Welcome to Racking Up Rentals!

Episode Summary

Listen on iTunes
Listen on Spotify
Listen on YouTube

In this first episode of the new and improved podcast, Racking Up Rentals (formerly Sleaze-Free Real Estate Investing), host Jeff introduces the new show and explains the focus: investing in real estate with the goal of building long-term wealth through owning rental properties…and buying them directly, off-market from sellers using the timeless fundamentals of relationship and direct negotiation.

Episode Transcript

0:00

Yes, welcome. Welcome, welcome. I’m so excited. I’ve been looking forward to recording this episode for you for a while now. And this is the 35th episode of our podcast overall, but it’s the first episode of our new name, racking up rental. So you might be asking yourself, you know, why the change? Well, I’ve got a few reasons that I wanted to share those with you. First of all, you know, the world of real estate investing is a pretty broad one, right? It encompasses a lot of different stuff from wholesaling to flipping houses to even things like buying notes to buy rental properties to, you know, making money today and making money tomorrow making easy money making long term money. And I realized that if we really want to be a helpful to everybody as we possibly can be, we have to be more clear about what we do. And be more specific because real estate investing is too broad of a category. And as I looked at my heart and what I’m interested in, in what I’m doing in, I realize that my own focus and my desire for the focus of this show in the thoughtful real estate entrepreneur as a whole, is much more specific and narrow than real estate investing as a big umbrella. What we’re going to talk about in this show is what I would call wealth oriented investing, you know, what I think about is sort of two different ways of looking at money you can, you can make a lot of money today, which makes you feel rich, and it’s much more about the income. And the other option is you can build wealth over time, and that is what I believe is lasting financial independence. And that’s where my heart is. And so this show Racking Up Rentals is about wealth oriented investing. Now, does that mean that we won’t ever talk about, say, flipping a property or wholesaling or something like that? No, not necessarily. But those topics we won’t talk about, for their own sake. But flipping or wholesaling, or a number of other things could be used as tools in pursuit of the ultimate goal of buying long term hold real estate that builds wealth. There’s a lot of people who study real estate investing who want to get fat checks today. They want to have big assignment fees from title companies and things like that. big profits from flips, and that’s great. But that’s not what we’re really focused on. We’re talking about long term lasting financial independence from owning real estate over the long term. This is about your net worth. This is about your balance sheet, not so much your income statement. One idea that I came up with A little while ago that you heard in the new intro music is this idea of quietly becoming the wealthiest person on the block. That’s so much where my own heart is. I feel like that is what I’ve done. That’s what I continue to do. And I think that word quietly is so important to this because quietly, is something that speaks to how we as thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs go about it. Now, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with being not quiet, I guess about your wealth, but that’s not really the style, the personality that we are going about our business with. I personally, I want to continue to build my financial independence and build my net worth build my wealth, but I don’t necessarily want to look

like a flashy person, or I don’t want people looking at him going, Oh, that guy is rich. I want to know that I’m doing it and I’m becoming that way for myself. Not so that I can just look that way to other people. So one of our main focuses here is wealth and not just making money. The other thing is we’re going to focus more and more and more specifically on acquisition. acquisition is the process of buying things, and all the stuff that goes into that. And specifically, our strategy for acquisition is about working directly with sellers. We don’t do acquisition off the multiple listing service. We don’t do acquisition through real estate brokers, we do acquisition by sitting down directly in the living rooms of the people with whom we’re speaking about buying their real estate. You could call this the living room game. As a matter of fact, I’ve got a friend who has done business very much similarly to how I have. And one time he said though, actually, in kind of a complaint, he said, you know, the living room game just isn’t scalable. And I thought to myself, I guess that’s true if you want to own 5000 units, the living room game is really not probably going to be the best way to go about that. In that case, you’re gonna probably want to learn about things like syndications and how do you bring together lots of different investors in a pool so that you can buy bigger assets and you already own a fraction of those your you own a portion of the entity that owns those properties. But that’s not where my heart is. And that’s not where we’re headed. With this show. We are going to talk very much about the living room game specifically. And I think the living room game is about honing your skills, both the left side of your brain and the right side of your brain

