Each week for the Best Ever Round Table, the three Best Ever Show hosts — Ash Patel, Slocomb Reed, and Travis Watts — come together for a deep dive into a commercial real estate investing topic.
Have you recently dipped your toe into commercial real estate? Maybe you’ve done a deal or two, or maybe you’re considering putting some more CRE in your portfolio. If you’re just getting started, this episode is for you. Ash, Slocomb, and Travis discuss what originally attracted them to commercial real estate and how you can decide if it’s the right path for you.
1. Why Commercial Real Estate?
Ash, Slocomb, and Travis each had different circumstances that led them to consider investing in real estate.
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Ash was seeking a way to offset taxes.
“I found real estate by accident,” he says. Every year, he would ask his CPA how to offset his taxes as a W-2 earner, but never received a useful answer. “I always heard that real estate was a great way to offset taxes,” he continues. “I didn’t understand what that meant, but I thought I should buy some real estate.” -
Slocomb was looking for a side hustle.
Before becoming an apartment owner/operator, he worked as a youth minister. “I was just looking to bridge the gap with a part-time job, be contributing equally to our family as my wife was, and I finally picked up Rich Dad Poor Dad,” he says. Soon after, he embarked on his first house hack and fell in love with real estate. -
Travis was following his dream of entrepreneurship.
“I just didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do for a business,” he says. “So it took many years to go full-time with real estate, and that was about a seven-year journey.”
2. Top Lessons Learned in Their CRE Careers
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If you want to go far, go together.
“If you’re full-time in real estate and your goal is to scale, you have to start looking at partners, joint ventures, and other people to work with,” Ash says. He also advises carefully selecting your partners and clearly communicating your expectations beforehand. -
You always have the ability to adapt.
When Slocomb realized he was pulling most of the weight in a partnership, he decided to do something about it. “I formed a property management company through that experience so that my partnership could pay me management fees for doing all of the work,” he explains. That management company has allowed him to take down additional deals, scale through hiring, and scale through new partnerships. “It was my ability to adapt to changing circumstances that those things happened.” -
You don’t have to start small.
“I would say to anybody listening, whether you are or want to be a GP, an LP, do a JV, individual purchasing — you really can start with multifamily or commercial, or something above that,” Travis says. He didn’t realize this for a long time, and like many CRE investors, now believes he could have gone bigger faster when he started out.
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TRANSCRIPT
Travis Watts: Welcome back, Best Ever listeners, to another Roundtable episode. These are episodes where the hosts of the Best Ever podcast come together and we talk about either current events, what's going on in the real estate market, or just real estate topics at large. So the latter is what we have today, and the topic is why we chose real estate, and is it right for you?
So this episode is kind of designed for anyone whose toe-dipped into real estate, maybe you've done a deal or two, maybe you're considering putting some more real estate in your portfolio, or for somebody just getting started, you can hear our perspectives and what originally attracted us to this asset class.
What's cool about the roundtable to me is we all have different backgrounds, we're all different ages, we all have different philosophies, different strategies, but yet, we all came together to invest in real estate, in one form or another. So that's what we're going to explore, and I guess let's just kick it off you guys with your back-story... Not necessarily what you do today and stuff, but just kind of what led you to first look at real estate as an investment class, and I guess your background there. Slocomb, you want to start?
Slocomb Reed: Absolutely. Thank you, Travis. I am Slocomb Reed, apartment owner-operator in Cincinnati, Ohio; pre-real estate I was a full time professional youth minister. I was looking for a side hustle, recently married, my wife was making real W-2 money full-time, and I was making W-2 money part-time. I was looking to just bridge the gap, part-time job, be contributing equally to our family, as my wife was... And I finally picked up Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which had been recommended to me for years, and that set me on fire. I read several Rich Dad books, did a bunch of networking, I learned that you could owner-occupy a multifamily up to four units, on an FHA loan, with three and a half percent down; before I knew it was called house-hacking. But it doesn't take long to figure out that doing that, especially doing that in 2013-2014 was going to produce way more than any 15 to 20-hour a week side hustle job.
