2081: The Surprising Economic Trends of 2023 | Q & A with Investment Counselor Carrie

This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts, visit hartmanmedia.com.

Hey Jason, so I thought I would share a hybrid management update.

I just had five back to back closings with five different investors in the same market. Three of them are self managing or hybrid managing and they all have tenants already and the two that are using property managers do not. You are so right on all of that and I just wanted to share the progress and how boldly our clients are starting to take management into their own hands.

Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants and been involved.

In thousands of real estate transactions.

This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your Financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman.

With the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to episode 2081 and for all of our American listeners, I want to wish you a very happy Thanksgiving. And Axios is out with an article about the economy and why there are many things to be thankful for. I want to go through that with you real quickly and then we will get to our special guest today, which is none other than one of our investment counselors. Carrie is with us here today to discuss a whole bunch of things, answer some of your questions and I think you'll find that to be very informative. But a couple things. First, this article economic trends. We're grateful for unemployment. Americans are working and the Fed cannot seem to ruin the labor market as hard as they are trying. We know about this. I've talked to you about it before. But employment is good. It's strong. Wage inflation is there and remember that is very sticky. And as income property investors, we love inflation, don't we? Of course we do, because we get inflation induced debt destruction and we own hard assets that go up in value with inflation. So it's a double inflation arbitrage as I've talked about over the years. But it says Americans are working. If you believe workers wouldn't return to the labor force, the last year has proved you wrong. Workers have joined the job market in droves. The rebound in supply lifted in part by immigration surge has helped the labor market continue to come into better balance. With low unemployment, the share of workers from 25 to 54 years old who were employed was 80.6% down ever so slightly from a multi decade high reached over the summer, but still very, very strong. So then the wages, right. If employment is good, that means wages are rising. And that's point number two. Real wages are rising. No matter your preferred wage growth measure. The data tells a similar story. Well, pay isn't rising quite as fast as in the year before and it's breakneck pace. But inflation has cooled much faster. That means people are getting richer. Yes, doomers, did you hear that? People are actually doing better. They are getting ahead. And another point that we're going to come to here in a moment is going to show you another way in which people are getting ahead. Surprising to many who have been predicting the end of the world. Right? The doom and the gloom, just not quite happening. Hourly earnings for rank and file employees were up 4.4% and inflation was up 3.2%. I know that's the CPI. It's understated. We've talked about it ad nauseam. We get it, don't have to mention it. Productivity, productivity is surging. Productivity is way up. And folks, wait until all of this incredible technology. I mean I'm going to call this year the year of AI. You know, artificial intelligence. It was there before, but in this past year it has really started to take hold. This revolution. We are like at the beginning, beginning, beginning stages of this. There is so much more to come and that is going to create a giant surge in productivity the likes of which we have probably never seen before in all human history. It is going to blow our minds. The prosperity that will be created for most of the world from this AI revolution is just, it's incalculable. I don't know how any of us could possibly imagine what it's going to lead to or measure it. But here are the articles saying on point number three, to be grateful for, to be thankful for. Americans are producing more goods and services for every hour of labor. Okay, the article goes on. If you're looking at the video, you can see it there. I've got to go kind of quick because we've got a fairly long discussion with Kerry here. But yeah, so there's just a lot to this. If you're watching on video, you see my screen with all the details, then they go into two bonus reasons to be Thankful, right. And that is the banking crisis that wasn't right. We had Silicon Valley bank, we had a couple of other smaller banks, they went under depositors were shielded from losses even above the FDIC insurance limits. So again, this is the problem that wasn't. And I can hear some of you who keep track of this stuff out there saying. But Jason, what about bank of America? Well, that is cause for a little bit of concern, but I don't think there's very much concern with B of A because number one, like I talked about when I did my show on Silicon Valley