Unlocking Real Estate Success: Gabe Johansen on Creative Financing and Building Wealth

Yeah. Get to really learn about them and what their, what are their goals? What are they trying? And you know what's funny is some people don't know. You have to help them understand. I've had a lot of people that I've worked with and they're just, you have to bring it out of them because they're making a move and they're not exactly sure why they're making that move or what the best move is to make. So we truly are advisors. We're like therapists in a way, right? I mean, it, a lot of what we do is just talking to people and figuring out what it is they're trying to accomplish in their lives. And real estate is a terrific wealth-building tool. I, in my opinion, is the greatest wealth-building tool in the history of man. The problem with real estate is you build a lot of wealth and then it's a hard decision on how to extract that wealth. Because if you sell, you're going to pay all these taxes. If I carry a contract, now I become a lender and I take on a new kind of risk that maybe I'm not comfortable with, or maybe I am, right?

Welcome to the She's Got Assets Real Estate Investing Podcast. I'm the host, Shona Leppis. Follow along as we unpack and demystify real estate investment strategies through expert interviews and personal experience. From how to find off-market deals to creative financing to long-term and midterm rentals, we aim to educate and inspire others to gain financial freedom and generational wealth through real estate. And as always, please subscribe so you never miss an episode. We really appreciate reviews. It helps others find us and just helps us get found. Welcome everyone to the She's Got Assets podcast. I have an amazing guest on. I feel like I say that every time, but I'm really thrilled to have Gabe Johansen on. I'm already going to butcher it. He's the CEO or founder of the M— C— CMI family of companies. SMI. SMI. See, okay. SMI. I had it and I said it wrong. Anyway, Gabe, you have such an amazing, just, I don't even know, you're so accomplished. So I don't want to say, you can intro yourself because I won't, I clearly already—

No, you're doing great. Thanks for having me on. It's fun to be here. Awesome. Yeah. I call myself the president of the SMI family of companies. That makes it a little easier. We do brokerage, property management. We have a syndication arm, a lending arm. And yeah, we've been around for almost 50 years in that space and We're continuing to grow. We service the markets between Vancouver and Roseburg primarily for property management, and then we broker all up and down the West Coast.

That's pretty full service. That's impressive. So I know you have an amazing backstory and I'd love to just hear like the nutshell version, and I know you've had a lot of mentors and I love that too, because I feel like we're often told we can just figure this out on our own, and I think that's not true.

You're absolutely correct. I have had a lot of mentors and I mentor a lot of people. I think mentoring is super important in life and in business. I started out in cars, so my dad was a car dealer and that's a rough way to make money for anybody out there listening who's been in that business. It's a dog eat dog world. So I got my hardship worker's permit when I was 14 years old and I started washing cars. And my dad told me, he said, this is what you're going to do the rest of your life unless you want to work your way up. I'm not going to pave the way for you. And so he did a good thing by letting me go out and make my own way. Of course, my dad owned the business, so I'm sure that probably helped when I went to interview with some of the managers to try to move up in the company. But I decided from a very early age that I did not want to sell my time. As a matter of fact, from the first time I ever clocked in, I can still vividly remember the sound of the crunch on my time card and thinking like, wow, I don't own myself anymore. It was just, it was a soul-crushing moment for me. And I decided very early on that I did not want to sell my time. I didn't really know what that meant, of course, back then, but I ended up working in my dad's company for 20 years, which to me, I wish I could have learned all the lessons that I learned in a much shorter amount of time, but I got to work from the bottom to the top. I ended up running the company by the time we ended up selling it. And I just, I learned sales and marketing and business and struggle and survival and all the things that you learn probably. So all the things they probably try to teach you in college, I learned there. I did do a couple years of college, but I started a family very young and it was time to go out in the real world and make money. And so anyway, that's, that was my story. I was car in the car business till my mid-thirties and then I had the opportunity to get into real estate. I had a friend, we were actually in a Bible study together, and he looked at me one day and he said, what are you gonna do after you sell the business? And I said, I don't know, maybe I'll come help you sell apartments. And he was the owner of SMI at the time. And anyway, he invited me to lunch. We sat down and he essentially offered me an opportunity to be his exit partner in the brokerage side of SMI. And so we connect, I went to work for him, we connected our desks together, we spent 4 years. He taught me real estate. He want— his number one rule for me was he wasn't gonna teach me about real estate unless I was gonna be an investor. And I actually, that was the part that really sung to me. I thought that sounded really cool. I'd rather be an investor than a broker, even though it sounded cool to be a broker too. And so I just, I would've followed this guy anywhere and he wanted me to learn how to find deals and win deals and learn how to value a deal. Structure deals and all that stuff, which was really smart because then after a few years I got, I cut my teeth on that and then learned how to start buying deals. And so I was about 3 years into brokering before I started buying real estate. So my investment career is only about 10 years long. I've been investing since I was about almost 40. I was like 39 years old when I did my first deal. I'm 49 now, so I'm 10 years in, into the investor part of the game, but he ended up selling me the brokerage side of the company and that went really well. I grew the brokerage from just myself and another, a couple of other kind of part-time brokers to today we have, I believe, over 50 brokers brokering both commercial and residential and businesses. And then some time went on, about 5 years went by and they decided they also wanted to sell the management company and it just so worked out that They were hoping to pass that down to their kids and their kids decided they didn't want to be in the management business. And so I got to buy the management company as well. So that's the, that's from the beginning to the end in as short a time as I possibly do it. There's a lot in between there, but I got to learn a lot of hard lessons in the real world and do, I was really depressed when I got outta cars cuz I didn't wanna stay in the car business. I had offers to stay in the car business. I'd been around it a long time and there were companies out there that wanted me, but that was really to me, my dad's dream. That was his vision. It wasn't necessarily mine. I loved cars. I felt like I really had a great opportunity to earn a good living and, and to learn a lot, but it just wasn't, it wasn't what was in my heart. That's not what I wanted to do. And so to be able to go off and at that time do what I wanted to do was very exciting, but then I was depressed because I was like, oh man, I just wasted 2 decades of my life doing something I didn't really want to do. And I quickly realized that business is business and the things that you learn in business translate over. And so it made me a very good broker early on because of the experience that I had. I felt like I was able to run circles around some of my competition because I had a very deep understanding of how people work and how deals come together and how you get creative around trying to bring a buyer and a seller together and stuff like that. So I ended up being not so depressed and realized, hey, I've got a kind of a superpower here where I can take the things that I learned. It was a whole new language. Real estate and cars is like going from Italian to Chinese. People were telling me stuff. I was like, I don't know what you said. It sounds really cool, but I have no idea what you're talking about. So for new people out there getting into real estate, when you hear us say something, I know we talk in jargon and we don't even realize it. So I try to slow it down a little bit and explain what it is. But it's interesting because you can correlate pretty much everything that happens in real estate into the other businesses that are out there. But I think I found my true love in real estate because I feel like I'm retired. I get to do what I want to do every single day. And, and just putting deals together is something that I'm really passionate about. And building companies and building a portfolio and all that is just super amazing. I feel like I'm doing something that I'm not looking forward to a day where I don't have to do this anymore. I hope that I get to do it for as long as I possibly can.

