CW 1106 FBF: Reducing Tenant Turnover Costs, Client Case Study Gary Pinkerton, Investor Education, Immersion & Mastermind Power
7 Dec 2025 · 43 min
Podcast episode (Creating Wealth Show, ep. 836) featuring Jason Hartman and client Gary Pinkerton discussing strategies to reduce tenant turnover and make-ready costs, align property manager incentives, and make rental properties more 'bulletproof' (durable flooring, low-sheen paint, HVAC preventative checks). The episode also touches on investor education and events (Venture Alliance Mastermind, Jason Hartman University).
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Welcome to this week's edition of Flashback Friday. Your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past that Jason has hand picked to help you today in the present and propel you into the future. Enjoy.
Hi Jason, thanks for inviting me on to give a quick preview of the new YouTube channel. As many of you know, Jason has been podcasting for many, many years, delivering a lot of value to his audience and providing thousands of episodes of free education. And he brought me onto the team a couple of months ago to help him dive into the world of video in order to expand his educational platforms. So we recently launched a new YouTube channel that is now the official YouTube channel of Jason Hartman and his company and you'll find a couple of older channels on YouTube that are specifically for some of Jason's podcast shows. But this new channel is exclusively for original educational content all about income property investing. It will include a select amount of a few full podcast episodes that are the most popular, but for the most part it'll just be clips from podcasts and original videos. The channel is just Jason's name, Jason Hartman, and the channel setup is almost like an online course where you have playlists that are categorized into key areas that cover the whole gamut of real estate investing. And that way you can easily find content about specific topics that are relevant to you. And so subscribing to this YouTube channel will be like attending an income property investing school. If you're a beginner, you'll find value there. If you're a veteran, you'll find value there. The categories of education that you'll get to enjoy on this channel include my Ten Commandments of Successful Investing. And you're most of you are probably aware of his ten Commandments. He goes into some depth in the series that we have on that channel. Finding the right markets and properties, analyzing real estate deals, managing your properties and tenants, current laws and rules for income, property investing, debt taxes, and how those two things affect real estate economics and current trends related to real estate investing, financial freedom, mindset and inspiration, and popular podcast episodes and then clips from different events. We those are the kind of things you can expect from this channel. And you'll also get some short clips of some key training that was pulled from specific podcast episodes that are within those different categories that I mentioned. So I encourage you to go subscribe now. The link to the channel will be in the show notes, but for now you can just search Jason Hartman channel on YouTube and then scroll down to where you see Jason's name with his face. And the blurb for the channel reads, we provide real estate investors with education, research, resources and technology to deal with all areas of their income, property needs. And so once you see that description, you'll know that's the right channel. So we hope to see you there.
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.
I want to take just a moment to tell you about Renters Warehouse, an award winning property management company that services over 13,000 investors with over 18,000 properties nationwide. They are the only residential property manager rated by Morningstar. Their centralized model with local staff provide trustworthy support across multiple markets. These experts track all aspects of your property and never try to profit from maintenance repairs. Plus, you'll enjoy flat rate pricing and warrantied tenants up to 18 months. Check this out. For a free 3 month property management trial exclusive to Jason HARTMAN Listeners, visit renterswarehouse.com Jason Again, that's renterswarehouse.com Jason Foreign.
Welcome to the Creating wealth show. This is your host, Jason Hartman with episode number 836. 836. Thank you so much for joining me today as I am happy to be back in the good old US of A. Yes, I have left the land of scarcity and lack and that is the European continent. I know it may be a surprise to some of you that I say that, but you know, from an economic only standpoint, I am only talking about economic and standard of living. I am not talking about culture and history and lifestyle, but only from the economic standard of living kind of, kind of point of view. America is the land of abundance and Europe where I was born is the land of scarcity. You know, it's like every time you walk into a hotel room you got to put that stupid card in the light switch to get the electricity to go on. Every, you know, the cars are small, the houses are small, everything is little, you know, like you take a shower and the little water heater that heats the shower, water runs out. It's just the land of lack. You know, folks, if you live in the US Or Canada would be included in this or, you know, many other countries. Of course, you just, you just don't know how lucky you are. You know, it blows my mind again that the Obama and Bernie Sanders crowd want wants to make America more like Europe. I just don't get it. It may blows my mind. I mean, look, I was born in Europe. I have been to Europe a zillion times. I love going there. But America is the land of abundance. Now, of course, the waistline of Americans is too abundant and, and you know, that's there, there are problems with it. It's not all good. But I just tell you, the, the free market, the abundance thinking is such an important part of your success as a real estate investor and as a person in life in general. Today, I want to welcome back to the show our client and venture alliance member, Mr. Gary Pinkerton, former nuclear submarine captain. Gary, welcome. How are you?
