Investing Beyond Boring Real Estate: Oil, Gas, and Industrial Properties with Keshav Kolur

Are you one of the many busy professionals working in offices day in and day out? Do you wonder how some people grow their wealth fast, retire early and play on work days? Well, you're in luck because Ginny Bolling hosts this show Pivots of Prosperity, where she interviews people that can do just that play on work days. Many guests have become financially free. She also interviews people that are on their journey and people that are in support roles like attorneys, contractors, brain brokers and others. Commercial real estate is the common element. She is on a mission to be sure. Busy professionals know they can own substantial commercial properties too, like apartments, self storage facilities and others, and not have to do the work managing them. Passive investing is the key. Syndications are the typical method. Tax write offs are some of the biggest rewards. Ginny and partners find the deals, build a strong team and business plan, then offer the investment opportunities to passive investors. New episodes are released every Tuesday at 12, so watch for new releases. If you want to get involved, let us know. You need to get pre qualified to hear about most deals. See the show notes for contact information.

Hello, Hello. Jenny Bowling here with Pivot to Prosperity, brought to you by Pivotal Real Estate Investments, where we help investors build wealth and income through commercial real estate that also improves communities. And today we have Keshav Kohler with us and thank you for coming, Keshav.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Jenny.

I just said it funny. K. Shove Keshev.

Yeah, okay.

Okay.

Yeah. It's an honor to be here.

Yeah. Well, thank you. I'm going to read your bio and then we'll jump right into it because you have a lot to talk about.

Yeah.

All right. Keshav is a full time real estate investor and one of the principals and founders of Clive Capital, a private equity firm based out of New York City. Since founding Clive Capital, Keshav has helped investors allocate capital to seven properties with a combined asset value of more than 165 million. With a projected growth to 322 million by 2030. The portfolio spans 1000 apartments under renovation and 500 homes under construction across three markets. In addition to his experience as investor, Keshav is also the host of the Investing for Generational wealth podcast and which helps investors understand the many opportunities available through alternative investments outside of traditional stocks and bonds, including commercial real estate, energy, private lending and investing in businesses. Previous to that, Keshav was a software engineer working at tech companies like Amazon and Facebook. Yeah, a lot of people wonder why you'd leave one of them. Right?

Yeah, so.

Yeah, well, so welcome. And so as I read that, is there anything that stood out to you that, oh, I should add that or.

It is a little outdated. I think we acquired another property or helped our investors invest into another property, I should say 100 unit apartment building in Lynchburg, Virginia. And since then we've also expanded into industrial real estate, which I know you wanted to talk about, and private lending as well as oil and gas, primarily for the tax benefits, which in my opinion are even better than the tax benefits we see in real estate. So I do need to update that bio and that's another thing on my very long list of things to do.

Well, probably the easy one to touch on quickly maybe is the oil and gas, right? Because like you say, it's got the great tax benefits. But how would you describe that as, as an investment and how it compares to the real estate?

I would say right now it's one of my, it is my favorite investment right now. And I'll go into why. Even though I got started in multi family, so in oil and gas, I made my first investment in November of 2023 and you know, for background, I made my first real estate investment in September of 2021. So been investing for about three and a half years now. Been in the space for about four years, took the first year just network and do my due diligence, educate myself. But investing since the very beginning in real estate, oil and gas, more Recently, November of 2023, finally found a company that I felt comfortable investing with because the oil and gas space is less transparent than the real estate space. It's very fraught with scandals and know, fraud because a lot of operate, maybe not a lot, but some operators like to take advantage of the tax benefits that are offered in the space in oil and gas and they like to lure otherwise, you know, innocent investors in by dangling that carrot of tax benefits. Even if the project goes belly up, you know, they lure people in by saying, hey, you can reduce your income, you know, don't worry about the rest. And unfortunately investors, you know, know, bite and they suffer the consequences. I've been looking for an opportunity to invest in oil and gas since February of 2022 and finally found this investment in November of 2023. Why I was so interested in oil and gas is real estate. The tax benefits that come from depreciation are great. They definitely are way better than anything we find in the stock market. But those depreciation tax benefits are restricted to only offsetting your passive income unless you or your spouse is classified as a real Estate professional. And for a lot of folk, you know, myself included, for example, in the tech industry, them, like neither them nor their spouses are real estate professionals oftentimes, but they stay still, pay a really high tax bill. Especially since, you know, most of them are working in high tax areas like New York primarily, like primarily the Bay Area, California or New York. So they're always looking for ways to reduce that tax bill on their W2 or even in the stock market. Right, because most of these folks are invested in the stock market and the market's been going bananas recently, so they have a lot of gains to offset real estate. Unless you're your spouse, a real estate professional doesn't help you tackle those problems. But in oil and gas, anyone can invest and you can receive on this investment that I made at least, and another one, we just helped other professionals in tech, primarily employees of Meta, Google and Amazon, back in December, help them invest into this opportunity as well. Every 100k invested, they're able to reduce their taxable income by 80k. They don't have to be in the industry full time. Neither does their spouse. On top of those tax benefits, you know, a deduction of 80k, which depending on your tax situation can translate to tax savings of 30 to 40k, on top of that, you're still getting monthly payments, cash flow and you know, we're projecting a 2 to 3x in 5 to 7 years, something like that. And the investment that I made November of 2023, started making payments in May of 2024, and I've been receiving a couple thousand dollars since then. I think recently it dipped below $1,000. But yeah, it's great for tax benefits and it's great for cash flow, the risk, you know. Well, actually, you know, I'll stop there, Ginny, and you know, see if you have any questions or thoughts.