bank at the time, they are not telling you very important things about these hold to maturity assets and about these various mortgage backed securities and bond related investments that these banks have. They're not telling you at what rate they have them, what the maturity dates are. There are so many things that the media doesn't tell you and many times those dogs that don't bark are the most important dogs. I know everybody loves to paint this picture of catastrophe and doom and gloom. I get it right, because that's what sells the news and gets the clicks. But it's just overstated. We come to see it over and over that it's always just totally overstated. And a big money center bank like B of A, they're not going to let that collapse. Okay? They're going to get the bailouts. And if they get the bailouts, what will that do? That's more money creation to do the bailouts. We all saw it during the Great Recession, you know, just over a decade ago. And that simply causes more and more inflation. And we know how to benefit from inflation. Philosophically do not like it, but from a practical point of view, it benefits us big, big time, big time, big time. So again, the bank failures, the catastrophizing, they thought there would be so many bank failures and it just didn't happen. All of those, all of those YouTube videos all of you clicked on, you wasted your time. Don't follow those people that are putting out this doom and gloom bull because it just doesn't happen that way. They love to take the little couple of pieces of negative news and expand that and not mention all the things they're not telling you about this stuff. Right? So I'm not saying anything is perfect or rosy. It's definitely not. There are lots and lots of problems. But somehow some way we tend to get through this stuff. You know, the commercial real estate banking going to be a problem. I mean there's going to be a lot more commercial Property defaults, especially in the office space market. And that's going to hurt the banks. No question about it. But you know what, it's just like Y2K, right? We've been talking about that for so long and everybody's completely aware of the problem. The banks are taking steps to do workouts and prevent bigger problems. And the government and the central planners, I don't like any of it. I get it. They're all taking steps as well. So again, this stuff is largely overblown. Yes, there will be some problems, there will be some failures. There will be people and companies that definitely lose money. No question about it. But will it be the end of the world? No. Okay. Last thing they say, gasp is getting cheaper. Well, to that I say, compared to what? You know, if Biden didn't try to just destroy our domestic oil production industry, it would have never gotten more expensive in the first place. You know, that's a whole nother discussion. But what this does mean is that the wealth effect is larger because it keeps the cost of some consumer items down. It tames inflation, and it puts more money in the pockets of workers, consumers, taxpayers, and they feel wealthier, so they go out and stimulate the economy more and more. Okay, save the date. December 5th is coming up fast, folks. December 5th. What date is that? That's the first Tuesday of the month and it is our monthly Empowered Invest Investor Pro meeting. If you are not a member of Empowered Investor Pro and you're not in our community where you're joining these monthly Zoom meetings, you are missing out big time. This one of our guests for this upcoming meeting, I'm super excited to have him because he is going to talk about a new type of insurance you can get that is really cheap. It is so cheap, I can't believe they offer it. I wonder how long it will be around. Actually, that covers tenant damages to the property. Yes, you heard me right. This is new. It's super exciting. We've got the guest talking about it on our Empowered Investor Pro. We're going to go into detail on this. I love these meetings because you get to ask questions, I get to ask questions. We grill these people. We get down to the brass tacks. We get the real answers on all of this stuff. So go to empoweredinvestor.com if you're not a member and join Empowered Investor Pro and join us. Or on the first Tuesday of every month and especially this upcoming meeting where we're going to talk about this great insurance program and a lot of you are asking, are we going to have a Black Friday sale or a Cyber Monday sale? Yes, we're working on it. We've got some pretty good offers coming up for you, so look for those in your email box. These come by email, so you've got to be on our newsletter list. Go to jasonhartman.com, make sure you fill out any web form on our website or any of our other websites as well, and you will be in the system. So you get our email newsletters, which contain a bunch of great information, but also they have the sales and the promotions and these special deals for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and other ones as well. All right, without further ado, let's talk to Carrie and let's do some listener Q and A and just talk about the market in general and some good tips for you. So let's get into that interview right now.