Love that. And I, so I have to, I had this kind of stupid realization recently that were— I knew we're in the people business, but sales specifically, I've been studying sales and I didn't realize how much of that was part of, especially off market. So do you, looking back, do you really value your used car, your sales experience? And as I think we don't talk about that enough, honestly, in this business.

It's funny, real estate has very little to do with buildings and it has everything to do with people. Real estate is a people business. And so when I look at deals, whether I'm trying to buy deals myself or broker for buyers or sellers, or even helping my brokers do a deal, it's really easy to get hung up in what is the asset, where is it located, what are the rents, how, where could we drive the expenses down? You can really get hung up in the minutia of the numbers, but the first place I always go is I want to know who's the buyer, who's the seller, and I want to get inside their head to figure out what it is that they're looking for. Because if we can figure out what the people are looking for, then we can put the deal together. The building is the building and we can deal with, oh, it needs a roof, or we need to raise rents or all that stuff. That's simple. The people, it's very interesting because real estate is very unique, but people also are very unique and everybody has a different reason for why they're doing what they're doing. Everybody buys for a different reason. Everybody sells for a different reason. And everybody has a different, they're at a different age. They're at a different cycle in their investment life. They have a different appetite for risk. There, there are some people that really love debt. Some people that only want to pay cash. There are people who only like 1 to 4 unit and they want 30-year money. There are people who only want to buy 100+ unit complexes. There are people who want to syndicate and have hundreds of investors. And there are people who only want to own the real estate by themselves. You can go on And so to try to figure out who that person is, it really helps because really what we're doing is we're just, we're solving a puzzle, whether we're trying to buy a deal or we're trying to broker a deal, we're just piecing a puzzle together. And how do you piece that puzzle together unless you know what those pieces look like? And so that's where it starts for me is when somebody brings me a deal, somebody may go, hey Gabe, I got this sweet deal. I really think you'd like this deal. You know, the rents are low or it's in this market you like or whatever. The first question I always ask is, what is the seller's motivation? What do they plan to do with the money? Are they trying to do a 1031 and trade into another deal? Are they just cashing out and paying taxes? And once, once you can start to figure out why they're selling, like immediately you can start to understand which way to steer that transaction to where you have a higher chance of success because a good deal to me might not be a good deal to Shona. We may want something totally different. And so there's this misconception that a really great deal is a great deal for everyone. And that's not true because a great deal looks a lot different to every individual.

I think we forget that, right? We just look at numbers and we don't look at the people. Do you have a story where you like the seller's motivation? Was it something you weren't expecting or something? Or I'm just curious because I love that.

Yeah, we see We see this all the time. It's funny that when you ask the question, some of our brokers have felt really embarrassed when I say, what are they going to do with the money? That's my favorite question. When they sell, what are they going to do with the money? A lot of people feel that's too personal. It's embarrassing to ask that question, but if you can find out what they're going to do with the money, then you can start to figure out what it is you need to do to tailor fit that deal to them, to give them what they want. And we find this all the time where we'll ask somebody, what are you going to do with the money? And I got to tell you, probably half the time people will tell you they have no idea. They're just like, I don't know. I haven't thought that far ahead. Right? Like they might just be selling because they don't want to manage it anymore. They might be selling just because they feel like the market is getting to a place where they don't trust. They think maybe the values are going to go down or maybe the laws are changing and they're just really fed up with the way landlord-tenant law is going in their area and they feel like it's just going to get worse and worse and they're not going to have any control over their asset anymore. And so there's just lots of different reasons why somebody would want to sell that are, that is more than just what we initially think when we think Oh, they bought it for a million and now it's worth $2 million. They must want to sell because they want a million dollars in profit. And that's not always the case. A lot of times it's just a quality of life move. Sometimes they're getting older. They don't, they're trying to clean things up. They don't want the debt or whatever the case may be. A lot of people in the, in, in the world today are moving around state to state. So they're moving their money. They're like, hey, I don't want to be in Oregon. Maybe I want to go to Idaho. I want to go to Texas. There's that sort of thing. So I think. It's super important as investors and brokers, we oftentimes just hear somebody want to sell and we don't stop and ask why. And that's a question that I always ask, maybe to my own detriment, because I've had people call me and say, Gabe, I want to sell my project. And I go, okay, before we do that, I got to really break this down and ask you why you want to sell. And sometimes I just talk them out of selling because I'm like, why would you do that when you could just do a cash-out refi and pull some cash out of this or do a HELOC or do something. And you could use that equity to go buy another deal if that's what you really want to do. I think a good— if you're just brokering to broker, you might not want to offer that advice. You don't want to— not a smart— I've lost several commissions over that, but I believe that I'm a relationship guy and I believe that if we always look out for our people, we look out for our clients, that comes back to us. They, that builds trust. I feel like I treat my clients like they're my partners. And then what's ended up happening over time is some of my clients have become my partners because they trust me and I'm part of their team and I'm helping them make decisions rather than just through the lens of I need to get a deal closed so that I can get a commission. I think about more about their needs and what they need in their portfolio and where they're trying to move their goals to. And that's, it's worked for me. It's the long game. So in the short term, I might've screwed myself over a little bit and had a couple of slower years than I should have had. But over time, I think that it all comes back.

Yeah, that's how I was taught in my various kind of journey with mentors. So how do we get over that, like that faux pas, that uncomfortableness of asking why? Is it just, how do you, is there any tips on that? Because you're totally right.