So that's what got me into real estate, was house-hacking. I had my first experience with my house-hack, fell in love with real estate, figured out I was pretty good at dealing with tenants... Not with buildings, like toilets or framing a wall, but with tenants, and I decided to dive full-time into real estate by getting my sales license. A youth minister's salary is very easy to replace, so it didn't take long for me to be making money in residential real estate sales to cover the income that I left from my previous career.
I started buying other deals within a year and a half of going full-time into real estate, and then I was off to the races.
Travis Watts: That's awesome, man. I didn't realize how much we have in common. I'll share a couple of things here in a minute. I'll let Ash do his bit... But it's funny, I just want to say this real quick about Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and just a lot of those books. What's kind of funny about it is everyone seems to attribute one or multiple of those books into their gateway, but he's not always presenting real estate as the asset class of choice. He's saying things like "I like to reduce my tax burden. I'm a fan of cashflow. I like to use leverage, infinite returns" all these things, so you just kind of draw that conclusion for yourself, that "Well, real estate kind of makes the case for that." So kind of funny, and I have some similar parallels that I'll share here in a minute. Great stuff... Ash.
Ash Patel: Yeah, thanks, Travis. Hey, Best Ever listeners. I've been a full-time non-residential commercial investor for over 10 years. Prior to that I had a 15-year corporate IT career. But throughout those 15 years, I would say after the first year after working, I started side hustles; I started a number of companies, everything from a marketing company, a web design company, SEO company, sports supplements... Some of these worked well, some of them didn't, but they were all additional jobs.
I finally quit my career after 15 years to start an IT consulting company, and it was a tall task to replace the income that I was making, and I think it's one of the reasons I stayed with it so long. It was easy, it was comfortable. The side hustles weren't going to replace the amount of money that I was making.
I found real estate by accident. I would go to my CPA every year and I'd say "Hey, we're both W-2 earners. What do we do to offset taxes?" and the response that we always got was "If you make it, you've gotta pay it." And I knew there had to have been a better way.
So I always heard real estate was a great way to offset taxes. I didn't understand what that meant, but I thought I should buy some real estate. And again, I was very fortunate in that my first building was a mixed use building; I saw the commercial side, I saw the residential side., and I saw that commercial tenants improve your property, and they're business owners... Versus residential tenants - in this case, it was college kids, putting holes in the walls, clogging up sinks and toilets, and just destroying everything in their path.
And funny story about Rich Dad, Poor Dad - I actually read that book probably six, seven years into my real estate journey, and I disagreed with a lot of what he said. Mainly, he was a stickler for only investing in cash-flowing properties. I've bought fully vacant buildings and turned them around... So to me -- maybe that's a good starting point, but I don't agree with a lot of what he's preaching in that book.
Travis Watts: Totally. It's interesting to go through the series of those books, and I kind of feel the same way in a lot of ways... But we've all got to do our own thing, right? So there's a lot of ways to make money out there. Obviously, he's not a fan of the stock market, but a number of people in my network make a killing in the stock market. So you've got to find what works for you.
So like you, Ash, I started a lot of small business ventures, starting as early as high school, and then throughout college, and then post college, there was about 20 of these little businesses that inevitably didn't do well and failed for one reason or another... Mostly my bad... And real estate was the final attempt. I was kind of burned out, a little bit depressed over all these failures, and it was the one thing that was actually working. So like you, Slocomb, I was doing some house-hacking, and also, like your situation as a youth minister - so I was working a call center job, I took a 180 after college and decided I wasn't going to pursue what I went to school for... So that was my first entry-level job. 20k a year gross annual salary, pretty easy to replace. And as I had a roommate paying me $600 per month, that made a big difference at that time in my life. So that's what kind of got the wheels turning, in addition to the books and things like that.
