2415: Real Estate Scams Revealed: Why True Wealth is "Built to Be Boring" with Jonathan Greene

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Hey Jason, it's Sarah. Today I got a quote for a garage door repair. The property manager said I needed a new motor and quoted me $672. So of course I asked for a couple additional quotes. And that technician found that a sensor was disconnected and my $672 repair went down to $0. So don't take the first quote that you get. Always get a second opinion.

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.

It is my pleasure to welcome Jonathan Green to the show. He has been in real estate all his life, started walking houses with his parental units when he was 2 years old, and has been investing. He owns an independent brokerage, and he's going to talk about a topic today, hopefully near and dear to my heart, which is looking for the predictable patterns that expose gurus and scammers, which is a great topic. Jonathan, welcome. How are you?

Yeah, Jason, I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. I definitely enjoy that topic, but I like all real estate topics. I've just been doing it my whole life.

Good stuff. Well, where do you want to start?

Well, I mean, you know, I, I Social media is the best place to start if people are wondering how people get into these traps because there's just so much content now, especially with AI that's being generated, that it, I think, goes both ways. I think there's a lot of user error in the space, but I think there's a lot of scammers out there. And, you know, part of what I like to do, as I know you, is to try to help people, you know, avoid that and focus on things that are more tried and true. But the problem is most people are looking for that shiny object, that rocket ship, you know, like a startup that goes 0 to 100. And real estate investing as a whole is built to be boring if you want to be successful, but most people don't like boring.

I love that, built to be boring. You know, that is really the game. It's the long-term strategy of creating wealth over time. Nothing beats income properties. I always say income property is the most historically proven asset class in the entire world. Yeah, but these get-rich-quick stories, I mean, there are a few of them out there. We have to be honest, of course. Sure. Every, you know, infomercial-style guru will use that one story out of the 1 million courses they sold to people who never did anything, never made a penny, lost money, paid, you know, 40 grand for a coaching program, whatever it is.

Yeah.

I mean, is there any hope here of cleaning up the industry?

Regulation-wise, honestly, probably not. I think it has to come from people like us who want to help consumers and new investors and seasoned investors. Regulators kind of avoid what seems pretty obvious to people like us who've been looking at it for so long. But I don't see any regulation coming because it's not really an industry that can really technically be regulated at this time. You know, there's a lot of things that I think people can look for, but it's, it's something that transcends, you know, real estate investing gurus. It goes to all sorts of coaching and mentorship programs and figuring out where you're really going to get mentorship. But one thing I want to say is even if you get caught into a guru thing, it's not always a loss if you focus on the other people who are in it with you. So, even if you sign up for something that turns out to be not what you expected, you have people around you who are also doing the same thing. So, maybe you don't want to do what we both know is mostly MLM type of stuff inside there. You can still then build the group with the people that are there and make the best of it. So, I still think there's a way out of it. Yeah, I'm worried. I don't think it's regulatable. And I think people have to take responsibility for their own decisions as well, because I think there's a lot of user error not doing enough due diligence to see what, you know, again, is pretty obvious to us.

Well, let's talk about the regulatory thing for a moment. And I want to ask you about the MLMification, as you call it. That's a great word. Yeah, a great phrase. But the government has tried. The FTC has instituted rules of, you know, make disclosures as to who's getting paid and that kind of stuff and how you're getting paid and the use of testimonials. And typical with government is they just don't really get it. They don't have— they don't understand how business actually works very well. So I don't think those attempts have worked. And the other thing is the government has very limited resources when there's 340 million people out there making promises, right? They can take like and make an example of one person, but there's no way they're going to clean up an industry. Maybe everybody gets a little fearful when they hear about the example. Take an example like in the internet marketing guru world, Frank Kern. He's a name that most of us are familiar with. He's been around a long time. He got nailed and the FTC, I think it was, fined him for a few hundred thousand dollars. But to a guy like that who's, you know, a multi-deca-millionaire, okay, you know, that's a drop in the bucket.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's, it's really just nothing. What are your thoughts?

