're like, oh, you know, real estate is this great vehicle. And then they get into like flipping houses and they're like, oh my God, managing contractors, holy crap. Well, maybe if I just rent them, I just got to fix it once and it's done. Then you get into rentals and They're like, oh my God, dude, I'm getting 11 o'clock phone calls at night having to fix toilets. This is terrible. Then I'll just get a property management company that, that'll fix it, right? And then you realize that there's bad property management companies and they don't do things and they don't— oh my gosh, the headache. So we sought a way that would truly deliver passive, which means 100% hands-off, consistent income that is secured. Buy real estate specifically in the Nashville market and specifically in entry-level housing. And so we work with a variety of investors, not just accredited investors. We work with non-accredited investors too. There's a couple more loop, uh, hoops we have to jump through to build a relationship with them first before they can invest. But yes, and we, we primarily, we work with a lot of business owners who like want to create income from real estate, but they don't want to leave their job. They know that one day that they don't want to continue working forever and they want something that's going to continue to produce income for them.

Mm-hmm. And Nashville is a growing market, especially for young people coming in, getting into entry-level homes.

Oh man, it's booming. It's been one of the top 10 fastest growing cities in the United States the past 6, 7 years. We've got over 100 people that move here a day. Since 2010, we've had over 33% population growth. We've got year-round tourism that doesn't slow down. And we've got these big giants that are setting up shop like Amazon, Alliance Bernstein, Oracle. Uh, I mean, you know, we've still got affordability. I would argue that the downtown core doesn't have as much affordability, uh, but everyone has moved to the suburbs since. That's where a lot of demand has gone since COVID came and this whole work-from-home concept became something. So, uh, you know, you've got the suburbs that are still extremely affordable compared to the rest of the country, and you've just got these beautiful Yeah, you got that.

You got me curious now. What's a new home, a new starter home cost in Nashville, Tennessee?

Yeah. So if you're in the suburbs, you know, 30, 45 minutes and of course it depends on the neighborhood, but where we like to operate, we like to stay at that $400,000 and less mark. If we're building in Davidson County now, we really want to be under the median home price, which is $550,000. You know, we want to be that lower price, newer product competing versus older homes. But, you know, in Davidson County, you're, you know, you're in the high $500s in your median home price there. You know, the downtown core is not as affordable as it used to be 6 years ago, but all the suburbs still are. And that's what's so beautiful about it because that's where everybody's wanting to live.

And so you're keeping your crews busy building homes.

Everybody's staying busy. I mean, it really hasn't slowed down despite what interest rates and everything does. I mean, things keep creeping along.

Huh. So what is it you've been doing? How long you been doing this now?

I got into business 7 years ago and I started flipping houses and wholesaling houses. That's where we kind of cut our teeth, transition there into doing infill, new construction spec. Said, why are we running around building all these houses all over the place? Onesie twosie. It'd be great if we could just show up to 1 or 2 spots and build, you know, 30 or 40 of them. And then that's how we got into doing development. You know, we ended up trying to go vertical on a couple developments and Couple national builders said, nah, we're going to make you an offer you can't refuse. And we took those and we're like, well, I guess we're in the land development business now too. So what I love about our strategy as far as risk mitigation goes is there's multiple exit strategies. We can buy the land. We— everything starts with the city. You've got to go sit down with the city, talk with the planners and talk to the planners. What's the vision for the community? What's lacking? What are citizens complaining about? You know what? You know, what do you need tax revenue-wise? And if you can reverse engineer that plan and pull out a map and say, hey, what areas do y'all want to see developed? What are the parcels that are not the highest and best use? And then go and acquire those parcels. That's, that's what we'll do. So we only buy it once all of the entitlement and rezone is in place. And that's where we really make money for ourselves, our investors, and build our safety net. When you take a piece of land that has a house on it, 5 or 20 acres, and you go from that to 30 to you know, 150 homes, you force appreciate the value of that land by a lot. And so that's how we add value to the sellers.