Yeah, okay. Well, so yeah, it's known for definitely the good tax benefits and, and the cash flow that was a thousand a month or a year or it was.

I think, starting out, let me try to think. It was, it was 4% a year. I mean, 4% a month for the first maybe six months. And then it started decreasing from there. Now it's about one and a half percent a month. If I remember correctly, I get paid.

Out monthly tax deductions. The big push that everybody goes for. Right.

Well, it decreases over time because as you drill and extract the oil and gas and sell it, there's less and less to be drilled over time. So unlike real estate, where your returns are backloaded where you're really, where a lot of your returns come from, the appreciation on the back end and not from the cash flow on the front end. Oil and gas is the opposite. There's almost no appreciation play. It's purely cash flow. And your returns are front loaded because that's when you're going to have the most oil and gas to be extracted. As time goes on, you have less and less to drill, extract and sell.

Yeah, that's a good comparison there. Okay. And you were just starting to talk about the risk.

Oh, yes. So the business plan of how this works is in oil and gas we have similar to how real estate has realtors, we have landmen in oil and gas. And so these landmen help track transactions of mineral land. So when they notice that a company, for example, like Exxon is coming into an area and buying up all the land, and they know that Exxon knows that there's a lot of oil and gas there, Exxon, these companies usually pay geologists to do studies and confirm that there are indeed deposits of oil and gas beneath the ground. They don't just randomly go sticking drills everywhere. Once we know that, then we also go in and try to buy land in that same area. You don't need to own land on the exact pinpoint where the drill goes into the ground. As long as you own land within the vicinity, you are entitled to a portion of the revenue that comes from the oil and gas being drilled and sold just by being the landowner. Now, the tax benefits comes in because we acquire what's called a working interest. Where the. Where basically what we're saying is, hey, if the company needs extra money to drill, we will come out of pocket for that money. Now, that being said, my partner, who I invested with, who has more experience than I do, and I'm learning from her, she's been doing this for decades and she's only had to do this a few times. Come out of pocket for that, you know, if the company needs it, and only a couple thousand dollars, nothing crazy. In exchange for taking that small risk though, you get the tax benefits and the tax write offs even without having to be in the industry full time. So it's a combination of buying the land in the area and acquiring a working interest in that land. You're not, to my knowledge, I'm still ramping up on the space, but to my knowledge, you're not investing in the company itself, you're investing in the land. So that's how you get both the cash flow and the tax benefits from.

From these owning nearby land, you might qualify for the tax write offs. How do you, how do you confer? Does it have to, do you have to, have to prove that there's oil under your, your boundary, your property boundary?

That's a good question. My understanding of mineral rights is you have to be within a vicinity. I don't know that you have to necessarily confirm that there, that there's a deposit under your land that you own. Interesting.

Yeah, well, that's pretty cool. And it's different. People don't know that. But we don't want to spend all our time on that because we also want to talk about your industrial fund. Did you call it?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so you know, oil and gas is one of the many investments we offer. Industrial real estate is one of them as well. Specifically triple net leases. It's one of the safest investments out there that I, you know, that's my personal opinion. And that's because the tenant is on the hook for everything, right? So as long as you get the right tenant in there, and in our case that usually means a manufacturing company, you know, a logistics company, someone to use industrial real estate, which for simplicity sake, let's call it a warehouse, right? Someone to use a warehouse or a factory, as long as they're a good tenant and they make their payments on time, you run basically no risk, right? You have a long term contract, 10, 15, 20 years that locks in the rental rate, it locks in the, you know, rent escalation rates also it also locks in if there are any repairs that need to be made, any damages that happened, and you know, property taxes, insurance, all of that is on the tenant. The major risk that you run here is if the, your tenant, the company goes bankrupt. So as long as you have, you have the right company in there, that's obviously easier said than done. You have to do, you know, very deep due diligence on the company, do credit checks, things like that. As long as you have a good tenant in there, you know, we're typically seeing a 14, 15% IRR there. You know, I would say it's in some, I would say it is safer than multifamily, right? The returns are slightly lower because of how much safer it is. Right. In multifamily, you have tenants who could be moving out every year or they could even break lease in the middle. I guess these companies could break lease too, but their leases are 10, 15, 20 year long term leases. And again, repairs, property taxes, insurance, damages are all in the company. They're not on you as the landlord. So that's another thing that makes industrial really safe. And for us, you know, the three years that we've been doing this and just talking to investors over that period of time, you know, hundreds of investors, we've come up with six criteria that we find investors usually look for in their investments.

