Episode #666 - Offense & Defense: The Dual Agent with Gary Wilson, Founder of Global Investor Agent

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on ready. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

The thing is that it's like the stock market. Any theory will work when the market's going up. And in real estate, it's easy to look like a genius when the market is heading up and things are stable and you can get easy money. But it's not always that way. For those reverses happen, you can get tagged. And it's important to have, when you have that rental property, for example, to have it in a price range where people are going to be able to afford it. There's a bigger market. It's not a really expensive type thing. Like a couple years ago I was looking at moving inside Palm beach over to another area and they said, well.

You know, we got these rentals. You might just come over here for this rental for a few years, something.

Like that, 20 grand a month. I said, no, thank you. Yeah. And so I guess they found someone to rent it but. Or to lease it. But when you were on that thing, where did your first big. You wouldn't have written seven or eight books on real estate if everything had always been gone. You know, lessons to pass on to other people and everything you've learned, you wouldn't be as knowledgeable as you are today if everything had always gone super smooth on that, all that compounding thing, you know, if you didn't have to operate in the real world, Gary, everybody would do it. So where did you get the big surprise or the big reversal and you had to scramble?

Yep. Well, there was two instances. One of them was in 2004. In September, Pittsburgh was hit by two storms consecutively and major flooding. It was all on the news. President Bush Jr. Flew up to. He actually went to a place called Millville where I owned some properties. And so the big. I'll give you the lesson first. The lesson is, guys, everybody wants to play offense. It's more fun. Everybody wants to play offense. You got to score points. But let me tell you, the people that attain that earn and retain wealth also play defense. You got to play offense and defense, whether it be sports and war. And war. Nobody goes to battle with playing just offense. You got to have an offensive plan and a defensive plan. Same thing in business. So what happened in those floods? My wife and I were flying out on Friday to Chicago for the weekend to actually celebrate our anniversary. And on the Way out. There were some rain coming, some rain in the forecast, but nothing to get excited about. Well, by the time we landed in Chicago, got off the plane, we go into the condo we were renting or using, turn on the news. And there was a brief flash. Major flooding in Pittsburgh. About that time, my phone rings, my cell phone, it's my lead contractor. And all he said was, hey, Gary, the Blarney Stone is flooded up to the awning. You better come check this out quickly. The blinding stone was a restaurant across the street from one of my properties to call one of the tenants there. Nobody answered. Called her cell phone, she answered. So I called her business. I knew where she worked. The guy answered, hung up right away. And I called back, said, don't hang up. My name's Gary Wilson. Your employee Jessica rents for me. I need to find out what's happening in Aetna. And he said, aetna? He said, aetna's gone. Aetna's flooded. I gotta go. And I'm like, oh, crap. So any case, we flew back in on Sunday and let me tell you, the famous Three Rivers had boats up on the shores, up on the famous fountain of Three Rivers. The Three Rivers Fountain. There were yachts and houseboats in the fountain. I knew we were in some big trouble. So Monday in the fountain.

Oh, yeah, from Monday I roll into Aetna. You were the only one in trouble.

Oh, no, no, there was plenty of people took a big beating on that one. So I go into Aetna the next day, which is the primary. We got wiped out pretty good. Thankfully, I took the deeds to my properties, just one of those God winks because some told me to grab my deeds, right? Went in there with my old army boots, my four wheel drive truck, which didn't do squat on that silt. It was sliding around like I was ice sk get to the National Guard saying, you can't come in here unless you live here. And I said, I don't live here, but I own several properties. Here's the deeds. He said, yes, sir, come on in. Let me tell you, Larry, my goal was to fix the places up, get them back on the market and start making money again. But when you see people on their hands and knees trying to clean off 100 year old photos of their great grandparents, baby pictures, everything's covered in mud. They got no light, no electric, no water, no gas. It's heartbreaking.

And at the end of that day.