Well, I mean, I think, you know, if we're talking coaching mastermind, you know, programs intended to build people, you know, income for them to reach their dreams, that's harder to regulate than, you know, syndications, which we may talk about, which is where a lot of fraud goes on in terms of operators. But to me, those are separate entities. Syndications are a little bit more regulated based on what you can and can't do with rules from the IRS and things like that. But this kind of sidecar of coaching, which everybody is very popular now, it's also still very popular in the wellness space. There's still, you know, obviously a lot of scammers in there as well. I just think it's something that, again, consumers really have to take a look at and make sure they're not just looking for the shiniest website or the best TikTok ads, because there's people who are just really good at content. That doesn't mean they're going to be your coach, mentor, or a good operator of a syndication if you're trying to put your money into something that you hope will be, quote, you know, passive.

That's an interesting point too. You know, when I hire someone for anything, whether it be my CPA, an attorney, whatever, it took me a long time to figure this out. The person I try to hire is the artisan, the craftsman, the one who's actually doing the freaking work, you know, versus hiring some great marketer. It seems like the psychologists have figured out what triggers human mind and how marketing works and how you move people down that funnel and how you scale things. And like, this has all been kind of figured out now. You know, years ago it wasn't figured out like it is today. Uh, it's become a real science. And of course there are many gurus teaching that science as well. But these people don't actually seem to know very much, or, you know, they don't really like do the work. They're, they're just a marketing guy, you know.

Yeah, that's the problem. I mean, but again, that— I think that if you're a consumer and you're about to buy into something, you really have to take a look at yourself and say, am I buying into this because of primarily things that I've seen on the internet? If that's the case, you shouldn't be buying it. That doesn't mean that it's reliable, you know, like you're saying, like just because there's a testimonial, that doesn't mean anything. They could have paid for for it. You know, it could be real, could be fake. You know, these things are not easy to verify. I think you want to talk to other people who've gone through the program and what it meant to them, only if there's not an MLM content to it. Because, you know, this, this multi-level marketing has appeared in everything. Everybody knows it. It's Tupperware, it's Avon, and it's very present in the real estate investing, you know, guru space. If you know going in that someone's going to get a commission for bringing you in, you need to investigate that pathway because that's usually where the problems start. If someone has an incentive to bring you into the program other than the owner, that's where I'd start sniffing around.

Yeah. Okay. Any tips on sniffing around? Like, how does—

Yeah, I mean, first, the first question, if you're being recruited to some type of program and it's not by the person at the top or the person at the top, you see an ad and then you go into some funnel where you're talking to other people, I would ask straight out, are you getting compensated? You know, if I go in, honestly, even if they say no, if it's not the person at the top, they probably are unless they work for the company. So you want to find out if they've gone through the program. I think if they've gone through the program and they're trying to put you in the program, that's likely an MLM option. But again, it's still, it's still hard to verify. To me, I can see it, I can smell it, but I can see why a consumer wouldn't. But I think a lot of people get to the stage that they want to take action and they believe that taking action— sometimes they'll even burn the boats. They'll spend their last money to get into this. You know, there's so many, you know, great stories about how people got into us like this. So they're almost putting themselves out there as a mark. And that's why, I mean, users have to take their own responsibility for why they're going and what limited research they're doing to verify it.

Any thoughts on the cost of some of these programs? I'll give you an example. I— and, and, you know, this has happened on more than one occasion where I'll be speaking at one of our conferences, and by the 10:30 break, we're 90 minutes in, and I've had this happen a couple of times where someone will come up to me and say that they paid $48,000 to join Robert Kiyosaki's coaching program. Yeah, Grant Cardone's program. I'm not quoting Grant's prices, by the way. I just want you to know that, you know, whoever's program, right? And they said they learned more from me in an hour and a half than they learned doing that for 4 months. It just seems like the cost is just so enormous of some of these programs that that should be a red flag in and of itself, just the cost.