Thanks. Thanks, Jason. I really appreciate it. This has been two or three times I've been on and it's always humbling, but I feel like it's an awesome experience. So thank you for inviting me back.
Well, thank you for joining us. And yeah. So you retired from the Navy what, about a year ago now?
Pretty close. Yeah, I stopped working and officially it was August 1st, but almost exactly a year ago when I finished in uniform.
Well, during the Great Recession, you know, we heard a lot about people being underwater. You used to be underwater too.
I did, I did. But it wasn't an accident. That was on purpose.
That was on purpose in that submarine. That's just such an amazing thing. You know, Gary, I tell you, you know, we have got to line this up as a Venture alliance weekend trip. You got to take people onto a submarine sometime. We got to make that work somehow.
You know what? I could, I think we could totally do that just as a tour and I could guide the tour. It would, the whoever's on duty on the ship would probably appreciate me doing it instead of them doing it. But, you know, it would be a great opportunity to kind of add just some personal insight to it. I think it might be a great tour. And anytime that we line this up near one of the coasts, we could do that.
I definitely want to do that. And you know what we've got to do as part of our this would be a great Venture alliance mastermind photo op is if we could have one of our Venture alliance members stand at one of those keys and another one. You see at one of the keys in the movies how you turn the key to launch the nuclear missiles. Can we launch a couple nuclear missiles just for fun? No.
And in fact, we're not even going to get that photo, I don't think. But it's a good idea.
Well, they do it in the movies. It looks pretty neat how they do it, you know. Is it really like that, by the way? Is it like that you got to turn two keys or. It's probably not like that anymore.
It's pretty close because there certainly is a whole lot of redundancy and backup and more than one person involved, which, I mean, if you think about it as. Now I'm a private citizen with some. With a family here, and I'm really happy the fact that there's a whole lot of backup before, you know, before we make those kinds of decisions. So. Yeah, it's pretty similar.
Yeah. Wow. Interesting. Very interesting stuff. Well, hey, Gary, you said something to me today that I thought was really important. You know, we were, we were using voxer and voxing back and forth forth. The best way to communicate ever invented in human history. Voxer. We were doing that this morning before we started recording the show. And you said that you wanted to talk about something that's really, I think, super important to real estate investors. I'll borrow a phrase from poker, thinking of Keith, our Venture alliance member, who's the professional poker player, and it's called the turn. The turn. Okay. Anyway, that's important to a real estate investor because this is the area where you, you just lose and it's on the tenant turn. So it. We've talked a lot about this over the years, of course, but it begs the question, what can we do to, number one, keep our tenants longer? Number two, make those turns between tenants. I'm talking about the time between the tenant when you may have to do a make ready to get the property ready for the new tenant. This is something that can really eat up, you know, eat up a lot of your return on investment. And the turn is vitally important. So the first thing on the turn I think we want to say to our listeners and investors is don't have the turn. Okay? So try to avoid the turn completely, the tenant turnover and keep the tenants there, but don't do that at the risk of being one of these dumb landlords that doesn't maximize yield. There's a balance between these two, right? You want to increase Rents, but not enough to motivate the tenant to move, obviously. So maybe let's talk about that. But let's also talk about what can we do to make our properties more bulletproof so that it's cheaper so that you don't have to spend a bunch of money on the turn. And the other thing is we have this constant issue, Gary, of the property managers, if you're not self managing your properties, okay? Now this is something that if you're self managing, you're not going to run into it as much as long as you're not wimpy with your tenant. Don't be wimpy with your tenant, okay. You know, be a business person and have expectations for them and make them live up to it. And here I'm talking about security deposits, okay? But with property managers we have this inherent kind of conflict of interest. You know, there's an old saying, you can't serve two masters, right? And property managers kind of do, do serve, well, two masters and then themselves. So they, they serve the owner that's truly their client, okay. That they have the fiduciary obligation to. Hopefully that's a fiduciary obligation. I don't know if it truly is in every state, but it's an obligation because the owner is the one paying them. Right. And that's who the contract is with. And, but then they also have the tenant and you know, they don't want their name all over Yelp and all these complaint sites when they are aggressive, or maybe not even aggressive, but force the tenants to uphold their part of the bargain. So if they, you know, if they damage the property, the property manager can be reluctant to charge the tenant for repair items. Okay. And this is one of the reasons I really like self management, one of the many reasons I do like it, you know, and maybe whatever else you want to talk about. And of course you're a very experienced investor. You've got many properties that you've purchased through our network and you know, you've been investing with us for years. So tell us about some of your thoughts and experiences on the turn.