So I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, just didn't know exactly what I wanted to do for a business... So it took many years to go full-time with real estate; and that was about a seven-year journey. I did some oil and gas work and stuff like that, but I would say it was books at first, it was getting my feet wet with house-hacking, and then I did a couple of fix and flips, and that really got the wheels turning. So I just tried to amp up my W-2 income, save as much as I could save, and I just went full-force into the real estate world. So - good stuff. I appreciate you guys sharing that.
So I'm curious... Slocomb, we'll circle back to you. So what's changed since you first dove into real estate? Either your mindset, philosophy, the deals you were doing... What's changed through today?
Slocomb Reed: Well, so far as the deals are concerned, as I have grown as an active real estate investor, the deals have gotten larger. I bought a four-family a couple of months ago that I honestly keep forgetting about, not because I'm neglecting it, but because I already have the systems in place, and it's such a cookie-cutter set-it-and-forget-it type deal for me, because I have the team in place to handle all of those things.
Scale has happened a lot faster. This is ironic... I was a little late to this recording session - apologies again to Ash and Travis - and one of the reasons that I was late is because I was on a call with a sales client who bought his house hack a couple years ago and now he wants to get into sales full-time. And one of the things that we were discussing is that finding ways to immerse yourself in real estate full-time, even if it's not real estate investing, when you're coming from an unrelated field and you don't have a background doing this... Immersing yourself full-time in real estate not only is it going to help you grow faster, accelerate your own investing, but it's also going to bring about the moments of clarity where the light bulb turns on and you realize, "Oh, I could be doing that." Those moments come a lot faster when you immerse yourself.
So what has changed for me since committing to going full-time in real estate back in 2015 - those moments of clarity, the conversations that you have that open your mind to the possibilities available to you in an arena like real estate investing - those things definitely accelerated it.
Travis Watts: I love that. Ash, what's changed since you first dove in?
Ash Patel: Ah, man... Everything. So in the beginning, you buy one property, you buy two properties, and you have all the time in the world to manage them, go on site, deal with issues... And then all of a sudden, you're at a point where you're trying to balance... I've two kids that were young at the time, I've got a wife that works probably 60 hours a week, and all of a sudden, you're inundated. So if you don't have those systems in place like I didn't, you have to uncover yourself, unbury yourself out of this giant hole that you've dug... The longer you go, the harder it is going to be to dig out. And I spent years just being inundated, probably on the verge of a nervous breakdown several times, because things were just so overwhelming. So it took me a lot of years to figure this out, but putting systems in place, putting teams in place, hiring assistants, hiring help, and offloading as much as you can... And focusing back on your core competencies.
One of the things that made me successful was I would spend hours every day searching for deals, and I can't tell you how many years went by where I had no time to search for deals. And I was taking time away from my core competency, putting out fires and dealing with things that I should not have been dealing with. So getting back to those core competencies is very important, and I think a lot of the Best Ever listeners either have or will go through that same struggle, but just try to get ahead of it. Otherwise, you'll end up like me spending years trying to dig yourself out of these holes.
Travis Watts: Awesome, man. Everybody listening, what we're sharing is basically - we're all now full-time immersed in real estate, and not everybody is and not everybody necessarily wants to be. I think we all kind of started somewhat as side hustles, as you both have pointed out... But for anyone looking to really dive in long term, I think that inevitably starts to make sense at some point. So just keep that in mind, that you certainly don't have to be a full-time real estate investor. That's not really what we're suggesting. I just want to throw that out. The other disclaimer - a couple minutes ago, as we switched over from Slocomb to Ash, I was reading my wife's text here as I was talking, and I said "I love you." So I didn't mean that. I did not mean that, Slocomb, but... I just wanted to throw that out there.
Ash Patel: Travis, I'm curious... If I can interrupt, I've got a question for you.
Travis Watts: Yeah.