Yeah, but if you look at the psychology of it, these people know that the actual high cost is the carrot. They put a high cost on it because then the people who are looking, who are kind of desperate to succeed, interpret that as high value without thinking. So they think, well, if it's $50,000, it must be, it must be legitimate, which of course those two things don't correlate at all, you know. And I think that's why people started doing it. I mean, I remember myself even, you know, with 40 years into the game. I had somebody on my show who's talking about an investing topic. Don't want to give it away too much. And then I was just like curious. I'm like, let me see what he's got going on. And it was like a solo mastermind for $50,000. I was like, he doesn't know that much. Like, there's not that much in the game. So immediately I shut it off. But I think that the psychology behind it is higher price equals more reliability to to consumers out there.

Interesting. So the consumers almost give it more credibility if it's expensive?

Yeah. I mean, if you say something's $99, then people think, oh, well, that's a scam because it's a 99 instead of just 100. Like they're trying to bait you into it, which is potentially true. But yeah, I think I believe that the people who price it high— not to say that there aren't some people who are worth it, but if I'm paying $50,000, that better be a one-on-one type of thing. I'm not going into, like, a class with other people for $50 grand. I mean, I just can do better with my money.

You know, the other thing is so many of these quote-unquote gurus are just really newbies. Like, I remember when the Airbnb thing was such a hot topic, right? And, you know, that is— and completely oversaturated. Airbnb owners are definitely— they've been experiencing a lot of pain. But there were a lot of gurus out there promoting that. And some of the people who were teaching it, I couldn't believe it. When I sniffed around and asked people about them that know them well, it's like they did one deal. They did a rental arbitrage deal. They've never even owned an actual property themselves. Like, it's shocking to me how in today's world someone can get sort of credibility with no real credibility. Like, they, they haven't even been through an economic cycle.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, again, that's a fake testimonial type of thing. It's pretty— I mean, you can look people up where they live and where they've said deals and see if they've owned. Of course, they'll say, oh no, I've owned it in LLC. Okay, well, tell me what the LLC. Let me look up all your— oh, he did a single property LLC. Okay, tell me all the addresses. I mean, I can find anything on the internet, but yeah, I agree with you. I think there's a ton of inexperienced operators who've done a couple deals and then decided I have a better scale if I build a class or build a mastermind. I mean, I've been doing this for 50 years, walking at least properties, and several times over the years, you know, people have said, oh, you should start a mastermind, you should do a course. And every time I go to do it, I just don't want to. I actually personally don't want that responsibility of taking so much money from someone because I don't— personally, I don't think they're— I've been a coach before for on-market real estate, real estate agents. They never show up prepared. Been a coach for real estate investors. They don't show up prepared. So I don't really want to take someone's money just for them to show up and ask me what to do every week. I'm very regimented. You know, I've had a coach, I show up prepared, and I don't trust people that they're going to do it. But yeah, it's a— I think it's a tough place to figure out who's who. But on the other end, like I've been saying, I feel like there's a ton of user error in this space. I feel like there's whatever the marketing is out there, there's plenty of kind of mastermind groups or things that are just fine. And if you're willing to do the work, you actually will succeed. Whether you paid $5,000 or $50,000, if you work with the group, you probably will succeed. It's not like the majority of anything out there, the stuff that they give you, the deliverables, whatever they give you into a notebook, it's probably good because they just picked it up starting from Carlton Sheets and they just kept, you know, redirecting it into something new. But a lot of people go into things looking for this, you know, quick fix. And they don't even want to do any work. They think they're going to join a workshop and then be a millionaire in 2 months and join the FIRE movement. It's just not realistic. I don't think people want to work as hard, you know, as my dad did, you know, as just a single-family landlord buying houses, talking to tenants, teaching me how to collect rent. I don't think people want to do that.

