2108: Generational Investing Secrets: Building a Legacy in Real Estate with Robert Helms

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

This is Scott Crook. I was on the Empowered Investor zoom call last night and just so thankful for the value that's created inside that group. And you know, you just consistently bring subjects that are so important and relevant to what I'm needing and I believe other investors need. So thank you so much. I appreciate you and all that you've done for helping us become better investors. Thanks men.

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 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, empowered investors. This is episode 2108 and our guest today will be none other than Robert Helms returning to the show. He is a real estate guy we're going to do singular this time, not the plural as usual. So he'll be here with us in a moment. He's got some really good stuff to share today. Talking about investing the market in general, but also helping your children get into the real estate investing world. So we're going to talk about that. And also he is going to be wanting to one of our faculty and speakers on the Empowered Investor cruise. So be sure to go to Empowered Investor Live and get your early Bird tickets while supplies last, or I should say before time runs out because the timer on the site says that you don't have much time left. Okay, last call on this early bird deal coming up. Go to empoweredinvestorlive.com for that. And Fannie Mae is out with revised mortgage interest rate predictions for this year and they have revised their rates downward. Now, if this happens, you could have one of the best investing years ever. I mean, it's just amazing what this could mean to the market. So let me just review this with you for a moment before we get to our guest and let's talk about it. So previously, just last month, they were projecting that, you know, rates would hit 7% and they beat that projection already. Then they're saying second quarter, 6.8, 6.6 and 6.5 rounding out the year, but now saying that we're going to see 6.4% this quarter, 6.2% next quarter, 6% in the third quarter and 5.8% to finish the year. Now you might be thinking, well, okay, I've been trying to time the market as far as, and we're going to talk about that with Robert today quite a bit. I've been trying to time the market in terms of prices because I keep thinking prices are going to go down and there's going to be a real estate crash or at least a correction and an adjustment. And of course you've missed the boat over and over on that one, right? Because people have been saying that for easily 12 years now and it hasn't happened. The complete opposite has happened. And those people have missed out over and over again. Remember, they not only missed out and this is an important thing to really understand. The human mind is not good at looking at this, okay? They've not only missed out on the deal they could have had, but they missed out on the return on investment while they were waiting. Because income, property, of course, you've heard me say it, it's a multi dimensional asset class. And you make your return on investment from so many sources. If you go to Jason hartman.com and you click on the Properties page right now and you look at some of the performance with very conservative assumptions, very moderate appreciation levels, very moderate rent cash flow levels, etc. I mean, you can disagree. Look, go check it out for yourself. Do your own research. As I say in my ten Commandments of Successful Investing, you need to become your own best advisor. Not me, I'm not your best advisor. You are your best advisor. You learn things, you assimilate them, you make sense of them and then you test everything against your own knowledge, right? And your own rationalizing. So that's the most important thing. But go to the website and you can see Performa projections easily into the 20% range, all in, because it's a multidimensional asset class. When the people that miss the boat over and over, and I mean really, like think about it, if you were sitting in 20, 19, 2020, 2021 and thought, oh gosh, this recovery is so long in the tooth it can't last, literally, you missed a life changing opportunity. And when I say you, I don't mean you, because probably you didn't Miss it because you're listening to this show, but so many of your friends and family missed the boat, right? They missed it just over and over again. And it's like coulda, shoulda, woulda, right? And that was literally a life changing opportunity to invest. I mean life changing, game changing, that would project out for decades to come and make people so much better off financially and so much more secure. And now they might miss it again. Okay? Because they're trying to time the market, they're trying to time the rates. And the people who win the game are never the market timers. Right? You can always make the deal better for a relatively low cost. So if we do see these low rates, of course, if you as that prices into the market, it'll price in in advance. That's always the way it works. Because people see rates coming down, housing affordability goes up and they buy everything in sight. If you wait until the rates drop, you're just not going to have any selection, right? The inventory is going to be extremely limited. It's already very limited. So looking at this right now, let's compare that against the research we've done just three weeks ago. So this is brand new research and I've talked to you about it before. How many more people can afford homes as the rates decline? Well, all they have to do is go to 6.5% and you know, we're arguably there now. Right? And 2.8 million additional people can afford to buy. They can qualify for a loan. 5.4 million people at 6% and 7.7 million people. Okay, those are millions, by the way, all those numbers. 