Okay.

And each investor has their own blend, right. So the six criteria are appreciation, cash flow, tax benefits, risk, liquidity, meaning how long is your capital locked up for. And then lastly, this one I found about most recently is impact investing or you know, charitable investments. And that's a pretty interesting one. And different people you talk to will have different goals when, when it comes to investing. Right. Some people will want really low risk for them, multifamily and industrials, pretty good bet. For other people, they want really high risk. They might want to go invest in Trump Coin. Right. So on each of these characteristics that I mentioned, you're going to have someone who falls into one end of the spectrum or the other or somewhere in between. So we like to bring various types of investments that fit within our investment thesis still to cater to all of our investors.

Yeah, that's a good way to do it. So they can diversify and stay with people that they know like and trust. Right, exactly. Yeah, that's good, that's good. And so you said you also have a debt fund.

Yes, we do. We raise it. We raise capital for private debt as well. You know, that is really for folks who are looking for, who want to optimize for cash flow, who. And who want to optimize for liquidity. If you don't want your capital locked up in a real estate syndication for three to seven years or longer, some of our debt opportunities are a better option. And then lastly, I'd say for folks who have retirement accounts, right, if you have an old 401k, you have a Roth IRA. Converting it into a self directed IRA and investing in it and investing it into a debt investment is much more lucrative because debt has no inherent tax benefits. Whereas if you invest it into real estate, you're basically giving up, you're giving up the depreciation that comes along with the real estate. Anyway, that being said, I'm not saying you shouldn't use it to invest into real estate, but if you have the option, then I recommend using retirement accounts to invest into debt and then using cash or leverage to invest into real estate and other tax advantaged opportunities.

Yeah, yeah, no, it makes good sense, especially in today's market too. There's so much going on in the world of debt, you know, it's really got a lot more different uses than in a different market. Really? I would say so. Good. Well, so. And how did you get into real estate?

Yeah, so I actually, you know, graduated college as an engineer six years ago now. And coming out of college, I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Purple book that we all know and love. And that got me thinking about real estate, not syndications specifically. And I forget if it did mention syndications or if I just missed something there, but it got me thinking about real estate to start. And so I thought, hey, you know, I should at least go out and buy single family homes and rent them out. This and then so I actually got licensed as a Realtor on leap day of 2020, February 29, 2020. And two weeks later, we all remember what happened. Covid struck and so the markets shut down. But later that summer, when the markets open back up, help some folks sell homes, buy homes. So built up some capital there, as well as some capital from my day job as a software engineer, started looking at residential properties to buy and rent out. Luckily, at the time, before I went too far down that rabbit hole, one of my friends from college came across a Reddit thread where someone was talking about syndications and this, you know, person on Reddit had invested into 40 single family homes and owned them and then said, hey, it's a pain in the butt. Investing in apartment buildings is so much easier. It can be active or passive, it's more lucrative and it's more tax advantaged too, than buying single family homes. So I thought, and then to me it sounded cooler to invest into apartment buildings than just single family homes. So I thought, hey, I should look into this. But no one I knew was doing it at the time, friends or family. It was new to me. So I thought, yeah, it was too good to be true. I took that was September of 2020 when I first heard about syndications. Took the next year from 2020 to September 2021 to just network in the industry, do my due diligence and practice analyzing deals, reading books, watching YouTube videos, and finally felt comfortable to make my first investment into an apartment building in San Antonio. And that started cash flowing. And at that point, that was a proof of concept to me that, hey, this works. This person didn't just run off with my money to the Bahamas. And if I'm going to make these investments for myself, I might as well not might as well. But I want to help my family and my friends and anyone else who's interested. Also Diversify outside the stock market into these passive private equity opportunities. So I started my company, Clive capital, January of 2022, three years ago now. And that's Accel Care. Goal is to help people diversify into these opportunities, primarily tech professionals. Because of my background at Amazon and Meta, where I ran the real estate investment clubs. And so a lot of our investors are from Amazon, they're from Meta, Google, Microsoft, et cetera. It's to help them diversify and get into real estate, oil and gas, as we mentioned, private lending. So so far, like you mentioned in the show notes, we've helped people invest into over a thousand apartments under renovation, 500 single family rental home center development. We're expanding into industrial real estate, have helped folks invest into that, the private lending and the oil and gas to achieve, you know, generational wealth, financial freedom, passive income, all that good stuff that we're all chasing, that makes life a whole lot better, right?