Yeah, so I've had quite a few recent experiences. I've also had a lot of conversations with Fernando and everyone I think is very familiar with Fernando and he and I, it's really funny. My hat is off to that, that guy because he and I went to the venture, excuse me, the Meet the Masters in 2012 and we were both basically starting right there. I went a little bit different direction with a couple investments, syndicated things that I participated in. I wish I hadn't, I didn't lose a lot. But you know, kind of a long story short. And then I'll get back to the property management. Fernando went directly into properties and has, you know, quite a few more. And so he's seen this a lot more than I have and. But I'm starting to see quite a bit of the turn as well. And I think to kind of generalize things, what seems to happen when you get a, you know, recently rehab property in a B class kind of neighborhood, whether it be a, you know, a fourplex or a duplex or even a single family, is that there's this churn at the very beginning because you don't always have the best tenants in there. But the thing is that when you do get that really good dependable tenant, eventually it may take the second or third time. Then when you get that tenant, you got to recognize that you have that tenant and you don't really want to lose the tenant. And they will typically stick around on their own because that makes them a good tenant. And so there's a lot of churn at the very beginning on a property, it seems. And then you settle into I had somebody for five years and then I had somebody for two years and then, you know, maybe it was another one year one, but then I jump back in and I get a three or five. So it's real important to find that person and then do things that is necessary to hold onto them. But also, as you pointed out, don't be wimpy, don't be a bad business person. So for example, I have a class A building in San Antonio that I bought before, you know, I joined the network several years ago. I had a tenant there that was really good, but the market had, you know, she was there for two years and this spring it came due for her to renew her lease. And she said, listen, I just haven't been keeping up with the rental increases. So I actually lowered her rent, not raised, but lowered it by $50. That put us about 150 under market. But it's a class A building, so that's not a large percentage. It's like less than 10%. And I let her renew for that year, but we did a two year lease, so the next year was higher. And so that helped me not have to have a fifteen hundred dollar turn. It helped her not have to spend money to move. But most importantly, I had been to the property recently. I knew she was taking care of it well. So it was, it Was a win win for everyone. If you go to like, you know, have a property in, in Memphis, for example, and you know, I have several properties there and this is a bad egg, but I have several good eggs. This one I got in October and put a 24 month lease on. And so now we're approaching six months in the tenant.
Right, right. There is one way to decrease the turn is to do two year leases.
It works, right?
That's something. Well, yeah, nothing, hey, nothing always works. Okay. But as a general rule, I believe you should try and do two year leases on your properties. Okay. And if you want to, you can build an escalation into that contract. It doesn't mean you're leasing for, you know, say the Property's leasing for $1,000 a month. It doesn't mean you're committed to a thousand dollars a month for two years. You just say the first year is $1,000 per month and then in the second year is $1,030 per month. Okay. And that's pretty easy to do, you know, to have an escalation built in. That's maybe, you know, 3%. Right? 30 bucks. So yeah, go ahead. So two year leases. First, first, first rule.
Yeah, right. And I like the idea, right. And this isn't a new idea, but I like and have had good experience with the concept that you always want to, and you've said this a lot, Jason, that you always want to have your clients with the understanding that rent will go up each year when it's renewed because the market economy inflation is going to go up in most areas. Right.
So your tenants, your tenants.