7.7 million additional qualifying buyers that have new housing affordability at a 5.5 rate. Why is that in yellow on this chart? Because I didn't make it green, like green light, as if it's likely to happen. Because I thought this was unlikely to happen. So I made it a yellow light. Right. And then of course, all the others, very unlikely, 5%, 4.5%, etc. Right. But now it's looking like this might be likely. 7.7 million additional buyers. I mean, look, the largest mortgage agency on planet Earth, Fannie Mae, is projecting that we will see rates right about that rate and that'll lower the payment from over $2,200 a month to $1,905 per month. At 5.5%, allowing an additional 7.7 million people to afford a home. Okay, all compared to what? Compared to the existing inventory. Remember, this is slightly higher now. I think it's at 500. 5,000, you know, irrelevant. It's such a small number. It's a drop in the bucket. What's not even a drop in the bucket? It's like half a drop in the bucket. We ended the year with 499,000 homes for sale. So if we get to the point where 2.8 million and arguably we're already there, basically, or 5.4 million or 7.7 million new people can afford to buy a home, what does that do when those people drop into a market where there are 500,000 homes for sale in the country? Now, of course not all of them will buy. Obviously everyone who can afford to buy does not buy, clearly. And we don't know how many will buy, right? There's no way to know that. But if you just guesstimate that maybe a third of them will move into the housing market and start bidding on properties, you're going to see crazy multiple offers. If this happens, and it is an if, because we don't know if it'll happen. But we do know that the largest mortgage agency on planet earth is projecting this to happen. We'll see, right? We will see. And you know, even if it doesn't happen, so what? Right, you're still going to make the returns from the multidimensional asset class, leverage, tax benefits, appreciation, renter paying down your mortgage and of course the most important, inflation induced debt destruction, where inflation is literally paying off your debt for you, your mortgage debt. I mean, your renter pays the debt, but then inflation pays it as well. So you basically get two parties paying down your mortgages and making the monthly cost lower because it's debased by inflation and making the principal balance lower as it's debased by inflation and also paid for by the tenant. So it's an incredible asset class, folks. It really is. And if you want help with that incredible asset class and you want to use a great tool, check out our sponsor, Baselane. I've talked about them before. I want to show you a couple other features today. Real quick before we get to our guest, Robert. It's built for landlords. This is a banking platform platform. It's unlike any other real estate software because it's a banking platform too. Unlimited accounts partitioned by unit. So think about it. I keep most of my rental property portfolio under one account. Now, they might be owned by different entities, different LLCs that I have and I don't keep all of them under one account, but I keep most of them under one account. Why do I do that well because it's just easier to manage. So I formed basically a management company. And then each property files its separate schedule E, which by the way, this can help you with too. But here, since this is a banking platform, not just a piece of software, it can partition by the unit. Super handy virtual cards. Okay. For more security. So if you want to pay for things and you pay online or you pay whatever, and you've had as much identity theft as I've suffered in my life, check out virtual card numbers. This is a very handy security feature. Integrated bookkeeping tools right into your banking. So there's less likely to have errors of double entry. Right. Because you're using your bank for one thing, and then you have to go enter into your bookkeeping software for another thing. Right. So this eliminates a lot of that problem and all of these other features. Integrated rent collection tools integrated with external accounts. You can open this account in just a few minutes. It's quite easy to do. No minimum depositor balance, no monthly service fees. My big bank is just a complete ripoff. I mean, their service fees are insanity, Right? They just fee you to death. It's ridiculous. No overdraft fees. Wow. No ach. Transfer fees. 1% cash back on your debit card. But you have the opportunity to get up to 5% back on home improvement purchases. So really cool stuff there. And you earn 4.19 annual percentage rate on the money sitting in your checking, which is 60 times the national average. So check this out. You can win a free $500 gift card. Go to baselane.com Jason. That's baselane.com Jason. And check that out. Also, be sure to register for our upcoming Empowered Investor cruise@empoweredinvestorlive.com and without further ado, let's talk to our guest and let's get to Robert right now. It is my pleasure to welcome my good friend Robert Helms to the show. As you probably have heard by now, we just did a little mini merger with the real estate guys for our collective mastermind group, which is now known as the Collective Inner Circle. Our two mastermind groups merged together and Robert will be a speaker on our upcoming Empowered Investor cruise. So we're really looking forward to having him. And, Robert, welcome back. How are you?