Yeah. So you end up buying— you'll buy a parcel, say 20 acres, and you'll, you'll get yield and title the land.

Yeah, we only buy it once the value is there. So we remove the risk by putting it under contract with the seller contingent on a result. And once we have all the approvals in place and it's stamped, then we can go raise money from investors and buy it with a plan A, B, and C in mind.

Got it. Yeah. And you've been pretty successful at this.

So far so good. You know, every year is different. You never know what the market's going to throw at you. You know, we were pretty diversified in 2023 and late 2022. You know, I can tell you that like our homes that we did, some of those did take a hit. But all of our development deals, man, they worked out fantastic. And we've got some land deals we're working on that'll work out great. So, you know, as long as you got multiple exit strategies set up, you know, you can weather whatever the economy's going to throw at you. But again, it all starts with making sure that you buy great deals or force appreciate your deals.

But, and you buy force appreciate, that's getting, getting the, getting the entitlements and the rezone. Yeah, the rezone. And that does that take time locally?

And oh yeah, a year to 2 years. It takes a long time to do that. A long time.

Yeah.

So if you start, you got to build that pipeline up. Once you build your pipeline, then you'll get consistent and steady deal flow. And so, you know, we've been blessed over the past 7 years to build the right relationships with the right people and the right owners to be able to have a consistent pipeline.

Oh, good for you. So you've been doing this for a while. What is it that gets you excited to get up in the morning and go to work?

Oh man, just the challenges every single day are unique. It's really fun watching a community come to life. There's something about having a vision, a blank slate, like literally a blank slate, sometimes completely flat piece of land, and watch a community come to life. What I really enjoy are all the parties that benefit. So I can't think of something where I wake up every single day and get to impact so many different people in so many different parties. You know, for example, Obviously we get to build homes and we're catering towards like the first-time homebuyer. Well, if you're a first-time homebuyer, why are you buying a home? It's because you want to start a family. Everybody remembers their first home that they bought. So I feel like we get a special place in people's hearts when we build these products. So we're servicing the community, we're servicing families. The city is going to get a forever tax-paying product. And so they'll be able to take that money, invest back in the community, invest back in the people and build something that makes the community great. And then obviously our investors make money, we make money, and the— just everybody benefits. All the neighbors around us, their home values increase. And so it really is just a win-win-win-win for everybody. That's what gets me up out of bed every morning.

That's exciting. So, um, you've obviously seen your— probably your share of disgruntlement and disputes and arguments over, over the years. How do you— how do you it's sort of inevitable in the construction business. How do you, how do you manage that? What's your attitude towards that?

Yeah, you know, it's, it really is a bummer because if you're a people pleaser, you're just not going to be able to please everyone. I think it was maybe Herbert Hoover that said, I don't know a surefire formula for success, but I do know a surefire formula for failure, and that's try to please everybody all the time. And we would love to be able to please everybody all the time, but the reality is You're going to always have some neighbors that don't want you there. They just don't want you there. But I'll tell you an interesting story. Human psychology is really funny. We had this woman who came to one of our meetings and I mean, she was passing out flyers and quite frankly, she was lying about the development. She said that it was going to be prime. They were like duplexes. It was going to bring a lot of riffraff to the area, passing out flyers, knocking on doors. She had a horse farm next door and she would cater and help these animals basically rehabilitate. And she was concerned about the machinery and the equipment and the sound and everything starting the horses. And, hey, you know, I get it. You know, I'm on board. And so we tried talking with her. She didn't really want to— she didn't really want to listen to us at all. And I was just like, look, we just want a win-win because we'll sit down with people after the hearing and we'll go outside and we'll talk to them. Right. And try to figure out, like, you know, how can we make this a win for everybody? And, uh, you know, I remember it was really funny because my partner went to her and he's like, what are you doing? And she's like, well, you know, I just don't want to see this here, yada yada. He's like, you do realize that if this goes through and gets passed, I'm coming to you next to buy your land and you can go buy a farm cash, bigger, service more horses and have a buttload of money in your bank account. Are you not interested in that? All of a sudden, she was all for the development and had completely flip-flopped sides. So, you know, it's been interesting and a fun journey to see what people come up with during the town hall meetings when discussing new developments. But it's always going to be a battle, unfortunately. But, you know, we're happy to— as long as we can help more than we hurt, then we're just going to have to settle for that.