And get them, that's very good, Gary. Get them used to that, like you're training them. Okay. Even though it's just a minimal increase, you're putting it in their mind, right? Planting that seed, that, that's just normal. That's what happens. Rents go up. Okay, Right.
In this one property, 24 month lease, recently rehabbed. I mean it was newly rehabbed in October and the tenant never once paid on time. Right. So we knew from the beginning, my wife sue does you know the books for this and she kept telling me, hey, we're not going to want to keep this tenant around. But the other thing she said, and this was really insightful, she said that, hey, the management company in this case, and this is not uncommon, the management company is keeping.
All of the late fees, which is fairly standard. But again, it goes against this idea of the manager and the owner having our interests aligned.
Because what's it's a conflict of interest. I hate that part of it.
Me too.
Remember, you're listening to Flashback Friday. Our new episodes are published every Monday and Wednesday.
And we've spoken out about that a lot, you know, and what we mean there, folks, is that when the management company keeps 100% of the late fee. Well, you know, follow the money, right? What's their motivation going to be? It's going to be to. To make the tenant pay late fees. And that makes them predatory on the tenant, okay? It's like incentivizing them to have this bad relationship with a tenant. Now, tenants are late, okay? I mean, that happens. But you don't, you know, you don't want that to be such a high profit motivator for the management company. You know, $50 late fees every month, 5% of, say, $1,000 rent. Right. You know that that's a big difference. When the management fee is only a hundred bucks a month, for example, or 90 bucks, and they get a $50 late fee, you know, they're going to almost. They're going to train them to be late, and then the tenant feels like they're getting ripped off. You don't want the tenant. The tenant, ultimately, you. You mentioned it, but, like, is your. They're not really your client. But you said client and they are your customer. Okay? So you want to have that relationship.
Good.
You don't want the tenant to feel like you're getting ripped off every month.
Right? Exactly. And so, and sue even mentioned she's like, this guy is paying later and later every month. And so he would scrape together 150, $200, and 100 of it would go, or 75 of it would go to the management fee. And then he would leave there dejected and, you know, upset that, hey, I scraped that together, and it didn't pay off even half of what I owe this month. And so you could just see it happen. Well, eventually here in the beginning of May, we get a notice from the property manager, and this was our first indication that the place was vacant. He said, hey, your property's vacant. Here's your make ready. The make ready was $2,300, and the place just got rehabbed in October. Now, there's some contributing things to that. One of them is that they made the client. Sorry, I said it again. They made the tenant, the customer, very upset every time he had an experience with him. And he did no favors in trying to keep that property in good shape. But also, there were some mistakes on the rehab that should have been Things that should have been done that were fixed in this round and it was a fresh set of eyes from the management company didn't happen to be the same company that did the rehab. So, you know, some of that 2500, I will admit, is, you know, stuff that needed to be done at the beginning, but about 1500 of it really wasn't. So if we go, Jason, back to where you were, you know, we were talking about what incentivizes the management company. They, you know, they placed the first tenant, got paid for that, they got a ton of late fees. They're going to get a really nice, you know, 15% markup on all of the make readies. They're going to get to place another tenant. So, you know, that's fairly tough. And I think the way around that, again, some of this, when you get a new property, you just have to keep working and making sure that, you know, maybe you get involved in who they place there and ask some questions. I do that often. So I think, you know, you just turn through it. But how do we prevent that from being expensive, I think is one of the things we want to talk about, right, that term.
Yeah, yeah, no question about it. Okay. So, you know, I want to make a comparison, as you were speaking, Gary, about your experience with the property managers in the late fees. Do you know what some of these property managers are? They're kind of doing? They're basically running almost like a, A payday loan business. Yeah, or a payday check cashing business that's not, you know, cashing your check at a bank. Right. Where these fees are just exorbitant. And these people live hand to mouth, you know, a lot of them. And there are a bunch of very expensive financing options. You know, that the term predatory lending comes to mind because that's almost what it is where, you know, these, these people are not financially sophisticated and they're just trying to get by. And you know, you put them in a position where your tenant is basically spending 5 to 10% extra per month just because they're late on the rent. And it is this vicious cycle. You know, I almost sound a little bit like a socialist here, you know, but, but it's really, it's not fair, you know, it's not fair. I'm going to stick up for the tenants. It's not fair. Fair to the tenants. So one of the principles that we constantly talk about here on the show and in all of our teachings is you've got to have an alignment of interest. Okay. And if, if you if you don't get control of the relationship and you do decide to have the property managers, which is fine. There are some great property managers out there and there are some bad ones too, no question. Like anything. But if you don't get control of that relationship either by self managing or just controlling the property management agreement and relationship there and making sure things are in alignment, you know, your interest and your tenant's interest and your manager's interest should be in alignment as much as possible. I won't go into that because we've talked about that deeply. Could take you know, another hour but you know, in past episodes it's there. Go to Jason hartman.com, you can search terms like that property manager, flat feed, property management, alignment of interest. There's lots of discussions about that on prior episodes. But. But yeah, how can we minimize cost of that, that tenant turnover when you have it?