Yeah, yeah. And it's an exciting world. I mean, you know, we, we talk as peers all the time to try to make sure that we stay up on what best practices are, what trends are and different things like that and, and what tools we're using between platforms and this and that. It's, it's, it's great to be able to have people come on the show like you and, and talk. I don't always have oil and gas or industrial people on the show like say so. So that's really good. And so, and so I'm going to need to ask you now because I, we just record 20 to 30 minutes usually. Is there a pivotal person or event that's brought you to where you are today or that's you toward a certain goal?

I would say it's my friend who introduced me to the concept of syndications. That one Reddit thread, right. Some people may have just written it off like, this is crazy and you know, this person's out of their mind. Were they talking about acquiring apartment buildings? That's not possible for everyday person like me. But I just took that, you know, bull by the horns and really just dove in, started talking to that person, you know, just texting with someone random on Reddit. And this was Covid too, right? So it was someone I didn't know, someone I couldn't meet in person because they're based out of San Antonio. But that's started my entire journey. So I always, you know, make sure I thank my friend, you know, because he's here in New York City too. I always make sure to thank him for Getting me started. And then he always jokes, yeah, just give me, you know, 20% of your company and we'll call it even.

Well, so when we do a special thing, a series called Local Legends and Pivotal People. So when there's somebody pivotal to you, if you want to nominate them as a pivotal person and you can call them and let them know, or we will. And if they come on the show, then we beef it all up and what not tap them as a special pivotal person, but then we also give them a lapel pin that says they're a pivotal person. So if you want to officially nominate them.

Oh, okay. I would say someone else who I would be interested in nominating then is my partner, Andy McMullen. And I don't know if you've had him on the show already, but I'm working with him on our ground up builder and developments. So he has a lot of experience. He's. He offered to take me under his wing and, you know, look so that I could learn from him. So he's also been pivotal in my journey and scaling and growing and meeting new people in the industry.

Okay, that was Andy McMullen.

McMullen, yeah. McMullen is MC M, U, L, L, E, N. Okay. The company is. Company is legacy acquisitions.

Okay. Do you want to let. Let him know that he's been nominated, or you want me to call him and tell him that you nominated him?

If you. I can CC him on the email and introduce him to you that way.

Yeah, do that. Do that. Well, yeah, give him. Give him the one, too. And that'll be. That'll. That it. People like it.

It's.

It's. It's fun to be able to be appreciated, and that's what it's all about. Yeah. Well, good, good. Well, so. And we need to wrap it up here. Let. Why don't you let people know how they can reach you?

Yeah, the best way to reach me, there's three ways you definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn. Would love to connect and, you know, share any knowledge, provide any value that we can. Case of cool or there's. I don't think there's another one out there. So. Perks of having a difficult to pronounce name.

Well, spell it because some people are only listening on itunes.

Oh, sure. Think so. Keshe of Kalore. That's KE as in elephant. S as in Sam. H as in Harry. A as in Apple, B as in Victor. Last name, Calor. K as in kite. O as in orange. L as in lamp. U as an umbrella and R as in rainbow. And our website's another place. Great place to check us out. Clivecap.com C. Oh man, a lot of spelling. Clive Capital is the full name of the company. Clive is C as in Cat, L as in Lamp, I as in igloo, V as in Victor, E as an elephant. My elementary school teachers would be so proud of me. So, Clivecap.com forward/alternative-assets there we have a hundred point due diligence checklist that you can use to interview anyone you're investing with. And this checklist applies regardless of the industry. So whether it's oil and gas, private lending, real estate, whatever it is, this checklist has questions like, you know, tell me about a time a deal went bad and what did you do about it? How did you communicate with investors? What have you learned from it? It's also talks about what's your track record? Like, you know, provide me with Testimonials. So just 100 questions like this. It's I found pretty helpful. We also have a two pager and an ebook about why you should be investing outside the stock market. It's primarily geared towards real estate because that's the easiest one to understand. But those same benefits and mindsets apply to investing into anything outside of real estate, like we're doing with private lending or oil and gas. And then lastly, Ginny, like you mentioned, is, you know, checking out our podcast, Investing for Generational Wealth. I don't know that it's as great as yours, but hopefully we'll get there one day. But check out Investing for Generational Wealth. And Ginny, if you haven't already, you know, you should definitely hop on our podcast as well. We'd love to have you there.

Yeah, I'll do that. That sounds good. All right. And so we'll put all this in the show notes too, so that people can find it. But just in case, I always ask people to spell it to be on the safe side. And so I appreciate coming on the show. We'll be in touch.

Sounds good. Thanks so much for having me on, Ginny.

You're welcome.