Ash Patel: You said that you always knew you want to be an entrepreneur.
Travis Watts: Yeah.
Ash Patel: Where did that come from, and how did you know that?
Travis Watts: My parents have always been small business entrepreneurs. They used to own an FBO, a fixed/based operation. They used to work on airplanes, small aviation stuff... And before that, they were doing entrepreneurial stuff in aviation. And my stepdad used to be a writer for different magazines, kind of a freelancer... And I don't know, I always saw the flexibility in that, and the creative ability in that... So even when I was 16 and 17, I was detailing cars and I was doing these odd job businesses for 20 bucks an hour, and all this kind of stuff... So I knew I just wanted to have that ability to be expressive, I guess is what it came down to. So I found a way to make real estate that, and do what I do today with these episodes and sharing this kind of content.
Ash Patel: Awesome.
Travis Watts: Yeah, man. So for me, a couple things have changed. One was starting with single-family homes, and then seven years later transitioning to multifamily apartments; that was a big change. Starting actively, and then moving passively, again, seven years down the road... Those were probably the biggest shifts that I had in my journey. And again, not everyone has to be like me, full-time active, full-time passive. A lot of people are hybrids of the two. So experiment and find you, I guess. So what are some of the most important lessons along the way? I really want to dig into that. Ash, do you want to start with that?
Ash Patel: Yeah. I think anybody that's wanting to scale, one of the biggest lessons is if you want to go far go together. So you have to build a team. You have to work with other people. You can only go so far as a one-man band, or one-woman band. You hear this story repetitively with real estate people that are successful - it wasn't until they built out their team, that they really started growing their business. So I implore all the Best Ever listeners, if you're full-time in real estate and your goal is to scale, you have to start looking at partners, joint ventures, other people to work with, even if their resources. If you want to partner with a wholesaler to help you find deals. Whatever it is, but try to use the resources from others, and try to give as much of yourself to others as well, because that always comes back to you.
I always knew that, but for whatever reason... Maybe I was afraid to ask for help, or didn't know what -- actually, you know, I take that back. I did have several partners in deals that some worked well, and some were hard lessons learned. I had a partner that was a homebuilder, and we bought an office building that was half finished. So I figured "Perfect. Who better to partner with me on this deal." Well, after we signed the papers and got to work, it was only me doing the work, and his philosophy was "Hire everything out." And my philosophy was "All hands on deck and get it done." So that was an eye-opening epiphany, where I realized that this partner is not going to add any value. I didn't need his money. I needed his expertise. And the expectations that I had were never communicated clearly.
So he didn't understand his role... And no fault of his. That's how he ran his business. It's a who, not how business for him. So be careful. Communicate your expectations about partners. But I think partners and teams are very important if you want to scale and grow in real estate.
Travis Watts: I love that. Real estate obviously is a team sport, and what's funny is - I always look at it this way... People are the problem, and people are also simultaneously the solution. You can't do it without people, but to your point, you want to pick the right partners, things like that.
Break: [00:17:15.23] to [00:19:14.05]
Travis Watts: Slocomb, important lessons you've learned along the way.
Slocomb Reed: Let's go with this lesson, especially after what Ash just shared... You always have the ability and the opportunity to adapt. There have been a lot of times in my real estate investing, and there will be probably forever, times when I get knocked down; something I couldn't have anticipated comes up and it's a big problem. There's always someone that I'm able to call, there's always something that I can learn to get myself out of every single situation that I've gotten myself into... And there are oftentimes when external circumstances to myself have caused problems for me and for my portfolio. But taking the Extreme Ownership that Jocko Willink and Leif Babin wrote about in the book Extreme Ownership, and the willingness to adapt to changing circumstances has been one of the biggest lessons that I've gotten from real estate investing.