Well, I think first, you know, the customer is always right. Right. And you can't always say the tenant, give the tenant whatever they want. That's not really what I mean. From the manager's perspective, the owner is a customer and the tenant is a customer. As you commented, they kind of work for two people. So I try to prevent the, the vacancy if I can do that to begin with as an example. And then I'll get to how do we minimize the cost? But I have a property in St. Louis, a very good tenant and they'd been there on a two year original lease, paid always on time, very, very good tenant, taking nice prop, nice care of the property. But it had a roof issue so a little water damage over time. Some door hinges need to be fixed and you know, some other pretty, you know, minor things re caulking the bathtubs. And so they basically said hey, we'll sign another lease we'd rather not increase because there's problems here in the property. And I said well if you don't sign again then I'll be able to fix all those properties and raise the rent substantially quite a bit above what they've paid. And so we kind of came to basically an agreement. They said well, we can't afford to raise, you know, to the market rent right now. So instead of me paying to 2,000 to 2,500 to do a turn on a property that it's been quite a while so it would probably cost that. I said hey, I'll take care of the highest priority items for you, kind of a mini turn cost. And then they went up part way in the rent and I Got to retain a really good renter so that that book is not yet published. But I'm hoping that that's how it comes out. It seems like that's where it's going as far as, you know, as far as. What can we do? You guys have already. Jason, you've already talked, you and Elizabeth both about some really good options, and I'm starting to put those into place. You know, so the. The wood laminate floor is a great option. I even had a property there in St. Louis where we were gonna put that in, but that extra expensive fifteen hundred dollars, my property manager said, hey, you know, the guy who does the make ready for us just recommended that we just pull the carpet and we paint it, because that's standard for the properties where we are here in this location. So I think being able, you know, having a good conversation with a manager that, that you trust and that you have good rapport with, they will save you a lot of money because they know the area, they know what's expected when the tenant, the potential tenant comes in looking to rent your property.
Yeah. Okay. So that, that's all very good stuff. So you want to make the property, the physical condition of the property, as bulletproof as possible. And you're referring to our. Our client and venture alliance member who's been on the show, Elizabeth Embryo, who, by the way, is hosting a. Another show, the Women Investing Network, so check that out as well. And.