to become the best deal maker possible. I actually love that word dealmaker. I think it’s so nicely articulates what it is that we do when we are at our best. We come up with Win Win deals because we’re excellent listeners. We are creative brainstormers we’re thinking strategically, and we’re trying hard to give the seller what it is that they want. Exactly. And we are being dealmakers in that role. And in order to be a dealmaker, using the thoughtful approach, which is of course, what we’re still talking about here, on this podcast, it’s all about timeless fundamentals of relationship, and negotiation. I want to stop and just talk about that word timeless for a second, because so much of today’s real estate investing education, even outside the real estate space, it’s all about how do you use the new tools of technology and social media, and Facebook ads to drive leads and all that kind of stuff. And what I want to continue to teach you is the opposite of that. I want to teach you the stuff that worked 100 years ago, the stuff that worked 30 years ago and the stuff that is working today, and it’s because it’s timeless and these timeless things are fundamentals. And the fundamentals we’re talking about are the fundamentals of relationship, building a relationship with the seller, having a good level of comfort, and we’re Pour with them and then with you and negotiating with them. And I want you to know that when I say negotiating, I don’t mean looking at them and saying, I’ll give you 200. And they say I want 300. And you say, well, I’ll give him 225. And they say, No, I’ll take 275. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the collective pursuit you in them, of having a conversation that is leading to agreement, that is what we’re talking about with negotiation. So we’re talking about acquisition, for the purpose of creating wealth, and all the other stuff that goes into that. We’re acquiring properties, but we’re also acquiring relationships with these people that might serve us down the road. And we’re acquiring in many cases financing. We’re in the business of acquiring off market properties and off market financing. You know, sometimes people call what I do and what I like to teach creative financing. And really, when I think about that, I have to laugh a little bit too much. Because I don’t think what we do is creative financing. I just think what the rest of the world does in the mainstream is very not creative. financing. It’s very by the book, it’s very much in a box. It’s very standard and mundane. But what we do is creative financing by most people’s standards, I would just call it financing. Because all we’re doing is we’re talking to the seller, understanding what their needs are. We’re understanding where we see opportunity with this deal. And then we are structuring something that captures that opportunity and gives the sellers what they need. If you want to call that creative financing, that’s fine. I would just call it financing. And that’s what we’re focused on in this show. This, my friends is exactly what I have done in my own life and in my own business. It’s what I’m continuing to do. And it’s what I’m passionate about. Frankly, I’m not passionate about flipping properties. Do I do it? Yeah, I do it a fair amount. But I don’t do it for the sake of doing it. I don’t do it for the page. Check I do it because it is a part of my overall strategy for building wealth over the long term with long term hold rental properties. But this is what I do and I want to continue to draw from my experience to tell you what I’ve been doing and how I think you can use it for yourself as well. So let’s go back to this idea of sleaze free you know, I imagine there’s some of you who actually might be a little bit sad to hear the name sleaze free real estate going away. And I want you to know that sleaze free is absolutely still how we do what we do. But the reason I felt like I wanted to change the name of the podcast is that sleaze free real estate investing is not the goal in and of itself. It’s more of the byproduct. In other words, I would never think to myself, I don’t care what type of investing I do, what types of products I buy, how I buy them, what I do with them or what my financial results are. As long as it’s sleaze free. I would never Say that I think that because really what I’m focused on, and what I want to help you be focused on is building wealth over the long term with direct face to face, old school acquisition of properties and finance. In the process of doing this the thoughtful way, which is still 100% the basis for everything that we do here at the thoughtful real estate entrepreneur.

In the process of doing that, we are being sleaze free, without any doubt, whatsoever. But we are relationship focused in our strategy. And I don’t mean we just go and we’d be nice for the sake of being nice. We are all about developing relationship and rapport and a mutual understanding with our sellers using both our left side of our brain and our right side of our brain, both the personal relational creative side of us, as well as the analytical and investment oriented parts of our brain. We are about using both of those in a relationship oriented approach. Roach so with the new version of our show here Racking Up Rentals, we’ve got a slightly different format, I just want to give you a sneak peek of what it’s going to be like. These episodes are designed to be a little bit shorter, and a lot more frequent. And in order to do that, these episodes are getting going to be simpler. I used to spend a lot of time preparing a really detailed outline of every episode, which I felt was the right way to do things. But I also found ultimately, it that it was so much work and felt like so much stress to me to create that perfect outline before I recorded that I ended up not recording nearly as much as I wanted to. And instead I want to pull from my day to day business as a full time real estate entrepreneur out there in the arena of entrepreneurship talking to sellers every day, trying to get deals done working on the projects I’m I’m working on managing my own portfolio. I want to pull more stories, more case studies, more examples and more of my own day to day lessons that I’m learning every day through being out there doing it, to share with you. So shorter format, more frequent episodes simpler overall, and much more timely about what’s going on in my own business and what I think you can learn from it today and put into play in your own life. My goal with this show is a couple fold. One is I just simply want to give you some clarity on the path toward becoming a wealthy real estate entrepreneur using these strategies of face to face acquisition. It doesn’t need to be a mystery as to how it works. It doesn’t need to seem complicated, and and the steps in the order of those steps does not need to seem difficult or mysterious. I want to give you clarity about exactly what that roadmap looks like for you so that you can can do it too, because that’s the second thing. I want to help instill in you confidence that you can do this. Because you want to know the real secret. The real secret of the thoughtful way is this.

Instead of relying on having money, and having connections, and all the things that people think you need to have in order to be successful in real estate investing, you are leveraging your ability to create relationships. I like to think of it like this. If you are a likable person, if people have ever looked to you and said, You know, you’re just a nice easy to get along with person, thank you. Maybe they you know, maybe they thought of you as affable or just likeable or congenial or whatever it might be. If you have that. I can’t teach you that. Either. You’re kind of a nice, likable friendly person or you’re not. But if you have that already, the rest of everything you else that you need, like the technical side of of understanding how deals get together and structuring them and putting the financing together, you can learn all of that, but in a thoughtful way, your ability to be a nice human and go out into the world and create a meaningful connection with another human, in this case, a seller in most cases. That is the number one key to your success. And that’s what we’re going to continue to focus on here in the show, I want you to have clarity on how this works and the path and the steps you can take along the roadmap and confidence that you can do it as well. So that my friends is the new show Racking Up Rentals and I’m super, super excited about this. That is it for today’s episode of the show. You can find notes on today’s show at thoughtful our e.com slash e 35. If you would please do us a big favor hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and also rate and review the show Those things are super helpful to to allow other thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs who are looking for this community who are looking for this school of thought to join because they know that something out there exists that feels more right to them than what they’ve been learning from the mainstream real estate investing world. It helps those people find us. And if you liked this episode, please take a screenshot of it right on your phone and post it to Instagram and tag us. We are @thoughtfulrealestate on Instagram. I will see you in the next episode. And until then, this is Jeff from the Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur signing off.