To piggyback off of what Ash just shared about partnerships, I bought my first really commercial apartment building with a partner, 50/50. We were gonna go equally yoked through every single aspect of the business plan for that property. He was a W-2 earner at the time, and within a year of our buying that property, he figured out that he could triple his income by going independent, and bringing on clients individually, instead of going through his employer. And when he tripled his income sitting in his office, all of a sudden, showing apartments and taking calls and dealing with lumber just weren't as appealing to him, and he decided he wasn't as interested in the day to day operations, because it wasn't going to be as much of an earning opportunity for him as it was before he tripled his income.
The adaptation there - he's still a friend of mine, great guy. We have continued to work together since then. But the opportunity to adapt was, "You know what, partner? I get where you're coming from. The work still has to be done, and now I'm doing all of it, so pay me." I formed a property management company through that experience, so that my partnership could pay me management fees for doing all of the work now that my partner was backing out. And that management company that I built because of that one deal has actually led to the ability to take down future deals, to scale through hiring, to scale through new partnerships... And it was because of my ability to adapt to a changing circumstance that those things happened, from a partnership where we didn't really fully understand one another at the onset, the way that off discuss.
Travis Watts: I love that. I appreciate you sharing. I was listening to Ken McElroy. He's the co-founder of MC Companies, a big syndication group, and he was saying a lot of very similar things. He launched a property management company for their properties, but not for the profit, but because that was his background. He saw a lot of inefficiencies when he was hiring the third parties. So yeah, you have to be adaptable, change and do your highest and best.
For me, I think one of the most important lessons was that you don't have to start small, and I did not realize this for a long time. I thought the only way to be a real estate person as a single family home, and then you've got all these options, whether you want to house hack, or flip it, or buy and hold, rent it... I didn't know there was anything outside of that that was available to me.
So I would tell anybody listening, whether you are or want to be a GP, an LP, do a JV, individual purchasing - you really can start with multifamily, or commercial, or something above that. So you do have to take, to your point, Slocomb, I think an honest, genuine assessment of your skills and your wants and your goals, and like I always say, "You do you", and hopefully that's your highest and best when it comes to this business.
So any stories... We'll reverse the order again, Slocomb. Any stories, good or bad, that you want to share, that are just entertaining about your journey?
Slocomb Reed: Absolutely. A couple of stories here... I was thinking about what lesson I was going to share, and I thought it was going to be a different one... Until I wanted to piggyback off of Ash; I thought the lesson I was going to share was that you can plan the work, but you cannot plan the success, because you don't know where it's going to come from; all you know is that you can show up every day and hustle. So I wanted to share a couple of those stories... And this is also piggybacking off of the phone call that I took just before this, that made me run late.
I was thinking back to my second investment deal, my first BRRRR deal which, was a three-family that I bought well below market, because I was buying it off market... And I came across that -- I had joined a residential sales team, because they were going to give me the opportunity to do a lot of open houses, and they were going to put my phone number on a lot of For Sale signs, so that I could take the sign calls. I had done an open house for a pretty standard, recently flipped bi-level in a decent suburb of Cincinnati, and I got a call about it from a guy who - I didn't really understand him over the phone, in part because of the language barrier, and in part because he was a quirky dude... But I needed work, and I need commission, so I agreed to meet him at the property, and it turns out he was looking to pay cash for that house, so he could put some family members in it. And when I figured out that that's what he was doing and that he was legit, I just wanted to meet him for lunch, go to Panera... And while we were at Panera, chatting, I asked him "Well, what all do you own right now?" And it turned out that one of the properties he owned was a three-family around the corner from my house hack, that he had put on the market once before, and not sold. Long story short, I ended up buying from him, because I took him to Panera, because I met him at the house, the bi-level in the suburbs, because I joined that team to put my number on the sign [unintelligible 00:24:57.10] And that's been a really good deal for me. I still own that property.