Let's kind of switch gears a little bit and talk about the money raisers. Sure. You know, it seems like everybody and their brother nowadays is a capital raiser. They're a syndicator, they're a fund manager. But the funny thing is, and what really surprises me most about this, is they're raising money many times for someone else's deal. They didn't even bother to go find their own deals, get their own deal flow, do their own private placement memorandum. Like, they don't even do that. They simply raise money for others, which is kind of what you said before about the MLMification, right? You know, another thing that just bugs me to no end in the world of syndicators is that everything you see promoting a syndication deal and with the JOBS Act, it all just blew wide open, right? Where, you know, now they can all advertise, which they couldn't do that before. They had restrictions on that before Obama signed the JOBS Act. And they are always talking about the deal, the asset. But what they never talk about is their fees they're charging as a sponsor, how much money they have or usually don't have invested in the deal, how they're using their own other entities, their own other companies to provide services to the entity you invested in. And they're overcharging for those services. There's no bid process. They're just totally marking them up to whatever. How they're getting all sorts of crony capitalist benefits. For example, you know, if someone here in, in the Scottsdale area is syndicating an apartment complex, which is very common here, there's tons of that. What they'll do is they're, they're doing that deal and then, hey, they're remodeling a house that they're doing as a flip. And guess what? Into the deal they write that that contractor that gets the contract to do the renovations on the apartment complex is going to do their flip deal or their personal residence for free, right? There's all kinds of stuff. There's no way you can keep track of this. There's no way you can really know it as an investor, and you're just getting the crumbs. I mean, it's just, it's such a complete scam. Your thoughts? You probably—

yeah, I mean, I think that's happened a lot. And, and I mean, obviously some people are committing fraud and some people are burying the stuff in the documents and giving people no way out because no one's reading the whole 40 pages, you know, the one thing that I'll say—

pages, it's 128.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's the, the 40 pages, just the pro forma PDF. But what I always say is that they have— you have to keep in mind, if you're looking to invest in a syndication or a fund, everything that you're looking at is just a projection. And a projection is nothing. It's a spreadsheet.

Target return, right?

But like, one of my friends said to me once, like, yeah, have you ever seen something with an IRR of like 4%? No, of course not, because who's going to invest in that? So of course, when people are, you know, marketing around the best-case scenario, that scares me. I want people who are always on the worst-case scenario. That's how I was as a flipper. I always look at my worst-case scenario, and I'm like, yeah, if I totally screw everything up and I still make X, yeah, I'm fine with that. Good experience. I always do better because I'm thinking like that. But I think anything where you're just focused on 19 things that all have to align in order for you to get, you know, this 24% IRR. That's the problem. But again, people are following good marketers like you said, and they're not following tried and true. They're not saying, hey, let me look at your last 6 deals, are these verified? You know, it's not that hard to research now. I mean, we have AI, we have a million different public record search. So when I've invested and when I started invested in syndications as an LP. Of course, I had more experience, I had more access, but I did what Brian Burke said in The Hands-Off Investor. I trusted the jockey. I, I want— the person I was talking to was the head of the company. I don't deal with conduits. That's important to what you said, like, you know, for people who are just there.

It's an interesting statement. Yeah, I don't know.

Unless someone is literally an employee of the company, and for me they need to be the top person at the company, It's just not for me, you know, and I'm not saying everyone can get that access. I'm fortunate to do that. But still, I don't want to work with a conduit because obviously there's a payback for that. You know, you don't, you don't want to work with anyone who's incentivized to get you into something. There's no qualifications for them or repercussions if it goes bad. That person doesn't care. They already got paid. They're doing it for somebody else.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. You know, 22 years ago when I got into the investment-only side after I got out of the traditional real estate business, I developed this framework, and I think you'll find this interesting, uh, Jonathan. Yeah, the Ten Commandments. Commandment number 3 has by far resonated with the most people, and that is thou shalt maintain control. Be a direct investor. Invest in your own stuff. Buy your own properties, right? When you don't do this, you leave yourself susceptible to 3 major problems. Number 1, you might be investing with a crook. Number 2, you might be investing with an idiot and you'll lose money either way, right?