And how do we get over that? I think it's a mindset. I think if you're thinking in your mind that I'm being very nosy and asking something that I shouldn't be asking, then you're going to come from a different angle than if you look at it from, I'm being helpful and caring, and I'm really, I'm really wanting to know what your plans are so that I can help you. Because you'll have somebody that says they want to sell and you go, okay, what are you going to do with the money? I don't know. Are you going to do a 1031? I thought about it. Are you going to pay taxes? Maybe I'll just pay taxes. Okay. Well, have you talked to your CPA? No. There's a phone call to make because when you find out how much you're going to pay in taxes, I can almost guarantee you, for those of you that are out there that have sellers that want to sell and just pay taxes, if they don't know what that tax bill is, we've had deals fall apart before they ever got started because they found out how much the tax bill was going to be and they're like, that doesn't work. Right. And so they may think they're going to sell and pay taxes, but when they find out how much exposure they have, That's off the table. So I would say everybody, everybody is wired different. Everybody's different. I have brokers that are very transactional that are all about spreadsheets and numbers, and it's harder for them to ask that question than it is for our relational brokers like myself, because they're not, they're not trying to get in somebody's business for lack of a better term. And that's what I like to do is I like to be intimate. I like to find out what's really going on and find out what they're planning to do so that I can do the best job that I possibly can. If it all just comes down to numbers, there are probably transactional brokers that sell more real estate than I do just because they're working the numbers. But I, it's amazing how many people you talk to when you call 'em up and go, hey, I see your new listing. I think this is great. I've got a buyer for it, or I might wanna buy it. What are your sellers doing? What are they thinking about doing? And I can't tell you how many brokers just go, I have no idea. I've never even asked. Besides, if you're a broker and you want to, and they are going to try to 1031 and do another deal, don't you want to try to sell them the next one and get commissions and earn on one? I mean, I think that would be something that you want to ask, right? So anyway, I think that maybe it just comes down to a mindset of understanding that when you're asking personal questions, it's not being nosy. It's just trying to serve your client. And even if you're the buyer and they're the seller, We try to always give our seller what it is they want out of the deal. At the end of the day, if a buyer doesn't get what they want and a seller doesn't get what they want, the deal doesn't happen. So then you may have to find some middle ground to help make that happen. But you really need to know what the seller needs out of the deal. That's to me where the whole deal starts, because they're the ones that have triggered this activity that now we're going to go out and try to Transact a deal. Okay.

This is going to sound silly, but to me, and I've been studying sales, right? So I just, I feel like when I think of it more of like, how can I serve someone versus how can I sell them? And that's just like understanding where they're trying to get to. And by asking the questions, you can serve them better because you understand their goals, right? Is it like selling on a note or whatever it is? And I feel like we can be more creative when we understand what they're looking to do. I don't know.

So I actually was Cardone certified. I don't know if Grant Cardone, but he's a big real estate guy now, but he, one of the ways he made money and that, and people love or hate Grant and that's fine. But he, he back, back in the day, and I think still today they had training systems and I don't even know that he developed these training systems or not, but they put, they plugged his name in there. I became a Cardone Certified Trainer, sales trainer. One of the things that I would teach my salespeople is that, that selling is not telling. See, a lot of people think that it's all about, you want to buy something. It's, it's like the, it's, you interview a salesperson and they go, sell me a pen. Right? And the first thing somebody does with a pen is they go, wow, this is the best pen I've ever seen. It'll, it'll write for 100 years. You can hold it upside down underwater, or you can, you know, it'll shoot fire. It'll do, you know, it'll do whatever amazing things that this pen does. And that's the first reaction somebody has when they think of the word sell, but selling really is just asking questions and listening and stopping and letting the other person tell you what it is they need. And ultimately you take those questions and you, then you let them sell themselves. So the first question, if you, if Shona, you said, Gabe, sell me this pen, I would say, Shona, Are you in the market for a pen? How long have you been looking? What other kind of pens have you seen that you like? What kind of pen are you currently using? What are you gonna use this pen for? Is it for fun or is it for work? How long do you expect the life of the pen to be when you buy a pen? What's your budget for this pen? Are you looking for something that's super high-end or you want something that's just gonna last for a couple weeks and we'll get you another one? I think that it comes down to, I'm gonna dig into your brain for a little bit and figure out why in the hell you wanna buy a pen to begin with. Right. And then from there we can talk about, oh, now that I know what you're looking for, now I can, I have the pen right here that meets, matches, it ticks all the boxes of everything you just told me. You'll go, yeah, that's the pen I want. You'll buy it. I never had to sell you and do some big crazy magic show to tell you why you buy a certain pen. You gave me all the answers. You did my job for me, right?

Yeah. Okay. So I, that's what I think when we're new, right? And I used to feel this way. It's scary talking to seller, but when you flip that script and you're just trying to figure out what they're looking to do, how can you help them? I feel like that's a mindset shift or something.

Yeah. Get to really learn about them and what their, what are their goals? What are they trying? And you know, what's funny is some people don't know. You have to help them understand. I've had a lot of people that I've worked with and they're just, you have to bring it out of them because they're making a move and they're not exactly sure why they're making that move or what the best move is to make. So we truly are advisors. We're like therapists in a way, right? I mean, it, a lot of what we do is just talking to people and figuring out what it is they're trying to accomplish in their lives and real estate. Is a terrific wealth-building tool. I, in my opinion, it's the greatest wealth-building tool in the history of man. The problem with real estate is you build a lot of wealth and then it's a hard decision on how to extract that wealth. Because if you sell, you're going to pay all these taxes. If I carry a contract, now I become a lender and I take on a new kind of risk that I, that maybe I'm not comfortable with. Or maybe I am right. Like, what are the things I'm going to do? A lot of people, sadly, they just die and leave their real estate to their heirs. The heirs get a stepped-up basis. They sell the property and they take a big lump sum with no understanding of what it took for mom or dad or whoever to build that portfolio and grow that amount of equity. And that person dies and doesn't get a chance to enjoy the fruits of their labor. And so it's, it just doesn't have a lot of great exit strategies. That's why the 1031 is so popular because people will trade and trade. But once you get to a certain stage in life, you may not want to take on more debt. You may not want to go fight for a new deal and 1031 and go get yourself into a property that might be a problematic property when the one that you have now is just fine. And so people end up sitting on a lot of equity and their return on that equity isn't really what it should be if they were working their portfolio correctly. So there's a number of ways that you can solve that problem, but we can talk about some of that stuff later if you want. I know you want to dig into other stuff.

No, I love that. But I guess my favorite way to buy is, you know, I haven't done what you've done. I'm not, I'm, but like involving the seller in some form of the financing. And I think part of that is understanding where they're trying to get to. So my coach would always, sale, I forget how he put it, but involved the seller in some form. And I think, I don't know, I think that's a really a win-win, right? Because they're getting past mailbox money. And so I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on that.

Yeah. My number one rule is always keep the seller in the deal. We always try to keep the seller in the deal however we can. And so whether that's we're doing a seller carry loan or maybe they're doing carrying in the side note for us. Or we're bringing them into the deal as a limited partner, as equity. They still get to own a piece of that deal. I've bought buildings where the partner— there was multiple partners. One of the partners, it was Freen-Claire Building. One of the partners owned 25% and I kept him in the deal, went to the bank and I was able to get a loan with no money down to buy it. And I left that partner in the deal with his equity. And I was able to own 75% of the deal. And now my partner is not burdened by my debt. And so he gets his cash flow just like he always would, like the building's owned free and clear. And I make payments on the building and I get to own 75% of the building and the future upside in value and all the other stuff. Simple stuff like that. There are times where sellers want to sell, but they don't need all the money. They need some of the money. And there's ways to keep them in the deal as equity. That as one of the SMI companies is called SMI Fund Management. We do a, have you ever heard of a 721 exchange?