It's my pleasure to welcome Carrie back to the show. She's one of our investment counselors. You've heard her on the show many times before. And we want to take some listener Q and A, some questions from you and answer them because I know these. And we've kind of, we kind of try to pick the ones that apply to a lot of you where you're all having the same questions, the same issues, same challenges, so we can help you overcome them. And got a couple other things to discuss, one of them being self sabotage. Kerry, welcome back. How are you?

Hey, Jason, thanks for having me. I'm doing good.

Good to have you. Okay, so let's start with, I guess, Blake's question, right?

Yes. So. Well, Blake just, it's just a general question. Just he's interested in checking out webinars, see if there's any way to access them. We have several resources, several opportun. Reach out to your investment counselor. We have everything from asset protection, self management, different markets, refinancing, you name it. So definitely reach out to us because there's a whole library full of opportunities with, with webinars and, and podcasts obviously, too.

Yeah. We've got a massive amount of webinars on demand. So on a variety of topics, specialized topics that we're happy are your investment counselor can direct you to any of those, give you the links for them. You can watch them at your convenience. And, and if you are an empowered investor pro member, which everybody should be a member of, that, that is the bargain of the century for less than the cost of a cheap gym membership, you'll meet with us on Zoom every single month. You have access to our Entire back catalog of now years of empowered investor Pro Zoom meetings which are all available to you when you join some really great resources as well as our community. The software is included free with at the PropertyTracker software is included in your membership. So just a lot of great stu. So be sure to take advantage of that. Blake. Also, we do have a live event coming up probably in December. We haven't announced that yet, but we're going to soon and that'll be a live virtual event. Okay. And then of course we have our in person event which is a cruise on beautiful celebrity cruises coming up as well. Well, when I say coming up, that's many months away but we will be sharing all the links for that so you can get it and request an invitation for the cruise as well. So that'll be great. Our Empower Investor cruise. All right, you want to take Tyler's question, Carrie?

Yeah. So Tyler is going to talk. His question is do you recommend companies like American Home Shield that offer coverage on household related appliances, et cetera, that break. So he's looking to rent properties that cost 30 to 75,000. Do you recommend that type of insurance?

Yeah. So that's a home warranty and on a, on really cheap properties like that, I would definitely recommend a home warranty if they will even give you one. Okay. Because you know, a $30,000 house or a 75,000 dol. Thousand dollar house is going to be a pretty rough house. Okay. We occasionally sell those cheaper properties, but we sell them because you want them folks, you ask for them. So we keep a little bit of inventory like that around. It's kind of like, you know, every retailer is going to have a sale rack of some, you know, maybe some returned items, some used items that you'll get for cheap. But honestly they don't usually work out as good as they seem on paper. They just tend to look better on paper than in performing in real life. Now of course everything is an individual case by case basis because every property is different, every tenant is different. But you know, by and large we'd recommend you buy the newer, nicer properties that get you better tenants and so forth. Do as you wish. But if you are in that market doing those super cheap properties like that, I would definitely get a home warranty if they'll give you one. You know, they may not and there's going to be a lot of exclusions. So you know, if you buy a dog of a house, remember the warranty company is not going to be like be responsible for anything pre existing of course. Or anything like that. So read the policy, read what they cover. Right. That'll be good education for you.

Yeah. And to your point, Jason, I mean, we won't even sell anything under 60,000. That's pretty stretching it, especially considering since appreciation hit that 60,000 property. $60,000 property is probably really worth 4550. So you're kind of getting really down in there. So hopefully you're self managing. Hopefully you're around these properties, you know what's going on with them. But yeah, definitely go over 60 if you can.

Yeah, yeah, get the. Get the better properties if you can. Tyler. And I appreciate what you said here also, you know, is than Merrill pirating your information, meaning my information and wisdom. I'm sure you probably can't say this for legal reasons, but that's interesting. Attended one of his workshops in 2019 after listening to my show and it was very obvious to you. Wow, that's. I didn't, I'm not aware of that. I don't know. But thank you for bringing it to my attention. And by the way, there is one competitor we have that I'm constantly having people tell me. And one of our listeners said they were going to file a complaint against him because he's just like a complete copycat. I mean, and a liar. He claims he's been in the business for much longer than he has. And when I confronted him about this, I said, well, you weren't Even licensed in 2004 when you claim you started. I mean, the guy's just a complete bull artist, you know, so there's a lot of fraudsters out there, folks. There's a lot of bad people out there. Be careful. Okay. Be really careful. Good. And did you want to go into any other comments? I mean, this is a pretty long question he asked and then he made a comment here as well. So I'll let you decide. Carrie?

Yeah, it just. He basically says in his comments, I'm grateful for the Creating wealth show and Jason Hartman. It's changed my life for the better. Looks like I've been a property manager for the last eight years and have over 20 years of construction experience. So he's ready to take on the reins with rental properties. So.

Yeah. Excellent. Good stuff. Well, glad to hear it, Tyler. Good for you. And we're here to assist you on your journey.