Yeah.

Assuming they're honest and competent, the third problem you have is that they take a huge bunch of management fees off the top for managing the deal, right? Acquisition fee, disposition fee, their own property management company that's providing the property management, their own construction company that's doing the construction. Yeah, they're paying like super high rates for all of this stuff and sucking all the profits out of that deal. It seems to me— and listen, I'm no fan of Wall Street. I always say Wall Street is the modern version of organized crime, okay? I, I think the best thing you can do is just buy some houses, buy some houses, right? And get rich slowly. But it just seems like if you're going to be relinquishing control and trying to be a passive investor, you might as well just invest in these highly regulated public things, right?

Invest in a REIT or— yeah, I mean, to your point, it's just stocks, you know? Yeah, well, I mean, to your point, I mean, if someone is, is trying to get me to invest in something, I'm always going to ask how much skin they have in the game and just send me the proof. It is not hard if they have, you know, $100 grand or they have $500 grand of their own money in it. They can just send me the proof that that's already in. If they can't, it's not for me. I want to know what the skin is in the game. And because if someone's telling you, hey, this is the deal of the century, you have to invest, and you say, well, are you invested? And they say no, I mean, are you serious? This is the stupidest conversation you can ever have. You're telling me that you want me to invest in the deal of the century, but you're not invested? You should have double the amount that I have in the deal because you know more than me. So if you have zero You're just telling me something right there. But again, some people, they're not good. They're too embarrassed to ask those questions, but too embarrassed will, you know, lose you $50,000.

Yeah. And even if you ask them, that doesn't mean you're going to get an honest answer. But, you know, on Wall Street, for example, as much of a scam as Wall Street is, at least, you know, there are databases that track insider stock trades, right? And you know what the insiders are doing, at least to a large extent, right?

Yeah.

And the sponsors of these deals, you know, they'll take between 25% and 50% as a sponsor fee, plus all these other fees, these little ways they make money, acquisition, disposition, their own companies, etc., sucking the profits out. And they won't put any money in the deal. That's simply for finding the deal and sending out a private placement memorandum. Like, it's insane.

Yeah, I mean, look, investors now, there's other, you know, they can use AI to help them get a little bit ahead. You know, they can take the entire pro forma that they've been sent, put it in and say, what are the 5 things that are missing from this? And I guarantee you, Steve McGann—

Great question. Great question. Yeah.

There's so much technology that you can use to help yourself now, especially if you keep that one chat open and you keep feeding it more and more, it will build on itself. And I think, you know, that's where people have to start using it better. You know, I'm not a huge advocate of AI. I use it for what I need, but I'm not like, you know, selling everything just to get in on this. Because I still believe in this human one-on-one connection. And I believe if I'm investing money, I'm not investing based on something that is, you know, electronic. I'm investing on the one-on-one person. They need to prove it to me. If you ask an investor, how much do you have in it? And there's a stutter and they're not answering, just end the call. I mean, like, you can tell because it's the same, like, you know, you know, you have a podcast, I have a podcast. When you have a guest on and you ask them a very simple question and they can't answer, you know, there's something wrong. You know, and I try to weed that out in the beginning for my podcast, as I'm sure you do, just like I do for investments. If someone can't answer the softballs, they're never going to get to the hardballs. And it's not— you, you should never be trying to force yourself to trust someone. If you don't trust your gut, get out, right?

And certainly diversify, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Put all your eggs in any one basket, you know. One of the big recent scams was Marco Santarelli. I don't know if you know who that is.