Not until I listened to some of your content.

Perfect. Okay. That was just new. We didn't invent it, but we're pioneering this idea. In the IRS tax code 721, it talks about how you can exchange shares or exchange equity in your building for shares of a fund, a real estate fund. And so we have clients, for lack of a better word, coming to us that own real estate. They no longer want— they don't want to try to do a 1031. They don't want to refinance and take on more debt. They're trying to figure out how to extract that equity out and live a, live a better life and have more money in their pocket. And we exchange, we let them bring their property into our fund. And now instead of owning that one building, Now they get to own a portion of a much larger portfolio. That portfolio grows over time and they pick up more depreciation and appreciation and cash flow. And it's a really amazing thing because they don't have to manage their property anymore. They don't have to take on the liability of debt. They don't have to take on the tort liability of getting sued. And so they get to take away the things that they don't like about real estate and they get to keep all the things they like. And there's just this economies of scale thing that happens in real estate where I've, I started with a duplex and more recently we've been buying bigger projects, 60 units, 100 units plus. And when you look at the way you can throttle the forced appreciation into those, and by forced appreciation, we're not just waiting for the market to get there. We know when we come in with a business plan that we can lower the expenses or raise the rents and get more net income out of that property. And the way you can do that on 100 units is just, it's a huge multiple than when you buy a duplex or even a 25 or 50 unit complex. So it's totally a numbers game. You get better debt, you get better management fees, you get like, you can just operate these things on lower expense ratios. And you can make the value of them go up much faster than you can on smaller properties. So for these folks that are coming in with us, we can bring in a duplex or a fourplex or a 20-plex or whatever. And then immediately we can decide with that, should we sell it 1031 into a bigger asset, or should we refinance and pull some cash out from that asset and go do another deal? And we can start to move those puzzle pieces around to where you're benefiting from our efforts, because we're just living in real estate all day, every day. And we're pooling everybody's resources to be able to go out so that maybe you on your own might not get into a 100+ unit complex, but in a very short period of time, we can take your asset and pull it in and we can turn it into a 100+ unit complex.

I mean, that scale and that leverage that you— because how do you get it out otherwise? I feel like when I— 1031, it's another headache often, or people in their 70s and 80s and why would they want Right.

You know, when you're older, you're thinking like, what am I going to do? I'm going to go fight everybody else for a good deal, which is hard to do. I got to lighten that up with the sale of my property, which let's just face it, I've brokered a lot of deals and there's just drama in every single one. There's just something that goes sideways once or twice or 5 times sometimes in these deals. They terminate out, like it's not, you put a house under contract and probably 9 times out of 10, you get to the finish line. It's like, people that are in residential, they don't understand when we talk about in commercial that 50% of our contracts fail because they're all subject to inspection. They're subject to due diligence, subject to the loan, subject to appraisal, subject to all these things. And, and deals just fall out left and right. It's not like a house where you go under contract and you're almost guaranteed that in 30, 45 days you're gonna get a commission check.

Okay. Yeah, that's a lot. With scale comes complexity.

It is more complex. There is no doubt. And the, and what really separates commercial from residential, I think the main thing is the lending. And so in residential, 1 to 4 unit, you're dealing with a lender that's really underwriting based on the ability to repay from the borrower. Whereas when you move into commercial, especially the larger commercial, it's really focused on the asset and can the asset perform? Because they know if I go borrow $20 million on a building, they're not looking at my credit score and go, oh, building can't make the payment. Can Gabe make the payment? You know what I'm saying? And so it becomes very much more asset heavy when it comes to their underwriting. It also makes it a lot easier once you have the experience to borrow and you've been a good operator. Commercial money theoretically is a lot easier to get in the process is even easier than a residential loan. Residential loans are the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life, but especially right now. I mean, it is like they, you're treated like a criminal almost where they want your firstborn and they want you to, you know, sell your soul. And, uh, commercial can, is really hard too. It's not easy necessarily. But I would say that one, as you grow and you start to build a base and you show that you have a resume where you've owned some properties, managed some properties, and you've been successful, it starts to get a lot easier to get into commercial debt. And then those commercial loans, if you went back and then went and bought a house, buying that house, the loan is going to be harder than buying your next 20-unit apartment complex. It's, it's insane. The reason for that is, is there's just so much government oversight on a residential loan because it's more, it's a consumer product. Once you get into commercial, they figure, okay, you guys are sharp and sophisticated and they probably don't even understand it as much as we do. And so they're not really trying to protect anybody, if that makes sense. There's the, it's like, you guys are on your own. You're all sophisticated. Financial wizard, you go figure out your own loans. And there are some disclosures and other things that have to go in there, but it's a commercial file. I can sell a $25 million building and the file is about that thick. You do a residential deal and it's like, what just happened here? It is ridiculous how many things you have to sign when you do a residential deal.

Yeah. Okay. That, I love that kind of segue. I do want to tie, I know that the, what to me, I mean, we all, the beautiful thing about real estate is wealth and leverage and especially getting into a property with none of your own money. Oh, I'd love to hear you kind, I know you talk about that because I think we need all this money. I used to think that, right? That you needed to have all the, because we started very traditionally, right? 20%. And I've learned so much else, but I think that's, is it mindset or how do we get over that? Is it just strategy or a mentor?

It's all the above. So I think that if you come from that position of I'll never be able to buy real estate because I don't have enough money, think of how much money you have to make even to go buy a duplex in today's world. You're going to have to go make a few hundred grand, pay taxes on it, and then go put it as a down payment to buy a duplex. So people think, how do you buy hundreds of units? Of apartment, how would this even work? And I think you have to get out of that mindset that I'm going to go earn money, pay taxes, and then park it into an asset. There are a lot of ways that you can get into deals. I'll tell you why leverage is my favorite part of real estate. If you take, let's say you and I, we go buy a million-dollar building and we pay cash for it. We're going to have to make that building worth $2 million before we double our money. If we can buy that same deal, let's say on a seller carry contract and they only make us put 10% down. So we put $100,000 down to buy the million-dollar building. We only have to make that building worth $1.1 million and we've doubled our money. You tracking?

Yep.

