Mastering Commercial Real Estate: Expert Strategies with Ben Reinberg

My advice to people in business, whether you're an entrepreneur, your employee, whatever, keep growing, keep learning. We're in technology age. Things are changing. AI is coming on the scene heavily. We are going to be a different world in the next 10 and 20 years. And you have to keep growing and evolving and you have to have that mindset if you're going to stay ahead of the curve in this world. Leverage will help you in everything with life. It will help you with your relationships, your personal relationships. It will help you in business, it will help you with revenue, it will help you with knowledge. Leverage is more powerful than money. I would have given my left arm if someone would have told me that in my 20s.

Guys, have you welcome the one and only Ben Reinberg. How are you doing, man?

I'm good, thank you. Appreciate being here and happy Tuesday.

Yeah, likewise, man. Look, I'm excited to talk to you. You know, I've got some commercial assets myself, and I've actually found that to be quite the lucrative little nest egg for me. If you, if you don't, you know, kind of, if you will. What do you think is holding most people back from actually getting into the commercial space versus residential versus, you know, storage units? Kind of why the commercial space is so beneficial.

Just to take a step back for most people, it's fear. It's. It's a complicated business, have to have a certain skill set. It's the unknown of I don't understand financial analysis, I don't understand numbers, I don't understand how the business works. But it's important. What they can do is take a different path than I did. I didn't really have a mentor when I started, but now with the Internet and all these thousands of coaches out there, and I'm actually looking into it as well because I've been asked a lot to mentor people. I do it for free my whole career. With kids in the business, yeah, sure, you and so what's interesting to me is that a lot of people have a fear of the unknown. I don't know what to do it. I don't have a balance sheet. I don't have money. But what they don't know is you can't get in without money. And there's different ways to do it. One, you find a mentor, you can go work for a company. I always advise people that are going to get in the business. This is what I would tell my kids, too, if they ever. They're never going to get my business because they don't want to, but if they did or any, you know, young man or woman out there. What I suggest is get into brokerage, get into investment sales. And people ask, well, why wouldn't I do what you did bed and get. Become a principal and start rolling and buying deals and become a landlord and build wealth in an empire. Why wouldn't I do what you did? Your path, and I'll tell you why. This is what I learned as I went through my process of my journey with my company Alliance Stephen, is that when you can look at more transactions, do more deals, get more knowledge, you'll increase your leverage of knowledge in the business. You'll speed up your learning curve, you'll shorten that learning curve you need to progress in this business. I didn't realize that. I mean, to me, I jumped in the water, the deep water, start swimming. It was great because I learned to be a principal and being a principal been phenomenal in the business. But if I was teaching someone, I would say get into brokerage, get into investment sales, and that will allow you see more deals, do more deals from a different point of view, learn how to underwrite and you can get into that biz and you can get into commercial real estate right away. That would be my suggestion.

Yeah, no, that's awesome. In fact, I was thinking through this. You know, one of the most difficult things I think to actually understand is how to use leverage to begin with. And for the audience and the viewers and listeners kind of watching and listening. Now, for those of you aren't familiar with the term leverage, it's a form of debt. So basically taking some debt, what do you think most especially early stage investors get wrong about debt? I know it scared the crap out of me. I've always been the pay cash kind of guy for a long time until, until some of the assets required me to, to finance something that I would put a large sum of money down, of course. But you know, what do you, what do you think most people get wrong about debt?

Well, what most people don't understand about debt is understanding how it really works and what's behind the debt and why banks and lenders are loaning money. And starting with the foundation of how banks and lenders and institutions make money lending, they don't want to take the property back. They want to see you successful because they want to see you meet your covenants, your debt service coverage and all these different terms could throw out there. But then day part of it is if you want to eliminate fear of debt. Debt is actually a really good thing. I don't Agree with Dave Ramsey. Okay. That's why my brand has been growing so strong, is because I look at things a lot different. I could appeal to the younger man or woman in business. I could appeal to the older people that are investors of ours. And the reason why is when you look at debt, debt is great leverage if you use it appropriately and wisely. Okay. And let's unpack. What I mean by that.

Yeah.

What I mean by that, Stephen, is you take on debt, but you don't over leverage an acquisition. Whether you're buying a company, whether you're buying a piece of real estate, whether in my business, commercial real estate, it's really important that you give yourself enough of a wide margin between what the value of that asset is. Okay. Whether it's a business or whatever you're acquiring piece of real estate and the amount of equity you have in that asset. Tom, why this is the perfect environment as the example. So we're, we're in a rising interest rate market. It might rise a little bit more. They're talking about lowering rates. I don't see it happening for a while. That's my view.

Yeah.