Hey, Jason, great to see you. Always good to hang out and excited about a new year.

Absolutely. Well, that's a good place to start. I know we want to talk about a couple of things today, and I definitely want to ask you about generational investing. You know, Building that legacy, getting your children into real estate investing. And you're really working on that with your 18 year old son Ethan right now. So we'll get to that in a moment. But first let's talk about the new year and what is your outlook? Robert, there's so much difference of opinion on these last several years. Everybody thought that the market's gonna go this way, that way, the other way. What are you seeing?

You know, it is crazy just how many different voices there are on this. I think big picture is inventory is terribly constrained. You know this better than most. You always talk about the very small number of houses we have for sale in America compared to the total housing stock. And I think that's a, that's a big issue. Right. Inventory's constrained, which usually means that prices go up. But the other thing that's constrained is the buy side because of high interest rates. And I will say one of the things that I've been hearing a lot of opinions on, on is what's gonna happen with interest rates. And I've kind of weighed both sides. You got people saying they're headed right back down to where we love them. And other people are saying, no, this is the end of low interest rates. And I gotta say, I don't expect interest rates to be back down at 2, 3 and 4%. Again, not interest rates to folks buying houses. In the time we've been investing, Jason, the interest rates have been all over the map. If you've been an investor only in the last 10 years, then you've only seen low interest rates. But I remember I bought my first property at I think ten and a quarter quarter or maybe it was even ten and three quarters. It was, it was high. And you had to have 20% down back in those days. Right. And then of course been the beneficiary of a lot of those great low interest rates loans over the years. And some people thought that was a new normal. I think where we're at now is pretty close to normal. So, yeah, I would see a little bit of softening. But you can't base your real estate investing on waiting until we get 3% interest rates again, in my opinion.

Yeah, I don't ever, never want to say never, as the saying goes. But we're not going to see those kind of low rates without another crisis. Right. Those are crisis era rates. So God forbid, World War III starts or another pandemic or, you know, I inserted that L in there on purpose, by the way.

I noticed that.

Yeah. I did not misspeak or some sort of crisis, then we could see those insanely low rates. But barring that, barring a black swan event, it's just not going to happen again. But you know, Robert, that kind of leads to another question. What is it about people that they just think they have to time the market? There are so many studies in every asset class, stocks, bonds, precious metals, real estate, cryptocurrencies, anything that market timing does not work, but yet everybody thinks they can outsmart the market. Right. Just speak to that for a moment, if you would.

I think it is just human nature. If you think in really abstract terms, there's only one person that buys at the very top and one person that buys at the very bottom. And we only know in hindsight. So you're really expecting out of the millions of people in whichever market that you just named, all those are true, that somehow you're going to just call the top or the bottom. Well, I'm not that smart. You're not that smart. We studied this stuff. So I think you have to really get your mind behind what the asset is and what it does and why you want it in your portfolio. And then, as our friend George Gammon likes to say, buy good stuff when it goes on sale. Well, sometimes you don't see the sale until you're in the rearview mirror. So what I love about real estate, of course, is while you're worrying about whether the price is going up or down, the tenants are making the rent payments. Right. And we're certainly concerned on a global basis about the, the durability of rental income. But when we don't have the housing starts that we really need, and when people are pushed out of the market because they can't afford the financing, to me that spells more tenants and more tenants and less inventory means rent should be pretty good.

