How Our Aging Population Impacts Real Estate | Special 150th Episode

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. Today is a special one. It's episode 150. Yeah. Three years. Essentially three years have gone by. I've done this podcast every week for almost three years. So time flies, doesn't it? I know my portfolio, my real estate portfolio has grown a lot. I hope yours has as well. And you've seen the value and the potential and the opportunity with short term rentals. It's a really, really exciting space and I want to talk about just how quickly time flies. This week I want to go off topic a little bit as we did 50 episodes ago and as we did 100 episodes ago. And this week I want to talk about the fact that we are living longer and we have really good scientific research that's telling us why we're living longer and how we can live even longer and be healthier. So I want to break down a book that really changed my life. And of course, I want to relate that directly to real estate because it has really big impacts. The whole world is living longer and that has dramatic impacts on our real estate. So stay tuned. Let's jump right in. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. We'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Quick actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio. I'm your host, Tim Hubbard. So I love to read, I love to learn, I love to go to conferences and meet new people. I want to thank you honestly, for listening into this podcast because every week that I get to do a podcast, it reinforces information that I'm learning. And of course, I feel obligation to make sure that I bring the best information to you guys. So I try to live by a quote that you may have heard. And it's that if you really want to master something, you've got to teach it. And so it's been very fun teaching on this podcast. Thank you for all the feedback. I never would have thought that we would have hundreds of thousands of downloads and still be growing. So it's really been a fun experience, but a lot of time has passed already. Right. So I want to break this book down, Lifespan by David Sinclair, and really astonishes me how we can learn a subject. We can learn the biggest, most important aspects of someone's research just by reading a little book. So David Sinclair runs two labs, one at Harvard and one in South Wales, and he's been studying aging for. For over 20 years. Just aging. They have two labs, some of the smartest, brightest people in the world studying how we can live longer and why we are living longer. So I want to break down the highlights from that. And of course, we're going to tie that into real estate because it really does affect real estate. So first of all, did you know, I'm sure you know, we've been living longer, but since 1960, we've added 20 years to our average life expectancy. 20 years. That is a long time. One of the really interesting things that I found from this book is that they talk about a disease that's already known. It happens to 1 in 100,000 people. It's very, very rare. It's called Werner's syndrome. Basically what happens when someone has this syndrome, they get gray hair, they get wrinkles, they have hair loss, osteoporosis, cataracts in their eyes. What are all of these symptoms, I guess we could call them? These are signs of someone aging, right? So there's a disease that ages us faster than normal. And what they've been able to do, knowing this is find the cells that are responsible for aging us faster. And I'm gonna bring up some of the best tips in the book for living longer, because I don't know about you, but I'm excited to live longer. Not just longer, though, healthier as well. That's an important piece there that we have to make a distinction between. So there is this disease that exists, very sad, that ages someone. And the average life expectancy with someone with this syndrome is 46 years. So sadly, they pass away much faster than someone without the disease. So we've been able to learn quite a bit from people that have this syndrome, and we've been able to take some of the cells and inject them into yeast cells. And. And we also see that these cells die much, much faster. And so this has allowed us to research aging much faster than we ever have been able to before. Now, it's not to say yeast cells are human cells, right? They're very different, but it's a step in the direction to really speeding things up. There are also other animals out there, like whales, for example. They found whales that live to be over 200 years old that share a lot of our same genetics. Obviously they're not people, but they share a lot of similar genetics. Whale that had a harpoon type weapon in its belly, and when they took it out of the whale and they did a study on it, they found it was over 200 years old. So we know that there's lots of animals that live longer than we do. There's lots of species out there, trees that live for thousands of years. So scientists are studying this, specifically David Sinclair and the people in his labs, and they're finding some really, really interesting information. So scientists think they found the cells responsible for this aging. They're called sirtuins. Hopefully I didn't butcher that. But essentially, we can make these cells healthier by doing a number of things, which I'm gonna dive into. And by doing these things, we can live longer. So before we do that, though, the author brings up a really interesting point in that we don't really think of aging as a disease, right? But imagine everyone was living to be 150 years old, and that was just normal. That was a normal life expectancy. And someone around the age of 50 had gray hair and hair loss and osteoporosis and all of these typical signs of someone aging. But at age 50, wouldn't we look at that as if they had a disease? I would, and I'm pretty sure most of you out there would. So this is the perspective that the author takes, and it's a really interesting point. But living longer isn't necessarily better, right? We don't want to live longer if we're just getting sick every other day. What we've done is we've learned how to fight off a lot of cancers and a lot of these different diseases that help us live longer, but maybe not that much longer. Usually, you know, a few years longer. Sadly, if we fight off one form of cancer, a lot of times people get another form. So