Let's just say we're in a rising interest rate markets and values drop. So if you put low leverage on acquisitions, let's say in our acquisitions at alliance, we put 60 loan to value on an asset. Say we're buying. Say, just to make it simple for your audience, let's say I'm buying a house. Okay. I'm not in that business. But let's say I'm buying a house for myself to live in.

Yeah.

So buying a house, I put low leverage on it. If I have to refinance in three years or two years and the market happens like what it's happening right now, that values are dropping, interest rates are rising and so I have to refinance it. If I put 80 or 90% leverage debt on the value of my house and I can't refinance it because the bank says, wait a minute, then the value is now that 80% that you originally put the mortgage on.

Yeah.

We're not getting involved with that because that's there's no equity in the house and if we have to take it back, it's going to cost us more money. It's not worth it.

Yeah.

So what we do in commercial real estate, and I tell this, and I preach this, is don't over leverage your properties. When I was a young man, I was in my late 20s, I took down a 300,000 square foot office Campus.

Okay.

I was young at the time. It was, it was 40 million bucks. It was a lot of money.

Yeah.

So I take down this deal, we put regular debt, we put mass debt on it. I was about, Gosh, I was about 85%. Okay.

Wow.

All of a sudden, one of Warren Buffett's tenants moves out of one of the floors of the office building. Okay. Value drops. Okay. Interest rates were rising too at the time. My values were upside down. I had to rework out the loan in order to the building. And it was very challenging at the time. And that taught me a lesson that I want to teach everyone listening is that don't over leverage your properties. Don't over leverage your assets. Give enough equity, have flexibility. Flexibility is the key to financing any asset. Because at the end of the day, especially in commercial real estate or any business you're in, whether you're buying equipment, I don't care what industry you're in. The ability to hold is so powerful because it allows you to ride through different econ. Economic cycles and allows you to continue in the industry. You want to. People ask me all the time, seem like, have you survived commercial real estate for 30 years? Like most people are in and out of it or they tried my brokerage, they don't like it. They don't. They're not passionate about the business. I understand the principal ability to hold. Okay. Whether building up reserves in our property, not over leveraging like the topic we're talking about now.

Yeah.

The little things that you do to preserve longevity in any industry you're in. I don't care which business you're in. The ability to hold is critical. You need to be conservative by doing that.

Yeah, no, I think that's great advice. 100%. You know, it's interesting. A good friend of mine, Brandon Fugal, does quite a bit of commercial real estate here in the city of Utah. And I was looking at buying a new live event facility. So I just really. I just exited a business I built over 25 years, relocated my entire life to Utah because I love it here. I just love staring at the mountains every morning kind of thing. And we also realized that the live event facility that we had in Raleigh would do very, very well here. You know, so a good friend of mine introduced Brandon and myself. We became friends as a result of that. And we were looking at different. We spent all our time running around the state of Utah looking at different properties and all kinds of stuff. And then we're having. We just stopped at a local Mexican restaurant, had and stopped to have lunch. And, you know, Brandon at times told me, so the land, the commercial landscape is changing. You know, it's. This was about six months ago, and he was. He was saying that the. There's a good chance that the commercial real estate market was going to take a significant hit in a certain amount. In a certain amount of asset classes. When I went to do some research again on your. Your excellent work, by the way, I realized that most of the things that you tend to invest in are in the medical space. And I'm curious to know. It seems like the medical space is a bit more insulated than the just straight office or conversion flex space. Was that strategic or is that something you stumbled your way into?

Everything we do is strategic. We do so much due diligence, Stephen, on everything we do. We put. So it's those quiet moments when no one's looking that we're putting in the work.

Yeah.

That no one wants to do. And it's because we want to protect our investors, protect our assets, protect our lenders. We have so many parties that rely on us. It's so critical to be a good fiduciary of our capital. Yeah. Part of that is doing your homework. And so when we develop a niche, you know, we're office industrial and retail experts. We're about to launch a new division of multifamily because we see a lot of opportunities coming in 2025 multifamily. Steven. What's really important is that for us, we look at it and we say, okay, well, at the time we decided to get into medical. I've been business alliance for about 30 years. And 20 years ago, we decided what also we could diversify into that produces stable cash flow, safe, secure, profitable investments.

Yeah.