Second story - I'll keep this quick. I had a business partner, we were doing some wholesaling together several years ago, and we went to a guru course, and that guru course had the opportunity to buy some cold call lead gen; they would scrape Craigslist and other for sale by owner stuff, and call them and leave voicemails and send you any leads that came from it. There was someone who called back off of this cold call from the guru company on Craigslist, and the Visual Voicemail said they had a property in Cleveland. So I almost didn't even listen to the message, but I saw that the zip code looked more like a Cincinnati's zip code. It turned out it was for a property in a neighborhood here called Cleves.
I followed up at the same time on the Bigger Pockets podcast; Brandon Turner, former host was talking about how he needed to turn 31 into an apartment building about that size. So when I figured out what this was, I emailed him, I ended up selling that property to Brandon Turner, and then about 18 months later buying it from him. And that ended up being a substantially good deal for me and the partner I brought in on that.
So you can't plan success; you don't know where those opportunities are coming from, but you can plan the work. Make sure that you're out there, hustling, and good things will come to you.
Travis Watts: I love that, man. It's such a great message, and it's so many parallels, too. I'm thinking about investor relations and working with Fairless... And it's funny, because sometimes you have this little brief phone call from some unknown person that just asked three questions, and then you kind of brushed it off, whatever... And then they end up investing a crazy amount of money or something in one of our deals... And sometimes you spend five phone calls with someone, going through every single analytical detail, and they never end up investing. So I never play judgment when I have a call set from some unknown person, even if the notes don't suggest they're even serious, or maybe non-accredited and they just didn't know what that even meant, and they ended up being accredited and very interested... So you just never know. So I love those... Ash, your thoughts, stories, anything you want to share?
Ash Patel: Yeah, I'm gonna share a story that's probably a bit more somber... It's not a success story. This was probably back in 2015. I had been in real estate for five years or so, and an estate auction came up with a bunch of commercial properties. I didn't even get to view them, because I found out about it kind of at the last minute... I was in Atlanta at the time; the auction was in Cincinnati, and I had one of my tenants who was in the area go to that auction and bid on my behalf. And I think there was selling maybe a dozen different properties... And I ended up walking away with probably seven different properties from that auction. And I couldn't even hear him on the phone, couldn't hear the auctioneer, it was so loud... All I heard was "Ash, do you want to keep bidding?" "Sure, yes. Let's just keep going." I have no idea what the numbers were... And at the end of the day, I found out I bought seven properties. And now I to figure out what it was that I bought, how to unwind them, turn them around, whatever it was; make money out of them.
It turns out one of the buildings I bought was a half broken building. The side was missing.
Slocomb Reed: Wow.
Ash Patel: One was a $15,000 single family house, which was okay... But the tenant ended up absolutely destroying that. It ended up costing me $30,000 to get out of... And a few other commercial buildings. Now, after I won this auction, there wasn't a lot of anxiety. I thought, "Okay, I'm good. I'll just keep doing what I've always done, turn these buildings around." And a few friends found out that I was bidding on this auction, and the consensus amongst them was "Everything Ash touches turns to gold. Don't worry, I'm sure he'll find a way to turn these around." Well, I started believing that, right? And my ego got inflated, and I thought, "Okay, I'll just keep doing everything that I've done, and these buildings will be gold mines in no time." Well, here we are, seven years later, and just last week I offloaded the very last building.
So this nonsense cost me seven years of aggravation... And I don't know that it cost me a huge amount of money. Some of them I sold for a profit, but let's just say I'm down 20k, 30k on the whole deal. But none of it was worth the time. And the reason I bring this story up now is we've had a long run where a lot of our Best Ever listeners have had a lot of success over the last several years, while we're heading into what could be uncertain times. So if you've had some big wins, please temper your ego, know that there's some headwinds coming at us... And I'll leave it at that. Just don't let the successes go to your head.