Journey, definitely. Yeah. So the next one is the whole talk about short term rentals versus long term rentals. So Leslie asks. I have a short term rental beach house that has about 800000 in equity. I'm looking to expand more into short term rentals and trying to figure out if she should sell the beach house. Cash out refi. What? What's the quicker way to launch and do a balance sheet? What's the downside of the cash out refi too?

Yeah. So, number one, contextually, most of these questions are pretty evergreen, but this question happened to come in a while back. Okay? So the times have changed a bit since then, which is also interesting. You know, you were probably at the time you asked this question, Leslie, doing pretty well with your short term rental, but I'm guessing you're not doing so well anymore because there's been an Airbnb bust. You know, of course, like everything, every market is very individual. Every property, every deal is very individual. There are definitely still people making money with short term rentals, but it's not what it used to be. Okay. I've been saying this ever since, you know, I first became aware of Airbnb, and maybe 2010, give or take, you know, it started gaining real traction in 2012. And I've been saying what I will repeat right now real quickly, Airbnb has never been through a real recession. Covid didn't count. Covid was not a normal recession by any means. There's just a massive oversupply of what I call non primary beds in the country and in the world. You know, you got to be careful with these. Okay? You know, and when the economy experiences a downturn, which by the way, most of the economists say now they think we're going to avoid a recession. I mean, this economy is just surprisingly strong. I mean, the Federal Reserve is trying to ruin it. They're trying to ruin the housing market. They are trying to increase unemployment, and unemployment is sticky. It just. They just can't put people out of their jobs very well because the labor market is quite strong and the housing market has been amazingly resilient, still appreciating in the face of massive interest rate hikes. But the short term rental market has not done as well through this. So be careful. I would definitely, always with every property. There might be a few exceptions to this from time to time. I did a video on my YouTube channel maybe four years ago, which still applies. You know, should you ever pay cash for a property or should you ever keep a lot of equity in a property or pay a property off? Right? And the answer is almost always no. Okay. Unless you are just so flush with cash and so rich that you kind of need a place to just park some Money. And that property happens to be your own personal residence and it's in a state with really desirable homestead laws where that equity is protected from creditors. Okay, Florida, Texas come to mind as the best states for homestead protection laws because they are Florida's unlimited, I believe. And Texas, I believe is up to $1 million or might be even unlimited. There are some ins and outs to homestead laws, so check. And there are some other pretty good states too. California is definitely not one of them, by the way. But almost always you should be stripping the equity out of your properties. And with a short term rental, maybe you should just be selling the property as a way to strip the equity and then using that, doing a 1031 exchange as we've helped so many people do, and rolling that into good quality long term rental properties that everybody needs. The bread and butter asset class, that entry level housing that is always in demand and it's massively under supplied. That's our recommendation. Okay, so hope that helps. But you know, if you're not going to sell the property, do get the cash out and refinance. Of course rates are high. You have to look at what's called the blended rate. You might do a second on that property, a home equity loan or second trustee loan, and then keep the first you have in place, which is probably a much lower rate. And then your effective rate is the blended rate between the two. Right. Now remember, on a blended rate you can't just say, okay, my rate on the second is just for example 8% and my rate on my first is 3%. So I'm going to take the average of those two. That would not be right, correct math. Because they have different balances, different loan amounts. So you have to give them different weighting based on the amount of money you're borrowing, not just the rate at which you're borrowing. Okay. So understand that and hope that helps.

Yeah, yep. But definitely, like Jason said, you know, short term rentals are kind of going away. Just make sure if you do get into the short term rental, look at a long term rental side as well. So it has to make sense if it's going to be eventually turned into a long term rental.

Will the numbers almost never will. I mean it just never will, you know. But what Carrie's really saying is it's got to be as close as you can get it right. Because hardly ever will a short term rental, which is going to be a more expensive property pretty much will it ever pencil as a long term rental. But you know, some of them get close so, so I think that's, that's what you mean to say, you know.

Right, right. Yeah. And then. Yeah, back to your. I was gonna make a comment on your, you know. Oh, about the unemployment. You know, so much is going on and we always throw out Alabama, but there's so many. There's a few billion dollar plants going in southern Alabama. You know, you have FBI headquarters. They're not going away. So look for those markets that definitely have the employment, we can steer you in that direction because that's definitely where we target to where there is employment.