And medical office was something I looked at and I said, well, the human body is never going out of style. Our tenants are going to pay rent, and we start really digging in to learn about the. About the assets. Now, Barack Obama was in office, and it was a little worrisome because he was talking about socialized medicine. We're worried we're healthcare. But I said, at the end of the day, you're still going to need medical facilities to our people in the United States. And so we doubled down and we got into it and we started with dialysis, and we grew to every single niche that you and your family would go see as a physician or a hospital or surgery center, whatever you name, that's what we own. Yes, we saw that niche, and it kept growing and growing and growing and it became dominant in our portfolio. So being an office industrial and retail expert, and I built 10 million square feet when I was earlier in my career of office industrial. So that was my life. And then we got into more retail and then to pivot 20 years ago into medical and keep growing that portfolio. And. And to be dominant in that space was a beautiful decision because for us, we said, no matter what economic cycle, pandemic, recession, I don't care what happens, you're going to have a high probability of tenant renewals, you have high probability of tenants paying rent and. And B, pay returns to your investors.

Yeah.

So for us, it's been an asset class that we like. And nine years ago, what happened? It spun off and we got into the veterinarian space.

Yeah.

Called me and said, ben, you know, have you looked at the veterinarian space? I said, no, I've been kind of on the outskirts looking. They said, you really need to look into this space. Great credit tenants. People are constantly growing their base of pets. I have two dogs in my house. And so I started seeing that. I started seeing the money that we are spending on pets now. I started hearing about people having reptiles and then learning about horses and cattle, and we start buying these different facilities, and it's just been tremendous. And so for us, even with our new fund, the Alliance Medical Fund, I mean, it consists of assets of not only veterinarian, but medical. Investors get great cash flow. So for me, I love medical because I look at it and everyone can really familiarize themselves with the properties we own, because all of us as human beings go see physicians. You know, you're going to the gastro or you have kids, and you were.

Absolutely integrated or insulated during COVID I mean, you were.

I mean, we. We collected. We collected our rents during COVID We had great tents. We were actually buying during COVID I mean, I remember it was nice because in Illinois, where our headquarters are, where I was living at the time, I'm from Chicago, we were a central business. So we're going in the office like a month, month and a half after Covid. I think, like after March, we went in. In May. But what was interesting, even when I was working from home, we were buying deals. We're aggressive, we're raising money, and we were flourishing during the pandemic. And I go back to look at medical office, and so I encourage investors, you know, if you want to invest passively or you want to learn about investing, medical office is wonderful because it's. It's just safe and steady. It's consistent cash flow. It's not ups and downs. It's. You know, one of the things that worries me about other asset classes that I've owned is you're susceptible to recessions, you're susceptible to rising interest rates, you're susceptible to government policies that change. You could be in multifamily in some of the states even. Yeah, I'm sure you've seen it even in Mountain west or in the Midwest or on the East Coast. You know, politics come into play and all these moratorium on evictions kill, are killing these landlords. Yeah, for me, I saw that and I said, okay, well we're in the right space and we're going to continue to double down. And what I love about the medical office space, which is really interesting to me is there's really a high barriers to entry. To become an expert, it takes years.

Yeah.

Understand the different niches, why they stay in a property, why business functions. Every single medical practice and niche within the medical industry operates differently. A dialysis tenant is different than a neurology tenant.

Yeah.

Hospital systems make decisions differently and they evolve over time. So you have to constantly be learning and you constantly have to be growing. And my advice to people in business, whether you're an entrepreneur, your employee, whatever, it doesn't matter. I say this to my own employees and my leadership team. Keep growing, keep learning. We're in a technology age. Things are changing. AI is coming on the scene heavily. I mean, we are, we are going to be a different world in the next 10 and 20 years and you have to keep growing and evolving and you have to have that mindset if you're going to stay ahead of the curve in this, in this world we're in.

Yeah, no, I 100 agree with that. You know, it's interesting, I was going to ask you about risk and we've been touching all about risk and we've, we've talked about the importance of being properly leveraged, not being overly leveraged. You know, we talked about the different asset classes and why some work, why some are a bit more risky than others. You know, when it comes down to your, your typical investor, let's say an entrepreneur just exited. Right. He's never, he's been so focused with his head down his prior business that he's never really looked into, you know, honestly investing in different areas, whether it be pna, P and E firms, family, office on and so forth.

He's never gone through the process or he or she's never gone through the process of Becoming an accredited investor, you know, what are the steps that person should take before they start to deploy capital that you know is liquid for them and do so in wisdom?

Well, you want to do some homework. You know, you want to. You want to start with the end outcome you want. Okay, so for me, I am. I'm conservative. I invest in all our deals. I invest in our funds because they're safe, secure, and they're profitable, and we diversify. So if you invest in the Alliance Medical fund, you'll have 20, 25 assets in that fund. So let's say, you know, an average commitment for investor in that fund is 250,000.

Yeah.