Yeah, yeah. Look, folks, rents are going up. That's a common misconception. Rents have only decelerated, they have not declined. That's there's a difference. Okay. But I think we are getting a little bit of softness coming from the massive oversupply of apartments. And those don't bleed over that much in terms of our favorite asset, Robert, which is single family homes for you and I, and the apartment market, which would be like Ken McElroy's favorite asset class. Right. That's pretty soft. Right now there's a record number of apartments under construction. It's going to take a couple, three years for that to kind of work its way out, but it will because we still have a housing Shortage, even with all of those new apartments. And you see apartment owners offering a lot of incentives, you know, free rent, et cetera, et cetera, to start your lease. But that's sort of nibbling at us a bit, right? You know, they're not going to get our market share of tenants because a single family home tenant is a single family home tenant. 10% of them away, maybe, Right. With their better deals and lower prices. So that's keeping our rents, I think, think artificially suppressed the apartment oversupply. But that's not going to last forever, folks. And everything you said is so true. At the end of the day, there is a shortage of homes, of units. There's just too many households for the number of units, for that shortage all over the board. 5 million was the common one. Now they, you know, some say it's down to 3.8 million, but like I shared at our last Mastermind meeting when I spoke, some say it's over 7 million in terms of a shortage. And now let's just get that in perspective. There's 500,000 houses for sale in the United States right now, folks, which is a low number. Yeah, it's a very low number. So think about if we're short 3.8 million homes or 5 million or 7 million, how long does it take in terms of construction to satisfy that shadow demand? It's pretty bad.

It's a long time. I remember back in the 90s when things were trucking along at a pretty even keel and we were adding a million to a million two housing units, and that seemed pretty good. For every year that you go with only 100 or 200,000, you've got another year to make up for it. So if the builders had everything they need in terms of available land, available labor, all the materials, and if pricing on that was fair, and it's gotten better, but there still are some snags and some logistical hiccups. If everything was right, it would still take 3, 4, 5 years with every builder building at full capacity for us to get that number. And that is just not likely to happen.

Yeah. And you know what people, some might be thinking, okay, well, let's say that takes two more years than Robert says. Right. You know, maybe it doesn't. It's not going to happen that fast. That's just very unlikely. But, but what people don't think about is that all of those land prices during that time will naturally increase because more builders are buying more land. And the land market is a competitive market just like anything else. And all of the construction material prices will increase and all of the labor prices will increase.

Bingo.

So that just adds to the cost of the house. Then the other part of this equation is the lock in effect. Right. And that's now been talked about extensively. Back a couple of years ago, nobody was talking about it. And I just read a report, you probably saw, the same report I'm going to mention from redfin saying that 90% of the country, in other words, to give the exact number, 88.5% of the homes in America are in a lock in effect.

Yeah.

What do I mean by that? The mortgage they have now is significantly cheaper than a new mortgage they could get today. So that means they don't want to sell. Right. So Fannie Mae's projecting rates are going to drop this year and below 6% by the end of the year, which is pretty exciting. But the problem is you cure some of the lock ins but then you just get more buyers because there's more affordability. So does this problem ever resolve?

Right. Well and you know, part of it is we have people that absolutely have to move. They get transferred or they're in a family situation, they got to move. And if rates are 6%, okay, well they'll, if they can afford that, they'll buy a home. They wish that the rates were 4 and they could buy a bigger home, but they're able to buy a home at 6% or even 7%. But the folks that are locked in most of it is just the math. Right. I, I have a home loan at 3.75 and if I were to refinance my home today, my interest rate would would be such that my payment would nearly. So that would be silly. And the move up buyers, those folks are doing pretty well. Maybe they have another kid, it's time to move to a little nicer neighborhood, a little bigger house. Well, not when you have a three and a half percent interest rate and you're looking at six and three quarters. That math is just hard to do. So I think we do see this stuckness in the market that's liable to stay with us. I am a little concerned about the other side of that coin, which is folks that absolutely have to sell and they are in a situation where the, even though there's not much inventory, where homes are flying off the shelves or we're in multiple offer situations, only in a few markets does that happen. So now when you have to sell, what do you do? You lower your price and that becomes a comp. And so I think we could see some price de escalation this year just based on those must sellers who don't have a choice, they gotta move, they gotta sell their house. But.

So you certainly always have people like that in any market. Right. You know, it always happens. But the distinction is that the market with low inventory, it solves their problem, even though they have a problem. And by the way, you made me think of a really interesting article I read. I think it was a Wall Street Journal article. You might have seen it too. It was entitled Unlikely Roommates and it was about couples divorcing and still living together under the same roof because they can't afford to get rid of that house because the deal is too good.

I can't stand you, but I can afford you.

Right, Exactly. I can't stand you, but I can afford you. I love it. That's a good one. So doesn't the market rescue that would be motivated seller?