So now we buy a million-dollar building and we do it all with other people's money. We have none of our own money in there. The day we make $1, it's an infinite return. You'll break your spreadsheet. Your smoke will come outta your computer. It'll just blow up. It doesn't even know what to do with that one. So the idea here is that real estate's very unique because you can leverage in and leveraging into other asset types like the stock market is really more like gambling. I'm not gonna go buy $1,000 worth of shares of Apple on my credit card. It's just, to me, that is, it's rolling the dice. But in real estate, you got a hard asset and there are problems with leverage. It can create issues. It's riskier in a way because if the value drops or you have to do a refinance or the building needs a roof or it has a heavy turnover, you're going to be writing those checks out of pocket. So one of my sayings is you should always pay the down payment late. What I mean by that is you should take the highest leverage you can get into the deal, And then you should fix up the property with your own cash because it's not going to pay for itself because you're too highly levered. And I think that this is one of the mindset shifts, which is the first thing that you talked about, is that people really hate the thought of owning a property that you're going to have to write a check to down the road. Like just, it's just do it. I just can't do it. But if you really think about it, if you had to put 20% down on that million-dollar building, you already had to write a $200,000 check. Now imagine how mad you're going to be when you got to write another $100,000 check to put a roof on it because it still doesn't pay for a new roof, right? It's just, you've built in protections for the bank and maybe for yourself too. And you got to be really careful with leverage, but it's a, super powerful tool in real estate because you can do, you can do master lease with option to purchase. You can do land sale contract. You can bring people in as equity partners. You can do preferred equity. You can do all sorts of things. We, one of the ways that we buy deals all the time is we'll find a deal that we feel is undervalued and we write a business plan. We call it an executive summary. We say, hey, you're selling this building for a million. We believe with, you, we change ABCD, it'll be worth $1.5 million. We take that plan to our private money lender and we go, look, we've got a building right here. If we can flip the switch on, we can make it worth this. And they'll just give us all the money to buy the deal. We don't have to talk. We might have to pay 12% interest, but we can buy the deal without any of our own capital going in. Then we go in as good operators. We clean the place up, raise the rents, do what we're going to do to get the value that we need, get a new appraisal, and we refinance out. It's almost just like a construction loan or something like that.

That's such an unlock, right? And I think we don't— so is that like a year or two or how long are you generally in?

Yeah, normally these hard money lenders or private lenders typically want to be— they're Band-Aid money, so they want to be paid off. Typically in 1 to 2 years, something like that. So it's gotta be a pretty short timeframe. But there are other ways to do it. I love, I personally love seller carry financing. And even in some cases we've had notes with sellers where we've moved those notes around to other properties because people, what's interesting is a lot of times people want their price. They want to get out of the day-to-day of operating their property, but the reality is they don't really want to pay a lot in taxes and they don't really have a use for all that money. There's some stat that our CEO of the SMI Fund Management Company is a guy named Logan DeVos, who you should have on here one day. He's the most brilliant real estate mind I've ever met. And there's some stat that he throws out that it's 81% of people that sell a property don't need all the money that comes from the property. So if you're already identified a 1031 property that you want to roll into, maybe you need all of that money to go into that next deal. But the reality is that usually there's a multitude of reasons why you're selling. Maybe I don't want to do— maybe I'm just tired of that property or I don't want to manage it anymore. Maybe I do want a little bit of money. I want to go buy a sailboat or I want to go buy this other, you know what, whatever the case may be. Right. Everybody's got their own reasons. And that's why you ask them what they're going to do with the money. A lot of times there's a certain amount of money in there where you could actually mitigate some of their tax exposure. And if you could keep them in the deal in maybe second position, if your lender would allow it or find other creative ways for them to give you a HELOC or a credit line off to the side. It's something that's not easy to do when you get started because you don't really have a track record. Once you have enough net worth and you can sign a personal guarantee, for me, people are more likely to say, oh sure, I may not do that for anybody, but I would do it for Gabe. And so as you get bigger and bigger, this gets easier and easier and you're able to start finagling it around. So we'll look at every single deal and there are some deals where we'll go, okay, we have to put a certain amount of our own money in. And then the question is, when are we going to be able to get that money back? And, but if you can do a deal where you're using very little or none of your own money going in, now you don't really have to worry about that. Now what you have to worry about is how do I force that appreciation into that deal and operate it in a way to where I get the value that I need? Because if I buy a deal 100% levered today and I can drive the value up 50%, I don't have high leverage anymore. It's not like that's a thought process a lot of people have is, oh, you bought it high leverage, you're very risky. It's not really because it's only risky if I had no idea how to make it worth more money. Because now I just always own this thing and I'm always buried in it. I just, I owe on it what it's worth forever and ever. And that's just not the way real estate works. The way real estate does work is through cap rates. And if you don't understand cap rates, they're basically just a multiple like you see on the stock market where they say this trades at a 25 times multiple or 30 times multiple of income and things like that. Cap rate is the same exact thing. Don't get confused. Don't think that this is some crazy concept that you can't understand because it's not. We try to make it hard. It's not. It's super easy. So all you have to do is take the net income of a property, take how much property brings in, take out the bills, and that's your net income. We call it net operating income, NOI. You take that and you put it up against the cap rate. So cap rates usually range in our market depending on the asset type from like 5% to 7%, let's say, right? Let's call it 6% just because that's an average, right? You take NOI and the way you figure out that there, it's like a three-sided triangle. So there's the value, there's the cap rate, and there's the NOI. There's the income. We call it IRV, income rate value. Okay. And I can't draw on my screen or I would draw it for you. Okay. So you take that and You take the net income and you divide it. If you want to say, call it a six cap, divide it by 0.06. So you can do this on, you can do this on your calculator right now. We'll take $100. Okay. My, oh, I'm reversed. $100. And then let's multiply it by 12, because that will be for the year. 12 months. We add $100 in net value to the property. In a month, and then we multiply that by 12 months is $1,200. Simple math. Then you just divide it by 0.06. It's like this.

Hmm.

And the number is $20,000. Okay. This is the magic of commercial real estate. When I talk about forced appreciation, you got to grasp this concept. All we have to do is make the net income of that property go up $100 and we just made $20 grand.

That is, it's magic.

It's, that's essentially like a 5 cap would be like a 20x multiple, 20 times multiplier, right? Because 5 times 20 is 100. I don't know what 6 is, but you can do the math on it. So that's all that it really is. So when we're talking about we can force appreciation, imagine now that I go buy a 100-unit complex, which I've done, and the rents were $1,000, which they were, and we were able to raise the rents to $2,000, which we did. Think about that. That's $200,000 times 100. The next thing that's cool about this is if you're in a commercial asset, you're doing retail, office, and things like that. The way an appraiser will look at that deal is they'll want to see your entire rent roll before they decide what your net income, what your projected net income is going to be. They won't give you any sort of pro forma number where they go, you lease this space over here for $5,000 and this one over here is only $3,000, but we're going to count it as $5,000 because the other one is $5,000. They make you almost like 95+% have the rent roll where it needs to be before they give you that value. On a multifamily, what happens, and even probably a mobile home park and some other asset types, self-storage, is you only have to have a percentage of that rent roll achieve the market rate. And in really good times, like 2 or 3 years ago, they would only make us get like 15% of our rent roll to that number, and it would already appraise like already 100% of those rents had achieved market rent.