So let's say you were at 250,000. Well, that turned 50,000 is going to be over 20, 25 assets. And it's great diversification. It's all medical properties. Yeah, I like that for myself. So I look at what am I looking to achieve? Okay, so some people want to put money in Treasuries and maybe you can get 5%, 5.1, 4.9, depending on what bank you use and people like that. I do some diversification where I park some money in Treasuries and I diversify. So it depends how sophisticated you are. It depends how what you want to do. But what I suggest is I always like and advise people is diversify into commercial real estate. And I'll tell you why. Because of the tax benefits. So I invest in companies, I've invested in tech stuff that is like a black hole because I know hopefully I'm going to make money. I don't know if I am, but they say I'm going to make a lot of money. We'll see if it happens. But at least I know in commercial real estate, okay, what I do and what we offer to the public and what I love is, Steven, you can go kick the bricks and mortar of every single property, every asset that we own. That's full transparency. That's what I love about what we do is transparency, integrity, consistency and expertise. That's the core value of Alliance. Yeah. And because of that, that's why I invest. Because as an investor and I'm sitting on the same side of the table as my investors or anyone in the public. It's like, that's what I want. So how do people want to be treated? People want transparency, they want to be communicated with. They want expertise in a system and processes and a sponsor, and that's what I'm proud of, that we offer. Because that's what I want as an Investor, Yes. I always say, like diversify your capital. Okay. So if you're out there listening and you're just getting started investing and say you exit and say you have some capital is go slow, start off early. So I always tell investors like, I don't want $5 million of your money. Give me 50, give me 500. I'm going to show you how special we are at alliance and keep coming back because that's what investors do. We have investors for decades that have been investing with us. And I understand why because I, I'm living the same life as that. I'm doing what they're doing, I'm mirroring what they're doing.

Yeah.

So I like diversification. I love tax benefits. You know, when we have income on our property, Steven, we get depreciation, interest, expense and property taxes taken off the income. What that means out to everyone listening, okay. Is you know, if you're an investor and you're an investment, you get a K1. Your K1 in our deals are, let's say I paid you a dollar of income in a year. Okay. Now it's going to be a lot more. This is all for example, illustration purposes.

Easy.

Math is what we call math. I'm trying, let's keep it right. So I pay you a dollar for the year. Okay. In 2024. And on your K1 it might say, hey, it looked like you paid me 80 cents because of the tax benefits and the tax bracket you're in. So you're paying tax on $0.80 instead of the dollar. Yeah. And that is the most wonderful thing that our country has established is tax benefits for real estate, especially investment properties, so to speak, which real estate. So there's a lot of tax benefits. We get involved in 1031 tax free exchanges when we sell property for our investors.

I'm looking at right now as we speak.

There's so, so many fantastic opportunities with commercial real estate. So I love it because you can leverage losses. Sometimes we can create paper losses. Even though we paid you returns, we can create paper losses. And in a situation, a fund or an investment property, a syndication you're in, you can use those losses, net them against other passive income investments that you have to minimize your tax taxes to the federal government, state. So I'm also a cpa. Most people don't know that, but I don't practice. But I understand the tax laws and I constantly am educating myself on different tax advantages so we could pass them on to our investors. That's what I love about what we do. It's because it's sophisticated game, but it's also a way to mitigate taxes and also make money. I don't know. A lot of investments out there, maybe oil and gas has some benefits which are really good too. So what I say to people out there is open your eyes, ask questions. What I like to ask my best question, if I give anyone advice, if I'm investing with anyone. Okay. And includes Ben Reinberg. Alliance asked me this question because I've been asked, I can answer it with, with colors, is how do you solve problems? How do you challenge? That's the horse I'm betting on. Stephen.

Yeah.

In any environment, okay. Good, bad or indifferent, you know, I can pay you a preferred return payment, chips are down and things are tough. How do you guys deal with, deal with issues when someone asks our company Alliance. Well, we have 200 plus years of leadership, team experience. Yes. We've seen challenges. We're a solutionary oriented company and group of companies. And so I'd like to know how do you solve problems, how do you communicate? Because I want someone to tell me when things are bad in an investment. Not everything's going to work out as, as we plan, life changes, we have a terrorist attack, economies changes, interest rate changes, global wars. Things that just come out of the blue where all of a sudden, you know, Israel's being attacked by Iran. Things happen. Yeah. So we have to take a step back and know that you're going to have to audible, you're going to have to pivot as a sponsor. And so I always ask that question. So I ask people, if you're going to get involved with someone, ask them how do you solve challenges. People so focused on returns and this and that. The real track record litmus test to me is tell me about a deal that wasn't as great, that maybe went sideways and how did you manage it? How did you deal with it? That to me is the badge of courage of the person. I'm an investment because those are the people that are going to show up when time, you know, because tough, tough times don't last. Tough people.