When the sun goes down, you get to go home and you're comfortable home and they're stuck there in the darkness because there's no power. So I called my wife and said, I'm saying to kick me out. These people need help. Let me tell you. Months later, when we were having those properties back up and fixed up and on the market, all 12 tenants were relocated. Out of 12 of them, only one of them did not come back. The other 11 came back and I said all of the same story. We came back because of you, Mr. Wilson. We knew we'd always be in good hands with you because of what you did. And that was the biggest lesson ever learned. And being a good business person and being a humanitarian and you can be both, and I wish I could write a book on that, but it's nearly impossible because each case is different. I did write a book called Turning Rental Problems in Real Estate Profits. And I tell that story in there at the end just to remind people that at the end of the day, there's nothing more important than relationships. You have good, healthy business relationships. You're going to make a lot of money. If you just constantly go for the next transaction, you won't last, you know. Right case. Now we'll tell you. The big recession did hurt, but it didn't knock us out. Thankfully, we had the right kind of properties. You touched on this, Larry. We didn't have the worst properties, we didn't have the best properties. We had properties in the price range and in the areas where people who would otherwise be buying were now renting. And we had our properties fully rented throughout the whole thing. We took a bloody nose and a bloody lip every now and then. But it wasn't disastrous like it was for a lot of people. We held our own because we had the right kind of properties with the equity positions in the right areas. That again, it's. Guys, it's. You don't want to do the luxury thing unless you want to. That's your thing. I get it. Whatever. You don't want to do the low end stuff either because you'll get beat up on that. But just regular people, regular properties and regular areas, that's the bread and butter.

Yeah. I think between me and you, I think we all need to go out and get our dream home once. But when you unfortunately, and it's good when you have kids, the kids are growing up and they can, their kid, their friends can come over and you can have a place where you're going to the kids be around more, you know. But yeah, there comes a time where most of my friends, I go see Their houses that I've heard about for years. And they show me. They say, you want to see it? I said, yeah. And when you get through, they say, you want to buy it? Yeah. I said, no, already done that. Been there, done that. And that's why I'm down in Florida in a townhouse, in a condo in Aspen. You know, it's like. And plus, you join. You know, I learned that for a deposit on a membership fee, you can join pretty much the nicest country club in town and have access to a gorgeous lawn, if it's a country club or whatever. And people running around maintaining that all the time, and you never have to talk to them. But it's just like, if you've got a pool, you're pretty much going to be a pool and a lawn. You're going to be talking to laborers, and pretty much every day of your life, part of the drill. They don't tell you, but if you're a member of a club, you never have to talk to the laborers. You know, you just go in and enjoy. And so, yeah, for a lot of the. A lot of times, it's for a lot of less money, too. And so when you. But I think it's smart to do that the first time, get it out of your system. To go in there is a growth experience, and you realize you can do something like that, that is attainable. And I think it's for a lot of people, if you put it off, you feel like you're punishing yourself. You're living in denial. You know, you really want to taste it one time, but you don't have to taste it the rest of your life.

You know, there's other fun things to do.

And so as you. How did you do? You know, I'm looking at some of these bullet points in your career. How do you go through trading over 3,000 investment properties in five years? Yeah, it seems like it would take an army involved in doing that.

Yeah, well, it actually did. So in the beginning, I got my real estate license really out of, in my opinion, necessity, because most of the agents were not trained to help me on investing. They were wonderful people, great at helping us buy and sell our own homes, but didn't know anything about investing. It was a shame. I thought, I don't understand this. Something's wrong with that industry. And what was wrong was they divided it residential and commercial. Like, it's black and white. You're the residential commercial. But that's not the way the world works. So all I did was I Created this model where if you got, if you can imagine one circle is residential, one circle is commercial. That's the old model. But where they overlap, there's that little magical piece in the middle where you've got a sort of a transition point there. I just basically built a model that served that transition point. People going from the small 2, 3, 4 unit properties into the bigger properties 5 and above, or non residential, you know, retail, commercial, industrial storage and so forth. So we essentially built, we built a team out of that, then eventually turned it into a brokerage. Built the brokerage. So that's how I went from doing. I was doing 100 a year plus myself on my own. 100 transactions a year. I didn't think that was anything spectacular. I just had my head down and I was just mushing forward and working. To me that was what was normal.

But remember, 100 transactions, that's buying and or selling a hundred separate.