I didn't know that. That's crazy.

So what ends up happening is you go into this and you can very quickly, if you can turn over 15 to 25% of your project and get them to the market rents, now you can drive that value all the way up and you immediately can go out, do a refi or raise capital through selling shares or whatever it is you're trying to do. To recapitalize and get money back in so that you can recycle and go back in, into your own deal. That's the thing about any portfolio that you're building is the cash is the lifeblood that keeps everything going. You have to have it in order to keep the operation going, but cash isn't really the goal. It's not the ultimate goal is just to stack up bank accounts full of as much cash as possible, which is what I thought I was doing when I started. That's— I thought, this is going to be awesome. I'm going to try to collect in life money. I realized, oh no, that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to stack assets. We're trying to get as many assets as we can. It's like the golden goose. Like, you're not looking for the egg, you're looking for the goose. You want the goose, not the egg. Really, commercial real estate is The currency of the wealthy. It's what they, you know, you've heard about recently in the news, everybody's talking about Elon Musk and how, you know, he doesn't pay taxes and this and that. Recently he talked about, he's supposedly the richest guy in the world because he owns stock in SpaceX and Tesla and all the other stuff. If his businesses went under, he says he would be worth zero. That's where all the wealth is. It's in stocks. He says he keeps less than $1 million in cash. So the richest guy in the world keeps less than $1 million in cash. This will, this is a visualization for all of us, because this is how real estate works. I know people that are, that have $200 million net worths. They keep less than $2 or $3 million in cash because cash is going down in value. They're printing cash or through inflation. That's just, our money is just going down in value. They're devaluing the currency, which is why you want to hold the asset. And we can get, we can get off on a tangent on money creation and all that sort of thing. But at the end of the day, Musk is talking about basically like he doesn't hold a lot of cash, probably because he doesn't need it, right? His businesses are paying for the jet and for whatever else he needs. And decides that he lives in a box in the parking lot or whatever he does, he, it is what it is. But when Musk decides he wants to buy Twitter and he needs $40 billion, he needs, he doesn't have it in his bank account. So what does he do? He goes and he borrows against his assets. When you borrow that money against your assets, whether it's Elon or it's Musk, you don't pay taxes. Because it's debt. It's not a taxable event. And so if you're somebody that's at the age and in a cycle where you're comfortable with debt, which I believe there's good debt and bad debt, you've read Rich Dad Poor Dad. Debt is obviously consumer debt, credit cards, car loans, even your house might even be bad debt in some ways.

Mm-hmm.

The reality is you're taking on debt and you're buying things you really can't afford, and that's why you're taking on the debt. That's bad debt. When you're borrowing money to buy things that make you money, that's good debt. So if I own a building and it's worth $10 million and I make it worth $20 million, and I decide that I want to go out and borrow $5 million against it to go buy more buildings or do whatever I want to do, I can borrow that $5 million against that building. No tax, zero, because it's just debt against that building and I can put $5 million in my pocket tax-free. This is amazing that when we talk about the magic of real estate, this is how it happens. You've heard of the BRRRR method and all that, right? Where, you know, really what you're doing is you're parking your own cash and trying to get it back out as possible. That's the goal. But there are other ways to do this to where you bring in investor money or you bring in— we did a deal recently where we had a partner come in, we needed, we were short $1 million to do a deal. We brought in a partner and we just gave him half the deal and he put the money in. He gets to own the deal with us. We run the deal. It wasn't even really a syndication. We just partnered with somebody who had the cash that we didn't have at the time to do that particular deal. And we're all going to make a bunch of money on it. We didn't have to bring our own cash and park it into that asset. To finish the thought process on this, I learned this all from my mentor, Paul Curley, who Pruckeys, try to get him on the show also. He's a hoot. The concept is if I go out and I make a bunch of money and it's income and I pay tax on it. Now I've made, like we were talking about, I make $300 grand. I pay whatever I pay in taxes. Let's call it $100 grand. I don't know if it'd be that much, but now I have $200 grand. So I've already handed off to the IRS. $100,000. I've got $200,000 left over. Now I'm going to go park it in an asset that's illiquid. The only way I can get that money back is if I refinance at some point down the road when it has more value, or if I sell it, and then I'm going to have sale costs and all the other stuff that go in there. So I'm taking my hard-earned money that I've made and I'm parking it somewhere where I can't touch it. That's okay. It's one, it's, it is one way to do it. Better way to do it is to find a way to go into that deal without your money or as little of it as possible. If you think about this, if I can buy that same deal and I park none of my money, I may still have my $200 grand sitting here. I call that a war chest. Now I go buy this deal and I have this money so that, hey, We've got a big turnover. It's going to be $20,000.

Okay.