Well, certainly the first few doesn't. Right. Right now you have someone who's like, well, I guess I'll sell. And because of low inventory, those people that have to move come in. But if too much of that goes on without a break in really the demand side, then who knows what happens. We have lots of fol have reached either the age because of their household or they're retiring, they want to move to a warmer place. All those things. We're starting to see homeowners who become renters because of interest rates and everything else. And why be tied to a mortgage? You know, people in their 60s and even 70s are moving to warmer climates where the cost of living is maybe a little lower and they can rent something for a lot less than what they could buy. And so those kind of shifts, I think in aggregate might start chipping away at price. I haven't really seen it in too many marketplaces, but I just get the sense that we look at the uneasiness for the home buyers. But sometimes there is that uneasiness we're going to have with home sellers who have to get rid of their homes.

Right, right. So when we look at the sort of frozen market that we've been in for the past year and a half, we see a lower volume of transactions and that affects all of the people who get paid on the trade. Right. The real estate agents, you know, home builders are doing great. Okay? But you know, the escrow people, the title people, the mortgage people, the home warranty people, the, you know, everything. And people spend so much money when they buy a house, they buy new furniture, they buy new Appliances, they just massively stimulate the economy. And that's why the government and the central banks can't afford to let the real estate market suffer, right? But this really weird situation the Fed must really not like, and that is that it seems like they'll want to cause some market clearing, meaning they'll want to unlock the market, at least for a burst here and there, where people will be motivated to sell and motivated to buy at the same time. And, you know, just a lower interest rate solves that problem for both sides. What do you say about that? That frozen effect, it's sort of a little different than the lock.

In effect, it is different. I think there's one really key distinction about it, and that is whatever Fed policy is, when money is easy, however that looks, it circulates more. And so a dollar circulates through the economy. And what's always interesting is that many, many people count the same dollar. So you earn a dollar you spend in the grocery store, the grocery store spends it to their supplier, the supplier sends it to the raw manufact of those entities count that same exact dollar in their numbers. And so our GDP is actually not correct, or is it? So now you have the situation where it's frozen and what people tend to do, human nature, is to hang on, okay, I'm not going to get the new house, I'm not going to buy a new car. I'm not going to make that investment. I'm going to wait and see. Which is again, what a lot of people decide to do when things are frozen. And so now it's not just that that affordability is different with inflation and all that. It's that those dollars aren't circulating like they used to. So you make a great point. When someone moves, there's a lot of secondary and tertiary activity around that move for sure. So when they're not moving, we're losing that. But we're also losing every other place that those dollars might circulate. Once they get in the hands of those professionals and those vendors, and likely so it exacerbates itself, it becomes a worse problem.

And that's why they just will never let deflation happen. Because that velocity of money problem gets really impacted by deflation.

It's so funny how they make deflation the enemy. And Peter Schiff talks about that. Yeah, that would really be terrible if prices all of a sudden went down and it costs less to go to the movies and less to buy steak. That would really suck. Well, when we see it happen, it usually gets curbed Pretty quickly. So there are folks right now, a lot of economists are saying they expect to see deflationary pressure before more, more inflation, maybe even hyperinfl. I'm not sure that I see that in the cards, but that's why I hang around with smart people.

Yeah, yeah. I want to just show you a couple of things. Kind of reference to what we've been talking about. This article is Fannie Mae optimistic that mortgage rates will dip below 6% by year end. Okay, so we'll see if that really happens. But if mortgage rates dip below 6% in the fives is kind of that magic area where the delta between those super cheap mortgages that people have, they can sort of start to rationalize, hey, I know I'm going to pay a little higher rate, but it's not as bad as it was a year ago or even a few months ago. I'll make the trade. Right. Because the powers that be want to see more velocity of money, just like you mentioned.

Well, I think the rate is, it's also psychological. Part of the reason we have the effect we've had is because it went up so far so fast. You know, it's over time, you might be able to accept that. But when it happens so quickly, you know, and John Burns says 5.5%, that's, that's kind of that magic rate that speaks to what you're talking about. Folks will give up their 4% loan for 5 and a half if it gives them all the other things they want. A better school district, a bigger house, nicer neighborhood.

Right. Yeah, yeah. No, it's really interesting. So you can see here the difference between the current forecast, which is lower in the prior forecast and this one's for sales volume. But here's what I really want to have you comment on. And you saw this slide before. It's the payment at different rates and the millions of households that can afford, or not afford, as it were, to buy a house. So, you know, you look at this and if we have 6.5%, 2.8 million more people can afford, they can qualify than right now.