I've had him on my podcast.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Narada Real Estate. Well, he is under indictment, and his sentencing was supposed to be this month. I guess it got postponed till August, but he faces up to 20 years in prison for defrauding investors. And that's $63 to $93 million. The estimates vary. I know one guy, he's a client of ours now. He invested $400,000 with him, you know, and that was like his life savings, basically.

Right.

Yeah. Another guy was like $1.2 million or something. Just diversify. At least do $50,000, $100,000, and, you know, do it in multiple deals. Okay. Not—

yes, that's what I, that's what I do. I mean, I agree with that. And I think, you know, my dad taught me early on that I'm diversified. I've always been economically diverse in terms of stocks. Stocks, you know, my own special account where I like to have fun, index funds, real estate. There's so many different— I mean, if you want to invest in syndications, you can go into so many different asset classes. But I think also people forget that you can diversify geographically, you know. So my, my syndications are multi-family syndications, but they're in different parts of the country, and they're in parts of the country that I'm interested in, but I have no interest in just getting like a one-off single family there. So I can learn about it as I And if you have an interest in, say, mobile home parks, then do your due diligence to become a limited partner first. You can learn a ton if you're— if you have a good GP who's sending you updates once a month, you'll really learn a lot. And then maybe you decide to buy something smaller or you say like, this is complicated, it's not for me. But yeah, I think diversification in life is really everything to get— get spread yourself around to make sure that you're not too tied in on just one asset, one geography. You know, anything like that, or one promoter. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Absolutely, absolutely. Very, very good points, Jonathan. We've been talking about how to spot scams and things like that, but you know that we do both love the most historically proven asset class in the entire world— income property. You know, what kind of tips or advice would you like to share with people, maybe on the flip side of our discussion so far?

Yeah, I think if you're just looking to start off, or even if you're looking to expand your kind of rental empire, it all starts with good real estate agents, which of course, you know, you, you owned a brokerage in the past. I own an independent brokerage now. 99% of realtors don't know anything about investing, so you can't just go on Zillow and pick a real estate agent. You need to pick someone who works with investors all the time. It's probably less than 1% who even know how to identify what a good multifamily property is and and how to figure out what the rent roll is going to be and is there going to be appreciation. But as you were saying before, rental properties, even if you make a lot of mistakes, you're going to appreciate in America and literally every market unless you've wildly overpaid, you're going to slowly just make money. And that's how I learned what to do. But I think it starts with one being financially prepared, making sure you have all your ducks in a row. And as you were saying with the people who invested into Marcus, Don't spend all your money on one thing. Be cautious about how much you're doing. Make sure that if you're pre-approved for $500,000, maybe try to get something for $350,000. So you're not, you know, fully just loaded up from the beginning. Find a good real estate agent. Again, as we were saying with other things, ask for proof that they've worked with investors. They can tell you addresses off the bat if they have, how many investors they have, how many multifamilies they've sold and bought. And I think that That sets you on a much better path. And don't use AI to, to check up on them in that way. Me personally, now we're finding so many clients who just run ridiculous scenarios in AI and then they're asking us questions. I'm like, I've been doing this my whole life. If you're going to use AI, like, I'm good. We're going to pass right now. So I think there's a big differential. What new real estate investors— and if you want to be good at investing in rental property, what you need is reps. You need to go look at houses, know what they smell like, you know, know what cat pee house versus a smoker's house looks like, understand what a structural defect is. Because if you don't know your real estate agent that well, you're not going to know if you can rely on them. And, you know, investing in rental properties, as you know, even if you're out-of-state investor, you still need a 360 of the house because where are all the problems? They're in the basement and nobody has pictures of the basement in every corner. On Zillow because they don't look good. But that's exactly basically all you need when you get there is what the grading on the outside looks like. Are there any water issues? How old are the mechanicals? You know, those are the things that actually make you lose money on rental properties when they're highly avoidable.