Correct. Now that's me helping others. I was still doing my own by mine. I would buy and hold. Right now I'm helping other people. I'm teaching them how to invest and helping them through brokerage, get their properties and sell them. I then I built a team and then a brokerage. That's when we were able to do more. It was like 5,000 properties and we had a small little ragtag team of about 50 agents. And we were just a machine, you know, it was just a factory line. But it's because we had a model that served a need. There was a market in there because, let's face a big commercial outfits, they don't want to deal with four plexus. They want to deal with strip malls and storage facilities and things like that. And yet the residential agents were not trained to work with people buying duplexes or fourplexes. Well, we were, it was like we were operating in a vacuum. It was crazy. And so I started thinking, how can I tell people this?

Yes.

I started traveling around the country teaching and training real estate agents in the US and Canada for about six years. And I must have taught over, I think it was. They stopped counting. At a 24, 000 agents I taught. I mean in classrooms. In classrooms I taught them. And one on one, probably about 4, 000 of them, literally people would pay me to coach them one on one. I used to say no to this stuff there. I say no, I don't, I don't want to do that. It sounds like work and I'm too busy as it is. And, and eventually I think, okay, well God's trying to tell me something when a hundred people ask me the same thing over and over again. So I say yes and yeah. And it turns out it was a wonderful thing I made, built a lot of good relationships. A lot of those people now are working with me now. And we have a team called the Global Investor Agent team. We're in 36 states and I mean, I got nothing to sell here, nothing to pitch. But I'm just telling you guys, if you're investing, you need to look for an investor agent. They need to tell you, yes, I've been certified and I'm a certified investor agent. If they're not, just politely say, look, you should get certified. Then if you want to work with me, because you want to work with agents that actually can walk the talk.

What'S an investor agent? What's that?

It's a real estate agent who understands real estate investing. They're trained so they understand the terminology and the methodology and often they're investors themselves. And they, like me, realize the benefit of helping other investors. I mean, let's face it, Zig Ziglar said it famously and perfectly. If you just simply help enough other people get what they want, you'll really get plenty of what you want. And in the case of real estate, if you want to own real estate, help other people own real estate. And I promise you, you'll be immersed in the right game at the right time and you will acquire some of your properties.

How did you get to the point where, how did this ramp up to where, you know that is a totally different world or yourself to dealing with 50 something people? So how did you ramp up? And of course I know the answer to that is because I've answered it myself a million times. There's one day at a time. I just solved that day's problem, that week's problem, that month's problem, that year's problem, and there we were. But anyway, how did you go through that process yourself?

Well, really, I went through a process called a vision exercise. I learned, I kind of came up with it on my own. I learned a lot from a guy named Stephen Covey. He's since passed away with amazing human being, amazing gentleman. True servant leader John Maxwell is another of the same cloth and just amazing people. And I learned from them. So I did this vision exercise I created for myself, or really go into a deep state of prayer, if you want to call it that, and then start writing out what's my vision for my life. And I did it in retrospect. Like this is what I want to see. Not when my small human brain thinks I'm going to see. It's a big difference. It's like you're letting God just speak through you. This is what writers say, writers can to the flow. It just comes out. It's like the words come through the pen. Let me tell you man, I did that.

I do it every year now.

I've been doing it for over 20 years. And that vision drives me. It's like instead of me pushing the boulder uphill, there's this magical force at the top of the mountain reaching their.

Hand down and help pulling me up.

Because I'm simply asking for help. And then from there you determine your goals and your actions and your plans. And I just wake up every day, usually about 4, between 4 and 5 in the morning, and do my daily routine, prayer, meditation, exercise. And by the time the rest of the world gets access to me, I've already lived a full day. So it's like a foregone conclusion. I don't actually question anything anymore. I just give thanks for everything because I know everything has a purpose. Even the things that are and seemingly bad, that can cause you pain. I promise you, you'll look back on it one day and realize that that was actually part of your journey. You know, it was the growth of you. So I just had that attitude, just being grateful for everything. No matter how stinky it is at the time, I know something's going to come out of it. And by the way, it might not be for me. It might be me sharing that story with someone else or helping somebody else. That's how the human race continues. You pay it forward, you help the next guy. But any case, I wish I could tell you there was some kind of a real practical magical formula, but it really is. It's have that great get clarity on that vision. I mean so clear that you just. It's beyond believing.

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