Yeah. Where the. These states that are doing a good job. Alabama is doing a great job at attracting manufacturing. And you know, when you have a good manufacturing base, generally factories do not move easily. Okay. Tech companies can easily move because they don't have big equipment. Right. It's not costly for them to move. Okay. Their workers can just go work remotely out of their house. Okay. You know, essentially that's a way for the company to sort of move. Right. They'll just downsize their office space and in San Francisco and let their people work remote. And their people will move to Nevada or Arizona or wherever and live in, you know, much more desirable tax jurisdictions, lower cost of living environments and just have a whole better life. And the company has effectively moved. Right. It doesn't have to announce a corporate move per se to sort of have an effective move essentially. Right. You know, generally also when you're looking for states, the same states that are right wing leaning politically are right to work states that don't require employees to join a union to get a job, which is absolutely ridiculous. Those states are going to be the states with the better futures, the better economies, and they're going to have more manufacturing there because they are right to work states. And that's why you see Alabama just doing so well at attracting auto manufacturers and so forth. Yeah, really good. And Leslie, by the way, made a nice comment. I love listening to you. You are a great teacher. Thank you for all you do. Appreciate it, Leslie. Thank you.

All right, so the next question is with Archie. Archie from Hawaii. I am concerned with investing in a housing market top. I believe there is more of a probability that prices will decline rather than increase in the short term. I understand that inflation is the upside of the 30 year fixed rate mortgage. Single family, 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 1% RV below cost of construction, linear market investment. How do you weather the storm with this investment investment strategy, deflation scenario? And how did this come to in 2006?

Yeah, great question. And you know Some of these questions are like these evergreen vintage questions that we're bringing up today because we sort of hand picked these. I want to give you the date of this question, okay? Just so you understand what I have been hearing my entire career, okay. Which is very long, longer than I'm going to even Admit. Okay. In 2012, everybody was concerned about a crash because we had been about four years out of the Great Recession, right, And prices had gone up. Things that improved, people were saying, oh my God, you know, the market's topped out now it's 2012, we're gonna have a crash. And they said that in 2013, 14, 15, 16. They've been saying it all along. And you just gotta look at the data. And that's what we're here for. That's what I'm constantly telling you about, is the inventory data, the supply demand metrics, etc. Etc. Archie's question about the concern. You know, I believe there's more of a probability that prices will decline rather than increase in the short term. This question was February 8th of 2020. Now, since this question, I mean, it depends where you look, but you know, in some markets, prices are up 40% from the time of this question. Okay? So the complete opposite has happened. Right? And I understand why you thought that at the time. Right? Because the business cycle, a new president, Right. You know, like, there were reasons to think it. I get it, I understand. But you really just gotta listen to every episode of the show. And by the way, Archie, thank you for saying the next comment was, I enjoy your podcast. Keep up the good work. It's just amazing how the media and the crash bros can mislead you. You, okay, so don't be misled. But to answer the question, okay, regardless of when the question is asked, if it was asked in February 8th of 2020 like it was, or 2007 or 2024, I don't care. When the question is asked, the answer to the question is buy properties that make sense the day you buy them. Get as close as you can to making sense, right? Which means that the property is going to have some decent metrics. And remember, making sense is a relative term. This is important. Making sense is a relative term. When you decide if something's make sense or not, you have to ask yourself, compared to what? Okay, compared to what? In other words, at the time, that snapshot in time at which you have to make a decision to how to deploy your money, how to deploy your investment capital, right? Well, what's going to happen if you put it in treasuries or the stock market, or keep it in the bank or buy Bitcoin or whatever, or gold or silver. Right. You know, what are the other options? That's the question compared to what? And the human mind is terrible at looking back, right? And they'll say, okay, in February 8th of 2020, my decision was I bought another property and it went great. Okay? But they will tend not to compare it to what happened to the stock market, precious metals, bitcoin, cryptocurrency, whatever, you know, ethereum, dogecoin, whatever it is you do. Okay? They will tend not to make that comparison. Okay? And similarly, if the real estate deal hadn't gone that well, they won't also make the comparison to how badly maybe the stock market was going at the same time, or crypto or precious metals. And almost hate to give crypto the status of an asset class, but, you know, I'll only give one crypto the status of an asset class. And even then, I don't think it's that great. I dabble in it just a tad. But it's bitcoin because that's different than all the rest. That's a whole different category. All the rest are likely not good. Not to say people haven't made money here and there, okay? But, but you know, overall. So understand that make sense means can you sustain the investment? Right? If you're going to, you know, put 25% down on the property, are you going to at least break even on that property? Right? And a lot of people are so funny. They say, well, I can't get the property, the cash flow with these high interest rates. Well, are you getting your bitcoin to cash flow? How's your stock portfolio cash flowing? How's that gold or silver or platinum or palladium you own cash flowing? Well, the answer is none of those things are cash flowing. Okay? So my answer to your question is when, you know, people in their mind make this faulty comparison with real estate, you know, put 100% down, I can almost 99% guarantee you you will have positive cash flow, a lot of it. Okay? Now I can't guarantee you 100% because maybe you won't rent the property out or something, right? I can't, you know, I can't guarantee it. Okay? But 99, unless you just are terrible at the whole game, okay, you will have positive cash flow with 100 down, and you're putting 100 down on stocks, bonds, cryptocurrency, precious metals, everything else out there, you're putting 100% down, folks. But somehow the expectation is, with real estate, it's got to work. When you're only willing to put in 20, 25%, right. You know, you expect positive cash flow out of that, but you don't expect any cash flow out of bitcoin or stocks or precious metals or bonds. You don't expect any cash flow from that. And you're putting 100% down. I mean, isn't that. Carrie, that's a good way.