That's right. That's right.

Really important. Yeah.

Well and I think the, the, the diversification approach, you guys have one.

How you look at le, how you look at debt and leverage debt on, on the behalf of your, your investors are all, are all really strong. You've got, you've been able to sustain great returns for your investors, which also tells me you guys are probably really good at optimizing cash flow on deals. Specifically, can you give us a little insight into some strategies and tips without giving away the secret sauce, of course, that it takes to kind of optimize cash flow on deals to get a better return for your investors? I'm sure, you know, there's a handful of our folks that would definitely be in the category of having the investable resources. And this is an. This is an asset class commercial in general that I like. I've got, you know, I've got commercial flex space that we use for a live event facility in Raleigh that I'm obviously getting to a 1031 exchange and buy something here in Utah as a result of that. It's something I'm still learning about. You know, I hadn't even thought about the medical. Medical side of commercial space until doing a little bit of research and trying to, you know, get ready for the show. And I was really excited by it. So I'm curious to know, kind of how do. How do you guys approach optimizing cash flow?

Well, the way to optimize cash flows, number one, is you have to build reserves. Okay. One of the things I'm extremely grateful and proud of my career at alliance is we've never asked for a capital and ever ambassador. Wow. And it's unheard of. And knock on wood, that never happens.

Well, before we go too much further, explain what a capital call is. I know what it is.

Capital is a lot of sponsors get into issues where they need money from their investors to again go back to leverage with debt. Okay. Value's not there. They need to inject more cash to pay off more of the loan in order to refinance. So they might do a capital call. They might lose a tenant in order to carry the property. Steven. They need to do a capital call. And a capital is just asking for money to be able to solve some sort of challenge going on. That's really what we're talking about, is there's a challenge. So how do you mitigate challenges and optimize cash flow? Well, there's a couple of ways we could look at this question, but this is really what's really important when I look at, with my experiences, reserves. So for example, if we pay a preferred return of 7, 8 or 6% on a medical fund or a medical investment, because that's what we do a lot of. And at the end of the year, I have another 4 or 5% spread in cash flow. Instead of distributing that, I might make a decision or my company will. Steven. To say, you know what, we're going to Build up for the rainy day and you don't get greedy. Okay. And you be smart and I communicate. This is where the experience comes in of this business. This is what I love. Because I'm in the prime of my career.

Yeah.

And I'll explain that after we're done with this, what that really means so people can understand how valuable that is. And especially in commercial real estate. So what happens is we'll build up reserves. And if something happens in those examples, I have enough money, I don't have to do a capital call. Building up reserves is so important. Investors are like, well, why don't you distribute the cash? Why don't you distribute cash? We don't want to ask you for money. We'd rather let the property sustain itself and build up. For if we have to refinance, let's say it's a multi tenant property, we lose a tenant, we have ti tenant improvement dollars, leasing commissions, we have carrying costs. I gotta pay taxes, I gotta pay insurance on the vacant space. I have to pay what I call leakage. I stole the lights on. I got power, I got electrical, I got gas.

Because you have tenants above and below.

Absolutely right. You have to continue to operate the property and also you have to market it to lease. And it costs money to carry a space or to carry a property. So having reserves is important. Now, how do you optimize cash flow is also about, how did you buy the deal? Because money's in the dirt. And people ask me, like, what does that really mean? And what it means is the money is how you acquire the property. It's in the dirt. It's making sure you understand what the replacement cost is for that property. If the property burned down at that point in time, how much would it cost me to rebuild? Okay. We look at all these real estate fundamentals. Understanding the real estate fundamentals is so critical in our business. It could be. I'm going to look at the current rents in the subject property we're buying, and I'm going to compare that to everything else going on the market. We're going to do so much due diligence on this property. Okay. That we know going in. How are we buying it? How are we going to optimize cash flow? Do I have the ability, Steven, to raise rents? Do I have the ability to reposition tenants? Do I have the ability to take leases and extend them and add more value?

Yeah.

Thing that we're outstanding at at alliance is adding value to income streams and optimizing cash flow. Yeah. By doing that Is the secret is understanding your market, the real estate. You have to protect your downside to let the upside take care of itself. That's a real secret to the business. And how do you do that? You do that by building reserves. You do that by proper underwriting, understanding the market, and getting a lot of people's opinions. You know, a lot of people go out there. And one of the things I see in business, and this is for everyone in business, and I'm speaking on Friday at Fun Launch Live. And one part of my speech that I'm speaking about is. Is not being lazy.

Yeah.

You're doing your homework, you know, because with my new TV show that. That just came out is about leverage. That's the new season.

Yeah.