if we can slow down aging, then we can slow down the onset of all of these diseases, and we can live longer, healthier. So I want to give you four tips from the book that he recommends. They have science behind all of this, lots of statistics. To live longer, but not just live longer, live healthier. So this book was really exciting for me. I really do want to live as long as possible, as long as I'm healthy. So, number one, the number one takeaway from the book, if you want to live longer, if you did nothing else, this is his number one recommendation, after decades of research, is to eat less. Yeah. Just by eating less or intermittent fasting, we're putting stress on these cells that are responsible for. For aging. Stick with me. I know this is way off topic, but it's really exciting for me, and it really does play a big piece in the real estate world, because the whole world is getting older. That is a fact. Our populations are aging. In Japan, the number of adult diapers have been outselling Children, diapers. So this is a fact, and it affects real estate, and we're going to get to that. So that's the number one thing they recommend in the book, that to help us live longer, backed up by evidence, is to just eat less. Number two is our diet, the actual things we put in our body. And I don't want to belabor this, but we've heard about the blue zones and certain types of foods that people are eating, oftentimes in a lot of Mediterranean areas, and they have longer life expectancies. Exercise, we all know exercise is healthy. Interesting thing in the book that they point out is that maybe jogging for two hours at a slow pace is not that effective for lifespan. It can be very good for weight loss and all these types of things. But to actually put enough stress on these cells that are responsible for us aging, we have to be exercising in a slightly stressful way. And so that could just be wind sprints, you know, sprinting, getting your heart rate up a little higher, doing heavy weights. So it's not just exercise, but it's the type of exercise. And then the fourth thing that he recommends is changing our body temperature. You've probably heard about cold plunges and cold baths and ice baths and cryotherapy and some of these things that have popped up that have really good research for healing joints and recovery, especially for athletes. But this is something that they found as well. Put stress on these cells, the same cells that are responsible for aging us. And if we can keep those cells healthier longer, well, we can fight off disease longer, we can live longer, much more time to enjoy this beautiful world and grow our real estate portfolios. All right, thanks for sticking with me. You got to read this book. It's Lifespan by David Sinclair. I swear it will change your thinking. At least check out his podcast and you can listen to the first few episodes. He's going to break this down, obviously, much better than I can. I want to connect it to real estate now before we go too much further. So the first point here is that we are living longer, but that doesn't mean that our population is growing. In most places, our population is shrinking. But as a real estate investor, we just want to be where most people are and where most people are going. So it doesn't matter that the global population's shrinking or that our nationwide population is shrinking. There are people moving around and they're moving to certain areas. So we want to be in those areas where all of those people are moving. I will break down a couple steps to help you with that here in a quick second. So if our population is aging, then where do you think a good place might be to be investing? If our population is aging and they're living longer, you might want to be next to some health care or a city that's known for health care. The fact is that especially in the US we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on health care. And every year we spend very little, very little on lifespan and longevity research. So all of that hundreds of millions of dollars is helping people to live longer. But unfortunately, a lot of those people that are fighting off cancer, they're already kind of sick, and so they're, they're getting sick with something else. So I know it's kind of a sad, dreary topic to think about that hopefully we will be living longer and healthier. But the reality is places with a lot of medical are getting a lot of investment and people need to use those medical facilities. So it's really good for real estate in general. I think it's an industry that's going to, we're going to need for a long time and those cities are going to do well, in my opinion. Now, as short term rental real estate investors, we've got another side benefit to this. We've got traveling nurses that also need to help support these medical areas. And if you've listened to a podcast for a while, you know that traveling nurses are excellent, excellent guests to have. They usually stay for a few months. Their companies pay for it and they're nice to work with. So I think being near medical area can be really good. So just one thing to consider, the other thing to consider is that if the population is aging, a lot of our older population are entering retirement, right. Or they're not going to work forever. But a lot of them are on fixed income, so they don't have as much money now as maybe they once did. And if they have a savings that they're living off, well, unfortunately, inflation is eroding that savings much faster today than it has historically. So you'll want to check for markets that are affordable. So affordable and medical. I think those are two really good things to look for in any city that you plan on investing in. Now, I know this whole demographic topic is a little complicated, right? There's a lot of pieces that go into it, but the fact is there are ways to measure this and there's lots of data that we have access to that we can find. Now there's a couple books I want to recommend. One is called Big Shifts Ahead, it's by John Burns and he has excellent, excellent research on real estate. Actually, that's this book right here, Big Shifts Ahead by John Burns. And I want to break down a simple rule that he has for determining demographic predictions. So stick with me here, he says, and I'm going to read off my notes here so I don't screw all this up. He says