The Story is Worth More than the Real Estate - Creative Finance Key

Hello YouTube, we're back with rule number 14. This is one of my personal favorites because it applies to every single opportunity. The story is worth more than the real estate. This is true for every individual deal and your whole portfolio. What we're going to show you in this video is how we have built everything we've built by leading with a story. The opportunities, the capital raises, the partnerships, the businesses, All of it is built off your ability to communicate with others.

Now, what you've likely seen online— we've talked about this a little bit before— we've got a little circle drill. You put yourself in the center and you can connect with others through relatable points. They'll want to work with you based on your goals, and they'll bind to who you are based on the significance behind those goals. And thinking just really linearly, relatable points are your past, goals are your future, and significance is Your why. And it is exactly that simple. Well, we use that to go connect with people because we can use our story, we can actually leverage that when we don't have a track record. You may not own any real estate right now, but you can use your story of relatable points, what you experienced growing up, to connect with people who do own real estate. A lot of people want to rely on numbers, the math, or they want to rely on their past past dealings with real estate. But when you're starting out and you don't have anything, you can't do that because you don't have any real estate to impress other people and inspire confidence. And that's the problem that a lot of people are facing right now. If you're watching this, you don't have anything and you're trying to figure out, okay, well, how do I leverage this, or how do I leverage that to go buy something? You're not going to be able to leverage any assets if you don't own any assets. But you have your story, and you will have that whether you go bust, whether you make a ton of money, whether you buy a bunch of real estate, or you never buy anything. 5 years from now, you're going to be 5 years older and you're going to have whatever happened in those 5 years. That just seems to be true. 5 years from now, I'm going to be 27. Whether they have real estate or not, I'm going to have my story and I can use that to get into rooms with people who can move me forward. Now, the flip side of that is other people have their story. Not everybody relates to me. Not everybody relates to Christian. And not everyone likes my story. And most people like Christian's story because he's very agreeable.

But not everyone does, and some people just generally don't like me, and that's okay. They tend to like Cody a lot.

Yeah, so the cool piece is you can use your story to connect with others, but there's always a story behind them, and people love to talk about themselves, and you can use that to get into— Christian talks about the 80/20 rule a lot, where they do 80% of the talking and you do a lot of the listening. If you stay intentional, you have an objective when going in and a takeaway coming out, you can learn a lot This isn't a solo sport. It's why Christian and I play together. But you can't do it on your own. And people who say that they did it 100% on their own are lying because they learned from other people about something. There's something out there, whether it's in a book or a mentor. Maybe they don't have a mentor and they learn just from watching how other people operated or didn't operate. And they saw something that other people didn't see. There's a story behind everything and there's a story behind the real estate. And you can use that. We've used that. To bring in debt, to bring in equity, raising money. The story behind a piece of real estate, the 38-plex we bought, was the single worst property in all of Moses Lake, and we were going to be the young bucks that went out and cleaned it up. It's a great story. And the story of the property, it used to be outside of city limits, and so cops couldn't go there, and it became a drug haven, and it was a terrible place to be in the '90s. We wouldn't want to be there. Mm-hmm. Today it's in the city limits, cops can go there, and we're cleaning it up. We have investors who can buy into that story, and they helped us buy it. We eventually bought them out, and now that whole community is getting cleaned up.

Now, another piece of practical application: buying the real estate can help you buy more real estate. When we go to meet new owners and set new coffee meetings, we usually start with what we've done. Like, when I was brand new to this, I had a little duplex out of town and a little duplex in the town that we were trying to buy. I had 4 units. I was calling people who had 5 units. "Hey, you have more than everything I own and you have it all on one campus. I'm buying one duplex at a time and this is super slow. I wonder how did you get to where you're at today?" Simple, natural questions, but you build on your story. It's a little bit easier to call someone instead of, "Hey, I have no real estate, no money, and I want to learn how to play the game." After you get that first duplex, it adds to your story and your ability to share with someone, "Hey, you've done something I've never done." But we're property neighbors. It's a very easy relatable point.

And it's one thing to know your story, but it's even another step further, if you can take it that far, is learn how to present it. 'Cause most people know their story, very few people know how to present it. And your story is the most important piece of this puzzle because once you learn how to present it, it allows you to start over in case things don't go exactly as you think they're gonna go.

And it's a lot simpler than you might think. When we were starting this, we had a YouTube channel. This was when we were about to close the 38. We made the decision.

We called our shot too. You go watch the first video, video. We were downstairs in the old office and we said, we're under contract on a 38-plex. And we were both super awkward and we had no lighting and it was awful.

We made the decision, hey, it's gonna land better if we call our shot online and we actually make this happen.