Leverage is more than just debt. Leverage is knowledge. Leverage is communication. And a way to really underwrite a deal and optimize cash flow is doing your homework.

Yeah.

Because as economies and markets shift, you at least can protect your downside, and that's how you optimize cash flow in this business. So reserves are important. Doing your homework is critical. And being conservative in your underwriting and not over leveraging your properties, all these little things that you do, success in your investments.

Yeah. Well, I want to learn more about the show, but before we do that, I want to ask you one more. I guess, Come on, one more question around the lending environment. We just, we kind of talked about the interest rates rising and things of that nature. Do you find that having more cash on your balance sheet gets you more preferential treatment with lending institutions? Because it seems like they're willing to work with you more if you're financially stable going into a deal?

The answer is yes. And a lot of that fear was when I was younger, you know, like, is my balance sheet big enough? But, you know, what I really learned is knowledge has the most leverage with lenders. So, for example, when I can tell them the story, okay, so, for example.

We acquired a deal in Las Vegas years ago. We have properties all over the country, but that was a market we acquired and we bought a surgery center. And it was the first time we were walking, stepping foot in that market with commercial real estate. And it was a tough lending environment. It was right after the recession. They had a huge housing crash in Las Vegas. No lenders want to even touch. Yeah. People said to me, they go, you're crazy. Like, you're not going to get that deal. I go, yeah, don't say can't to me, because. And so we did. We got it done. No property this particular Investment. We got to finance. Part of it was. It didn't matter. My balance sheet. I. Believe me, I'm plenty strong to get a loan. It wasn't what. What did it. What did. It was because I went out to, like, 15 banks. I had. I had like 13 of them say no to me. I was like, oh, my God, I can't. I've been doing this over. At that time, it was over. I was in the business for, I don't know, 20 years.

Yeah.

And we're saying no to me. I'm like, no. Are you crazy? Like, what are you talking about? This is a great deal. When I. What I learned from that deal and all our deals is knowledge is so critical because educating them, putting yourself in the lender's shoes, that's really important. When you could look at. And you pretend like you sit on the board of the bank. Let's say you're financing with the bank. And I talk about debt service coverage. I talk about the covenants they're concerned about. I'm protecting their downside, like I'm protecting my investors. I treat the lender like they're my investor. So here's. I'm like, here's why you're loaning on this property loan. Ltv. Lot of equity. I have a grade a tenant like UnitedHealthcare, one of the best tenants in the United States. Paying rent.

Yeah.

They do this amount of surgeries in the property. They've invested $6 million over the last four years. Here are all the money they spent. And it's itemized. Let me show it to you. I would underwrite it for them so they can walk it in to their committee or their people and say, we have to finance this deal. God's not making any more land. There's high barriers. The rents are below market. The governor stepped into Nevada and said, we want this area of Las Vegas, the medical district, to grow. We're going to invest billions of dollars over the next 10 years. We need. I told the whole story, Okay? I was the expert. I was what's called. I call the professor.

Okay.

So I was educating everyone.

Yeah.

And because of that, Stephen, what ends up happening is I naturally build rapport. They're like, this Ben Reinberg guy is a real expert. He knows what he's talking about. We should be doing business with him. He said he should be sitting on our board. He's that good.

Yeah.

So I create that story, that. That stigma, that. That ability to show them why they're going to be okay. And they're going to save. So I end up getting a loan from a great bank, and we refinance it. We that particular asset, which is incredible, and I'm a huge investor in that deal, is we paid all our investors their money back. We've owned this thing for years. Every quarter, we're paying them a check with no money in it. Hundreds of thousand dollars to investors with no money in it.

Yeah.

Like, how are we going to calculate this return, Stephen? I don't know. Everyone got their money back years, to infinity and beyond. So it's a beautiful thing. But with financing and these lenders is really putting yourself in their shoes and explaining to them of why they're going to be okay again. When you have low leverage and you could tell the story, don't worry about your balance sheet. When I first started, and I tell this story a lot, I bought an industrial building in Chicago. It was a little bit under. It was a hair under 100,000 square feet. I had no money. I had no experience. And I went to my godfather, Bruno, and I tell this story a lot. And I asked him for a loan, and I had no business getting that loan. Okay? I had nothing. I signed with recourse. I had nothing they could take from me. I was in my early 20s, and he gave me a loan. He gave me a loan at a great ltv. I ended up raising equity, and we bought it, and we did very well with the asset after going through some challenges on it early on. But for everyone out there is you don't need specifically a balance sheet, because if you do low leverage and you're going to raise the gap, you can. It's a lot easier. What happens is when you're younger, Steven, everyone gets fear. They're like, I can't raise money. That's the number one fear that goes out into the universe that they're saying themselves, okay, so now I can't raise equity.