Yeah, and she's doing a great job at that. But Elizabeth talked about the, you know, the laminate floors that. The flooring, I mean, you know, it's an amazing time to be alive. Right. New material sciences, better flooring that's much cheaper to maintain over the long haul. It'll cost you a little more than carpet it in the initial part, but in the long run, it'll be a lot less expensive. So I did one of my houses in San Antonio. You know, it came up. It was like six, seven years I owned it and never replaced the carpet or anything. And it was finally just time to do it. Once this last tenant moved out, it was about a thousand dollars more. And I did the entire house in the wood laminate. And that house has now got bulletproof flooring. Okay. You know, if there's a tear in that flooring, it's really easy to fix it and replace it. I don't think you should do the dark flooring. I think you should do kind of a middle tone. Okay. Color is an issue, of course, you know, when it's dark, number one it shows all the dust. And number two makes the rooms look smaller because darker rooms look smaller, of course, and lighter rooms look larger. And then the other thing that I'm a huge fan of is, is on the paint. You either do low sheen paint or you do, you know, the. More like enamelish paint. Okay. Eggshell is the name of the finish, not the color. Eggshell is a color, but it's also a finish. Okay? So low sheen or eggshell finish paint. And rather than flat paint on the walls, which scratches and, and just any little thing looks awful. Okay? On the flat paint, you do the low sheen throughout the house, you know, on the walls and the scuffs and scratches and fingerprints, they just wipe right off. You know, you can just. A cleaner, any household cleaner, you can just wipe it off and those walls become very durable. And I, I just think back to one of my own houses in which I lived the last. Well, actually the last house I lived in that I owned back in Orange County, California, which I, I talk about when I teach people about the LTI ratio and the Hartman Risk evaluator. That's the house, okay. I lived in that house for seven years and I put eggshell finish paint on it. And that paint looks good for seven years. And I was not easy on it. Okay? So, you know, make the walls bulletproof and the flooring bulletproof. By doing those two things, okay, that'll really reduce your, your long term costs. So you got to spec that out. You know, if you're, if you're buying a property today and that local market specialist in our network that you're buying from, you know, they do different types of rehabs, right? And they always want to deliver you the house at the lowest price. But you may want to tell them, look, I would like to spec this out at a higher level. I want to, I want to spend, you know, 200 bucks more and I want low sheen paint throughout, okay? And I don't know what the exact cost will be, but, you know, it'll be a little more. And I want to do the laminate flooring, the sort of wood looking laminate flooring throughout instead of any carpet and make it a lot less expensive. So I think those two things are very valuable.
I agree, I agree. And the only other thing, the two other, I guess, quick things, again, kind of market dependent, but I have a couple markets, San Antonio, and, and for, for whatever reason, St. Louis, there are areas where the air conditioners every year have substantial problems. Air conditioners and heating systems. And so I have gotten into a routine where I pay for that. I'm sure everyone has experienced where some local, either your property manager or if you've ever used a heating service, then they contact you, but they offer this, you know, this come check it out at the beginning of the season, very nominal fee of $75 or $100 or something. I'm using that now because the, when your air conditioner fails or when your heating system fails, it's when the, when mother nature has tested it and it's tested every other one in the area too. So you will pay out the no's. Your tenants will be extremely unhappy because it'll be delayed in getting response because they're busy with every other house that just got tested. So I do that now and I've gotten good experience and haven't had the crises that I had every year before that. And then the other thing I would say is don't be hesitant to use a service something like HomeAdvisor. I, I love HomeAdvisor. I'm self managing a property in San Antonio, Texas from New Jersey and I use HomeAdvisor all the time and it's incredibly inexpensive.
Tell us how you use it. What do you do?
Well, I've used it for appliances. A stove broke, a dishwasher broke. I've used it to have a gentleman work on, replace the control valves in a bathroom. So just really for any maintenance service, I simply just put in what the problem is and the zip code and, and you can choose whether you want people to call you immediately. That's typically what I do. And three different people providers will give me a call. A couple of them will head out to the property. There's, you know, sometimes there's no visit charge, so it's not a big commercial about them. But there's, there's other services available but don't be hesitant even with.
Sure there are. And of course Angie's List is one of them. The problem with Angie's List, at least last time I was using it, I don't really use it anymore, is it was all localized by zip code, you know, and we're, we're nationwide investors. So, you know, we'd have to join Angie's List in each of our markets where we own properties and, and that's, you know, Gary, that's one of the great things too. Nowadays you can do this with a couple clicks of the mouse, right? You can, you can basically run your real estate empire, you know, nationwide, yourself. And there's so much transparency now that was not There thinking of all I want everybody listening to, think of all of the tens of millions of real estate investors over the last few decades that have made fortunes investing in buy and hold rental properties and they didn't have this kind of ease of use and transparency that we have today. It is an amazing time to be a real estate investor. Okay. You don't need to rely on, on some estimate from a property manager or a contractor. You can easily compare things. No one can BS you anymore about the cost of a garbage disposal or a cost of whatever because you can go to Home Depot's website and you can find out yourself.