Yeah, that is.

Isn't it weird how we are as people?

That is so true. Yeah. Aha moment. Like, you know what, you're right. Yeah. I mean, even, you know, we had 0% down financing for a while and it made sense because it was deferred down payment strategy. So there's different ways and different angles you can look at investing, but it has to make sense day one to you and what your portfolio wants on.

Any investment you make, you are going to be required to put money into the deal. Okay, you want a hundred thousand dollar s and P500 index fund. Put down $100,000. End of discussion. Okay, that's it. You want a hundred thousand dollars worth of gold. Put down $100,000. Who you renting your gold to? Who are you renting your S and P fund to? Where's your cash flow coming from there, you know, like one $100,000 property. Put down $100,000. I can 99% guarantee you're going to have positive cash flow on that deal. Okay, so there you go. It's just funny, folks. We got to get our expectations in line with reality. I mean, it's just funny how we place unreasonable expectations on certain things and not others. I. It's just a weird thing we do as humans, you know.

Well, then let's, let's dive into the triple net listing, you know, and do those make sense? And what, what are some pros and cons? Because a lot of investors are coming at us saying, you know, single family, it's just not making sense to me. But triple net does.

Okay, so first of all, let's define it, okay? Because not everybody knows what that means. So there's a question here with no name in it. Okay, but it's question number 45, okay? It's about triple net leases. So on mostly retail properties, they will be triple net leases, meaning all of the expenses, net, net net pass through to the tenant, not the owner. By most people's consideration, this is the most passive way to invest in real estate where you have to do the Least, right? You've got the least involvement of all. And mostly these are freestanding type properties like a Rite Aid. Okay. Or a Walgreens or a CVS or they might be a restaurant, a McDonald's or, you know, whatever. Right. Well, McDonald's. McDonald's Corporation buys all those. So they're the landlord on their deals because they are the biggest real estate company in the world. McDonald's. Most people don't know that. Well, you probably do now because you saw the movie the Founder and you know all about Ray Kroc nowadays. Okay? But in before that movie, a lot of people didn't know that. And so these deals are considered very passive. And you know who buys a lot of these deals? Doctors and doctors. I know we have a lot of doctors as clients and I praise you for that because you're in the smarter doctor group. You know, doctors are scientists. They're usually not very good business people. They have a reputation for being kind of notoriously bad business people. But they're scientists. Right. So I'm not a good scientist. Okay. You know, so, you know, I'm a good business person. Right. We all do different things, but they like these because they're simple. But there is risk. You do have risk on these deals. Rite Aid just filed for bankruptcy and they're defaulting on, I think 2200 properties. Okay. That they're going to close. So these are not risk free deals. Okay? Just understand that folks, you know, regardless of what kind of triple net they are, there is risk. My ex girlfriend, I remember her telling me the story how she and her now, you know, husband at the time invested in a Dollar General triple net lease. Okay. You know, she was kind of saying, ah, we should have invested with you. And you know, anyway, they didn't, you know, they bought a Dollar General and they got burned because Dollar General opened up another store right around the corner from theirs. And then they just didn't care about this one anymore. And they lost like $240,000 in the deal. And I said, well, did you hire a lawyer and sue them? She said, no, it just wasn't worth it. By the time we'd have to pay for all the cost of litigation, you know, it just wasn't worth it. So they didn't do anything, they just lost the money. I mean, isn't that terrible? Quarter million dollars? Yeah.