Yeah, you know, I, I like one of the things you said, and I'll say it another way. In the real estate game, at least historically— it won't be forever, by the way, I think this will change in 2024 40 when we have our demographic cliff coming up. But, you know, for the foreseeable future and definitely for the past, time heals all wounds. You know, it's so disheartening when you see a real estate investor who just doesn't stick with it because, you know, the first few years it feels like you're just treading water. You know, it just, it just doesn't seem to— like, why am I doing this? You know, but then you start to get all of these things that coalesce and You know, inflation happens and a little boom cycle happens, right? You're getting paid down by your tenant and all of this stuff starts to work out, and maybe you refi at a lower rate, and exactly, this investment is fantastic, right?

Yeah, but think about it, that is just a product of everything else. If you want to lose weight and you quit after a week of walking, you know, a little bit, if you just walked an extra step, it's the same for every every single thing that we do in life. If you just keep doing it, you're going to create momentum, which will then create that compounding effect. I mean, it's Atomic Habits, it's Slight Edge. All these books tell you the same thing. If you just keep doing it, I'm just very regimented, so I just tend to like to do the same things. But I think you're right. I think the saddest thing for people is people who start off doing something that, you know, will succeed if you just relax. But again, A lot of times the people who opt out of that first rental property is because they spent too much to get it. They spent too much of their income. And then because they can trade it, they trade it, but they trade it way too soon. And if you just sat there, I mean, all you have to do is— we all have stories of the property that we bought and sold, and now it's worth, you know, 6 times the amount. We're like, oh, you know, sometimes trading is good, but it depends what you trade into to get it.

Yeah, that's a good point. And you know, I'm noticing that now with everything that's going on in the world geopolitically, people freaking out. I'm like, folks, back up. There's a long arc of history, okay? You know, I mean, do you go to a museum and stand and look at the painting 3 inches away? No, you back up and you take it in, right? Just look at the big picture and relax. You know, it's like that.

That's the greatest argument though for real estate because real estate is so tangible. You can look at it, you can touch it if you want, you can improve it yourself, which of course you can't do with stocks. What are you going to do? You know, add an ADU onto your, you know, 1,000 shares of Apple? There's nothing you can do to control that, but you can actually control your real estate asset. You can make repairs, you can stay up to date on maintenance, and in the alternative, you can do the whole momentum cycle the other way if you continually don't fix your properties and you just leave things, you're going to end up with a property that does decrease in value. But it's not as hard as people think. But again, I think it goes back to something we said in, in the beginning. I think a lot of new culture is very, uh, poised to try to get, get rich quick. And if you just go back and look at Warren Buffett, one of the greatest investors of all time, arguably the best, it's just get rich slow, you know, buy real estate and wait, relax, invest in things that you know are strong assets and just wait it out a little bit. But to do that, you have to not expend all your resources on one. Start small, you know, maybe do it with, with the friends that you know that you both want to take the same journey with. And those are people you can find, swinging all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, in even a guru class where you got tricked into it, but you met 3 people who all feel the same way as you. Now you have 3 friends who can go out and do stuff, right?

That could, that could be the value. You know, maybe exactly too much, you didn't get anything from him or her, but you met some people and improved your network. That's a, that's a very good point. There's a lot of studies on Warren Buffett, of course, and one that's really interesting is that when you look at his whole career, so much of his wealth came from the latter part of the career because he stuck with it. And he had the compounding effect, right?

Exactly.

And that's the slight edge. And I think you mentioned Atomic Habits too. Those are both great books. Yeah, really, really good advice. You know, just look at the big picture. It's a marathon. It's not a sprint. I guess maybe it's a good way to put it.

Yeah. But again, it really matters what your goals are. And if your goals are ever do something, like if you want to lose 20 pounds, you're not doing it in a week.

Quick.