Exactly. And that's what I was going to say, Jason, is that I would not hesitate with those services available like that. And the great experience that I've relayed to you that I have every time with them. This I wouldn't hesitate just, you know, checking your doing this. Even when you have a property manager, for example, in that property that went vacant early, one of the things on the make ready was that the dishwasher seem, seems to be broken, probably needs replaced. And when I asked them could you explain that? They said, well, we couldn't get the door open. And so their estimate was $450 plus 15% markup. And I said that's okay, that's okay. I'll take care of that myself. Right. And I haven't yet achieved that. The person's coming next week. But what I fully expect is that the door was stuck, you know, or even if not, it's still going to be far less expensive for me to put a brand new one in than have them go do that. So it was simple. Again, it was a click of a mouse. So just another thought on how you can reduce turn by just a little bit of personal involvement. That took me 10 minutes.
Just a reminder, you're listening to Flashback Friday. Our new episodes are published every Monday and every Wednesday.
Yeah. And you know, and it might even take you less than 10 minutes too. You know, it's really, really amazing. Just have the discipline and the initiative to do some of this stuff. And at the very least it is going to. You know, we're all about the empowered investor, right? Giving you the tools, whether they be the software tools that you can find at like, like realestatetools.com okay. The software company Fernando and I purchased a couple years ago. So you know, great tools there. The other tools you can find@jasonhartman.com and helping you be the empowered investor. And one of the things you do even if you don't actually take any of these things to the finish line if it's just an email. And here's an example of how it plays out. You get an email from your property manager or your tenant tenant and it says this and that. And a lot of your tenants, if you're self managing, you'll find your tenant to be incredibly helpful to you where they will do a lot of the legwork for you. It's amazing to me how well that works. You know, the tenant, a lot of times, you know, they'll say, hey, I already called someone and, and they're coming over to look at this, you know, this repair item, right? And the property manager might say, hey, we got a complaint from the tenant and you know, we need to fix this. And you know, then they have someone go out and take a look at it. If you Simply go to HomeAdvisor or you go to, you know, the Home Depot or the Lowe's website and you look up this item and just copy the link and paste it into the email and say, well, I checked the Home Depot website and it looks like we can get this part for, you know, $52.36, right? The property manager or the tenant are going to be, wow, this guy's on the ball, okay? And even, and here's a little secret, even if you're not on the ball, you want to fake it till you make it. You know, you want to make them think you're on the ball, that you are a sophisticated investor who's not going to put up with a bunch of crap and overcharges and you're not going to pay through the nose. You're not lazy, you're going to click your mouse a few times and do a search or two on whatever it is and you're going to be the empowered investor, okay? Simply by sending that one email that you will change the nature of the relationship. You know, that email that shows, look, you're not just taking their word for it, you're checking things, okay? And that's going to make you a much more successful investor.
Absolutely. So I promise to the audience that I will keep, keep checking into this. I mean, reducing the turn is kind of becoming a passion for me because I think it's important, you know, very simple numbers. If you were making, you know, net $250 a month on a property and you were in this process where, where it was, because it was the property manager's best interest to turn it every year, not even offer a renewal, you know, then Then you would be, you know, setting up to, to make $3,000 a year. Right. Well, if your turn is 2,000 every time, because you haven't thought, thought closely about how to reduce that, that's not a very good profit. I mean, there's a lot of other dimensions to real estate that make it very valuable, but that one cash flow would not be a good one in that scenario. So we have to figure out how do we extend this out to two or three years between turns and how do we get that turn down to 1000, maybe 1500? I think it makes a huge difference.
Yeah, very, very good point. Well, Gary, I know we were going to talk about a couple other things today, but we have run out of time as, as, as usual. But I think this is an important topic and thank you for sharing your case study as a, as a client with our audience again. We really appreciate it and we're going to have you back on soon. We've got a couple of news items we want to talk about about the, the disappearing middle class, about Mr. Zuckerberg, the biggest invader of privacy in human history besides the folks at Google, and what he found. Thinks, you know, I think he's got political aspirations. I can see a Zuckerberg presidential candidate and he's. I want to, I want to talk about his universal income stuff. You sent me an article on that. That's fascinating. And we like to talk on the show about the macro and the micro things. Okay. Because they're both important, you know, the big picture stuff, societal, government, political, and then the detailed tactical stuff like reducing the cost of tenant turnover. But Gary, before we go, I just want to ask you about some educational stuff real quickly and maybe share your thoughts on investor education with people because you, like so many of our clients, have been really just very motivated about sort of being in the culture, if you will, staying in the loop, coming to events and being really involved. Involved. And, and we've got two events coming up and you're coming to both of them. We've got our, our Venture Alliance Mastermind event. And, and you were like, I think our third member of the Venture alliance that's coming up in Chicago in June. So it's what, about three weeks away, I think. And then we've got our Oklahoma City, Jason Hartman University JHU and Property Tour combination coming up first weekend of July. What are your thoughts about those two events?