Yeah. You think Dollar General? Yeah, I mean, there's definitely. What about the tax side? Are there many tax benefits? Do you know for a term?

Well. Well, I should say it depends. Okay. Because there are like anything, you got to peel back the layers of the onion, okay? There are many different types of triple net leases. There are what they call modified triple net leases and they got all kinds of funny names for some of these, okay? So there are different types. If you don't own the structure sitting on the land, you don't get any depreciation benefit because you don't own the structure, okay? So sometimes you're just the landowner and they're doing a build to suit property on your land, okay? So you're leasing them the land and that's it. Right, and they own the structure. Of course, you know, with everything, check with your tax advisor or your lawyer or the appropriate professional for whatever, right? We're not tax advisors or attorneys. But if you don't own the structure, you can't depreciate what you don't own, okay? And the depreciation is the holy grail of tax write offs, and that comes from depreciating the structure. Now the beauty of that, especially on residential properties, not commercial, is you have a shorter depreciation schedule, 27.5 years versus like 39 years on commercial. So literally your tax benefit on a residential property is accelerated. It's 25% better, you know, give or take, than it is on a commercial property. So that's another reason to really consider the residential property. You know, the only universal need, folks, is housing. Everything else is optional. It can be worked around. People can buy stuff online, they can drive a little farther to go to the store, they can get home delivery. You know, there's just a million different things that can happen with office space can turn into remote work. Companies can move, everybody can work on Zoom. You know, they call them zoom towns, okay? If you owned an office property, that would have affected you quite negatively. Manufacturing can be shipped offshore. There are new technologies in manufacturing that can change the game, right? So every human being needs is a house. They need shelter, they need a place to sleep at night. That's the universal need. And luckily for you, there's a massive shortage of low end entry level housing. Okay? And when I say that my target for that is, you know, $350,000 houses, okay? You know, that's low end, okay? In good quality entry level housing, give or take.

Well, and we didn't line these questions to go feed into each other so well. But I'll take one more question here unless you have something else about the triple net. So Cody says if cash flow percent is the same, is a hundred thousand dollar property A better investment than a sub $100,000 property. Seems to me that every additional property you buy you assume the risk of another H vac system, water heater, roof, etc. Why not just buy the more expensive property in the first place?

Yeah, you know, that's a really good question. And you know what? I agree to a point. Okay? Say your plan is you're gonna buy 2 million dollar portfolio, okay? I wouldn't buy 12 million dollar property and think I'm gonna rent that out because it would be terrible. It would never pencil out. The rent to value ratio would be awful on that property, right? But I would also not buy 40, okay, cheap houses that are like 50 grand, okay? Because that's going to be just a management nightmare. And those tenants are such low quality tenants usually most of the time in those el cheapo properties like we were talking about earlier. So the happy medium is to buy properties that are, you know, at the time of recording this, 350,000, give or take, okay? In that range. And really the better way to look at that number is slightly below the median price in that given market. Okay? So if the median price in the market is 400,000 and you're buying houses that are 300,000, good for you, that's good. Okay? Just as long as you're a little bit below the median price in the given market. If it's 450 and you're buying a $400,000 house, that's fine, okay? But a little bit below the median in the given market is a good approach. Good, good, good.

And then I think the last one is you were going to mention a little bit about the too involved investor.