And I take it in that case you did end up buying her land and giving her a bucket of money and she went off to buy a horse ranch somewhere else.

Hey, everybody wins.

That's, that's— well, Brandon, what is it that you think is unique about you that makes all of this work, makes it all click?

You know, I was asking myself that question when I read the book 10X Is Easier Than 2X. Loved Benjamin Hardy, loved Dan Sullivan, read all their books. And they asked— they call it the unique ability. And I was really struggling because growing up, I really don't think that there's anything special to me. I got a 19 on my ACT. I always had trouble paying attention, had ADHD growing up. I really don't think that there was anything special until I read that book. And I really sat down and I went through the exercises, and I discovered that my unique ability is Modeling success. There's nothing special about what I'm doing. I'm very good at figuring out who's already done what I'm trying to accomplish and getting in rooms with those people, getting mentorship from others, paying for coaching programs, getting in masterminds with similar business owners to me so that we can go on this journey together and help each other. That's what I'm good at— modeling success. And for all your listeners out there, if you're a COO or you're a CEO, and you're trying to get better at it is what you're doing, the best thing you can do is surround yourself with a peer group. So if this concept of a mastermind group is new to you, I, you know, highly recommend, especially if you're like a COO level, there are masterminds out there. For example, Cameron Herold, awesome author. He wrote Second in Command, he wrote Vivid Vision, and I think he wrote Double Double. He's got a mastermind community for COOs. So if you're in that position and you're looking to learn from other rockstar CEOs who've been doing what you're doing for a long time and have a pathway to success, I would recommend that you go look into that. There are masterminds or groups out there that you can join where you can go and you can do what I do, model success.

You've gotten— obviously you participate in that. Tell us a little bit about what you learned in getting mentored or being in peer groups and in these masterminds.

Oh, God. Like, How long do you have? And we could do 10 episodes on this. It depends on where you're at with your journey, right? And what area of business you need help with. And I'll just kind of give you an example. There's literally been so much that I've, I've learned from, you know, I had one guy in one mastermind group, he, he's like, dude, you need to read this book on raising capital right now. Read this book. And I'm like, dude, there's a mastermind involved in this book. So I go raise this mastermind and like, you know, within 2 years I had $15 million. Right? I mean, crazy little things that you take out of the group that have this butterfly effect, right? He just recommended a book. That was it. And then that book had a huge impact on my life because of the group that it recommended. But I can tell you, when I was growing my house flipping business back when I was first getting started, it was key that I be able to speak and collaborate with other business owners that were flipping houses. An example of some highly valuable content that I got was I needed to hire an acquisitions rep. Well, never done that before. I'd never created an onboarding guide. I didn't know what sales courses to send them to. I had no clue. But there it was, somebody who'd been doing this for a year, they gave me a full onboarding guide, something that would have taken me, I don't know, 3 or 4 years to create, complete with all the sales courses that had already been paid for. Saved money on the sales courses, complete with everything that I needed this guy ramped up the CRM to use, to have them plug into and manage. So again, it kind of boils down to modeling success. You know, what did you get out of these mastermind groups? It was the information that I needed to apply to my business to get it to grow. A lot of the mechanics— do this, do that, this— you need this marketing channel, here's how to send mailers out, here's the list that you need to pull. So there's a lot of mechanics involved with that.

Nuts and bolts.

Nuts and bolts. Huh.

I've always thought I haven't been in too many masterminds, but I haven't heard much about nuts and bolts. But here are people who are obviously successful and they're able to tell you this is what you got to do. Yeah.

You know, you're a professor at university, right?

Among other things. Yeah. Many others. Yeah.