Well, Venture alliance has been a really, really stretching process for me, you know, from all aspects. You know, I mean, it's not inexpensive and you did that on purpose to stretch people. And it certainly, you know, worked in my case, you know, especially three years ago when we started this, or two years ago. And so it has caused me the stretch, it's caused me to raise my game. And the people I've gotten around have been far more. What I've learned from them and show and the experiences has been far more than any monetary cost. It's been for me. And I think everyone else who tries this would experience the same thing. So I certainly invite everyone to come join us. And the bigger our group gets, the more value that gets added to every one of us. So I'm one of the most motivated people out there trying to tell others about it, get people to join us, because I'd love to have a bigger group even. I'm learning a ton here and getting a lot of value. But it would be better if I just think about key Keith and, and Chad, you know, Keith being our, you know, our poker player, and Chad one of our local market specialists, the most, the two most recent. And John, I mean, my gosh, some great people that I've learned a ton from. So Venture alliance, really awesome. On kind of on the other side, more on the basics, go to school stuff with JH University and the area tour there in Oklahoma City. Very excited to go back to that. But for me, you know, repetition is the mother of success. And you know, Zig Ziglar had a quote, and I know you may know his quotes better than me, but it was something like, you can change your world or you can change your results by what you put into your mind. And so I go to those kinds of events, to conferences, to education events that you put on Jason for two reasons. One, because for that quote, by what I put in my mind. So if I'm continuously putting that information in my mind, thinking about it, going over how, why this process makes sense, then it keeps me focused on that and it kind of keeps me on target, but it also, you know, refreshes things that I've forgotten in the past or, you know, paths I wanted to go down, but kind of got distracted. But then the other quote about you are the sum total of the five people you spend the most time around.
Well, I want to spend my time around, quote. Yeah, that's right.
I want to spend my time around guys like you and Adventure alliance, but also people who are long term investment, wealth creation minded. And everyone in that room is like that. So for me, it's amazing. It's rejuvenating for me but it's also that repetition of learning.
You know, when we had our Venture Alliance Mastermind weekend on Jekyll Island, Georgia, the, the birthplace of the Federal Reserve. And yeah, we had G. Edward Griffin speak at our last Meet the Masters event and he's been on the show several times as well. The, the author, the creature from James Jekyll island book. But I'll tell you one of the things that my mom said, my mom came to that event, I think that's the only Venture alliance event she's been to. But she said, she said to me afterwards, she said, Jason, you know, this group you have is so stimulating. They're constantly like reading books and going to conferences and learning things and, and they're just, they're just so engaged in life. And she just said she couldn't believe how, how stimulating that that was to, to, to sit around the boardroom table, interestingly in the room where they founded the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve Room at the Jekyll Island Hotel and Resort or Resort and Club or whatever it's called where we stayed. And she said her mind was just expanded from that, that meeting and that's what the Venture alliance is all about. So you know, up your game. I mean, you know, get, take it to the next level. Check out venture alliancemastermind.com for that or just go to Jason hartman.com click on events. You can find information in both places and we'd love to have you involved in that. You can always come as a guest to those events on a one time basis. Of course. The property tour and Jason Hartman University event for the weekend in the first weekend of July on Saturday and Sunday are in Oklahoma City this time. So you'll see properties, properties are in short supply. Inventory is very scarce.
That's for certainly for true or that's certainly true.
No, no question about it. But we'd love to have you join us for both of those events, folks. So check those out. Jason hartman.com and venture alliancemastermind.com and, and Gary, thank you so much for joining us today. Appreciate having you on the show and appreciate you being so giving and willing to share your, your personal experiences and your, your case study as a client. We appreciate that. So thank you.
Absolutely. Thanks so much. I look forward to round two when we finish up what we were going to talk about.
All right everybody, we'll talk to you on the next episode. And 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, 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 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.
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