So.

So I'm fearful. So I'm going to take out as much leverage as possible. Much debt, so I can mitigate my fear of, okay, well, I only have to raise a million and a half, not 3 million or 4 million.

Yeah.

Well, think about this, how much easier it would be and how much less risk if you can go raise the extra million or 2 million and really grind and hustle.

Yeah.

Protect your investors, protect your capital and pay a less return and mitigate risk. Because everyone's like, well, when I'm younger, I want to juice up the returns because that way money will flow in, whatever.

Yeah.

But if you take the other approach and you educate them on how good is a deal. Maybe pay a preferred return of 1% or 2% less to protect them. To extend your career in commercial real estate.

Yeah.

The prudent decision. So it goes back to fear, has a lot of decisions it makes for people in this business. And if you can, people always ask me, like, what would you do differently when you're in choice? And it's funny because I'm, I just came out with a cool little.

Paper I put together as a free gift for putting our websites of the seven crucial lessons I'd learned before I raised a billion dollars.

Yeah.

Part of that was, is managing my emotions, understanding what fear, like what was I really fearful of. Right.

Yeah.

And so I knew in my first deal, Steve, I'm like, okay, well if this deals go sideways, it doesn't work out or I can't raise the equity or I can't get the loan. I'm just going back to where I started. What do I have to lose by pulling the trigger? And try. And that's what a lot of younger folks out there, you might be listening is that don't let fear prevent you from the trigger. And moving forward, don't let fear prevent you from saying, well, I need to be doing this or paying these type of returns in order to raise equity. No, you need to create. Leverage is knowledge and communication. Two things will carry you in any business, especially in commercial real estate. No question. I would have given my left arm if someone would have told me that in my 20s, 54 years old. I've had to evolve and grow that lesson. That lesson is huge.

Yeah.

The reason why the word leverage so prevalent for my new season on my TV show is because most people think of like we're talking about leverage instead. Really leverage is so many other things.

Yeah, it's a fulcrum.

Yeah, it is. It's where my lever. It's communication, it's knowledge, it's. It's getting in the right room, it's converting room, it's closing people, it's.

It's resources, it's credibility. You know, sometimes I'll have someone call me and say, hey, can you introduce me to so and so? Because they, they're leveraging into my credibility for me to refer them to them where they can do that. That's how we found people within our company. I was looking at different challenges. We were having my business years ago and I went out to my network and say, I would reach out to you. I would, I would say Stephen, I'm having this issue, and you might say, you know what? I know the right person, or, let me give you some advice. I'm leveraging into you, which is so important. So when it comes to, like, to get back to your point of a balance sheet or anything else, you can leverage into other people, other resources, like, and I know sometimes people don't want to bring on a partner, but sometimes if you bring on a partner and you give away some of the equity.

Or whatever, but if you choose wisely, you get a larger return in the end.

Well, not only that, you could shorten your learning curve. You can do more deals. You might be able to increase more resources by expanding your network. Yeah. So leverage is a really key term that I want to lay out there for everyone listening, because leverage will help you in everything with life. It will help you with your relationships, your personal relationships. It will help you in business, it will help you with revenue, it will help you with knowledge. And so leverage is more powerful than money, and that's what's going to get you that loan that we were referring to.

I was actually thinking that relational leverage, in many cases, at least in my experience, has been more powerful than capital leverage in many, many cases. I'm curious, what made you decide? I mean, you're got a. You got a very successful real estate business. You got a very successful, you know, entrepreneurial journey of your own. What made you decide you wanted to step into TV and kind of teach that. That modality?

You know what's interesting? I was trying to. I went back years ago. I was like, what's my mission? Like, what's what? Why am I here? Why did God put me on this earth? And I got very spiritual over the years, and. And I realized that I'm really good at helping people. I was mentoring people when I was younger in the business, and as I aged in the business, I was changing lives and impacting people with advice and knowledge that I had. And so we started my podcast two years ago. I own it. And I started enjoying it, and I realized I really enjoyed meeting people. I was giving advice, and I had really talented best. And the guests were calling me for real estate advice or business advice. I took a step back. I'm like, wow, I'm pretty good at this. I'm good at helping people. It's something I enjoy doing. And I feel that God gave me a lot of gifts in this world, and I have an obligation to share it with people. Part of that was the people that I'm aligned with said you know, you'd be great on tv. It could be a podcast and a TV show at once. Do some different things. And what I love about the new show is I'll have an incredible guest. Like Jeffrey Hazlett was my first guest from the Apprentice, and wonderful guy and really talented. So I'm sitting there and I'm learning from him. And so he's giving all this knowledge and content to the world that's listening. And I'm sitting there and I'm enjoying it too. But what's great is I'll stop the show intermittently when we edit it. And I do a front to camera and the front camera is educating people on what he just said, how it impacts you and things you should consider as you go forward. So for me, I really enjoy helping people. It's something that has. So that has evolved over the years.