Many, many other things. So it'd be similar to like a lot of professors getting together that teach the same subject and collaborating on like what gets the best responses from the class, right? What content hits the most, you know, stuff like that. Collaborating on success so that you can be the best possible professor at the university that you can, right, when you're teaching.

Well, and I think back, I mean, I'm an adjunct, I'm not a full-time professor, but I do remember a couple of years ago we did have a meeting, a Zoom meeting, uh, I think kind of during the pandemic because we're all moving on to moving to virtual teaching, which is not easy.

Oh, God bless.

And so we were talking about how do we engage students. And I got turned on to a book by a couple of Stanford guys who studied learning. And I learned a lot. And it really, it changed the way I taught the course. And now I'm back in person and, you know, I only teach the course once a year. So, but I see, I see your point. And now as I think about it, yeah, of course, I've done that before.

Model success. Don't be a pioneer. The pioneers are the ones with the arrow in your back. I want to follow the trails.

Well, this show, this show is called Listening with Leaders because I am— I teach listening. I teach listening skills. And, and what I do is teach people how to listen to emotions rather than to words, which has amazing transformative effects on people. Um, but I'm curious, in your business, how important is listening, and how have you developed your listening skills?

You know, it's listening is really tough, you know, when you're running 110 miles an hour and everyone around you is running 110 miles an hour, just to be able to stop, be present in the moment and actively listen. I mean, it can be tough, you know, for this reason I'll do one-on-ones with my team every 2 weeks just to check in with them. You know, I think a big part of that one is quieting the voice in my head. Never been in a conversation where You're like, oh, you know, I got something I want to say it now. And all you can think about is the thing that you want to say and you're just completely ignoring what the other person says. So learning to quieten the voice has been very instrumental in my listening. Getting rid of the distractions. I was having breakfast, you know, the other morning with my wife and I was like doing something with the blankets in the living room and she was trying to talk to me and she needed advice on you know, her schedule and what she had going on. And I was listening. I was listening. But you could tell she was getting frustrated with me because I was not making eye contact with her. And she's like, what did I just say? And she, and I, and I was able to repeat it to her. And she's like, okay, you were listening. And I was like, yeah, I was listening. But again, she got frustrated, didn't think I was because the eye contact wasn't there. So eye contact's important too. Removing distractions. I was on the phone one time. With an investor and I was also babysitting my nephews. And man, I picked the wrong time to schedule a call with him because I did not listen to a word that he said. I even apologized. I'm like, dude, I gotta let you go. I got the nephews going. So that's, that's been very instrumental as well. And then listening to, again, to kind of what you just said, like the emotions when I sit down with my team one-on-one, you know, we meet very often and I'm talking with them every other day, you know, how's your day going? And, There's a lot of monotony there. Oh, my day's good.

My day's good.

Thanks. You know, got it. Well, is it good? How is it really going? So you can tell when I ask that question, I'm not— I want to know how their day's going, but I'm not listening for the words. I'm listening for the emotions behind it. Do they sound kind of down? Is there some frustration in their voice? And so if I can hear anything that's kind of off cue, then I'll bring it up. Well, how's the day really going? You know, what's going on? You know, you sound kind of bummed out, or you sound— insert whatever emotion you think they're feeling here. So those are some of the tools that have really helped me in my ability to listen to people.

Well, you've done well. You just hit the checklist: stop the distractions, quiet the mind, listen deeply, and reflect back what people are feeling and saying. And that's the secret. It's, um, part of, part of what I teach is there's a, a way to str— I look at emotions as being data. And so how do you structure emotional data in a way that you can access it quickly and reflect back? And that way, the cool thing is when you're listening to emotions is that you can't focus on anything else. If you're really committed to listening to somebody and you're listening to their emotions, Your mind isn't any— your mind cannot go anywhere else. It won't because you're so focused on listening to what they're feeling. And so it eliminates the distraction problem because you're really focused. Um, pretty cool.