So if you, you're just going to fail, like we all know they're going to fail and, or, or you're going to be very sick or hurt yourself by trying to do it. So you just kind of have to manage. It's really about what a person is and how they feel about themselves and, and what the why behind why they're trying to get rich quick. If it's because you want to get a Lamborghini, I would say it's probably not the best reason. If you want to get money for your family, you know, get rich, uh, slow is still going to be a better idea for your family. Invest in assets that appreciate and that you can look at and say, hey, look, it's still there, it's still standing, it's generating income. Oh, we have to do a furnace repair, that's going to hurt us for a while. But oh wait, it's gone up $26,000 in the first year, so now we have some equity. And I think that's what people, you know, forget. You're not getting equity in the stocks. It goes up, it goes down. You know, the founder of the company could do something crazy and jettison your stock value down. There's meme stocks. There's no such things as a same house across the— that you bought that's on two blocks over on Smith Street. It's just a house. If you, if you fix up the attic into a new room, you increased its value, appraisal value goes up. I mean, real estate's a great asset. I don't tell everyone, as you were saying, I don't think everyone— it's not for everyone. No one like, you know, I don't think a lot of people love being a landlord, but if you're a good one, you'll do very well at it.

Yeah, the, the money comes in the boring operational part. Exactly. Where you're just showing up every day. You know, like Woody Allen said, 80% of success is just showing up, right?

Yeah.

And you're just doing the grind. It's not sexy, you know, it just works though. You know what's interesting? You mentioned how the real estate is still there, and it always amazes me the durability of real estate.

It's unbelievable.

I went and looked at some of the properties that I lived in when I was a kid.

Yeah, me too.

They're still there. The same property is there making, producing income for somebody else. I remember years ago I went to Paris with my girlfriend at the time. We stayed in a hotel that was 900 years old. I mean, you know, like, can you imagine that? I mean, how many companies have been in business 900 years? If you bought their stock 900 years ago, right? That hotel is still there producing income. And I saw an article today from the, I think, the NAHB, and it said that almost half of all owner-occupied homes in the country were built before 1980. So think about that. Yeah, there's about 140 million units in the US, right? I don't know, I don't know why they did only owner-occupied, but half of those were built before 1980, and they're still there. They're still an asset.

Yeah, I live in a, I live in a 1920s house. It's phenomenal. I've renovated 18, you know, late 1800s houses. Sometimes they need a little, you know, a little bump on the structural, but there's a reason they're still standing. Yeah, you know, and the more that you pay attention to your property, whether you're an owner or you're a landlord, the more it's going to appreciate because you're keeping it up. You know, same as a car. If you don't take your car in for an oil change, eventually it's going to break. I mean, these are just things— the costs that you don't want to pay are the that save you from disaster later.

And when you're doing capital improvements to a house, you're just putting more money in the savings account. Exactly. You know, it's not an expense that just evaporates. It's something that's there improving the value. So that's a good thing. Anything else you'd like to share, Jonathan? And please do share your website so people can learn more about you.

Yeah, I mean, best place I have a hub site that's Trust Green with an E at the end that kind of has the spider web to get everywhere. I have a podcast which you're coming on next week after this recording called Zen and the Art of Real Estate Investing. That's the website, ZenandtheArtofRealEstateInvesting.com. I'm very easy to find across social, Instagram. I love LinkedIn. I wish there was less bots on it. It's becoming a bot fest and AI disaster now. But yeah, I really appreciate spending the time. I love talking real estate investing. I never have anything to pitch. I just like to talk about real estate because because I grew up with a dad who would pick me up on Friday, bring me back on Sunday, and I didn't have a device in my hand. So, all I had was him talking about money and real estate.

Right. You weren't distracted.

I mean, if I tried, he would just keep going. It didn't matter. And I think that's a testament to what I learned. A lot of that comes from him just talking, even when I was trying not to pay attention. Yeah.

Good stuff. Good stuff. Well, Jonathan Green, thank you so much. Jason Hartman, thanks so much for joining us and happy investing.

Thanks.

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