And write a check, $20,000. Hey, we got, it needs a roof. It's going to be $50,000. Okay. Or I can write a check for $50,000. The difference being is when I write those checks for the capital improvements, which you'll hear us call CapEx, makes us sound fancy. We're doing CapEx on the building, or maybe it's just bleeding. Maybe it just doesn't produce enough income to make the payments and everything, and we just have to feed it. The difference is here is as I'm feeding that building, I'm getting a tax write-off. So whereas in scenario A, where I'm paying taxes and then I'm parking all of my cash into a deal where I can't get it out, now I'll still have my money. And every time I write a check to that building, I get to write off That, that expense. Do you see where that? Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So when I say pay the down payment late, that's what I'm talking about. Don't, if you can try to protect that $200 grand, you still need money to do real estate. Like people who think that they're not going to need any money, it better at least have a partner or somebody that's got money. Cause if you don't have access to money or any income or some assets or something that you can liquidate, like. You're going to have to have money one way or another, whether you're, even if you're putting the down payment, you're still going to have things that go wrong. You're going to need money for. So this is not necessarily a zero money game. It's what I like to call a zero money down. Okay. And what's very, I don't know who your audience is, if they're mostly in investing or if they're brokering or who's listening. But if you happen to be able to file your tax return as a real estate professional, this is the only way in the United States that you can— you understand depreciation write-offs, all the stuff, right? You need to write off all of those expenses. Your buildings are depreciating over time. Commercial building is 39 years. A residential building is 27.5 years. I don't know who came up with that. He doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but somebody made sense of it somewhere, right? So you buy these buildings. What happens is the IRS says that building's useful life is going down every single year for the next 27.5 or 39 years, right? So you take the number you bought it for, let's say we bought a $27.5 million building and we can depreciate that over 27.5 years. We would get to write off $1 million a year in loss, depreciation loss. Even though we didn't actually lose $1 million, the IRS lets us write it off. It's like a phantom loss. We actually call it phantom income because they let, they figure at some point, by the time you get to 27.5 years, you're going to have to rebuild that whole building because it's not going to have any more useful life left in it. So cool thing. Is if you've got a, let's say we made $500,000 on this building last year, net, we netted $500 grand. We had a good year, but we had a million dollars in depreciation. Number one, we don't have to pay taxes on the $500 grand we just made. The IRS just let us make a half a million dollars and not pay taxes. More magic. But again, if you're a normal citizen and you're working a W-2 or you own another business, that's really not related to real estate, depending on your income, you can write off a little bit of your income also that spills over. Like maybe you can write off another $50,000 of your income that you made from your job or from your business, which is really cool. But what's even better is if you're a real estate professional and you can, and I'm not a tax attorney or an accountant or a CPA. Go look all this stuff up and don't believe anything I say. I'm just a car salesman, but this is the way, this is the way that I understand it. If you're, and I file as a real estate professional, so I'm in the real estate business. I'm a broker, I'm a manager, syndicator. The majority of my income comes from real estate related activities. And so I file as a real estate professional. So what happens is if we have that extra $500,000 left over in depreciation on this building, it'll cover all $500 grand, can cover my other income from real estate brokerage, management, whatever, because I'm a real estate professional. It's the only profession in the United States where you can make as much money as you want and you don't have to pay taxes as long as you own enough buildings. And the reason they do that is because They're partnering with us. If you read the IRS tax code, which is a very boring thing to read, the basic gist of it is, and I've never read it by the way, so this, but this is what I'm told, is that what they're really trying to do in my layman terms is they want us to own buildings and they want us to own commercial and residential building, and they want us to own businesses because they want us to provide jobs. To W-2 workers who pay taxes. They provide a building for those businesses to go to provide jobs for W-2 workers. Plus those businesses are paying taxes and they want us to provide residences for those workers to be able to live so they can go to those buildings and work and pay taxes and the business can pay taxes. And so they're partnering with us, the pub— The public government space is partnering with us, the private individual, to go do what they cannot do efficiently, and that is to buy and own and operate businesses and buildings.

That's the game, right?

And I, yeah, that's, that was a very Hey, so, you know, they talk, Kiyosaki talks about this in Rich Dad Poor Dad chapter 1. He says that the rich are no smarter than you. They just play by a different set of rules. And everybody gets mad now today. Oh, that rich guy doesn't pay taxes. Well, everybody gets pissed off about it. It's like, but that's the way they wrote it. That rich guy is doing something that they wanted him to do. And so that's how he's incentivized to do it. By not paying taxes. And you guys know, like, making money is half the battle. The other half of the battle is keeping the government from dipping their hand in your pocket and taking your hard-earned money. Yeah, sure. We all— we're all upstanding citizens. We pay our taxes, we do whatever we do. But you don't want to pay more than your fair share. You want to pay as little as possible. And so when you operate in a way that is something that you're— where you're partnering with the public space and you're doing what they want you to do, you can actually get out of paying taxes. And then you hear about these people and they're worth tons and tons of money. They own lots and lots of buildings and they don't pay taxes. So if you can go buy buildings with very little or no money out of your pocket, and then you can keep those buildings going because you have a business or you have income to where you can actually support when something needs to happen on one of those buildings. Now, the most sexy thing that happens in real estate is that depreciation. If you're really— it's the last thing people think about when they think about real estate. I think most people want cash flow. It's like, I want to buy something, I'm gonna get a payday every month. So they work my butt off and I got extra money. And that's a great reason to own real estate, having cash flow. But when you look at the other economic benefits, you've got cash flow, you've got your loan buydown, your tenants are paying off your loan for you. You got appreciation, which we just talked about. Over time, the money goes down in value, which means your building's going up in value. And then you got forced appreciation. We talked about driving that net income up so that through a cap rate, you have a lot more wealth. And then to me, the one thing that I could have cared less about when I got into real estate was depreciation. And today that's my favorite part because now I can go out and I can use my businesses and I can make income and I can use that depreciation, cover it up so that I don't have to pay taxes.

So we all need to buy real estate. Why doesn't everyone buy? That's my, that's why I do this. Like I want people to own assets, but if people are so afraid of all of the things, but there's so much benefit.

It's not for everybody, right? Yeah. And it's a, it can be a scary thing. Like owning a building can be a scary thing. You can buy a rental house or a duplex or something and it could probably wipe you out. Like there you got, I think It— fear always comes from a lack of knowledge.

Mm-hmm.