Yeah, I think a big, a big part of it is if you can learn to bring yourself in the present moment. The Power of Now is such a powerful book on this subject. If you can, if you can figure out how to do that, bring yourself in the present moment. For me, it's— and it's hard to do, right? You know, I've got like, I've got little things I do to try to bring me into the present moment and, and like deboot me, power off work in the evenings. One of 'em's cooking. I love cooking cuz when you're cooking, you, you have to focus, you have to be in the present moment to do that. And so that's, that's been a, a key that I've used that's helped me a lot.

Good. Well, um, what I have found is that actually taking Eckhart Tolle's ideas of being in the presence now is actually quite easy. Once you learn how to pay attention to the right things. And that's not something that is intuitive. I mean, what I teach is counterintuitive and counter-normative. It, but it works with the way that our brains work, which, because there's neuroscience behind all of this. And I tell people, you know, I ask them, well, have you ever read any of Eckhart Tolle's stuff? And yeah, The Power of Now, being in the present moment. I said, when you were listening other people into existence, That's what you're experiencing. You're experiencing what he's talking about. And it's quite easy to get into that place once you know the 3 steps. And so that's cool. Good for you. Cooking, huh? I'm a cook too. I love to cook. In fact, I've got some cocovan stewing away right now.

Food brings people closer together.

Absolutely. And you know, for me, cooking is instant gratification. You know, I can spend an hour putting something together, a couple of hours putting something in there. There it is. And it's here for us to all enjoy. Whereas like you in a real estate project, you've got 2 or 3 years. There is no instant gratification in real estate.

Right. And yeah, no, it takes a while.

Yeah. And my former career as a trial lawyer, there was no instant gratification being a trial lawyer. You know, it took forever to go from start to finish. And I think that's why I enjoy cooking so much. And I love I love being creative too, which it sounds like you sound like a really creative guy and the satisfaction you get in creating something that you share with other people and the feeling of satisfaction you get is probably pretty significant for you.

Yeah, I'm very blessed. I wake up every single day and I try to, I try to count my blessings whether or not it's a good day or a bad day and practice gratitude.

Good. Well, that's another man. You, you've been reading, you've been studying all the right people doing the right thing. Gratitude is critical every day, waking up saying, I am so thankful and grateful for what I have. It's a, it's a real attitude. It's a real attitude adjustment. And I love the, the sign, excuse me, the sign behind you, stay hungry, stay humble.

Yeah, that was, it was a, I think I was scrolling through Facebook and I was needing stuff for the office and I said, oh, this will be perfect. You know, this nice pretty big canvas, core values, blah, blah, blah, and put it up in the office. And then COVID hits and we got to shut the office down and everyone works from home. So now all of my stuff from the office is in the house and my wife would not let me hang it up all over the house, all these, you know, motivational, you know, business posters. And so I've got an office full of canvas over here that is just hanging out with me.

Very cool. Very cool. Well, one more question, Brandon. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know unless you revealed it to us?

One thing that nobody would never know unless revealed it to it. I can do a one-handed pushup. I can do a lot of one-handed pushups.

Oh, no way.

Oh yeah.

How do you develop that skill?

Not just working out for a long time. I've, uh, I've been working out, God, I don't know, 20 years. I, I, I do weird stuff like I'm doing a a 30-day straight workout right now, you know, to kind of launch into the new year. Never done it before, but want to see what happens with it. So I'm constantly trying to push my body and test things in unique ways. Some people call me crazy for it, and I don't blame them.

But I think I also read that you go— you do some pretty amazing trips. You like to travel and do some extreme stuff.

Yeah, I got, you know, I think I took 40 days off work last year and the year before that. And, you know, I try to go somewhere for 10 days a quarter, somewhere that's on our bucket list. And I'm about to go to New Zealand for 2 weeks here in 2 weeks.

Wow. Summertime down there. Fun.

Yeah. Now we had to do it during the summertime down there for the weather.

Absolutely. Well, it's been a real pleasure talking with you and getting to know you a little bit, Brandon. Thank you so much for being on the show with me.

Hey, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Absolutely. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much. For listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team.

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