Yeah.

And the TV show gives me an outlet to do that, to not only meet people and learn and grow, which I love.

Yeah.

Also to help people. And because I look at this and I said, I look at my career in my life, I'm like, you know how nice would have been if I would have met Ben Reinberg when I was in my twenties.

Whatever, short my learning curve, get through challenges and struggle. I didn't have that when I was younger. Yeah. And so I, I thought was important, like if I can help one person out there, you know, and create impact and change their life or trajectory. And it doesn't have to be in commercial real estate. It could be anything. It could be just the way you look at things, the way you communicate with people, the way you treat people.

Whatever might be, you know, taking advice of what my morning routine looks like, whatever it is that you could take away from me helps me. I've done my job. It's the same thing. Like we're on this podcast, right. So if something, if someone takes one piece, one word, and it helps them and maybe someone is in real estate or they want to get into commercial real estate and they learned about not over leveraging the property. I've done my job and it makes me happy and I get rewarded for it. I really do. There's. The universe rewards me for this work that I do. And I get great resources, my employees and my leadership team. Seems the benefit of me being out there and helping people, it inspires them to help people and creates good community and culture within my business. And it, it attracts investors and resources to them that are running the company. Yeah. So for me, it's a really win Win. I get to meet incredible people. It inspires me. It invigorates me. And so the new show has just been wonderful because it kind of encompasses everything to do and love to talk about.

That's so exciting. In a couple of 60 seconds we got left or so I'm curious to know, where can I actually watch the show, Learn more about how to. How to maybe partner with you on some investment strategies? Where can I find it?

Well, we're going to be on 1400 streaming networks. I don't. Yeah, I don't have the list of what that all looks like. And then we're pitching it to a network which hopefully will land this year. And Stephen. So obviously you can go to YouTube.

You can go.

You can listen to it on every major platform, whether it's Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, all these different platforms. You could watch it on YouTube when it comes out, LinkedIn, Facebook, all these different platforms have it. And if you want to watch, I would start with YouTube. And eventually we'll be finding out what all these streaming networks are. We'll announce that as well and put on social media and our website. A lot of people go to BenReinberg.com to get all the information on me. If you want information on the company, you can go to my company. It's AllianceCGC.com like you see on the screen here. It's AllianceCGC.Com yeah. A lot of people are asking me. They see me on podcasts like, how do I get. How do I invest in with what you do? How do we shoulder. Shoulder with you? Yeah. Go on my website or my personal brand website, benrir.com click the button, fill out the landing page. Yeah. What's great about our website is we're giving out for free. The seven crucial lessons I wish I knew before I raised my first billion. It's great. We're going to put out free content every single month, which I'm really excited about. And I'm writing it. It's coming through my eyes. That's awesome. It's actually coming from me, the, the free gifts I'm going to give. And the other thing, we're doing some cool things. We're hiring, too. Like, you know, for anyone out there, if you have experience in raising money and you have a Rolodex of investors and you want to build a career, one of the gifts I'm giving out when I'm speaking soon, I'm giving out this year is I'm going to mentor someone in our business. They're going to come work for me. They're going to learn from one of the best human behaviorists in the world as well. And they're going to come work. And so the qualifications are, you know, you've been able to raise money in real estate, say commercial real estate. You have a Rolodex investors, and we're going to help you build a career in wealth. And we're going to do that to give back, but also create impact for my company as well. And so we're looking for that as well. And so we're just doing some great things. Part of it is really helping people, and that's what serving others has been incredible for me and my career and it's been great for my company.

Yeah, man. Dude, that's all so exciting. I can't wait for people to check it out more. The other thing I loved about your website, your personal brand website, I visited myself. It's not just one host of great resources, there's a whole host of resources there that can benefit the public. So I want to invite everybody, go check out that. I also want to invite everybody, go check out the show on YouTube. Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Dude.

And yeah, man, looking forward to stay connected.

Yeah, great seeing you. Thanks, Stephen. Appreciate being.

Take care. I hope you liked that video. And if you did, make sure you check out this next video right here.

When this first happened, I remember being at the hospital and that doctor came and said, there's no chance of survival. He's not going to make it. We need to know from you two when to unplug the machine. So we decided to take a walk. We went out to this little serenity garden in the hospital, my wife and I, and we're going to decide that was where we're going to talk about when to unplug it and kind of to, you know, talk about how we're going to say goodbye.