Well, yeah, not exactly, yeah, that too involved. But the tendency of us people to self sabotage ourselves. I just thought I'd talk about that for a minute. You know, sometimes and it's just a funny thing with me or not with me, it's. I mean I do it, but everybody does it, okay? With people. It's a funny thing. Why is it that we sabotage ourselves, you know, most of the time? I mean, you know, like that old quote, right? We have seen the enemy and it is us, right? You know, like we are our own worst enemy, right? Because we'd rather have the story. Sometimes we'd rather be a martyr than fix the problem. Okay? And you know, I'm thinking about clients who, you know, maybe they have a bad property manager. I mean imagine that you never have a bad property manager, right? I'm kidding. Of course you have a lot of bad property managers out there. And we do the best we can with finding you the good ones and exerting whatever leverage we can over them to help you have a good experience. But our real recommendation is hybrid self management, our special unique approach that we mostly teach in the Empowered Investor Pro Group. We talk about this every single month. We help people do it. And once they do it, they tend to love it. They say such good things about it. In fact, you know what we've got to do? We're going to clip. I got to get this done. We got a clip. Some of those videos of people self managing in our Empowered Investor Pro Group from our Zoom meetings. We've got to take some clips and put them on the show because, folks, your properties could perform so much better and your life could be so much easier if you would let us help you with this. It is really just wonderful. I mean, all of my properties now are on the hybrid self management plan. I love it. I get my full amount of checks every month. There's never any deductions and I do nothing like, I mean, I have not talked to any of my tenants in months and months and months. And when I say talked, I mean communicated in any form. Text, voxer, phone. I certainly don't go there in person. I've never met them. Okay. It's just easy. It's easier sometimes to not have a third party involved. To where you just don't have to manage a manager and you just deal direct with the tenant is actually easier. So find out more about that. Don't be a victim, okay? Be a winner. Put yourself on a course where you're going to win the game. This hybrid self management approach is the way to go. Fourteen years ago, I discovered it by accident. And I've told the story many times. I'll just very quickly tell it here. One of my properties that I had never seen, I'd never visited this property. I bought it sight unseen. It was in San Antonio, Texas. My manager got out of the business. Karen, my assistant, was lining up a new manager for me. She got them to send the management agreement. She put it on my desk. This was back in the day when we used paper, okay? It was 14 years, almost 50. It was probably 15 years ago now. She put it on my desk and I never looked at it. I just got busy and I never had time to look at it. And the first of the month rolls around in the mail. I got a check from the tenant with a nice note that said, hi, your property manager got out of the business and told me to send the checks directly to you. By the way, we love the property. If you ever need anything, give me a call. Here's my number and my email. Like he's saying if I need something, okay. You know that's the funny dynamic, right? Instead of him calling me like I need something. Right. And it was a great experience. I sold the property last year. I still never saw the property. I owned it all those years, never saw the property, never met any of the tenants. Self managed, fantastic experience. You're going to have better tenants most of the time because you're going to be able to screen them yourself and exert some control over that. You're going to have. Somehow my maintenance costs just evaporate when I self manage. I just don't have costs. It's amazing thing. It's just a much better experience. So let us help you with that. You can listen to our episodes on the show, go to jason hartman.com type in self management and find all the shows there on that topic and listen to them. But the best way join Empowered Investor Pro for you know like 80 bucks a month or whatever it adds up to, okay? Get the software included, get our monthly zoom meetings included, sometimes more than once a month. Network with other investors in our social network that you become a member of. And you're just going to get a ton out of it. I mean literally every single property. You could at least save the management fees that you're paying, right? And you know, what are you paying in management fees? 120, 150 bucks a month maybe, right? So you're going to save 15, 1800 dollars a year right? There, there. But then you're going to be getting 100% of the late fees. You're going to be getting all of the pet fees. You're going to be getting probably higher rent, you're going to be getting probably much lower if any expenses, okay. I mean it's just going to perform so much better. You're going to get lower tenant turnover. I bet you you're just going to have a better experience, okay? And you're going to spend less time. That's the counterintuitive thing. That's the last one I'm going to leave you with. Not more time, less time dealing with your properties. When you set this up correctly. It is so easy. It really is so easy. So let us help you with that. EmpoweredInvestor.com, check out the pro program. But you don't have to be in that. You can do it without being in that, but it'll be a lot better for you if you're in it. Carrie. Anything else? Let's wrap it up.

That's it. Jason, thanks for having me.

All right. Hey, thanks for being on and helping with those questions. And until next time, everybody, happy investing.

Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes. Be sure to check out this show's specific website and our general website, hartmanmedia.com for appropriate disclaimers and terms of service. Remember that guest opinions are their own, and if you require specific legal or tax advice or advice in any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to itunes or Stitcher radio or whatever platform you're using and write a review for the show. We would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.