And that is better than perfect.

Exactly. So we went ahead, we put it out there with the roughly 40 people who subscribed to our channel at that time. One of them was actually an old family friend. And I didn't know he had multifamily. I knew he had small businesses, some single-family rentals. Turns out the last piece of multifamily, little 7-plex in Seattle, was something that he was ready to offload. And his actual goal was he wanted someone who he trusted to partner with his son.

And that was your friend's father?

Yeah, that was my friend's father growing up. That was actually one of the people who inspired me to go into real estate. If you've read Rich Dad Poor Dad That was my rich dad. He was the neighbor 3 houses down who was buying the other houses in the neighborhood, had some laundromats, and retired at 42. And I was like, how on earth did he do that? He inspired me to get interested in real estate, which led to an 8-year story that we share in other videos, but got me to where I'm at today. It was really fun. Even if you're not a master at telling your story yet, a 40-person audience, someone in that resonated, went I want this to be who my son is partnered with. This is a story that is inspiring to me. I have the confidence that this is the right person for me to sell this building to.

And just like that, we picked up $1.1 million in real estate for $25,000 out of our pocket. $10,000 and $15,000.

Incredible opportunity. Uh, one of the better deals we've done. One of my favorite properties. It's the only one I can easily drive to. It's 10 minutes from my house. Really cool property just from starting to tell the story. One other practical example for you, I'll start this and I'll let Cody take over the story because that's how it happened in real life. Got a call in Texas from a broker. We had just bought the smallest building we've ever acquired. It's a little triplex, and by little I mean like 310 square feet. Texas, Christian, we were in Texas, smallest apartments we've ever acquired in Moses Lake. We're in Texas at an event that Cody's gonna speak at, so we're not even in town. Get a call from a number I don't recognize. He goes, "Hey, congratulations on your transaction in Moses Lake." "Well, which one?" "Oh, the tiny little triplex on the water." I was like, "Ah, interesting that that's the one you called about. We have a couple of other rentals nearby." "Oh, awesome, you guys still buying?" "Of course." He had a 10-plex, seller-financable, and it happened to be a property that Cody and I had been talking about for the last year of we would love to own that building.

Every time I drive by it and Christian's in the car, I'm like, I'm gonna buy that. I'd love to own that someday.

I have heard Cody talk about this when I was in my office. It used to be one of the buildings that Cody would show me on Google Maps. So he's like, one day I want to buy this property. I know who that owner is. So when I get the call, they talk about this 10-plex. I'm like, oh my gosh, that sounds familiar. Cody hops in the car and goes, "Wait, that 10-plex?" Hand the call over to Cody. He knows the owner, he's walked through the units, he remembers what the rents are. Talk about building confidence in owners. But the story that we were able to tell in real time on the phone won us a deal we otherwise wouldn't have had. And the story that we bought the smallest building that we own today gave us an opportunity to buy a bigger building identical almost to the 12-plex that Cody already owned, built by the same builder in the same year. The broker had no idea when he called us, but we were the most logical buyer for this property on the planet.

And we wrote it up that day and closed it shortly thereafter. Mm-hmm. And the most powerful piece of it all is I went on stage at that speaking engagement and I called my shot and I said, hey, we were gonna— we're gonna buy this, we're writing it up right now. And then a month later, we closed on it. And now I have that on video and I can say, look, we call our shots, we make it happen. If a broker ever has an issue, well, now we have a story to tell. Like, hey, last time we called our shot, we did in front of 400 people and we did it, no questions asked. We never renegotiated once. We closed it out, didn't even need a bank loan, and we make our stuff happen.

This little segment in this rule is probably my personal favorite one. 'Cause it's something that's really just been our story and our journey has led us to like, oh my gosh, no matter what we do, the story just gets bigger. And every time you buy another piece of real estate, it adds to the story. More people hear about it, you learn how to tell it better, and that is why the story is always worth more than the real estate. There's no building or investment that you can make that is worth more than the story that you can tell about that investment or the journey to get there. So keep adding pieces to your story, Learn how to tell it, commit to mastering that, and I promise that real estate is never worth as much as that story will be.

Now, if you have questions on this or anything in particular, in 2 days we're doing Whiteboard Wednesday. Drop your comments down below or show up live. We do that every single Wednesday, live, 3 PM Pacific Standard Time. Show up, ask your questions, we will roll until the questions stop. Regardless of how long that takes, we will commit to that. But if you have more questions on building out that story or you just want to reach out to us, we've also got other videos with our phone numbers in it. Give us a phone call and we're here to help. We'll see you on Wednesday.

Adios. Welcome to the Multifamily Strategy.