Yep.

Yeah. I mean, this is crazy.

That's a great chart to show that sensitivity because we don't think about that incremental buyer. And this shows that really well that a half point difference, which is a considerable amount over a 30 year fixed rate loan. Right. That that makes a huge difference to the number of people can afford. The other side of this chart is the higher interest rates go up, the more renters there are likely to be Right, right.

So either that's the thing that so many people are just focused on prices, price, price of the house, and that is so mistaken. You know, it's like they focus on that and they want to time the market. At the, at the same time, people who are just chugging out cash flow, tax benefits, mortgage, principal pay down every month, and of course inflation induced debt destruction are just winning, winning, winning. And all these people that are trying to wait for the prices to go down are missing out. You know, they rarely calculate that opportunity cost very well. But here's an interesting thought, and I don't know the answer to this question, but if rates bump down half a point or, you know, a point to 6.0, you know, how many of these 2.8 million additional qualifying buyers, or 5.4 million or 7.7 million additional qualifying buyers, how many of them actually buy? Is it it a third of them? I don't know the answer to that. I don't think anybody knows the answer to that.

Well, it's interesting, they have that same sensitivity, like they're looking at the rates and they're thinking, oh, we'd like to move and we have this opportunity and wow, look, rates went down again at some point. It moves the market and the market being made up of a whole bunch of people like that. But at what point do people say, wow, it's time to go versus let's see how much farther it goes down.

Yeah, yeah.

It's one of the great things about single family, of course, is that we can change the financing more than once. A lot of commercial properties you get a five year loan and that's how it is for five years. But not saying that you'd want to refinance a lot these days if you were to grab a six and a half percent loan and a year from now it's five and a half percent. You can do the math and the math will tell you what to do. Maybe it is time to refi. So that is another big advantage to single family homes.

Yeah. And what you mean there is that a lot of most of the commercial loans have prepayment penalties and so you can't really refinance. They've got big, huge prepayment penalties, so you can't refinance. And that's one of the things I love about income property. The deal you strike on the day you buy it is never the final deal. You can always make the deal better by refinancing, by changing your terms, by doing a lease option, by improving, by improving the property. Yeah, yeah. There's just so many options. But the last thing I wanted to show. And you saw this before, Robert, because I presented it a week ago. Only 500,000 homes for sale at the end of the year. Right. So you get. Think about it. Remember the prior chart. If 2.8 million new people can qualify, or 5.4 million new people can qualify, and you drop even 10% of them, 280,000 or 540,000, into a market with 499,000 homes for sale, there's a problem there. Yeah. That means prices can't do anything but go up.

Right.

It's just. There's no choice. So. Yeah, it's just simple supply and demand, folks. But hey, any comments on that? And I'd like to just switch gears and talk about other topic.

No. I love the fact that you keep track of this stuff because it does matter. And you can tell what the options are going to be going forward based on things like average days in market and what's happening, the median home price. But when you look at the total inventory across the board, it just gives you that. That feeling that, yeah, this is. We're not here often. We're not often at half a million homes for sale in the US A more healthy market is probably regular market, might be three times that. So that is definitely constriction. Just one more way that the market is frozen.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that means as rates come down and new people can qualify and they come into the market, they just naturally have to create a bidding war environment, which, by the way, you mentioned something a few minutes ago about how I always say a similar thing to what you said, which is every deal looks good in the rear view mirror. A great book that I just finished is called the Psychology of Money. I saw that title for years and I never got that book because it just seemed too simple for me. I was an idiot because I missed out because it's a great book. Book. And one of the things he says in that book, Morgan Housel is he says that every thing you buy, you always overpay for it. And here's how he explains it. And I thought, you know, that's. He's right. Think of it. If you were in an auction, say we're bidding on a piece of art at the Sotheby's auction, right. And you hold your paddle up and you're the last one and you bought it. That means nobody else in that room would pay what you paid.

Right.

So you by definition overpaid. Right. And if you are the one that bought anything, any widget. Right. Any product or service, you have paid more than anybody else would have paid at the time you did the deal.

Right.