there are four big influences, and those are government policies, economic conditions, tech advances, self driving cars, for example, and societal shifts that happen during five stages of a person's life. So everywhere from childhood to retirement, early career, and everywhere in between. So we have these four forces that affect people at different times of their lives. And these two things combined help us answer a lot of demographic questions which are going to help us as a real estate investor, know where we need to be. What types of questions do those fundamentals help us answer? Well, how much money consumers are going to have, what they will choose to purchase, when they will make those purchases. So what time in their life, who they will live with, are they moving back in with family, why they will buy certain products over others? And the most important question that's going to get answered here is where these people will live. And so we know states like Texas and Florida and Tennessee, they're seeing really big population growth, right? And we know states like California, my former residence where I grew up, has been losing residents year after year after year. Doesn't mean certain cities within California haven't grown, but overall the population has decreased and those people have gone to other states. So there is a migration happening. We just want to make sure that we are in cities that are, that are growing even though our nation is declining in our population rate. So another book that's going to help you really uncover where you can find all this data is called Emerging Markets. And it's fantastic book. It's by David Lindhal. It's a little older, but the vice in there is still really good. And it just reinforces the fact that this stuff's all figureoutable. You know, it might take a lot of time. And yeah, there's a lot of lists going around that says this is the best city to invest in, this is the best city to invest in. But really it comes down to people, jobs and demographics and government policies and landlord friendliness and these types of things. And that's information that we can find online, readily available stuff we talk about on this podcast channel and then we have talked about throughout the last 150 episodes. I can't believe it's been that long. So we're living longer. That's a fact that affects real estate and where we want to invest. That's a fact. I find it really exciting that we have the potential to live much longer and healthier. And I want to bring up one last subject. We Talked about it 50 episodes ago and we talked about 100 episodes ago, and that is consistency. Another one of my favorite books by Jeff Olson called the Slight Edge, that talks about this very fact. And so if we have more time and we're consistent and what we want to do, we can achieve really great things. And I want to finish it up with a personal story to prove this consistency here in a quick second. So Jeff Olson talks about how good habits turn into good results, and the opposite is true. If we have great habits every day, we can achieve great things. But if we have negative habits or they're getting worse, well, that's going to work against us and. And it's going to be a snowball effect, right? It's just going to get worse and worse. This is hard for us to do a lot of times because those daily habits we have, they have very little impact, right? There's no real visible change if we make a good habit one day or two days or three days. But after we've been consistent for a while, just like our real estate journeys, then we see big results. Fantastic quote by John Dryden. We first make our habits, and then our habits make us. Good one, right? So quick story for you. I was in the US recently visiting friends and family and real estate markets and checking on existing properties and all that fun stuff. So I was with my friend recently, the same friend that I picked fruit with on an orchard. And not too long ago he started his own business. He now has over 600 employees. I'm not gonna name him because honestly, he probably needs security now because his company was valued for hundreds of millions of dollars and he sold 30% of it. It's in his bank account. And he achieved that. He earned that because of consistency. Consistency. He's had that company for seven years and he's worked relentlessly on it. I know that for a fact. And he also didn't come from a background in software or anything like that. And so we can really achieve whatever we want. It just sometimes these things take a little while. I didn't come from a real estate background. None of my family are big real estate investors or anything like that. But little by little, if we have good goals and we stick to them, well, good things happen, right? So just a quick story to illustrate that. I'm super excited for them and I'm super excited to live longer and to explore this amazing world. I hope you are too. I hope you found a lot of value in this podcast. Please Write in@striches.com if you have any episodes you want us to talk about. I would love to talk about them. It's great to hear feedback from you guys. I'm going to leave you with one more quote and then a little riddle. The quote is by Dennis Waitley and he says, you have two ways to look at life. You can accept the way things are or you can accept the responsibility to change. That is a good one. I've repeated it before, but it's a very, very powerful one. So I'm going to leave you with this little riddle. Five frogs sit on a lily pad. One decides to jump off. How many are left? Now you might be thinking, obviously, Tim, four frogs are left on this lily pad if one decided to jump off. But just because someone decides to do something doesn't mean it's actually going to happen. So, no, the correct answer is there are five frogs on this lily pad. Yet just because we decide to do something doesn't mean that it's going to happen. So hopefully you found some value in this podcast and you've taken some action or it's helped you grow your portfolio. Sky is the limit. We have more time than we've ever had. We're living longer and we've got the research to live longer, healthier, and that is really exciting to me. And I'm also excited to do another 150 episodes. So thanks for sticking with me. And until next week, I hope you have a fabulous one. Ciao.

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