And so if you don't understand, and I will say this for myself, I don't own a single piece of real estate by myself. I still have enough fear about real estate that I don't go out and buy deals by myself. I have partners in every single building that I own, and I own a lot of buildings, but I bring on partners that are smarter than me. They're young, they're bright, they're wealthy, they know what they're doing, they're hungry. And I've taken on bad partners. I, to me, my favorite part of real estate is partners. And I wouldn't be where I'm at today without my partners, but I've also taken on a few bad partnerships that could have almost wiped me out. They were very stressful to be in. So it's super important if you're going to do the partner game that, you know, you set out and you find the right people that know more than you, that are, more successful than you. We'll, we partner with new investors all the time that bring us a deal and they go, hey Gabe, I want to do this deal. I found this sweet deal. You guys like the deal? And we're like, sure. We'll put them in the deal with us. We'll partner with anybody to come and do a deal. You just gotta bring something to the table and good partners. A good partner for us is somebody who just brings the deal because we have everything else. Right. If, if you're not bringing it to us though, you wanna make sure you got partners with that have the capital. You gotta have the money and you gotta have the wherewithal. So you gotta have some experience and they've gotta have some time to be able to help run that. And, and the more of those 3 things that partner has, the better of a partner they're gonna be. And so sometimes you just bring on a money partner and they're like, leave me alone. I don't care. I'll write you a check. And that's great. And then other times you have a partner who's really smart, but they don't have the capital to go into a deal. But they're willing to devote 5 days a week of their life to focusing on that deal and making sure that it runs properly. And so that's their portion. They're earning as part of that partnership is to run it. And then the other, the other part is just expertise. And so this is one of the reasons why people like to partner with me is because I've been around it a little while. I got a management company, got a brokerage, done a lot of deals on a lot of buildings. And so you bring a deal and oftentimes I'll look at the deal and go, yeah, it's not really a deal. But other times I'll look at a deal and I'll go, this could be a deal. We just, and most deals can be, if you can massage them correctly. Every, everybody gets hung up on price. They think if it's a low price, that's a really good deal. That's not necessarily the case, right? Like I would rather pay a high price and have somebody that wants to carry a contract for 100% of the financing than have a low price, unless it's a low enough price to where I can go to a hard money lender or something to be able to buy it. But at the end of the day, you're not going to be able to scale your portfolio and do what you want to do. If you're really going to get into this, you're going to have to learn another Kiyosaki term, OPM, use other people's money. He probably stole that from somewhere. You have to learn how to leverage people and assets in order to grow this portfolio and how to utilize money. It sounds sad, but my, in my portfolio, I don't really think about the buildings at all. I'm not super into buildings. I don't, I'm not in love with buildings. I'm not a guy that's, I would much rather go buy cool cars or something. Buildings are not like my favorite, my, my favorite thing in life. What ends up happening is it's about people, like we talked about earlier. I love people and I love the partnerships and when we win, I love to win together. When we lose, I love to write a smaller check and not a bigger check. You gotta make sure you're with partners that can write a check because that's where your partnerships go sideways when you get into a deal with somebody who doesn't have the means to help hold that project together. But what we do most of the time, I will say a majority of my efforts is just borrowing money. Real estate is a wonderful mechanism to borrow money. If you don't like to borrow money, don't get into real estate because that's really what we're doing. We are utilizing these assets that banks really like because they're there. They're permanent structures that generate an income that you can pretty easily figure out whether or not there's going to be a demand for people who want to use that building. Especially in multifamily, commercial, and things like that. You can study the market and understand that asset is going to always generate some form of income. And banks love to lend on that. Banks are in the business to lend you money. They want to make money lending you their money, right? But they want to do it with the best collateral that they can get back. And the best collateral they can get is having a hard asset that's generating an income. Because if you fall apart or die or something happens, they've still got an asset that can make that payment.

That— you dropped so many amazing things. I do just, as we wrap up, I've heard you say like your kind of motto, and I'd love to hear you just say that again, because clearly you're like amazingly successful, but you're— you, I think a lot of it is you're easy to be around, right? You're like, that's— you're a people person, right? So.

Make friends and have fun. I try to live my life by those two rules. I picked that up when I was in the car business, when I was training car salesmen. I was trying to figure out why can one guy sell cars and the other guy can't sell cars? And this is really what it's all about is it's not as easy as it sounds, by the way. Life throws a lot of different things at you. It's not easy to make friends with people, like being a good friend, you've got to care about people. And, uh, there's another saying that I, I really love that people, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And I think that if you're a people person and you truly love people and you're selfless and you're giving and you care and you're trying to do, in honestly, in your heart, you're trying to do something good for other people. I think it's really easy to make friends because you're looking out for them and you're trying to do what's best for them. To me, I just don't have fun if I'm not doing stuff with friends. I don't think, I think life is just too short to run around and just try to amass as much wealth as you possibly can. To me, that's just not rich and fulfilling. And I want to live a rich and fulfilling life. And at the end of my life, nobody's gonna go stand up and say, here's Gabe's risk of real estate. He bought buildings and everybody else, right? It's gonna come down to the relationships. It's gonna be my partners, my employees. It's gonna be, I believe, like any of the lives that I've touched and helped people maybe get their real estate business started or whatever the case may be. I honestly, I'm in recovery. I'm a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. I'm very open about that. And I spend a lot of time with people in recovery. And so I'm, I'm an open book. I want to help. I think that, I think having friends is awesome. And I think that it just makes life worth living. And so I try to carry that in through everything I do, whether it's my personal life, recovery, or in real estate. And it's just so much more rewarding to me to be able to pass some of that stuff on and see other people succeed. And in the end, it all comes back. I get, I want everybody to own more buildings. Some people call me the real estate preacher because I just, I'm really, I, when I find something that works for me, I just can't keep my mouth shut. I want everybody to do it. I don't want you to go do it because it's gonna somehow make it better for me. I just want you to go do it. I want everybody to be able to own more assets and everybody has a different idea of what kind of buildings they want to own and how many and how they want to structure it and if they want partners or not. And that's fine. But I think everybody really needs to be diligent about getting their name onto assets because that is what's going to build you the time freedom and the generational wealth that you're looking for. We can all go work for income and we can all make as much money as we want, but we're going to pay taxes and we're always going to work. We're never going to have that money working for us and have those assets working for us. And so I just am a firm believer that we all need to own assets, everybody. And even if it's just a couple of houses or a duplex or something like, just get started. Action is the only real measure of intelligence, Napoleon Hill says. And so you can listen to podcasts, you can read books, you can study, study, and all that stuff is really great. But at some point you're going to have to take the real lesson and that's doing it. And you will learn 10 times more than you will just listening to us talk about real estate. It's fun. It's really fun to talk about real estate, by the way. At some point you just got, you got to go out and you got to buy a deal. You got to go find a way. To buy a deal and it is very doable for everybody to get into real estate. So I would highly suggest that you get in and, and I think that everybody should do it. It's a wonderful thing. It's been life-changing for me and it'll be life-changing for you.

Mic drop. Thank you so much, Gabe. I know we're time, so thank you. That was, I always get inspired, but He just re— there's all the reasons why I love this.

Thanks for having me on. It was a lot of fun hanging out.

Yeah. I like chased you down at that event. I'm like, and then I had Dane on and he just, he was like singing your praises. So I'm like, yeah. Thank you. I know you're busy. You're like, I really appreciate it. How, if people wanna work with you guys, clearly you have amazing stuff going on. What's the best way to reach out, find you?

Yeah, I'm an email guy. Gabe@smire.com is my email address. And then if you had Dane on, Dane's a great guy to reach out to if you want to do a deal with us, which is dane@smire.com. We've got an asset group that we buy deals in and we're looking for partners and looking for people to bring us deals. Even if you're just trying to bring a deal, you want us to help you structure it or have questions about how to get into it. That's, I think that's the key takeaway is you don't have to do this alone. I love the real estate community that we've been part of and helped build. It's very collaborative and we're all working together to help each other. And so we don't necessarily have to get something out of helping you. We want you to be able to go buy buildings and run deals by us. You're looking to bring in, you, I don't know how to find the money to go do this deal, or I don't know how to structure this deal, or I don't even know if this is a deal. Yeah, I would ping Dane, D-A-N-E, D-A-N-E at SMIRE.com. That's, that would be the place I would first send deals, but you guys can always reach out to me as well too. And I'm happy to answer questions.

That is very generous. Thank you. Thanks again for coming on. This has been amazing and thank you. Really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me on, Shona.

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