But that doesn't mean someone else won't come along and pay more later because.

Right. Or that in hindsight, it was a good decision. But that's a. That's a great thing. I ordered that book because you recommended it so strongly. Can't wait to get. Get started reading it. But, yeah, I mean, people have their stuff, their psychology about money that's based on the way they were raised and what they've learned and their experiences in the marketplace and all that. One of my favorite quotes comes from Brian Tracy about this. He says that the pain of low quality always outlasts the pleasure of low price. But when you buy the cheap one, usually you overpaid even for that one.

Yeah, yeah. Very interesting point. Okay, hey, let's just switch gears before we wrap up here, and let's talk a little bit about generational investing. I bought my first rental property when I lived at home with my mother. I was 20 years old. I assumed an FHA loan. A client of mine, I was selling real estate part time at Century 21 while I was going to Long Beach City College. Okay. And I bought this property from a client. Okay. And I continued to live at home for a couple more years, but I owned a rental property. That's so backwards compared to the way most people do it. But your son wants to buy his first property at age 18, and you're helping them do it. Talk to us about getting your kids interested and helping them invest in the most historically proven asset class in the entire world. What are you doing there?

You know, it's so funny when we go back and look at properties and what they cost 50 years ago or 100 years ago, you know, the house my dad grew up in, my grandparents bought in Los Gatos, California. They paid $3,500 for Los Gatos. Yep, 3,500. Which took them a lot to be able to scrape together the money necessary to buy that house. And that house sold a few years back for $2.9 million. So we look at that stuff and we just kind of laugh about it. Oh, it's crazy. But if you think about it, properties that work their way through the hands of generations have that kind of success often. And when would you want to start, start, you know, learning about this stuff? I mean, you bought your first house at 20. I didn't buy my first property till 24 I wish I'd started at 20. Right, and you probably wish you started at 18.

18, yeah.

So. But the reality is, you know, been in real estate for my whole life. My sons have kind of grown up in a quote unquote real estate household. Doesn't make them interested. Right? I got very interested in what my dad did when he was a budding real estate investor. In fact, he would, you know, drag me along and I do painting and, and some handiwork in his apartment buildings and get paid what I thought was a lot of money and then recognize over the years and I got the bug and I got my license to sell and we worked together. Meanwhile, my sister, raised in the same household, could not care less, thought real estate was a waste of time. If we ever talked about real estate, you know, when we went out to dinner, she'd say, please, please, no work talk. And then a couple years ago she sold the house that she bought in Campbell, California for $230,000 for 1.7 million, getting a bigger check than she'd ever gotten in her whole life. And I'm like, there you go. So I didn't want to force my kids to be interested, but what I did is just made sure they had people around them like our friend Ken McElroy. His sons Kate and Kyle are about three years older than my kids, two and a half years older than my kids and growing up on our investor summit, every year they'd be, my kids would look at them and go, wow, they have a business. At age 11 and 14 they have a business and I want to have a business and, and just put them in an environment where they're interested. And When Ethan was 16 he took me aside and said, dad, I want to talk to you about something. Which is always nervous when you have a 16 year old with a girlfriend. He says, I, I don't think I want to go to college. My friends that are going to college really aren't doing much. And I think is with the number of people we have in our life that, that are real estate folks, I think I should do real estate. I'm like, awesome, let's talk about what that looks like. And so he has now gotten the bug. Now his 16 year old brother is just starting to be interested but doesn't have the bug. So the whole idea of generational investing is twofold. One inspiring the next generation to want to do better. I think we all want the next generation to do better than we've done. That just elevates humanity. And I think parents are definitely about wanting their kids to have, be and do more than them. But at the same time, you want to give them the tools necessary. Because even though the fundamentals are the same, everything else changes. So I want them to be eager to learn and stay involved and be reading and listening and those things, but they have to see the big picture for it. And so the other part of generational investing is just being smart about. And as hard as this is to talk about estate planning, like, how are you going to leave your kids? The example I always use is do you want to leave your kids at age, say, 25, $10 million cash, or do you want to leave your kids cash flowing real estate?

Yeah, right.

It just. And so it's not going to happen by itself. You need to be thinking through if you have kids. If not, what does it look like for other family members, nieces, nephews, folks or causes you care about. Right. So there's the generational side of passing it on to the next generation, and then there is the legacy side. So Zig Ziglar was famous for saying that inheritance is what you leave to somebody and legacy is what you leave in somebody. So you give them.