Travis Watts: That's great advice, Ash, and you may be just change my story in my head. I had something in mind I wanted to share... But talking about risk, and I want to pinpoint markets; I think we haven't really touched too much on that. So when I was in oil and gas, I worked out of Brighton, Colorado, which is maybe 45 minutes outside of Denver. And I was consumed and living within this bubble of oil and gas. I worked so many hours, and all of my time was consumed there> So I started buying single family properties in Brighton, and a place called Henderson, which is right next to Brighton, not realizing something very critical. That was a) oil and gas is a boom and bust industry; they hire like crazy, and they fire on the flip of a coin when oil falls out. So in 2015-2016, when oil started falling out, those jobs went away from that area. So my tenants were oil and gas workers; they were making six figure incomes, and that was very stable for me when they were occupied. So when oil falls out, you have to look at your surrounding market, in my case, and what other jobs and industries are in Brighton, and Henderson? Low wage jobs. You have gas stations, you have fast food, you have Dollar General... So that was a very scary situation, because the amount of renter's out there are not going to be six figure incomes for the most part.
So markets play a very key role, and you want to look for diversification within markets that you invest in. That was a very high risk, high reward situation, and I didn't even realize I was in it until that stuff started unfolding, and 2016 is when I inevitably left oil and gas, because I was going to be laid off anyway... So that's what I dove into real estate, and other markets by the way, and syndications full-time.
So let's wrap this thing up, you guys. It's been great. Any Best Ever advice that you want to give somebody who's entering real estate? I know, Ash, you just gave some great tidbits there... Anything else? If anyone's considering real estate here this year, or in the upcoming years. Slocomb?
Slocomb Reed: Thank you, Travis. Keeping it quick... Be willing to do the work and the good things will come. You can't really plan your success. You don't know now where your best deals, your best partnerships, your best investments are going to come from in the next two years. All you can do is grind and put yourself in a position to receive those opportunities.
Travis Watts: I love that. Ash.
Ash Patel: Yeah, my advice is do it for the right reasons. Don't do it for the fear of missing out. Again, back to this 12-year run - how many millionaires have we seen created over this run with real estate? And when other people see success of real estate investors, and they want a piece of that - and maybe they want it because they feel like they're missing out; not the good reason to get into real estate. Do it because it's right for you. No different than when the stock market has a big run; all these meme stocks - people have that fear of missing out, so they dive in at the tail end and they get slaughtered.
So figure out what's right for you. If it's passive, if it's active, don't just go buy the house down the street, because you want to become a landlord and you want to capitalize on this real estate boom, because those stories often don't work out well. You become a landlord and you realize it's not as easy, it's not all unicorns and rainbows; there's roof repairs, furnace repairs, tenants that are going to leave and destroy your property... So do it for the right reasons, educate yourself, but do not use fear of missing out as your catalyst.
Travis Watts: I love that as well... I'll leave on a neutral note. So as an investor, I always look at what is essential, what is needed, versus what is not. Arguably, there's a ton of companies and stocks you could go invest in that really are just non-essential. So residential real estate is essential, in my opinion; people need a safe, affordable place to live. That's kind of the niche that I focus on the most, but it's not everything I do. I still diversify outside of that.
Let me paint this picture a different way, too. Not everybody needs the skyscraper in Manhattan that rents for $15,000 per month. That's going to serve a small niche of people. They exist, it's sexy, but not everybody needs it. Equally so, on the other end of the spectrum, not everybody needs the D class property in a crime-ridden area, that's just making things worse and further in crime.
So again, do it for the right reasons, as you guys pointed out. Hopefully, it can be a feel-good business where you're really serving and adding value to other people... And just watch your investments in terms of the essentialness to them. So I appreciate you guys sharing your thoughts. It's been a great episode. Thank you, Best Ever listeners, for tuning in. Feel free to like, subscribe, share, leave a comment... I encourage you to share these episodes with anybody you feel could use these. This could add value to their journey, or if they're just getting started in real estate. So with that, this has been another Roundtable episode. Stay tuned and we'll see you next week for the next episode.
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