His quotes were the best.

Yeah, they're the best. And when you leave somebody, not just an asset or an income stream, but you leave them something that they can continue to craft and evolve and get excited about and see the differences. I mean, the best thing in the world about being a real estate investor is we get to provide clean, safe, affordable housing to people that need it. It's how many families can you serve? And you start approaching it from that point of view and all of a sudden kids that might not have been that interested because not everyone's money motivated, but they're not that interested in the details around real estate become interested. So it's a fascinating journey we're on. I'm just getting started, really, with my 18 year old. My partner Russ has been through this. His kids are a little older than mine. And I think it's just an exciting thing to be thinking beyond, you know, your run rate, if you will. You're. You're going to leave the earth at some point. And how do you, you know, give the ball to somebody who wants to continue on?

Yeah, I think that's a fantastic thing. You know, one of my favorite authors years ago wrote a bunch of good books is Stu Weber. And he, he talked about leaving a legacy, not a monument. Right. And there's a difference. Okay. And I think getting them into such an important asset Class, teaching them the fundamentals, helping them respect that asset class and do well with it is so important. And you mentioned, and we don't talk about this that much. I have a little bit, but not a lot. But as real estate investors, I just want you to think about something. Most people want their life to have some impact on other people. Everybody in one form or another is in some kind of business providing some kind of product or service. But the product that you provide, housing, is the most impactful product in anybody's life. Yeah. All of your tenants that have lived in all of your houses over the years, folks, I'm talking to everybody here. If you have one rental or you got 10 rentals or 200 rentals, it doesn't matter. Okay. If you own one rental for five, 10 years, you're going to have a few tenants, probably. Right. They will for the rest of their lives remember that they lived in that house. They will have made memories in that house. They will have had experiences in that house. I mean, talk about impact. If you sold widgets or computers or furniture, that's nothing compared to providing housing. I mean, the amount of impact you have. I remember every place I've ever lived in since. I mean, I went back to Europe with my mother last summer and I went to the apartment that she lived in when I was born.

Wow.

Okay. It's still there and looks pretty much the same. And we actually knocked on the door and the lady led us inside. Okay. And. And we looked around. I didn't want to take pictures inside her house because I thought that was just pushing it. But the property is still there and the memories are still there and they last forever. That for that whole person's life, they will remember the house you provided for them. Think about the impact of that. Really, like just impact on your, your customer, you know, and your tenant is your customer.

That doesn't fit into the spreadsheet very well. But it is a big part of our return on investment, right? Absolutely. And you know, good, bad or otherwise, we have folks that can't afford their own home. So when they can help us pay our mortgage payment down and give us a little profit and build those memories you're talking about, I mean, it really is a win. Win across the board.

Yeah. No question about it. It is. Robert, I'm really looking forward to having you on the cruise. And I'll just put up on the screen here that information again. Join us empoweredinvestorlive.com we are heading out of Fort Lauderdale last week of April. It's going to be fantastic. Mastermind cruise. So small Mastermind group, two days of education at sea, but they won't be long days. This isn't going to be a time of, like, work. Okay. And, you know, certainly bring your kids. That fits right into what you were just talking about, Robert. I think it's just going to be a fun time. Singles, couples, couples with kids, singles with kids. Whatever, whatever makeup you've got, you're always welcome. And just go to empoweredinvestorlive.com and join us for that. And Robert, I'm looking forward to having you share your wisdom on the cruise. And we've also got another speaker that I gotta get on the show real soon to announce him. And. And we will just look forward to seeing you there. And of course, people can find you at Real Estate Guys Radio, Right?

Absolutely. Have been broadcasting now. This is our 28th year on the radio and really looking forward to the cruise. The cruise is a great environment because everything's taken care of for you. It stops at some fun spots. It's going to be a ton of fun. And if you're not laughing, you're not learning. But the mastermind part is going to be extraordinary. Getting to really power down with some folks and. And you're going to make connections and meet people that I'm going to guess are going to be in your life for a long time to come. So super excited to be part of it.

All right, well, thanks so much for joining us and everybody. We'll see you on the next episode.

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